Steve Reads

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about tools that help make the difficult easy, which has got me thinking again about probably my favorite quote of all time, by A.N. Whitehead:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.

I think about this at work all the time, because our use of SQL makes possible a lot of data-gathering and -analysis tasks which really would have been impossible without it. Answering some question about many thousands of servers (100,770 as of the end of September, 2011) would be unimaginable. Certainly getting many quick answers to many quick queries would be absolutely unimaginable. Without some tool that allows quick aggregation across many different datasets, we’d have to resort to home-brewed scripts that, say, ssh to thousands of machines in parallel and ask them questions. Or we’d have to reinvent Query, more likely.

There are two aspects to SQL that I think about constantly at work: first this trick of turning an impossible problem into a triviality, and second the sense of playfulness that it enables. It takes only a tiny bit more effort to turn from the question you were trying to answer into something unexpected, something more general, or something more nuanced. Often answering questions that you didn’t know you had involves finding a table you didn’t know the company published, which in turn involves asking around to see who would know best about a given kind of data. Finding answers to questions you didn’t know you had seems to me part and parcel of what SQL is all about.

The term “generative technology” gets at this. I would link to the first Google search result for this, except that I don’t really like how Jonathan Zittrain — who is, in fairness, most associated with this term — runs with it. iPhones versus non-iPhones isn’t really at all related to what I have in mind here, and I don’t think the definition he has there gets at what even he means by it. The term “generative” comes ultimately from generative grammar, which my non-linguistically-trained self understands to mean “a set of simple rules for the formation of sentences, which rules can be combined in infinitely many ways to construct infinitely many distinct sentences.” In mathematics, think of axioms and rules for their combination: there aren’t that many axioms defining the integers, but they can be combined with only a few more rules (about ordered pairs and what, exactly, multiplication of two ordered pairs means) to build rational numbers, and thence real numbers, and thence complex numbers. The simple axioms, and simple rules for their combination, lead to infinitely complex objects.

(Because I cannot resist a filthy quote when given the opportunity, it’s here that I’ll quote Stephen King’s advice on writing: ‘When asked, “How do you write?” I invariably answer, “One word at a time,” and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That’s all. One stone at a time. But I’ve read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.’)

And so it is with SQL and other generative technologies. They don’t give you a single product that you use in the 10 or 20 or 100 ways that you’ve been told to use it; in this sense, I view Facebook as non-generative. A generative technology, like Unix or SQL, might have a steep learning curve, but once you’ve learned it you can do infinitely many things.

There are lots of complexities once you’ve learned the atoms, and even once you’ve learned how to combine the atoms. In Unix, for instance, your first task is learning to string together programs with pipes. Once you’ve done that, you’ll soon enough be writing your own programs. but you have to write them in the Unix Way, which often involves allowing them to sit with a pipe on their left side and a pipe on their right; in this way, they themselves become part of the generative toolkit. Again, invoking Whitehead, the point is to make complicated action reflexive and doable without thinking. Take a common Unix pattern:

[some commands] | sort | uniq | sort -nr

This takes the output of [some commands] — assumed to contain one interesting pattern per line — and displays it in descending order of frequency, with the frequency in the left column and the pattern on the right. This isn’t many characters, so typing it out becomes second nature; the smart thing to do, though, would be to put this Unix fragment in its own script, which we might call sort_by_pop (or really ‘popsort’, which would save you some keystrokes: there’s already a command that starts with ‘sort’, but no commands that start with ‘pops’, so ‘popsort’ would be easier to get from tab-completion; Unix people think this way):

(19:44 -0500) slaniel@example.com~$ cat sort_by_pop 
#!/bin/bash
sort |uniq -c |sort -nr

Now you can just pipe things through sort_by_pop if you want to sort them by popularity:

(19:44 -0500) slaniel@example.com:~$ grep -o '^[^ ]\+' access.log |sort_by_pop  |head
    607 46.165.197.141
    520 173.242.125.206
    309 199.21.99.67
    229 130.195.253.1
    169 66.249.71.18
    162 72.14.199.102
     83 72.246.0.10
     37 142.167.21.94
     34 198.228.223.217
     33 80.58.205.47

Hm, what’s that grep(1) bit? Looks like that bit of script could be usefully abstracted into something called ‘get_ip’:

(19:48 -0500) slaniel@example.com:~$ cat get_ip 
#!/bin/bash
grep -o '^[^ ]\+'

whence we simplify to “cat access.log | get_ip | sort_by_pop”. Now you don’t need to understand the nuances of how sort(1) and uniq(1) work if you don’t want to; in fact, you may never need to know that those atomic tools are sitting underneath your molecular abstractions. If you trust the person who wrote the tools, you can assume that get_ip gets an IP address from a suitably formatted Apache access log, and that sort_by_pop sorts a file containing one pattern per line in descending order of popularity.

And so forth. The idea is to constantly combine the atoms of your knowledge into larger and larger molecules, which allows you to forget about the individual atoms unless you really need them. (Where you often need to remember the atoms is for performance reasons.)

In SQL, one way of combining atoms into higher-order molecules is by means of views. A view is a new table (“relation” for the relational-calculus purists in the room) constructed from lower-order “base tables”. There may be some very clever way to get by without views, but I don’t know what it might be. Often you’ll end up with a query that requires you to join one complicated sub-query to itself; without views, you’d be repeating the sub-query, which would probably involve copying and pasting a bunch of text. This would make editing one of the sub-queries a hassle, because you’d have to repeat your edits once for every sub-query. With views, you create the view once, give it some shorthand name, then use the shorthand on every subsequent reference. Any edit only has to happen once, in the view. Again, the point is to make higher-order thought effortless.

(Java, by contrast, requires so much boilerplate that it gets in the way of quickly scanning a piece of code and understanding what it’s trying to do. Either that, or it requires the developer to carefully shunt his boilerplate off into a little boilerplate area of his code. Or it requires the code reader to develop a finely honed skill of skipping over boilerplate. One organizing principle for writing code of any sort ought to be that it puts the least possible distance between the task you’re envisioning and the code you write for it.)

Having developed such a love for SQL, and having long ago learned how to build high-order castles in Unix, I’m now on the hunt for other generative technologies that will make difficult tasks possible. My goal for 2012 is to discover such a set of technologies for time series. It’s not just a matter of writing formulas that allow me to manipulate time series in any way I see fit, though that’s hard enough (it will probably involve R, and may also involve Data Analysis with Open Source Tools, recommended in the highest terms by my awesome friend Dan Milstein). And it’s not just a matter of manipulating them in a way that makes exploring them, combining them, and being surprised possible, though that’s part and parcel of the generative idea.

Rather, the difficulty with making these things work right starts, it seems to me, way down in the guts. Akamai’s Query system is brilliant — one of the most brilliant technologies I’ve ever seen at a company, central to everything I do at every minute of every day — and works so well because there’s a lot of stuff going on under the hood which, again, I mostly don’t need to think about. The low levels do break, just as they do in any software system (all abstractions are leaky); and when they break, I’m forcibly reminded that all my simplifying abstractions rest very tentatively on a lot of lower-level foundations. Without someone doing a lot of low-level grunt work, Whitehead’s dictum doesn’t hold. (Perhaps the grandest abstractions of all in the modern world are “the market economy” and “industrial democracy” — abstractions that we forget are based on very concrete things like cheap fossil fuels or policemen who will enforce contracts at the point of a gun.) In the case of SQL, someone has to build a backend data-storage method that allows quick lookups. In the case of time series, what will the backend storage system look like? Will we need something like MapReduce? Do we need a different high-level language to concisely encapsulate high-level time-series concepts like “the trend component” or “the spectrum”?

Here is the place to note a lesson that I find I have to repeat to myself over and over: don’t think any harder than you need to. My interest in time series is very non-abstract; I have some specific questions I want to answer about some specific datasets at work. And yes, I want to make sure that I can combine them in new and interesting ways in a reasonable amount of time. But until I’ve asked a single specific question of a single specific dataset, I shouldn’t think too hard about making an apple pie from scratch.

So anyway, there’s a general point in here, and a specific one. The general point is to hunt for abstractions that make it possible to get a lot done without thinking, and make it possible to explore areas you didn’t even know you could explore. The specific point is that in 2012, I want to see what I can do with Akamai’s time-series data. I imagine one of these points will be interesting to you, the other less so.

Backbar, in the Union Square neighborhood of Somerville, is on Facebook, but I’ll be danged if I can find their website through any combination of reasonable search terms. So let’s try this:

• Backbar is on the web.

• You can find directions to Backbar, and even a map!

Perhaps this will do some good. I see that the indispensable Boston Restaurant Talk included Backbar’s URL, but for some reason didn’t actually provide the link.

A discussion flared up on Facebook based around this article by Michael Ellsberg in the New York Times whose premise is that college isn’t worth the money, and that we’d be better off encouraging entrepreneurship.

I happen to have been looking recently at the data on this. Let me give you a spoiler: it’s not even close. It’s worth the debt load. Here are the numbers:

• Median income for males with bachelor’s degrees, 2010: $55,038 (does not count those with more than a bachelor’s degree, like doctors or lawyers)

• Median for males with associates degrees: $40,918

• Median for males with some college, no degree: $36,082

• Median for males who graduated from high school or got a GED: $30,232

(I could obviously include numbers for women in here, too. I’m leaving them out only for brevity’s sake.)

The mean incomes are similar, but even more striking:

• College degree, 2010, male: $70,567
• High-school degree or equivalent, 2010, male: $36,755

To dramatize this a bit, imagine I grabbed two men at random and asked them their incomes. The probability that the randomly selected college-educated male is earning more than the randomly selected high-school-educated male is about 74%. [1]. I imagine that if I ran a similar simulation — whereby I simulate our two graduates after each has worked for 40 years, and add up their accumulated earnings — that the results would be even more stark.

