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Tom Mueller, How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine: Infuriating but clear read about one area in which profit-driven healthcare increases death and suffering at great financial cost. Twenty-two percent of American dialysis patients die every year, whereas in Japan it’s 5-6% and Western Europe 9-12%. Why? Largely because the pressure to squeeze dollars out of patients leads to dialysis that is (1) centralized, and not carried out at home, and (2) fast, so they can have greater throughput, instead of overnight (it can be done while a person sleeps!) and tailored to an individual’s system. Fast dialysis can cause sudden blood pressure drops and other problems, leading to stroke and cardiac failure. Meanwhile, dialysis centers have local monopolies, and aren’t afraid to punish patients who complain by labeling them combative and denying them service; the only alternative is often to go to the ER, where there are other risks.
Nalin Mehta, India’s Techade: Digital Revolution and Change in the World’s Largest Democracy: Very celebratory account of India’s technological advancement, including its Aadhaar ID cards, with very little mention of the way that the Hindutva government has harmed democracy and encouraged anti-Muslim sentiment. Still, a lot of useful detail, which also helps explain why many non-Muslim Indians may feel that the government is making their lives better. The digital ID allows people to get benefits from the government—removing many paths for corruption, though not all—meaning that total transfers from the government to the poor went up by two orders of magnitude. This means toilets in villages that didn’t have them, as well as food aid. Millions of houses got registered in women’s names as single or joint owners, which creates some legal protections they didn’t have before. The digital ID also allows half a billion people to do digital money transfers without needing a traditional bank account, leapfrogging past many barriers and meaning that India is home to nearly half of the real-time digital payment transactions in the world. Because the government runs the payment system, the interchange fees that siphon billions from small businesses and consumers in the US aren’t (currently) a problem. Hints of the potential dark side come up in a list of what government service centers in villages now provide—not just transfer payments and tax documents, but “character certificates” and “caste certificates”; pervasive surveillance and “social credit” are certainly possible. Like China, India is trying to export its model to other countries, by offering digital banking/ID services in countries in Africa where the hope is to make a similar leap and also to be independent of the US system, which offers countries like Russia an alternative to the US sanctions regime.
Elena Conis, How to Sell a Poison:History of DDT’s rise and fall and attempted rise—both at the hands of public health advocates who acknowledged its long-term risks and harm to birds but found it the most effective against malarial mosquitoes, and at the hands of anti-regulation types who wanted to use DDT’s history against environmentalists generally, accusing them of sacrificing millions of poor children for a few birds. As it turns out, there probably are some pretty bad tradeoffs—Conis documents that, while the connection to cancer takes a while, the endocrine changes caused by DDT can cause much more risk of illness, including cancer, to exposed people’s children and grandchildren. Indoor spraying might still be justified in high-malaria environments, but it is not a safe product.
Paul Sabin, Public Citizens: History of Ralph Nader’s activism and the nonprofit institutions he helped create in order to put pressure on government and corporations both. Nader’s belief in individual activism over government-building contributed to the collapse of regulation a lot of times, rather than improving it, including by isolating leftists from the Democratic Party. A little depressing to see how little has changed.
Max Fraser, Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class: Whites from Appalachia are often considered to be reactionary; Fraser argues that the story is more complicated than that, as many came from traditions of union organizing. Throughout the twentieth century, many were driven off of marginal farmland and, despite nostalgia, had very little to go back to (even if they held out hope of retiring back home).
David Cannadine, Victorious Century: Political history of Great Britain during its long 19th century, starting with the disruptions arising from the increased surplus rural population (both cause and consequence of the shift to industrial manufacturing instead of agriculture) and continuing through the shambolic acquisition of an Empire, often against the wishes of politicians in London. Although it’s quite long, it also assumes a fair amount of knowledge about British society, such as how and why one would become a peer.
Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Well, this is a terrifying book. Ellsberg began as a committed Cold Warrior, before his disillusionment led him to leak the Pentagon Papers and become an antiwar activist. What I didn’t know was that he had a larger cache of secret documents about US nuclear policy, though they apparently got lost when he tried to conceal them from the feds. Still, he worked for RAND and had a lot of access, so his accounts of how, in practice, individual base commanders and even individual pilots could have launched their nuclear missiles—despite what we’ve told the world about the “nuclear football”—were credible. We know a few stories about how individual Soviets averted nuclear war, but not nearly as much about similar decisions by Americans. Luck is not a great strategy, but it’s what we’ve been using and will continue to use as long as America retains a first-strike capability. Ellsberg also writes persuasively about how Presidents, and especially their representatives in private negotiations, have used the threat of nuclear war in political confrontations, and ended up thinking that it worked, to the continued risk of the world.
