John
Has some very good explanations and helpful metaphors. Written in 2021, it desperately needs updating. Helpful to read along with “Number goes up”
Has some very good explanations and helpful metaphors. Written in 2021, it desperately needs updating. Helpful to read along with “Number goes up”
Should be mandatory reading for every mayor, city council member, county commissioner, state legislator, governors, and everyone in any office associated with any prosecutorial or investigative function. And any citizen.
Should be mandatory reading for every mayor, city council member, county commissioner, state legislator, governors, and everyone in any office associated with any prosecutorial or investigative function. And any citizen.
She is a good writer and did a good job exposing the key moments and decisions that set us on this disastrous path where, as she quotes Rohit Chopra as saying, “Students aren’t the customers, they are the products.” But the book falls a little short in several ways — first, she seems to feel obliged to add the obligatory “Wave a magic wand” chapter in which she imagines a complete overhaul of higher education from top to bottom on a national scale . . . Not that many pages after briefly discussing the Supreme Court’s final transformation into a National Policy Council, wherein it gets to decide which decisions are major and which are not, thereby allowing its Federalist Society members to determine — absent any constitutional basis whatsoever — which administration policies may be enacted through executive action and which must come through Congress as “major questions.” So, in a country where even the plain language of the law allows the administration to forgive student loan debts (just as the IRS routinely forgives tax debts) but the Supreme Court insists otherwise, a chapter on magical reforms is just wasted.
Better she should have spent her time comparing our debacle in education funding to our debacle in health care funding, housing policy, conservation, immigration, and mental health systems — all areas of enormous public failure because of the retreat from the idea of these areas as essentially public questions into simply battles over private entitlement. She talks about the transformation of education after the GI Bill from a public good to a private investment, and the book would have benefitted greatly from putting that hideous transformation into context by showing how the same impoverished thinking that has led higher education into its weakened and enervated state has been operating across every other public policy aspect as well.
She is a good writer and did a good job exposing the key moments and decisions that set us on this disastrous path where, as she quotes Rohit Chopra as saying, “Students aren’t the customers, they are the products.” But the book falls a little short in several ways — first, she seems to feel obliged to add the obligatory “Wave a magic wand” chapter in which she imagines a complete overhaul of higher education from top to bottom on a national scale . . . Not that many pages after briefly discussing the Supreme Court’s final transformation into a National Policy Council, wherein it gets to decide which decisions are major and which are not, thereby allowing its Federalist Society members to determine — absent any constitutional basis whatsoever — which administration policies may be enacted through executive action and which must come through Congress as “major questions.” So, in a country where even the plain language of the law allows the administration to forgive student loan debts (just as the IRS routinely forgives tax debts) but the Supreme Court insists otherwise, a chapter on magical reforms is just wasted.
Better she should have spent her time comparing our debacle in education funding to our debacle in health care funding, housing policy, conservation, immigration, and mental health systems — all areas of enormous public failure because of the retreat from the idea of these areas as essentially public questions into simply battles over private entitlement. She talks about the transformation of education after the GI Bill from a public good to a private investment, and the book would have benefitted greatly from putting that hideous transformation into context by showing how the same impoverished thinking that has led higher education into its weakened and enervated state has been operating across every other public policy aspect as well.
Being vastly shorter and written with a more engaging style, this book has a far lower opportunity cost than “Slouching Towards Utopia” and tells much the same story. Leigh is a far better writer, and he makes good use of a few choice graphics. But, in the end, his “How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity” is just another glib and superficial paean to capitalism that actually explains nothing.
The one trick repeated again and again in lieu of any actual “explanation” is to note some great advance in human wellbeing and ascribe that advance somehow to “economics” — in other words, all the work from the Enlightenment and all the study and effort that physicists and chemists and agronomists have put in to propel great advances in health and welfare is counted as having somehow depended on economics and economists. Thus, in writing about economics, Leigh is like virtually all other economists, acting like the “researchers” at the Institute for Creation Research (the outfit that masquerades as scientifically minded folks who just happen to think that evolution is a myth) — they already know the gospel, their sole task is to busy themselves trying to tell more and more vignettes of the received wisdom in an ever more compelling way. If economists had any explanatory power, societies with more economists would out-compete societies with more physicists and chemists and engineers. Better to read Harari’s “Sapiens” than this.
Being vastly shorter and written with a more engaging style, this book has a far lower opportunity cost than “Slouching Towards Utopia” and tells much the same story. Leigh is a far better writer, and he makes good use of a few choice graphics. But, in the end, his “How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity” is just another glib and superficial paean to capitalism that actually explains nothing.