Fortunately, the Census Bureau has already done that work for me. On a quick scan, I can’t find “work-life earnings” for all males, so I’ll just compare white males. Over the course of his working life, a college-educated white male (specifically one with a bachelor’s degree, not a master’s degree, a professional degree, or a Ph.D.) will have earned about $2.3 million. His high-school-educated white-male partner will have earned $1.2 million.

I repeat: it’s not even close. It’s so not even close that I consider it irresponsible in the extreme for Ellsberg to cherry-pick some success stories (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates) and imply that students should strive to be like them, rather than encouraging them to take a rather more sure route to success. Had Ellsberg encouraged students, instead, to skip college and aim to be professional sports players, I hope we’d all be deeply offended. The piece he actually did write is no less offensive.

P.S. (25 October 2011): as various commenters have pointed out, this only shows correlation; it doesn’t show causation. It could well be that the people who have the drive to get a college degree are the same as those who have the drive to earn a lot of income — and that they’d earn a high income even without the college degree. It would be interesting to compare the lifetime earnings of those who got into college but chose not to go with those who got into college and went. I’ll see if I can find any interesting data in this direction later.

[1] — This is just an estimate. It’s based on a simplifying assumption, namely that the probability distribution of incomes is approximately lognormal (i.e., that the logarithm of income follows a Gaussian [bell-shaped] distribution). That assumption, combined with the estimated means and medians from the links above, gives the 74% number.

Thanks to Cosma Shalizi for pointing me to a simple approximation to the true income distribution, and noting how I could go from the estimated means and medians to an estimated probability.

Matt Yglesias makes the entirely correct point that We Underinvest In Infrastructure Because We Overinvest In War, Health Care, And Low Taxes, along the way noting the various estimates of how much we need to be spending over the next N years on bridges, roads, and whatever else. Various organizations give us various numbers:

“All of the numbers are so gargantuan large that they’re useless when you’re trying to communicate with the public,” said Roy Kienitz, undersecretary for policy at the Department of Transportation.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that an investment of $1.7 trillion is needed between now and 2020 to rebuild roads, bridges, water lines, sewage systems and dams that are reaching the ends of their planned life cycles. The Urban Institute puts the price tag at $2 trillion.

The fact that these numbers are so gargantuan is exactly why we shouldn’t be talking about them in raw terms. $2 trillion is an essentially unfathomable number. So let’s try it some other ways:

The IRS collected about $2.3 trillion in fiscal year 2009, across personal income taxes, corporate taxes, Social Security taxes, the estate (“death”) tax, Medicare part A, various excise taxes, and so forth. Individual U.S. states collected about $704 billion in 2010, of which 33.5% was income tax and a bit less was sales tax. Federal and state taxes altogether, then, come to about $3 trillion. So our $2 trillion infrastructure investment is about 2/3 of the country’s total tax bill. (The $3 trillion tax bill, to put that in some more perspective, comes out of a $14 trillion GDP. Taxes come to about 21% of GDP, in other words.)

U.S. 10-year Treasurys are available at historically low rates right now — right around 2.5%. So let’s say the government borrowed $2 trillion today, and paid it off at 2.5% over the next ten years. How much would the monthly payment come to? (There is probably a lot of complexity about government financing that I don’t understand, but I’m treating this exactly like a mortgage with a 2.5% interest rate. Feel free to correct me if there’s some important nuance I’m missing.)

The monthly payment, it turns out, would be about $18.8 billion. This is getting more fathomable. And while the various governments’ $3 trillion in receipts come from many classes of tax levied on many different types of people and businesses, let’s just simplify and say that there are 144.1 million taxpayers — which is the number of individual Federal income-tax returns. How much will each of those taxpayers have to pay every month to ensure that our bridges don’t collapse in a decade? The answer: $18.8 billion per month divided by 144.1 million taxpayers, or $130.43 per month.

Now that is a number I can understand. The cost of ensuring a non-crumbling infrastructure is $130.43 per person per month. How much of an increase is that over what we pay now? Well, we pay a total of $3 trillion per year, or a quarter-trillion per month, or about $1,731 per return per month. $130.43 is a 7.5% increase over what we pay now.

I can wrap my head around “my tax bill will increase by 7.5%.” The story gets even rosier if you consider that investors are currently willing to lend the Federal government money to be paid off in 30 years for about 3%. That lowers the monthly payment to about $60 per person, which is about a 3.5% increase in overall taxes.

All of this assumes, recall, that every dime of the $2 trillion would be new money — money that we wouldn’t spend anyway. That is obviously false: if a bridge collapses, we’ll presumably repair it. And presumably there’s a lot of roadwork that we’d already be doing. But assuming it’s all new money, the average tax bill would go up by somewhere between 3.5% and 7.5%. I can wrap my head around the concept “my tax bill will increase by 5%,” much more than I can wrap it around “$2 trillion over the next decade.”

Note also that, if we somehow managed to get a lot of high-income people into this country, we could lower the per-person expense even more. What counts as “affordable” depends to a great extent upon how many people live in this country, because “per-person expense” has both a numerator and a denominator. There are two obvious ways to get more high-income people into this country: either (1) allow in any immigrant who has an employer to sponsor him or is looking to get a Ph.D., or (2) encourage native-born Americans to have more babies. Ideas for how to make either (1) or (2) happen will have to occupy another post at another time.

Trillions are unfathomable, so it’s important to find some way to put them in context to make them fathomable. Switching from aggregates to per-capita numbers is one quick way. Switching from “costs over ten years” to “cost per person per month” is another way. Percentages are another good measure: percent of GDP, say, or percent of current tax revenues. Otherwise we get stuck in massive-number fatigue, which helps no one (except maybe the political party which takes terrorizing you over the budget as its reason for being).

I don’t know why I made the mistake of reading David Brooks. This is a mistake that I’ve avoided making for so long. Why must I make it now?

Anyway, I’ll be quick. Brooks’s point is basically that people expect their government to do massive social engineering and do it well, and that they should rather expect it to fail: the systems government is engineering are just too massive to engineer them well. This is by way of telling us that government isn’t going to get us out of this recession, and that it’s foolhardy to expect that.

Let’s imagine it had gone the other way: Alan Greenspan had jacked up interest rates to prick the housing bubble a few years back, or any number of regulatory steps had been taken to tighten lending standards. Then Brooks would have nothing to talk about today.

Or go back to Hurricane Katrina. There were various conservative pundits, solemnly averring that the government’s disastrous response was just proof that central planning never works, and that people should never expect to get any help from anyone but themselves and their families. But had the government — at all levels — done its job, we never would have heard them claiming that this was proof of the government’s wisdom.

If we want to talk about the failures of central planning, let’s talk about war, or the DoD. There could be nothing more centralized, more hierarchical, or more literally regimented than the U.S. military — yet this is supposed to be why conservatives are all about the military. It’s a killing machine precisely because it is focused, like a massive machine, on the task of destroying other militaries.

So do we see David Brooks shaking his head from side to side as he sighs, telling us that war is not the answer because central planning never works? The closest we get to that is an apology, after the fact, for having supported the invasion of Iraq.

The best we can say, then, is that Brooks has learned his lesson, and will never again support conservative-friendly centralized government projects; he’ll be just as intolerant of conservative government causes as he is of liberal ones. We’ll just see about that.

Delightful read. My main concern when reading a book like this is that it’s going to be fawning, and will subscribe to the retrospective superhero status that its subject has attained. Brands couldn’t avoid that entirely here, of course (he chose to write about FDR, so I have to imagine he doesn’t loathe the man), but he’s just about as forthright about the man as he could be.

Most everyone knows the FDR story by now, but maybe it’s worthwhile to briefly reveal the highlights. Scion of the Roosevelt clan, Teddy Roosevelt his fifth cousin. Assistant secretary of the navy during World War I. Crippled below the waist by polio and confined to a wheelchair for much of his life. Governorship of New York. Elected president in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression after booting Hoover from office. Took the country off the gold standard. Closed the country’s banks during his first week in office. First 100 days created the New Deal. Domestic program foundered on his court-packing scheme, though it may have eventually helped him by holding a gun up to the Supreme Court’s head. Then Pearl Harbor, World War II, re-elected 3 times, and dead just months before the end of the war.

What a book like this brings to its subject is style, rather than much new information. Brands’s style is to let the subjects speak mostly for themselves: the ratio of quoted words to narrated words must be north of 1:1. Yet Brands stitches the quotes together effortlessly; it’s as though the characters themselves, and not Brands, were walking me through their lives.

Far from being fawning, I felt like Brands’s take on FDR’s leadership was slightly ambiguous. On many occasions — particularly whether to invade Europe through the north of France or the south of Italy first — it felt as though FDR sat quietly and hemmed and hawed until forced to make a decision. Sometimes his dithering may have served a strategic point: wait for someone else to make the first move, but steer their move so that they feel like they had more choice in the matter than they actually did. Other times he really did seem indecisive.

FDR left behind so little writing (in contrast to Churchill) that Brands often has to scrape around to describe the man’s inner life or his relations with others. The scraping occasionally goes too far, as when Brands describes what “must have” gone through FDR’s head. No one knows what must have gone through his head. No harm in speculation, but it’s just that.

Perhaps others already knew about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt’s relationship. I did not. In fact, I didn’t know a thing about Eleanor. She’s a thread weaving throughout the biography of FDR, of course, in spite of FDR’s best efforts. He cheated on her from early on with Lucy Mercer, who was actually with him on the day he died and slipped away before the press could find out; Mercer may well have been the love of FDR’s life. His and Eleanor’s union was a loveless marriage of convenience that would have ended in divorce soon after she discovered the Mercer affair, had Eleanor not known that divorce would end Franklin’s career. So they stayed together, under the stipulation (whether this is a known fact or just a strong suspicion of Brands’s, I don’t remember) that they would never have sex again, and that essentially they would lead two separate lives. FDR continued his rise to the presidency, and Eleanor slowly escaped from the painful shyness that had enveloped her throughout her youth. By the end of Franklin’s life, Eleanor was a powerful public figure in her own right. FDR dominates the book as a world-historical figure, of course, but Eleanor is the more captivating person.