Stephanie Land, Class: Land’s memoir of her last year of undergraduate studies, when she saw the end of precarity in sight (though she still didn’t know how to make a living as a writer) but kept getting derailed by small changes. It is unflinching in its details, including its defense of pleasure and mistakes. Poverty in America is a tightrope, and those who don’t walk condemn those who do for every bobble.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed: Really interesting; I’d never read it before despite having read many references to it. The core idea is “legibility”: standardization and simplification—of rules if not of reality—make it easier for outsiders, including government, to understand a community. A colonizer who needs a “native guide” is worse off than one who doesn’t, which is one reason that colonies often had more comprehensive systems of land titling and clearer ownership rules than the colonizing nation itself. Common property may not be less productive than individually owned plots, but it is much harder to tax, and thus much less useful to the state. This power can be used for good (working sewers, less cholera) but can easily be turned to ill, especially if the state is wrong about the lines it has drawn (collective farms, monocultures). Although he repeatedly emphasizes that the organic societal formations that states have sought to replace with regimentation are regularly discriminatory and flawed, he’s ultimately skeptical of big state ideas. At the same time, while he criticizes compulsory villagization in Tanzania—and there’s plenty to criticize—he doesn’t ever address whether there was an alternative, given the country’s resources, to the concentration of population in order to deliver things like schools and famine relief. Maybe the correct answer is “you just can’t have schools with a scattered rural population and really low wealth,” but that’s a pretty serious tradeoff that deserves some discussion.
Another interesting point: the “high modernism” he criticizes focuses on visual order—neatly laid out rows of plants, streets, etc. But, as he points out, visual disorder can also mean high-functioning complexity—the intestines of a rabbit, in his striking example, are not visually orderly but do a great job at their actual job.
I also found it notable that, at the end, Scott acknowledges that non-state actors can do the same thing. Capitalists are interested in control and appropriability; they will adopt less efficient rules if they can appropriate more of the outputs. Scott described what’s now known as “chickenization” as a capitalist, high-modernist project, offloading risk onto individual farmers who would be easy to surveil precisely because their practices were so rigidly dictated by the chicken processor.
Cat Bohannon, Eve: The story of human evolution, focused on female bodies and what their owners would have wanted. I didn’t love the flippant tone, but YMMV; there was a lot of interesting stuff there about, e.g., how breastfeeding developed, what fat is for, and how male and female human hearing differ (and why that might be). I also liked the point that the “prostitution narrative” for how monogamy developed—males would provide more regularly for babies they thought were surely theirs—had big downside risks for females and their babies; if males are sure who’s the daddy, then they predictably kill the infants that aren’t theirs whenever there is a power shake-up. Thus, monogamy only plausibly makes sense when females can be relatively sure that such tectonic events are unlikely.
Nalin Mehta, India’s Techade: Digital Revolution and Change in the World’s Largest Democracy: Very celebratory account of India’s technological advancement, including its Aadhaar ID cards, with very little mention of the way that the Hindutva government has harmed democracy and encouraged anti-Muslim sentiment. Still, a lot of useful detail, which also helps explain why many non-Muslim Indians may feel that the government is making their lives better. The digital ID allows people to get benefits from the government—removing many paths for corruption, though not all—meaning that total transfers from the government to the poor went up by two orders of magnitude. This means toilets in villages that didn’t have them, as well as food aid. Millions of houses got registered in women’s names as single or joint owners, which creates some legal protections they didn’t have before. The digital ID also allows half a billion people to do digital money transfers without needing a traditional bank account, leapfrogging past many barriers and meaning that India is home to nearly half of the real-time digital payment transactions in the world. Because the government runs the payment system, the interchange fees that siphon billions from small businesses and consumers in the US aren’t (currently) a problem. Hints of the potential dark side come up in a list of what government service centers in villages now provide—not just transfer payments and tax documents, but “character certificates” and “caste certificates”; pervasive surveillance and “social credit” are certainly possible. Like China, India is trying to export its model to other countries, by offering digital banking/ID services in countries in Africa where the hope is to make a similar leap and also to be independent of the US system, which offers countries like Russia an alternative to the US sanctions regime.
Elena Conis, How to Sell a Poison:History of DDT’s rise and fall and attempted rise—both at the hands of public health advocates who acknowledged its long-term risks and harm to birds but found it the most effective against malarial mosquitoes, and at the hands of anti-regulation types who wanted to use DDT’s history against environmentalists generally, accusing them of sacrificing millions of poor children for a few birds. As it turns out, there probably are some pretty bad tradeoffs—Conis documents that, while the connection to cancer takes a while, the endocrine changes caused by DDT can cause much more risk of illness, including cancer, to exposed people’s children and grandchildren. Indoor spraying might still be justified in high-malaria environments, but it is not a safe product.
Paul Sabin, Public Citizens: History of Ralph Nader’s activism and the nonprofit institutions he helped create in order to put pressure on government and corporations both. Nader’s belief in individual activism over government-building contributed to the collapse of regulation a lot of times, rather than improving it, including by isolating leftists from the Democratic Party. A little depressing to see how little has changed.