The one trick repeated again and again in lieu of any actual “explanation” is to note some great advance in human wellbeing and ascribe that advance somehow to “economics” — in other words, all the work from the Enlightenment and all the study and effort that physicists and chemists and agronomists have put in to propel great advances in health and welfare is counted as having somehow depended on economics and economists. Thus, in writing about economics, Leigh is like virtually all other economists, acting like the “researchers” at the Institute for Creation Research (the outfit that masquerades as scientifically minded folks who just happen to think that evolution is a myth) — they already know the gospel, their sole task is to busy themselves trying to tell more and more vignettes of the received wisdom in an ever more compelling way. If economists had any explanatory power, societies with more economists would out-compete societies with more physicists and chemists and engineers. Better to read Harari’s “Sapiens” than this.
This could have been a five-star book if there had been an editor who could have stood up to the author and fought for the reader’s interest in the same way the author fights for the interests of people against the ignorance and arrogance of the traffic engineering profession. It’s a hugely important topic, deeply informed and passionate author with important insights to share. The problem is, the book reads as if it’s 88 blog posts glued together almost verbatim, and the deep work of actually building all that material into a coherent work rather than just a compilation of separate works was simply skipped.
The author is probably a terrific classroom teacher, but the jokey asides that work so well in person just come off as snarky half the time in print. Further, about half the footnotes are worthwhile, but half are just japes … again, probably workable and useful in the classroom or on a video to help people keep paying attention, but they are just distracting and annoying in the text. Worse, the microscopic mice type font used for footnotes and endnotes make it impossible to actually go from the text to the footnotes readily.
This would have been a much better book if the author had been forced to condense it into several long-read magazine articles, and given some help from the graphics department to put some good graphics in, especially a timeline or two that could have served to SHOW the reader how the more traffic engineering we got, the worse our safety got. Instead, he spends pages and pages trying to use text to explain something that is easily grasped if shown graphically. The best part of the book is the final two sections, which would have better been placed at the beginning to motivate the rest of the work.
I would love to read a second edition of this book if he takes his own (repeated over and over again) advice to others to actually TEST the product in the real world rather than just assuming that because he’s credentialed, what he produces is the best way to produce it. Just as his peers in traffic engineering need to start designing for safety of people using the product, the author needs to rework the book with the reader at the center.
This could have been a five-star book if there had been an editor who could have stood up to the author and fought for the reader’s interest in the same way the author fights for the interests of people against the ignorance and arrogance of the traffic engineering profession. It’s a hugely important topic, deeply informed and passionate author with important insights to share. The problem is, the book reads as if it’s 88 blog posts glued together almost verbatim, and the deep work of actually building all that material into a coherent work rather than just a compilation of separate works was simply skipped.
The author is probably a terrific classroom teacher, but the jokey asides that work so well in person just come off as snarky half the time in print. Further, about half the footnotes are worthwhile, but half are just japes … again, probably workable and useful in the classroom or on a video to help people keep paying attention, but they are just distracting and annoying in the text. Worse, the microscopic mice type font used for footnotes and endnotes make it impossible to actually go from the text to the footnotes readily.
This would have been a much better book if the author had been forced to condense it into several long-read magazine articles, and given some help from the graphics department to put some good graphics in, especially a timeline or two that could have served to SHOW the reader how the more traffic engineering we got, the worse our safety got. Instead, he spends pages and pages trying to use text to explain something that is easily grasped if shown graphically. The best part of the book is the final two sections, which would have better been placed at the beginning to motivate the rest of the work.
I would love to read a second edition of this book if he takes his own (repeated over and over again) advice to others to actually TEST the product in the real world rather than just assuming that because he’s credentialed, what he produces is the best way to produce it. Just as his peers in traffic engineering need to start designing for safety of people using the product, the author needs to rework the book with the reader at the center.
This could have been a five-star book if there had been an editor who could have stood up to the author and fought for the reader’s interest in the same way the author fights for the interests of people against the ignorance and arrogance of the traffic engineering profession. It’s a hugely important topic, deeply informed and passionate author with important insights to share. The problem is, the book reads as if it’s 88 blog posts glued together almost verbatim, and the deep work of actually building all that material into a coherent work rather than just a compilation of separate works was simply skipped.