The title suggests that the book has more focus than it does. Traitor to His Class doesn’t answer — or even come very close to answering — why a man from such exalted beginnings would care about the little people whom capitalism had steamrolled. It’s not clear that the book even tried to answer this — unlike, say, Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, whose organizing question is: why did a man who was so famous as a power-hungry political ball-buster do so much for people who could do nothing to aid his rise, particularly after he’d reached the summit? Traitor to His Class isn’t like that; it’s a straightforward, and straightforwardly enjoyable, biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest men.

(Attention conservation notice: 4000+ words, spread across reviews of eight books [9th forthcoming] that I’ve neglected to review over the last four months.)

I’ve been remarkably derelict in my book-reviewing duties of late, as the long row of book covers up above will suggest. Work, and life, and going on vacation without my computer, all have gotten in the way of writing here. So let’s see what we can do to remedy that, eh?

First, I must apologize a little: it’s been weeks or months since I’ve read these books, so I’m likely going to be remembering things incorrectly. I hope I convey the essences correctly.

Clark’s, Easterly’s, and Banerjee’s/Duflo’s books need to be described as a group, I think, both because I read them in the sequence listed; and because that sequence, coincidentally, was a really good order in which to read them.

• Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Clark’s goal is noble and grand. He’s trying to explain, first of all, that the Industrial Revolution really was an astonishing break with the rest of history up to that moment. Here’s the money chart from near the beginning of the book:

Something decisive and quite extraordinary happened in 1800. Some nations took off and escaped the ‘Malthusian trap’; others didn’t. Explaining why this ‘great divergence’ (to use the phrase that Clark borrows from Pomerance) happened is the book’s main project.

What is this ‘Malthusian trap’? It’s what happens to many families when they get a little more money: they have more kids. Those kids are supposed to work on the farm with their families. But there they run into the law of diminishing returns: each additional person trying to work the same fixed amount of land will generate less output than the previous person. The first person working a field may not have enough brawn to tend to all of it, so he’ll focus on the parts that get him the maximum return for his labor. Maybe he marries and his wife helps out; even if she’s as strong as he is, she’s unlikely to extract any more from the land than he did (if he could have extracted more, why wasn’t he already doing so?). And so forth: each additional laborer extracts less. But now there are more people to feed. So the total amount of food per capita has now gone down. The Malthusian trap is the tendency, among pre-industrial societies, to wipe out any gains from increased income by having more kids.

This leads Clark down the road that led economics to be called, centuries ago, the “dismal science”: the best thing that happened to pre-industrial societies, according to Clark, was for their population to be wiped out by the plague. This is why the world loves economists.

How did parts of the world get out of the Malthusian trap? Sheer dumb luck, according to Clark, as well as — and here’s where I found the book highly distasteful — genetics. The dumb luck part was an influx of resources from the new colonies abroad, like the United States. But that doesn’t explain all the difference, says Clark. He claims that the only available explanation is that the British, by 1800, had ruthlessly selected for the bourgeois virtues. That is, their superiority was genetic. Over the preceding hundreds of years, in Britain more than elsewhere, the wealthy had had more kids than the poor. By contrast, the wealthy everywhere else had been — and continued to be — subject to the Malthusian trap: the children of the wealthy tended to become less wealthy than their parents. In Britain around 1800, the wealthy had also inherited various behaviors that the poor had not. The wealthy, for instance, saved for a rainy day, and were ready to invest when investment opportunities arose. The poor had been selected against, and those who remained did what they needed to inherit the earth.

Clark has many, many charts to back this up. They come from obscure corners of British historical recordkeeping, and the data-analytic work he did here is certainly worthy of great respect. I imagine him spending many, many hours in the basements of old British churches, carefully turning through brittle yellow pages to determine the birth rate among, say, medieval British landowners and early-industrial-era textile-plant owners.

That said, you know that old line about the drunk guy fumbling around underneath the lamppost looking for his keys? A passerby asks him why he thinks his keys are there, and the drunk man replies that they’re not there, but that beneath the lamppost is the only place where he can see? Clark’s book is a lot like that. Only here it’s Anglophone recordkeeping rather than a lamppost, and an explanation for the Industrial Revolution rather than keys.

Given where he ends up — that white people in Britain c. 1800 had been bred to be the perfect bourgeois — it’s hard for me to escape the conclusion that the data didn’t lead him there. I’m pretty sure that’s where he wanted to end up.

A book like this is never a pure historical exercise, because it leads inevitably to the question: when some countries escape from the Malthusian trap in the modern era and others don’t, why is that? What did Japan do? What did the Soviet Union do? Korea? Hong Kong? China? How about countries that haven’t done so well — Nigeria, say, or Kenya or Haiti. I’ll say up front that I’ve not engaged with the data on these countries in the way that Clark has with Britain’s. But these are not trivial counterexamples. If the “they inherited bourgeois instincts from their parents’ good genes” story doesn’t hold for them, then it’s not much of a story. At that point it becomes a story that worked for one small island at one point in history but doesn’t hold up for most of the interesting cases.

So at best, I’m willing to put A Farewell to Alms on the “lots of people have lots of stories about how the world works” pile.

• William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics.

Easterly’s scope is more narrow: why has aid to poor countries done so little good? His big theme is that people respond to incentives, and that most aid creates exactly the wrong incentives. In the era right after World War II, rich countries thought that poor countries needed infusions of capital to get past the Malthusian trap: they get the capital, they build factories, and then they leave behind their pasts as centers of extractive industry. The amount of capital they received in aid was proportional to just how poor they were: the poorer you are, the more aid you receive. This gives poor countries no incentive to get out of their poverty traps: the wealthier they get, the less aid they get. The results were predictable.

The next story, according to Easterly, was that education was the thing: if only people could get educated, they’d dig their way out of their slough and all will be well. That also turned out not to be true.

Well, so what’s the issue? What’s actually holding poor countries back? Again Easterly returns to incentives, this time in a different form. Suppose you’re in a society weakened by official corruption: in order to get anything done, you need to bribe someone. Any one person who tries to buck the system by not paying bribes will be defeated, and the system will continue as it was. Or on the other, more hopeful side, consider a country having trouble attracting investment. It gets a little investment, which funds something like a new factory; now there are a few people in the poor country who know about how to run factories. Their knowledge spreads to those around them, and now there’s the potential for still more investment. Negative social structures lead to vicious cycles; positive developments lead to virtuous ones. There exist poverty traps, in other words. The existence of such traps is the fundamental problem. Easterly is extremely skeptical about the ability of (even well-run) foreign aid to fix the problem.

One thing he doesn’t discuss, though I’m sure it’s occurred to him, is the possibility that the best thing wealthy countries could do for poor ones is allow more immigration from poor countries. As Ed Glaeser says, the point should be not to help poor places, but rather help poor people. If people believe it’s in their best interests to move to the United States, that might be the very best thing we could do for them. Though there’s an exit and voice problem that we might cause, in that case: the most motivated, most intelligent people in a country might choose to leave; those people are the very ones who stand the best chance of helping the poor country out of its morass.

• Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.

This was a breath of fresh air after the previous two books. Recall that the first book in the triumvirate was about how certain nations might be genetically predisposed to remain poor for all time; the second was about how foreign aid doesn’t work because nations are stuck in poverty traps. Banerjee and Duflo instead get right down in the muck and ask what, specifically, works and what doesn’t to make individual people’s lives — not the life of a whole country, necessarily; just the lives of individual people — better. With the realization that no one person can make a government less corrupt or make the incentives for investment any stronger, how do we improve the lives of poor people? Poor Economics is a long collection of results that the authors have accumulated over decades of working on the ground in many foreign countries. This is work for which Duflo recently won the prestigious John Bates Clark medal in economics. How much should we charge for anti-malarial nets around beds, for instance? Does giving such nets away for free make people use them less (because the nets’ costlessness makes them seem valueless)? How, specifically, can we get people to use such nets more? How can we encourage people to use condoms? How do we improve individual schools in individual countries? The answers are unlikely to be one-size-fits-all: what works in India may well not work in Brazil.

Banerjee’s and Duflo’s main innovation is their method for answering these questions: the randomized controlled trial. I would have thought that this was already a standard tool within the international-aid community, but apparently it’s not. RCTs are the gold standard of experimental work within science, and now Banerjee and Duflo are bringing them to international aid. Their catalog of RCT results, in Poor Economics, is tremendously interesting and vibrantly written. Highly recommended.

• Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography.

You may have noticed that there’s no real reason why Europe ought to be called a continent. As a landmass, there’s virtually nothing to distinguish it from Asia. You can walk from Africa to Europe. For that matter, what about the artificial North America/South America divide? If we’re dividing up the world on the basis of geography (as opposed to culture, language, etc.), there ought to be one thing called “Eurafricasia” and another called “America.”

We might, however, decide that cultural divisions are legitimate ways to cut up the world. Fine, then, so where does European culture end and Asian culture begin? Greece has always straddled the boundary. Turkey wants to be part of the European Union, but it’s more Ottoman than Western European. The dividing line between Eastern Europe and western Asia is essentially arbitrary.

Spend enough time reviewing all the exceptions and mis-categorizations, and you come to realize just how senseless a lot of these divisions are. Spend enough time with Lewis and Wigen, and you realize that not only are the distinctions arbitrary; they also change over time depending upon ideological and political need.