Max Fraser, Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class: Whites from Appalachia are often considered to be reactionary; Fraser argues that the story is more complicated than that, as many came from traditions of union organizing. Throughout the twentieth century, many were driven off of marginal farmland and, despite nostalgia, had very little to go back to (even if they held out hope of retiring back home).
David Cannadine, Victorious Century: Political history of Great Britain during its long 19th century, starting with the disruptions arising from the increased surplus rural population (both cause and consequence of the shift to industrial manufacturing instead of agriculture) and continuing through the shambolic acquisition of an Empire, often against the wishes of politicians in London. Although it’s quite long, it also assumes a fair amount of knowledge about British society, such as how and why one would become a peer.
Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Well, this is a terrifying book. Ellsberg began as a committed Cold Warrior, before his disillusionment led him to leak the Pentagon Papers and become an antiwar activist. What I didn’t know was that he had a larger cache of secret documents about US nuclear policy, though they apparently got lost when he tried to conceal them from the feds. Still, he worked for RAND and had a lot of access, so his accounts of how, in practice, individual base commanders and even individual pilots could have launched their nuclear missiles—despite what we’ve told the world about the “nuclear football”—were credible. We know a few stories about how individual Soviets averted nuclear war, but not nearly as much about similar decisions by Americans. Luck is not a great strategy, but it’s what we’ve been using and will continue to use as long as America retains a first-strike capability. Ellsberg also writes persuasively about how Presidents, and especially their representatives in private negotiations, have used the threat of nuclear war in political confrontations, and ended up thinking that it worked, to the continued risk of the world.
Stephanie Land, Class: Land’s memoir of her last year of undergraduate studies, when she saw the end of precarity in sight (though she still didn’t know how to make a living as a writer) but kept getting derailed by small changes. It is unflinching in its details, including its defense of pleasure and mistakes. Poverty in America is a tightrope, and those who don’t walk condemn those who do for every bobble.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed: Really interesting; I’d never read it before despite having read many references to it. The core idea is “legibility”: standardization and simplification—of rules if not of reality—make it easier for outsiders, including government, to understand a community. A colonizer who needs a “native guide” is worse off than one who doesn’t, which is one reason that colonies often had more comprehensive systems of land titling and clearer ownership rules than the colonizing nation itself. Common property may not be less productive than individually owned plots, but it is much harder to tax, and thus much less useful to the state. This power can be used for good (working sewers, less cholera) but can easily be turned to ill, especially if the state is wrong about the lines it has drawn (collective farms, monocultures). Although he repeatedly emphasizes that the organic societal formations that states have sought to replace with regimentation are regularly discriminatory and flawed, he’s ultimately skeptical of big state ideas. At the same time, while he criticizes compulsory villagization in Tanzania—and there’s plenty to criticize—he doesn’t ever address whether there was an alternative, given the country’s resources, to the concentration of population in order to deliver things like schools and famine relief. Maybe the correct answer is “you just can’t have schools with a scattered rural population and really low wealth,” but that’s a pretty serious tradeoff that deserves some discussion.
Another interesting point: the “high modernism” he criticizes focuses on visual order—neatly laid out rows of plants, streets, etc. But, as he points out, visual disorder can also mean high-functioning complexity—the intestines of a rabbit, in his striking example, are not visually orderly but do a great job at their actual job.
I also found it notable that, at the end, Scott acknowledges that non-state actors can do the same thing. Capitalists are interested in control and appropriability; they will adopt less efficient rules if they can appropriate more of the outputs. Scott described what’s now known as “chickenization” as a capitalist, high-modernist project, offloading risk onto individual farmers who would be easy to surveil precisely because their practices were so rigidly dictated by the chicken processor.
Cat Bohannon, Eve: The story of human evolution, focused on female bodies and what their owners would have wanted. I didn’t love the flippant tone, but YMMV; there was a lot of interesting stuff there about, e.g., how breastfeeding developed, what fat is for, and how male and female human hearing differ (and why that might be). I also liked the point that the “prostitution narrative” for how monogamy developed—males would provide more regularly for babies they thought were surely theirs—had big downside risks for females and their babies; if males are sure who’s the daddy, then they predictably kill the infants that aren’t theirs whenever there is a power shake-up. Thus, monogamy only plausibly makes sense when females can be relatively sure that such tectonic events are unlikely.
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Thanks for these
Fascinating write-ups!
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If I remember right he has some related discussion about local naming that references relationships and is different from official naming, acting both as cultural preservation and as a sort of insider resistance to legibility. Where I live in very rural Wales there's a lot of that, people are referred to by FirstName FarmName rather than FirstName LastName and roads are referred to by the major town that they lead to, relative to your home base, rather than their official names, i.e. the Newtown Road rather than the A487.
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