The author is probably a terrific classroom teacher, but the jokey asides that work so well in person just come off as snarky half the time in print. Further, about half the footnotes are worthwhile, but half are just japes … again, probably workable and useful in the classroom or on a video to help people keep paying attention, but they are just distracting and annoying in the text. Worse, the microscopic mice type font used for footnotes and endnotes make it impossible to actually go from the text to the footnotes readily.
This would have been a much better book if the author had been forced to condense it into several long-read magazine articles, and given some help from the graphics department to put some good graphics in, especially a timeline or two that could have served to SHOW the reader how the more traffic engineering we got, the worse our safety got. Instead, he spends pages and pages trying to use text to explain something that is easily grasped if shown graphically. The best part of the book is the final two sections, which would have better been placed at the beginning to motivate the rest of the work.
I would love to read a second edition of this book if he takes his own (repeated over and over again) advice to others to actually TEST the product in the real world rather than just assuming that because he’s credentialed, what he produces is the best way to produce it. Just as his peers in traffic engineering need to start designing for safety of people using the product, the author needs to rework the book with the reader at the center.
This could have been a five-star book if there had been an editor who could have stood up to the author and fought for the reader’s interest in the same way the author fights for the interests of people against the ignorance and arrogance of the traffic engineering profession. It’s a hugely important topic, deeply informed and passionate author with important insights to share. The problem is, the book reads as if it’s 88 blog posts glued together almost verbatim, and the deep work of actually building all that material into a coherent work rather than just a compilation of separate works was simply skipped.
The author is probably a terrific classroom teacher, but the jokey asides that work so well in person just come off as snarky half the time in print. Further, about half the footnotes are worthwhile, but half are just japes … again, probably workable and useful in the classroom or on a video to help people keep paying attention, but they are just distracting and annoying in the text. Worse, the microscopic mice type font used for footnotes and endnotes make it impossible to actually go from the text to the footnotes readily.
This would have been a much better book if the author had been forced to condense it into several long-read magazine articles, and given some help from the graphics department to put some good graphics in, especially a timeline or two that could have served to SHOW the reader how the more traffic engineering we got, the worse our safety got. Instead, he spends pages and pages trying to use text to explain something that is easily grasped if shown graphically. The best part of the book is the final two sections, which would have better been placed at the beginning to motivate the rest of the work.
I would love to read a second edition of this book if he takes his own (repeated over and over again) advice to others to actually TEST the product in the real world rather than just assuming that because he’s credentialed, what he produces is the best way to produce it. Just as his peers in traffic engineering need to start designing for safety of people using the product, the author needs to rework the book with the reader at the center.
This is the book that anyone who deals with scam victims needs to read to understand how the global tsunami of internet scamming works — griftocurrency is not just a harmless table top game played by libertarian, it’s an entire ecosystem built to facilitate exploitation of vulnerable people by predators, who are responding exactly as you would expect: by scamming people out of their savings and by enslaving vulnerable people in poor countries and forcing them to prey on people in rich countries, like small boys forced to work as pick-pockets in Victorian England.
The whole point of griftocurrency is to create a parasite money system that lets people who enjoy and depend on the all the global systems offered by the legit market and tax systems (clean water, food systems, etc) profit from scams tax free, while consuming more energy than many nations to do worthless computing games (“mining” griftocurrencies).
This is the book that anyone who deals with scam victims needs to read to understand how the global tsunami of internet scamming works — griftocurrency is not just a harmless table top game played by libertarian, it’s an entire ecosystem built to facilitate exploitation of vulnerable people by predators, who are responding exactly as you would expect: by scamming people out of their savings and by enslaving vulnerable people in poor countries and forcing them to prey on people in rich countries, like small boys forced to work as pick-pockets in Victorian England.
The whole point of griftocurrency is to create a parasite money system that lets people who enjoy and depend on the all the global systems offered by the legit market and tax systems (clean water, food systems, etc) profit from scams tax free, while consuming more energy than many nations to do worthless computing games (“mining” griftocurrencies).
This is probably the best of all the innocence books out there — by a former ace prosecutor, this covers the whole waterfront of factors that lead to the recurring and all-too-frequent misconviction and the innocent and failure to find and convict the guilty that results. Every judge and prosecutor in America should be required to study and receive annual refresher training on the factors Godsey identifies, and disinterested prosecutors and judges should be required to assess every case against these wrongful conviction factors to identify red flags leading to errors. Post conviction relief is not enough when the system merrily chugs along convicting the innocent and winning praise and glory for the prosecutors and judges who lock in on their theory of the case and blind themselves to the reality before them.