I’ve heard this sort of approach described as “deconstruction”: the demonstration that any system of categorization is essentially arbitrary. The authors don’t intend to be nihilist; they would just like a better way of dividing up the world that reflects natural divisions rather than ideological priors. They’re rather more successful dismantling the old system than replacing it with a new one, but the book is mostly intended to get the discussion going: how should we teach geography so that students don’t believe, for instance, that there’s a concept called “Africa,” when North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa have, historically, had very little contact? One profitable way of dividing up the world would be by historical lineage and cultural connection; if we did it this way, then North America would be connected with Western Europe, and Muslim countries the world over (North Africa, the “Middle East” [a very new concept], Indonesia, …) would count as a single unit.

The book is terribly fascinating, eye-opening, and educational, if a bit too academic. Even the title: bless their hearts, someone should have told the authors that if they wanted to at least double their sales, they could have dispensed with a word like “metageography” and replaced it with something that gets the idea across more clearly. “Geographic categories,” maybe. Better yet, how about “mental maps”?

Still, it’s definitely worth a read. I hope their project succeeds.

• Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business.

This book is canonical by now. It’s an explanation of how U.S. business evolved from the start of the Republic until the final evolution into Big Business. To radically condense the book, the story goes like this: when the country was founded, the idea of a “corporation” as we think of it today didn’t exist. If people wanted to build a bridge, they chartered a partnership, built the bridge, and disbanded the partnership. Then the railroads came. (I’ve only realized in the last year or so that railroads changed everything.) Suddenly coordination on a large scale was necessary: if you want to connect your tracks to my tracks, we need to make awfully sure that your trains and my trains don’t occupy the same spot of track at the same time. This required coordination on a national scale. It required precisely constructed timetables. It required staffs that mastered the finer points of scheduling, spare parts, repairs, and so forth. It required a vast quantity of capital that couldn’t be assembled by the old partnership method; access to the great New York City capital markets was indispensable.

As Nature's Metropolis laid out so brilliantly, the railroad allowed an unprecedented degree of centralization. Rather than buying meat from your local butcher, cows were now slaughtered, eviscerated, and prepared for sale in Chicago, then packed on ice-filled trains and shipped east. Great factories were assembled for the slaughter and shipment of meat. Likewise for oats and wheat.

Now the economic problem facing modern man was not what it had been since the dawn of time; rather than a problem of limited supply trying to feed too many mouths, it was a problem of too much supply and not enough demand. Markets had to be created. The whole concept of breakfast cereal came about as a way to create demand for the output of the great grain-processing factories. Marketing became essential.

Now who would do the marketing? Specialized marketing firms didn’t have the same incentives as the grain manufacturers; they didn’t have the fire in the belly to get cereal out the door. So corporations took marketing in-house. In this way the makers of primary commodities moved closer to the consumer. At the same time, their factories’ need for constant production required a steady supply of raw ingredients. Companies moved to control the flow of goods, all the way from crops to customers, in order to keep production running smoothly.

And this is where we are today: in a world of massive, vertically integrated corporations — the Procter & Gambles, the Dow Chemicals, the General Millses — that control the flow of goods from field to mouth. Chandler documents this evolution grippingly, if at times in excessive detail. But that’s fine: his book is the first and last word on the evolution of American business, and it will remain a monument as long as people still care about that subject.

• Diane Coyle, The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy As If The Future Matters.

Oh how I hated this book. The margins are filled with my yelling at the author. Please don’t buy it.

There are a number of unconnected ideas in this book. We’re in a “weightless economy,” she says, where we increasingly are buying electronic goods or things like movie tickets that don’t correspond to any tangible thing. This premise is not demonstrated; it’s just asserted. There are entire pages (I’m thinking of pp. 197-198 in particular — probably my least favorite two pages in a nonfiction book ever) given over to anecdata, which is the closest she gets to coherently arguing anything.

Sorry, I’m getting off track. It’s going to be hard for me to calmly lay out the structure of the book without reliving the pain of reading it. So anyway, we’re in a weightless economy now. It’s been revolutionized by information technologies. This is asserted rather than argued. (A good case could be made, by a better author, that shipping containers were the real revolution.) The new world of information technology allows for longer supply chains (paths from component parts to the ultimate consumer). This is asserted rather than argued. (She would need to argue that supply chains are longer than they used to be, and that they’re longer because of information technologies. She does neither.) These longer supply chains mean that we need to trust everyone more. This is plausible but not argued.

Meanwhile, we have some big long-term economic problems. We have commitments to retirees that we’re unlikely, she says, to meet. Why this might be so is unclear, and she doesn’t argue it: the United States is very wealthy, and our tax burden is low. Eliminating the cap on Social Security payroll taxes would entirely close the funding gap.

I think that’s what gets me the most about this book: the depth of her analysis is no greater than that of a blog, but instead I had to slog through a book-length padded-out argument that doesn’t even make sense. She spends entire pages dishing out anecdata that don’t even begin to constitute an argument.

The argument that does make sense is that we have long-term problems like global warming, and that these require global institutions to coordinate responses to them. That could make sense: maybe nations will be unwilling to lower their CO₂ emissions unless other nations do, too; and since every nation feels the same way, no nation moves to reduce its emissions. This needn’t necessarily be the case: maybe a world of lower CO₂ emissions will be a world where we shift our resources into new technologies, new industries, new lifestyles that make the world better for everybody. Maybe a country that moves first into inventing these new industries will get an important leg up on every other nation. This isn’t a possibility that Coyle covers.

She’s compelled to turn everything into a Big Problem. Social Security couldn’t possibly be made solvent by eliminating the cap on income subject to the payroll tax; if it could be, her book would be very short indeed. All of The Economics of Enough is like that: someone who thinks like an engineer, with an eye to actually solving problems (like Esther Duflo, above) wouldn’t write a book like this.

The final irony on all of this is that I have absolutely no idea what “The Economics of Enough” means after reading this book. Does it mean “the era when we need to stop economic growth to keep our lifestyle sustainable”? No, it pretty manifestly does not mean that; Coyle establishes early on that increased wealth does make people happier, and that we’d be, if nothing else, politically in the wrong to demand of developing countries that they not experience the prosperity that the West has long enjoyed. I have no idea what we’re supposed to have “Enough” of.

To borrow a line from Roger Ebert, The Economics of Enough should be cut into free ukelele picks for the poor.

• Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life.

This is a very good personal portrait of the Iron Chancellor — the man responsible for uniting Germany. This is the man famous for his theory of realpolitik: an amoral foreign policy that seeks what’s best for his nation, paying no heed to scruples along the way.

As Steinberg tells it, Bismarck succeeded because he always had the ear of the king; when he lost his royal sponsor, upon the ascension of Wilhelm II to the throne of the German Empire, he lost his job. Steinberg makes much of Bismarck’s relations with his own mother and father, and how those relations led quite directly to his father-son-style relations with the various German kings. Bismarck continually threatened to resign, and when he did he would be overtaken with endless physical ailments. Steinberg spends rather more time on Bismarck’s psychology than I would have preferred.

The book I want to read, I think, would actually start before Bismarck and end after. It would start with Europe after Napoléon has been decisively defeated and exiled to St. Helena, as the continent strove to rebuild a new political order on the shattered remnants of the old; this era, up to Bismarck and thereabouts, is covered quite brilliantly, and in exactly the style I want, in Henry Kissinger’s Ph.D. thesis, A World Restored. The book I’m envisioning would situate Bismarck within his post-Napoleonic century and follow post-unification Germany all the way to World War I and possibly World War II. I’m looking for a portrait of modern Germany, I guess.

Steinberg does situate Bismarck within a larger context, but that context is the Junker landowning class into which Bismarck was born. He has less to say about the detailed politics and foreign relations among German states in the wake of Napoleon, as the major European states sought to create a true conservative balance of powers. Steinberg is more interested in Bismarck the man, with his stress-induced facial neuralgias and frequent taking of healing waters.

It’s hard to leave this book with positive feelings toward Bismarck. He was clearly a vain, easily wounded, egomaniacal man, but nonetheless a world-historically brilliant one. Steinberg makes me want to read more about him and about the country he created, but Steinberg’s own book is not the final word.

(For what it’s worth, Henry Kissinger himself, who surely knows more about Germany and realpolitik than I do, calls Steinberg’s book “the best study of its subject in the English language.”)

P.S. (September 5, 2011): Looks like the book I want is Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947

• John McCormick, Understanding the European Union: A Concise Introduction.

Having read this, I feel like I understand in broad outline the way that the EU works. I understand why EU regulation seems to cover such tiny details: in order to lower transaction costs between nations, bring greater unity, and not unfairly disadvantage any one country, the Union must regulate in great detail. I understand that the EU is engaging in valiant efforts to bring the poorer countries up to the standards of the wealthiest countries. The ultimate goal of all of this is, or was, to prevent war between nations from tearing Europe apart, as it did twice in the 20th century. Treat every European nation (whatever “Europe” means — this book and The Myth of Continents cover some of the same ground) as part of the same family, and prevent one nation from coveting another’s wealth, and maybe you prevent war. Maybe. I also understand from this book that European regulators have had a very hard time explaining to their countries what the EU does. I still don’t get the precise boundaries of the institutions, though McCormick did his best.

This was basically the first promising book I found through one Google search or another, so that I could understand what exactly is going on right now in Europe. Various countries are bailing out various other countries, and various bloggers have been writing that European monetary policy is “one size fits none”: it’s not even the right fit for the German economy. I had to assume that when Europe went on the single currency, its planners knew that something like this could happen. I hoped that McCormick could explain how Europeans envisioned a crisis resolving itself.

Unfortunately I didn’t really get an explanation of that topic — which is unfortunate, because that must be what most Americans want to know about Europe right now. The book came out in 1999 and was updated in 2002, so it was far away from the current day’s crisis. Time to look for another book that explains the origins of the current European mess.

• Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy.

[Will add this soon.]

I am now on Google+, because men of my ilk are required to join new services such as this. But it is not solving a problem I have. It’s just creating more problems.

I left Twitter some months ago, because my workflow was like this:

1. post to Twitter.
2. have the post automatically mirrored to Facebook.
3. flip over to Facebook to make sure that the post replicated.
4. if it took more than a minute to replicate, refresh a few times before giving up with an odd, low-level form of nervousness.

I was connected to all the same people on Twitter that I was connected to on Facebook. Granted, there were others on Twitter who were not on Facebook, like famous people or, to put it another way, people with whom the interaction was expected to be more one-way. I followed Chris Onstad, author of Achewood, for instance. It was fun. His Twitter feed is hilarious. I followed the author of a book I really loved, and to my great surprise and pleasure he connected me with the Boston Globe to write a piece for them. So I can definitely say that Twitter was good for my wallet.

But it was also really distracting, for reasons I laid out in that piece. And I don’t have the self-control to be connected to two social networks and yet only check them occasionally. Nor do I have the self-control to prevent myself from refreshing email dozens of times a day. Email by now is in fact a reflex. But at least email isn’t getting new updates constantly. And the fun of Twitter is following lots of interesting people saying lots of interesting things. It was too fun, honestly. Sad to say. It’s taken me until age 33 to realize that I actually have to talk myself down from unhealthy habits; I literally have to say to myself, “Yes, you want a milkshake from Toscanini’s made with burnt-caramel ice cream and a shot of espresso. But 1) those are empty calories, 2) you can use that $5 for something better, 3) you’re trying to cut down on your caffeine intake, aren’t you?” I probably should have been doing this throughout my life. In any case, I’m starting now, and it seems to be working.

So I ended up thinking that it was better to concentrate on one social network, namely Facebook, and ditch the rest. Really, it’s probably best to go with zero social networks, but Facebook is essentially inevitable now. Many websites require you to use a single-sign-on platform, and OpenID is dead; Facebook is the only one left. Google, as I recall, tried OpenID. OpenID sucked. So a Facebook account is … well, “necessary” isn’t the word, but it would certainly be annoying to go without one.

Also, though, Google+ isn’t solving a problem that I have. Its main innovation, so far as I can tell, is that it makes the concept of a “circle” fundamental: circles for friends, circles for acquaintances, circles for colleagues, etc. Others have the problem that they need their messages to go to specific circles; I do not. The problem is supposed to be that, say, you want to write naughty words, but don’t want your grandmother to read them; or that you want to bust on your coworkers but don’t want your coworkers to read it; or some such. First of all, Facebook offers enough in this direction that Google+ is not really solving a real problem. For instance, I was connected on Facebook to my girlfriend’s son, and I set up permissions such that he couldn’t see a lot of what I posted. Problem solved. I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of those blocks, too: coworkers have clearly put me on a “don’t share your Wall with coworkers” rule set. Facebook also offers a nice preview feature, which allows you to see how your profile looks when visited by a specific Friendster of yours.

More fundamentally, having to figure out who should read a given post and who shouldn’t is the kind of psychic weight that I try very hard to cast off. “Should this go to Acquaintances, or only to Friends?” is a question which, when asked often enough, will eventually rub my mind raw.

I’d much prefer to just post whatever comes to my mind to Facebook or Twitter, and let people decide whether they want to read it. On the receiving side, I’m sure Facebook has enough intelligent algorithms to decide whether you find my posts interesting; if it doesn’t think you do, they won’t show up in your feed. If you think I swear too much, you can ignore my posts. If you really hate me, you can defriend me.

Mark Zuckerberg, I’m told, said at one point that people should have just one persona, which is on display at all times. At some level this is wrong: I make dirty jokes with some people but not with my mother; I have one side of my personality that really likes discussing policy and theory, but that side will quickly put itself into hiding if it senses that the people around it just don’t care about those things.

But the costs of having different personalities on the web — one for Acquaintances, one for Friends, one for Policy Wonks — exceed the gains, for me anyway. I’d much prefer to put all those personalities together into one feed. I suspect the audience finds this more interesting, in any case: much better to get the occasional notional pornography title (a category of Facebook post that I very much enjoy writing) amidst links about health insurance, I think, than to get a steady diet of one or the other. I could be wrong about this, in which case my audience would prefer that I put different ideas in different channels. Not my problem. I guess Google+ is designed for people who think that is their problem.

Google+, I gather, came out of watching people’s occasional paroxysms of anger against Facebook’s privacy problems. But people don’t really care about their privacy; if they did, Twitter wouldn’t be popular. In Twitter, everything you write is visible to the world. Had Facebook decreed from early on that everything you post is public, people would have nothing to be angry about. It’s the perception of a bait-and-switch that angers people about Facebook; it is manifestly not that people care about their privacy. So inasmuch as Google+ gives people more privacy than Facebook, it’s not offering the world a solution to any problem that the world actually suffers from.

Neither Google nor Facebook actually cares about privacy. What they want is to sell ads, or to otherwise monetize their social networks. That means, as the saying goes, that “if you’re not paying for a product, you’re the product.” They’re selling you to advertisers. So at a fundamental level — the level of what keeps the lights on in Google’s and Facebook’s datacenters — neither of them is actually interested in your privacy. Neither of them could be interested in your privacy. If Google+ has any actual appeal, it’s the perception that it won’t bait-and-switch you. But that’s just responding to an accident of Facebook’s history. If Facebook were born now, it would be Twitter, and everything would be public. Not baiting-and-switching on privacy is not the basis for a network that people should care about.

What I get with Google+, then, is the solution to a privacy non-problem and the creation of groups of acquaintances that cause me stress without solving any problem I have. Can someone point me to some really killer feature that I should know about?

I am often a curmudgeon about new technology, but it’s not out of reflexive hostility toward new things. It’s that I really need people to prove to me why I need something. I was this way with the iPhone and the Mac, but eventually the tipping point came where it was obvious that the iPhone and the Mac were just better than every one of their competitors, and that there was no legitimate reason to avoid buying one. So I’m more than open to being convinced that I should use Google+. I just need to be convinced that it a) solves a problem I have and b) is better than Facebook. Thus far I’ve not been convinced.

I come back to Austin Frakt’s post calculating how much the Federal subsidy for health insurance is worth every few months, and I think I have to re-study it every time. It’s a hugely important post.

Probably a lot of others don’t read wonky health-insurance blogs quite as obsessively as I do, so the background is like so: your employer (if you’re lucky enough to have an employer that supplies health insurance) doesn’t pay taxes on the health-insurance fringe benefit. When they pay you a dollar in wages, they have to pay their part of Medicare and Social Security taxes. Once they’ve paid their taxes and passed your wages on to you, you have to pay taxes on them. Health insurance isn’t like that: your employer doesn’t pay taxes on health benefits, and neither do you. So one dollar in health insurance is worth more than one dollar in wages to you and to your employer.

Turns out that the subsidy is really distorting. Professor Frakt’s exercise may already be clear to everyone, but I don’t think it was clear to me for a while. So in bullet form, trying to make it as clear as possible (to myself as much as to everyone else) it’s like so:

• For every dollar an employer pays out in wages, a certain fraction of that dollar goes to taxes (employer pays Medicare and Social Security). Call that fraction T.
• So for every dollar in wages that the employee receives, the employer pays $(1+T).
• Flip that around: for every dollar in wages that the employer pays, the employee receives $1/(1+T).
• Now the employee has his dollar in wages. Of that, a certain fraction goes to taxes (Medicare, Social Security, federal, state). Call that tax fraction E.
• So the employee is left with $(1-E) of his dollar.
• But his dollar was already $1/(1+T) of what the employer spent.
• So of every dollar the employer spends on wages, what ends up in the employee’s pocket is $(1-E)/(1+T). Call this F, for “Final amount in the employee’s pocket.”
• This means that $(1-F) goes to taxes, for every dollar the employer spends on wages.
• Put another way: a dollar spent on health insurance, which no one pays taxes on, loses the government $(1-F). 1-F is called the “tax price.” Professor Frakt links here to a paper by the omnipresent Jon Gruber, an MIT professor who was central to building Massachusetts’ universal-coverage system, and who advised President Obama on the Affordable Care Act. The paper — “The Impact of the Tax System on Health Insurance Coverage” — sounds interesting.

To put some flesh on the numbers:

• when the employer pays you a dollar (in wages, but not in health insurance), it spends 6.2 cents on Social Security and 1.45 cents on Medicare Part A. So T = .062 + .0145 = 0.0765.
• you pay Social Security and Medicare Part A (same percentages as your employer), plus your Federal marginal tax rate (I’m in the 28% bracket), plus your state marginal rate (Massachusetts’ is 5.3%). So my marginal rate is 40.95%, whence E = .4095.
• So when my employer spends a dollar on health insurance rather than on wages, the government loses 45 cents that it would have picked up in taxes. (Professor Frakt ends up with 37 cents using more-conservative assumptions, namely that the state tax rate is 5% and that my Federal marginal rate is 20%.)

This distorts the labor market — encouraging employers to buy more-expensive health-insurance plans — and costs the government money that it could be spending on other valuable things.

And it’s regressive: if you’re in the top (35%) bracket, you’re getting more of a benefit from the health-insurance subsidy than is someone in the 28% bracket. Same goes for the mortgage-interest deduction, and it may be even worse there: not only do higher-income people get more off their taxes for every dollar they spend on mortgage interest than do lower-income people, but the more you spend on a house, the more you can take off your taxes. Assuming Bill Gates’s house cost the $97 million that some random web page says it did, that he put 20% down, and that he financed it with a 2%, 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, he’ll be able to use the mortgage-interest deduction to avoid paying taxes on $26,345,019.10 in income over the life of the mortgage. Assuming he’s in the 35% bracket, that’s $9,220,756.69 that the mortgage-interest deduction saved him. Whereas if you’re in the 28% bracket and finance a $350,000 home the same way, you’ll save $33,270.77 over those same 30 years.