This is probably the best of all the innocence books out there — by a former ace prosecutor, this covers the whole waterfront of factors that lead to the recurring and all-too-frequent misconviction and the innocent and failure to find and convict the guilty that results. Every judge and prosecutor in America should be required to study and receive annual refresher training on the factors Godsey identifies, and disinterested prosecutors and judges should be required to assess every case against these wrongful conviction factors to identify red flags leading to errors. Post conviction relief is not enough when the system merrily chugs along convicting the innocent and winning praise and glory for the prosecutors and judges who lock in on their theory of the case and blind themselves to the reality before them.
The Politics of Fear
Carries on and updates “The New Hate” (2012), being written in 2023; reprises many of the themes from The New Hate and shows how Trumpism is enacting its very DNA coded nature as the cult of conservative/xenophobic Christian Nationalist tropes.
Carries on and updates “The New Hate” (2012), being written in 2023; reprises many of the themes from The New Hate and shows how Trumpism is enacting its very DNA coded nature as the cult of conservative/xenophobic Christian Nationalist tropes.
Tremendously important book here in 2024 — tracing the roots of nearly every MAGA fetish and paranoid fantasy of the “brown peril,” as Stephen Miller plots concentration camps should Trump succeed in regaining the White House. I got it from the library but I will be on the lookout for a copy because it has so much interesting history that it would make a great reference, if it doesn’t get tossed on the pile of burning books in 2025 under Trump II.
Tremendously important book here in 2024 — tracing the roots of nearly every MAGA fetish and paranoid fantasy of the “brown peril,” as Stephen Miller plots concentration camps should Trump succeed in regaining the White House. I got it from the library but I will be on the lookout for a copy because it has so much interesting history that it would make a great reference, if it doesn’t get tossed on the pile of burning books in 2025 under Trump II.
Very good. Author bends over backwards to be fair to Tesla and Musk but, in the end, the essential — as in, the very essence of — similarity of Trump to Musk is impossible to ignore. The main difference seems to be that Musk is every bit the grifter and PT Barnum that Trump is, but has the wit to realize that he needs to surround himself with smart people (though he seems, like Trump, to most drive away people with any independent talent). Musk is thus the “thinking man’s Trump” — but he is still very much a Trumpian figure, rather than a Ford or even a Bezos.
Very good. Author bends over backwards to be fair to Tesla and Musk but, in the end, the essential — as in, the very essence of — similarity of Trump to Musk is impossible to ignore. The main difference seems to be that Musk is every bit the grifter and PT Barnum that Trump is, but has the wit to realize that he needs to surround himself with smart people (though he seems, like Trump, to most drive away people with any independent talent). Musk is thus the “thinking man’s Trump” — but he is still very much a Trumpian figure, rather than a Ford or even a Bezos.
I would give this more stars if I could. Nearly a perfect book — a gripping story followed by a thoughtful context analyzing the forces at work and a preview of coming ‘attractions’ set to bedevil us if we do not awaken from our trance of thinking that somehow this will all work out. Very hard to put down, and impossible to forget. I am pretty sure this will be among my top five books of the 21st C for a long long time to come.
I would give this more stars if I could. Nearly a perfect book — a gripping story followed by a thoughtful context analyzing the forces at work and a preview of coming ‘attractions’ set to bedevil us if we do not awaken from our trance of thinking that somehow this will all work out. Very hard to put down, and impossible to forget. I am pretty sure this will be among my top five books of the 21st C for a long long time to come.
I had to listen to this on audiobook as I was sure it would be too easy to quit in print form. A hugely hugely important book — the kind of book you wish every pundit and politician would read and that every pastor and imam and rabbi and talk radio host had read. Here in Spring 2024, as Israel wages total war on the civilians trapped in Gaza, it’s an absolutely chilling read. I thought I knew a lot about the Holocaust but I learned a good deal in each chapter, and especially I learned a new perspective that puts the rise of the Alt-Right in the US and Europe into sharp relief and gives me chills. Easily one of the top books of the 21st C so far.
I had to listen to this on audiobook as I was sure it would be too easy to quit in print form. A hugely hugely important book — the kind of book you wish every pundit and politician would read and that every pastor and imam and rabbi and talk radio host had read. Here in Spring 2024, as Israel wages total war on the civilians trapped in Gaza, it’s an absolutely chilling read. I thought I knew a lot about the Holocaust but I learned a good deal in each chapter, and especially I learned a new perspective that puts the rise of the Alt-Right in the US and Europe into sharp relief and gives me chills. Easily one of the top books of the 21st C so far.