These “tax expenditures” cost the government money in the same way that buying a bomber or building a road costs it money. But tax expenditures haven’t, until recently, appeared on the radar in the same way that a $500 toilet seat does. We may well be paying for Bill Gates’ $500 toilet seat, but it hasn’t had the same visceral effect.

…it is probably the most accurate word to describe what will be happening in a month or so. Right around a month from now will be the start of my two-week vacation, ending in early August. I am very much looking forward to it. I planned nothing in advance for that period, and just assumed I’d figure out what to do when the time came.

My experience with planning summer vacations is that there are essentially two possibilities: either

1. Go to some lovely, exotic locale and pay a lot to get there (and probably pay a lot for housing while there). I did this in the Bahamas a while ago. I did this in Turkey a whiler ago. (Istanbul is the most amazing place I’ve ever been.)

2. Go to Cape Cod (nearby vacation destination of choice for people in the Commonwealth) and pay a lot to stay there, if you can find a place at all.

So I was mostly pleased to realize this year that I do not have the free cash to do either 1) or 2). Instead I’ll be hanging out in Cambridge/Boston [1] and in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire and Massachusetts (Exeter, Portsmouth, Newburyport, Portland, and points in between). I’m very excited about this. I’m going to spend two weeks going to all the places I’ve meant to go to for years. I’m going to walk the Freedom Trail in full (it goes into Charlestown, whereas I’ve basically only walked the parts right near the Common). I’m going to hit as may restaurants as I can that people have recommended (Duck Fat and Toro come immediately to mind). I’m going to go to many bars. I’m going to spend time on many beaches with my lovely girlfriend. I’m going to buy a Boston guidebook and find anything that people always do with their tourist friends but never do on their own (minus Cheers — screw a lot of that) This will be great.

I hereby open up the comments thread to nominations for things to do during my “staycation.”

Update (20 June 2011): I’ll include things here that people have suggested or have come to my mind:

• Day trip to Newport, Rhode Island. Might be annoying to get there by mass transit (commuter rail to Providence, then two buses), but I could see if my lady would like to drive with me.
• A friend reports: “You know, across the bay from Newport are the towns of Tiverton (Four Corners) and Little Compton, which are genuinely two of the most beautiful small towns in New England. Little Compton also has Goosewing Beach, a little-known gem.”
• A water park somewhere, with the lady and her son.
• Learn to sail through Community Boating, Inc.
• Lobster rolls at one or more clam shacks in Essex (see this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece about Gloucester and its clams).
• Bread in Plymouth, via Chowhound.
• Kolbeh of Kabob, 1500 Cambridge Street in Cambridge, also via Chowhound

• Museums at Harvard:

  • The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, open 11 – 4 Monday through Thursday and 11-3 on Fridays during the summer. That’s for the Putnam Gallery in Science Center 136. The Foyer Exhibition Space is in Science Center 371, open M-F 9-4. Inquiries: 617-495-2779.
  • The Museum of Natural History at 26 Oxford Street in Cambridge. It’s open daily 9-5 with special “Summer Nights at the Museum 2011: Fourth Wednesdays, June 22, July 27, August 24, and Extended hours, 5-8 pm, with half price admission”. It’s also “Free to Massachusetts residents every Sunday morning (year-round) from 9:00 am to noon”
  • The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at 11 Divinity Ave in Cambridge. It’s “open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.”
  • The Semitic Museum at 6 Divinity Ave, open “Monday-Friday from 10:00am to 4:00pm and Sunday from 1:00pm to 4:00pm.”
  • The Warren Anatomical Museum, “part of the Countway Library of Medicine’s Center for the History of Medicine. The Museum’s Exhibition Gallery, which displays 300 cases and artifacts from the larger collection, is located on the 5th floor of the Countway Library.” The Countway Library is in the Longwood Medical Area at 10 Shattuck St.
  • The Sackler Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger, and Fogg museums at 485 Broadway in Cambridge, open Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–5pm.

• To quote a friend:

• Providence:

  • New Rivers
  • La Laiterie
  • Red Dog
  • check out the RISD Museum

• Tiverton Four Corners

  • Gray’s Ice Cream

• Newport

  • Scales and Shells
  • whatever else the NY Times said

• Portsmouth NH

  • there are some good places, but I can’t remember the names!

• Portland

  • Hugo’s
  • Fore St
  • Cinque Terre
  • the art museum in Portland is pretty good, too

[1] – Adam and I have been trying to figure out whether there’s a good phrase to encapsulate the urban core of Boston. Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline are in the core. Framingham, say, is not. The narrowest designation that the Census Bureau seems to work with is the Boston MSA, for Metropolitan Statistical Area, which extends all the way into New Hampshire. I will not be hanging out in something as wide as an MSA.

I’ve feared for a while that my generation would become libertarians by default: the social safety net has been so thoroughly worn down that there’s little social contract left; I fear that people expect Medicare and Social Security to be gone by the time they retire. If that’s what people expect, then they stop lobbying to strengthen Social Security and just look out for #1. Republicans, meanwhile, have never stopped trying to destroy Social Security. Current retirees will never let Social Security end, but maybe my generation will. My parents’ generation expects Social Security to be there, and many of them have pensions. My generation might well expect Social Security to die, and we all have very weak 401(k)s instead of reliable pensions. So we may not know what to lobby for, because we’re not used to having a social safety net to fall back on. We may not know what we’re missing until it’s gone. Hence libertarianism by default: the libertarianism of apathy.

This is all just speculation about what might happen, of course. This generation might turn out to be just as passionate about liberal causes as was FDR’s generation — particularly after watching several bubbles and crashes over just the last decade. Certainly I think that this calls out, more than ever, for more active management in the economy, and particularly for more protection against the business cycle. I think a lot of people my age think the same way. Now if only our elected representatives would stop merely trying to prevent the death of Social Security, and instead take the fight to the Republicans.

These thoughts have all been bubbling for a while. They were brought to a boil by a terrific short piece in the New Republic (via Matt Yglesias). Well worth your time.

Attention conservation notice: reviews of a few books I’ve read recently, in lieu of the full reviews that they all deserve.

• Nicholas Riasanovsky and Mark Steinberg, A History of Russia, 7th edition. Covers the entirety of Russian history, from the cloudy origins of Kievan Rus’ up to Vladimir Putin’s rule, and I gather that the eighth edition has even more on post-Communist Russia. Given the immense swath that this spans — Kiev, the rise of the Muscovite state, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, all the Romanovs, the state-furthered immiseration of the serfs, the Revolution of 1917, war Communism, the 5-year plans, Stalin’s insanity, the mid-20th-century stalling of Communism under Khruschev and Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin — it is amazing that Riasanovsky and Steinberg can pack it all into 600-odd pages.

  The book tries very hard to address all the scholarly controversy around every disputed tale of Russian history. The result is that it’s incredibly balanced, but that less-settled bits of the history are surrounded by equivocations and quantities of nuance that most of us just don’t need to know. Since the parts of Russian history that are most in doubt are the earliest parts (simply because there’s less documentation), the most boring parts of A History of Russia are at the very beginning. If you can make it through the first 150 pages or so, I think you’ll find the rest of it quite captivating. Skim if you need to.

  Riasanovsky and Steinberg also, for some reason, don’t believe in footnotes. There are maybe two footnotes in the entire work, and they come at the very end; I suspect that Steinberg’s addition to the newer editions (maybe the fifth and later) led to a little bit of modernization. The lack of footnotes isn’t a huge deal, given the lengthy bibliography at the end. That bibliography could stand to be narrated, but I assume they only put the choicest works back there.

  In short, this is a terrific single-volume introduction to the history of Russia, and I intend to turn it into a jumping-off point for more-focused histories.

• William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. I mentioned a little while ago that I found it hard to express the majesty of this book. I’m still having trouble doing so, but I’ll give it a go.

  Essentially William Cronon is trying to understand the connection between the city and the country. As a young tyke he always thought of the city — and Chicago was The City — as this gross agglomeration of steel and smoke and confusion, standing over the pristine, unspoiled wilderness that he and his family were driving to for vacation. Suffice to say that Nature's Metropolis is a prolonged rebuttal of that viewpoint.

  It’s more than the obvious observation that the country does the work that the city asks it to do and that the city wouldn’t eat without the country. It’s that the very way in which we understand the world, and the very means by which we eat, were transformed utterly by the city — by Chicago in particular.

  Let’s look at meat in particular; it’s one of three main commodities within Nature's Metropolis, the others being wood and wheat. Imagine the era before the railroad and before refrigeration. This was the era when ranchers would raise cows in Texas and the cowboys of myth would bring them north to be slaughtered. They had to be slaughtered near to where they were eaten, because meat spoils quickly and there was no fast way to carry the meat long distances.

  The train changed all that, as it changed so much besides. Now cows could be loaded on trains and shipped north within a few days. Capitalist logic soon enough changed one part of this: it’s quite inefficient, if you’re treating a cow as a mobile store of meat, to load the entire animal on a train. Much more efficient to remove the bones and skin and eyes and load only the beef. But it would still be difficult, if not impossible, to carry a train full of beef long distances — Chicago to New York, say — without its rotting.

  Hence the refrigerated train car: keep the beef cold; now you can concentrate all your meat production in one central place that can destroy animals at a vast scale, and can ship them from there to the rest of the country. This is how Chicago became meatpacker to the world; it would have been impossible without railroads. It also would have been impossible without the network of ice-refilling stations that sprang up alongside railroad tracks throughout the east. Refrigerated train cars and their ice-filling stations are associated with the names Armour and Swift.

  A drastic change like this, from eating meat that your neighborhood butcher slaughtered to buying “dressed beef” destroyed thousands of miles away, doesn’t happen naturally. It took marketing and tough competition to turn Armour into a powerhouse among slaughterhouses. It required them to squeeze into new towns, undercut the existing butchers using prices that only massive capitalist enterprises could afford, and play hardball. But within a couple decades, the work had been done: we were eating meat that had been killed far away and brought to us by rail car.

  The railroads, and capitalist enterprise, transformed nature and transformed farmland. Bison, you may remember, used to roam the Great West. Then the white man came. And then the railroads came; shooting bison from the train (I envision Sarah Palin, hunting from the air) became sport, and their pelts clothed women back east. There were so many bison that thousands and millions of them went to waste: the tourists would shoot them and leave their corpses to rot as the trains continued off into the hinterland. Soon enough there were no bison left, and cows came to roam the land. There’s nothing ‘natural’ about cows there; their presence is purely manmade. Or more precisely: the cow occupies what philosophers (going back to Aristotle, I believe) have called ‘second nature’. Humanity has always built its own nature atop the first, fundamental nature. (Where first nature ends is hard to pin down. Maybe all we can say is that sunlight striking earth is first nature. It’s certainly possible that everything nowadays from sunlight up to the factory is second nature.)

  Capitalism utterly transforms nature in ways that would have previously been inconceivable. The train radically contracts space. The market for grain futures destroys time, in a way that’s more amazing than I would have understood before reading Cronon: grain starts as, say, “Andy’s Wheat From Indiana.” But capitalism — specifically the railroad — demands that wheat be dumped into trains in bulk. (Here I say “demands” as a shorthand for “rewards with low prices”.) So grain starts getting treated as a big, bulk, fungible fluid that gets loaded onto trains as an undifferentiated mass. Now we can talk about “wheat,” and we can ship, say, No. 1 Summer Wheat from Chicago to New York. Then we knock up the abstraction one level: we trade contracts to buy and sell wheat six months or a year from today, which is a good that doesn’t even exist yet, and not only that, it’s an abstraction of a physical thing that started as Andy’s wheat. The wheat future isn’t first nature; it at least second nature.

  I’ve hardly even scratched the surface of what Nature's Metropolis covers. It’s engaging history. It understands capitalism in the large. But at the same time, Cronon plays with noisy data from midwestern bankruptcies and funerals, because bankruptcy and death are two of the only times that people have to reveal whom they owe their debts to. And by mapping out the pattern of debts, you can learn the shape of Chicago’s hinterland. And I don’t want to slight style for a moment: William Cronon is a very, very talented writer; few people could tell such a grand story at such detail so engagingly.

  Nature's Metropolis is six different kinds of landmark. Read it now.

• Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers. A light read, which I think I took care of in a couple hours. It’s a fun story about where the telegraph came from, with plenty of enjoyable stories along the way. For instance, the message tubes that we’re familiar with from various movies (Brazil, say) came about to help speed up telegram delivery: the plurality of telegrams arrived in the central-London dispatching station and went to the stock exchange, so for a time the telegraph companies hired runners (young boys, mostly) to ferry the telegrams a few blocks. Eventually they replaced these with suction tubes, which allowed for greater throughput (as we’d call it today).

  I didn’t actually know much about telegrams before I read this book. I didn’t know, for instance, that people typed them up on one side, and that people were involved in retyping the telegrams at every leg of its journey (British hinterlands to one floor of the London central exchange, relayed to a second floor of the exchange, retyped and sent along to the U.S., say). I sort of expected, without really thinking about it, that telegrams were relayed just like Internet packets are now: from the source to a router nearer the destination, to another still-nearer router, and so forth until it arrived where it was supposed to. But no; it was humans all the way, for at least a few decades.

  Standage’s particular twist on the story is to view the telegraph as a forerunner in many ways of the modern Internet — even down to the particular social conventions that telegraph operators adopted. Telegraph operators of the mid-19th century were like BBS operators of the late 20th.

  Having come from Nature's Metropolis, I was expecting somewhat more out of The Victorian Internet, especially because Krugman recommended both NM and TVI in the same breath. They’re quite different books. Nature's Metropolis wants to understand all of capitalism through the lens of a transformative technology; The Victorian Internet mostly just wants to understand the telegraph. It does so vibrantly; highly recommended.

• Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. There will surely be many books trying to understand how the financial crisis happened. This one’s angle is that the crisis of 2008-? started when the U.S. adopted the 30-year mortgage, which is to say when FDR established Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the 30s to create a liquid market in mortgages.

  “Liquidity” is a simple word that gets widely deployed, but I’m not sure that everyone’s clear on what it means. The idea is just that — as we saw in the recent crisis — sometimes everyone in a market gets scared of everyone else in a market, and gets convinced that no one is going to pay back his debts. When that happens, the market is “illiquid”; we heard that the markets had “seized up” in late 2008. You can imagine that 30-year mortgages would be particularly illiquid: you really need to trust the person you’re loaning money to if you’re going to loan him money for 30 years. There’s the risk that he’ll default on the mortgage. There’s the risk that you’ll loan money to him at 4%, but that inflation will be consistently at 5+% over the next 30 years, and that you’ll thereby lose money on this particular mortgage. There’s the risk that the U.S. will turn into Weimar Germany over the next 30 years, and that mortgages won’t be worth the paper they’re written on.

  So the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is an entirely unnatural creature. There would be no liquid market in 30-year fixed-rate mortgages if the government didn’t intervene. McLean and Nocera tell us that, before FDR intervened, the mortgage market was entirely local: you go to your local bank, you put down 30%, and your local banker — after sizing up your character (“A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom”) — gives you the loan. You surely couldn’t get a loan from some bank thousands of miles away on the basis of some forms you fill out. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac agreed to buy up mortgages from local banks, so long as those mortgages met certain standards (20% downpayment, etc.). They made the market for these mortgages “liquid.” Mortgages that Fannie and Freddie were willing to buy were called “conforming loans.”

  Then in the 70s came the revolution that we’re all, in one way or another, familiar with today: bankers turned all manner of financial instruments into securities. You could now buy a part of a mortgage, which would encapsulate (among other things) a bet about the borrower’s ability to pay. You could assemble many such mortgages into a security called a Collateralized Debt Obligation (or CDO). You could take out something like insurance on the CDO, which would pay you money if the mortgagee defaulted; this was called a Credit Default Swap. You could divide the mortgages within the CDO into groups called “tranches” according to how likely you thought it was that each mortgage would be paid off. And so forth. We’re unfortunately very familiar with how all of this works.

  McLean and Nocera map in gruesome and depressing detail what happened next: a market in “non-conforming” loans developed, and over time it took on a life of its own. As someone said, subprime loans weren’t bought, they were sold. The story of the junk salesmen gets more and more insane, and just when you think “this thing I’m reading about is The Bubble,” it turns out that The Bubble is a second round of insanity that carried out the final coup de grâce on the world economy.

  No one escapes from the story unscathed. McLean and Nocera show that every financier — most especially including Alan Greenspan — who said that the financial crisis was unforeseeable was not only dead wrong, but must also have been willfully deaf to what his advisors were telling him.

  For an intro to the book, I highly recommend listening to McLean and Nocera on a few recent Planet Money episodes ( 1, 2, 3). In fact, I recommend listening to everything Planet Money puts out; you should subscribe to the podcast.

P.S.: James Kwak at The Baseline Scenario expresses some doubts about the argument that a liquid national private mortgage market wouldn’t exist without government intervention.

(Sidebar bit of context: I voted for Mike to run against Scott Brown for the senate race when Ted Kennedy died. Had Mike won the Democratic primary rather than Martha Coakley, I’m convinced that the Commonwealth’s Senate delegation would still be 100% Democratic.)

Dear Congressman Capuano,

I see that Rep. Ryan is proposing to privatize Medicare. And I see that the GOP is trying to scare everyone into thinking that Social Security’s funding problems can only be addressed by cutting benefits for the middle class, even though the CBO says otherwise.

I have two questions about this. First, can you help me understand why the Democratic Party hasn’t taken hold of the narrative here? There’s a lot in the news about Social Security’s peril, but nothing about how the whole problem could be solved by eliminating the payroll-tax cap.

Second, and maybe more importantly: why can’t the Democrats take the fight to the Republicans? We shouldn’t be the party of fighting rearguard actions to prevent the dismantling of the social safety net; unfortunately, that’s most of what people have known us for over the last decade, at least, with the notable and terrific exception of the Affordable Care Act. (Here’s hoping it gets implemented.) Under President Bush, we were known as the party that fought successfully against privatizing Social Security. I’m glad we pulled that off, but why couldn’t we have taken the fight to them? Not only will Social Security not be dismantled, but it will be strengthened, so that it provides the sort of retirement that we need, and functions as a real pension for those of modest to average means? In the wake of Enron, everyone was aware — or could have been made aware through the use of that one vivid example — that 401(k)s are no substitute for a real defined-benefit retirement plan.

As for Medicare and Medicaid: we have all the facts on our side; why can’t we fight? Why can’t we bring Medicare to everyone, not just the aged (and some exceptions like those with end-stage renal disease)? Why can’t we show the American people that Medicare’s rate of cost growth is lower than that of private health care? Why must we settle for not letting the Republicans destroy it?

A robust Democratic party — the party I want to belong to — would fight these fights, not only because they’re just, but also because we have the facts on our side. And the story doesn’t seem hard to sell. During the fight over the Affordable Care Act, many were concerned that the elderly would fight the bill because they thought it would mean gutting their Medicare. So wouldn’t the simplest bill, with the most easily understood PR, have been one that simply extended Medicare to those under 65? This bill would have had the virtue of being the best bill, as well.

To some extent I know I’m preaching to the choir, both because you’re a very progressive representative and because the Senate is the problem more than the House; the Senate seems to be where progressive legislation goes to die. If the Senate is the problem, and the public decisively wants a stronger safety net (and I’d be shocked if, when asked whether Medicare ought to be extended to all Americans regardless of age or income, Americans said no), I want the Democrats out there every day saying that the Senate is standing in the way of the people’s will. I want “procedural reform” on everyone’s lips.

In short, I want some fight in my party. And unless this is a case of media misrepresentation, I just don’t see that fight.

Having now laid out a largely negative case, I need to explain that beneath it all is a very positive question: what do I, as a resident of the nation’s most reliably blue state, do to fight for a Democratic party that’s worth fighting for?

With respect, Steve Laniel

Level-zero programmers obsess over essentially unimportant details of programming: whether you should write blocks like

void someFunction(void) {
    printf "Yes\n";
}

or like

void someFunction(void)
{
    printf "Yes\n";
}

, for instance, or whether to use vim or emacs to edit your code. These are unimportant for at least a couple reasons. First, you can solve these sorts of style problems in an entirely automated way. Second, there are many, many things that are more important than these sort of nits; they don’t even really impact your code’s readability, for one. These details don’t even count as ‘style’. They’re purely mechanical.

A level-zero English-language writer pays attention to Strunk & White. What’s odd about Strunk & White is that, far from being about The Elements of Style like its name suggests, it’s really The Elements of Grammar. True, grammar does matter. Inasmuch as “style” means “writing to appeal to your audience,” and inasmuch as your audience cares about little grammar nits, grammar is important. Grammar, in this view, is arbitrary but important. It’s like the location of the silverware at dinner, or like not chewing with your mouth full: it’s an arbitrary convention that certain groups of people pay attention to. It’s a class identifier. Using “whom” properly, or not ending a sentence with a preposition, is a class identifier. It’s a way to signal to people of your class that you’re one of them. Others will completely miss the signal, which doesn’t make them rubes; it just means that they don’t subscribe to your particular class signals. So call it Elements of Writing For The Wealthy, perhaps.

But even with that caveat out of the way, and even if you don’t agree with Language Log that Strunk & White is a pile of trash, it’s still the case that The Elements of Style is wildly, comically unimportant to the act of writing readable text. Whether you use “whom” properly (and I’m a dues-paying member of the Whom-Using Board Of Pedants) has practically nothing to do with whether people will read your writing all the way through to the end.

Grammar is important to get you off the ground, in a certain sense. Works riddled with typos are often hard to get through. Using commas where you mean to use semicolons will sound wrong in your reader’s ear if he’s trained to read them that way (so again, the rule “know your audience” is logically prior to the rule “use punctuation properly”).

But that’s just the point: this is level-zero stuff. These are the rules you pay attention to because they’re rote and mechanical, and thereby easier to remember and implement than “grab your reader with a good hook” or “use lots of examples when you’re arguing an abstract point.” They’re high-school rules; they’re not adult rules.

I spent two hours on Sunday trying to explain what makes this book as amazing as it is. I failed. I will try again soon. Until then, I’d just strongly advise you to go read it. It’s one of the few best books that I’ve read in the last five years. And it’s not at the top of the list only because I’ve read books like The Power Broker and Common Ground that are such landmarks. It’s definitely in the top five, though. So please, go read it.

(Current events coincidence: Cronon has been in the news lately for his investigations into the Republican legislation machine. I happened to read Cronon’s book on Krugman’s few-months-old suggestion, but otherwise this is just a coincidence.)

Repeat after me: there is no Social Security crisis. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s turn the microphone over to the Congressional Budget Office from July of last year:

CBO estimates the 75 year actuarial balance to be -0.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); that is, under current law, the resources dedicated to financing the program over the next 75 years fall short of the benefits that will be owed to beneficiaries by about 0.6 percent of GDP. That figure is the amount by which the Social Security payroll tax would have to be raised or scheduled benefits reduced for the system’s revenues to be sufficient to cover scheduled benefits. In other words, to bring the program into actuarial balance over the 75 years, payroll taxes would have to be increased immediately by 0.6 percent of GDP and kept at that higher rate, or scheduled benefits would have to be reduced by an equivalent amount, or some combination of those changes and others would have to be implemented.

Once the temporary Social Security tax reduction goes away, we’ll be back to 7.65% for OASDI + Medicare Part A. So what the CBO is telling us is that we could increase the tax from 7.65% to 8.25% immediately and solve the problem for the next 75 years.

CBO also lays out some policy options, and how much of the 0.6%-of-GDP gap each of them would close. One option is to eliminate the cap on the Social Security payroll tax, so that income above $106,800 would also pay the 6.2% OASDI tax. If we did this, the 0.6% gap would close by … wait for it … 0.6%. (See the chart on page xi.)

Now then. You typically hear it said that people will have to work longer in order to close the gap. “Working longer” means “delaying when people can receive Social Security retirement benefits,” which in turn (because people have finite lives) means “decreasing the total amount that people will receive in retirement benefits over their lives.” That’s the whole point: make them work longer so that Social Security pays out less.

Since Social Security is the major source of income for a large fraction of Americans (I’ll find a citation for that; I just saw it cited the other day), and it’s not the major source of income for wealthy people, “increasing the retirement age” is another way of saying “decreasing benefits for the poor and middle-income Americans.” The CBO says that doing this would close about half the gap. (See the same chart on page xi.)

On the other side, we could tax higher-income earners. Taxing income above $107,000 would affect approximately the top 13% of tax returns, and would solve the entire Social Security “problem” in one fell swoop.

So, to review, two available options are

• increase the retirement age, which, virtually by definition, is equivalent to cutting benefits for poor and middle-income earners, and would solve half the problem.

• remove the cap on Social Security taxes, which would affect the top 13% of tax returns and solve the entire problem.

Please keep this in mind whenever you hear some Very Serious Person intone that we’ll all need to tighten our belts and work longer to keep Social Security afloat.

(Attention conservation notice: 2100 words about a book that will make you jealous: The Box is a terrific read about shipping containers, of all things. It’s like if you spent every day using your Honda Civic’s gear shift, then one day found that someone had written The Lowly Honda Civic Gear Shift and How It Will Change Everything and made millions off it. “I should have written that!” you say. But you didn’t write it. Marc Levinson did, and he did it better than you (or I) would. He did it incredibly well, in fact.)

Why do cities form where they do? Why do they grow to the sizes they do? One popular answer has to do with companies’ desire to be near their customers and near their suppliers. Much of Krugman et al.’s magnum opus, for instance, is based around this idea. The idea, in turn, depends critically upon transportation costs. Imagine instead that you could get products to your customers, and components from your suppliers, via a teleportation machine that magically conveyed them at no cost to you. Would you still need to locate your company near your customers? It seems unlikely. You might still put your company near where your suppliers are, so that you could draw on a pool of specialized talent when it came time to hire. But that teleportation machine would radically change your business.

We may have arrived at the teleportation era. As Glaeser and Kohlhase put it, “it is better to assume that moving goods is essentially costless than to assume that moving goods is an important component of the production process.”

Imagine the steps involved in moving a dishwasher from Maytag in Newton, Iowa to somewhere in the French countryside 40 to 50 years ago. It might be loaded on a train in Iowa, conveyed to the Port of New York, unloaded from the train by a burly longshoreman, loaded onto a ship, carried across the ocean, unloaded by another burly longshoreman on the Brittany coast, loaded manually into a train, brought to a major French city, then loaded onto a truck and brought to the countryside. Maytag would typically hire a cargo-forwarding company to handle all these details. The shipping costs in many cases were a double-digit percentage of the final cost of the product.

One of the main reasons why these costs were so high is that the process was so labor-intensive. As Marc Levinson lays out in The Box, stevedores would fit miscellaneous bits of cargo in every available nook and cranny of a ship: bags of coffee alongside televisions alongside containers of solvent. They’d have to be laboriously packed and unpacked whenever the shift from ships to trains or trains to ships or trains to trucks happened. The more-than-occasional crate of whiskey or bag of coffee or box of electronics would go missing.

In retrospect the solution seems obvious: find some way to get machines to do this for us. Put everything in uniform containers. Then get cranes to pull the containers off ships and drop them on the backs of trucks. Cut humans out of the process altogether (apart from operating the cranes). Radically reduce the labor-intensity of the process. Do what capitalism does best: replace humans with machines.

To fully exploit the benefits of the process, there must be standardization, and the standardization must extend from ships to trucks to trains. The more specific rules people must remember (“this 30-foot container has a special coupling to clamp it to a 20-foot container, and of course the 20-foot container must sit atop the 30-foot one …”), the harder it is to scale. With standardization, machines can grab the containers, shift them off trains, shift them onto trucks, and keep moving without thinking. (A.N. Whitehead: “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”)

How else might we keep pushing costs down? Well, if I’m a shipping company that sends a 20-foot container from Iowa to France, I need that container to come back to me somehow. I could just ask the ship to turn around after it deposits its goods in France and bring empty containers back to me, but that’s a ship that’s making no money — it’s just transporting empty boxes. To make back my costs, I need to charge customers for the outbound trip and the empty-box return trip. If I want to minimize idle shipping time, and thereby lower what I can charge customers, and thereby get more customers, I need to fill up that ship on the way back. This is easier when the trade gap between the two trading countries is near zero. Imagine, instead, that this is a ship traveling from China to L.A. The U.S. current-account deficit to China is quite large, meaning that there’s a lot of stuff coming from China and not a lot going back. So if a ship is going to make the circuit from the U.S. to China, it maybe will want to take a side trip from the U.S. to Japan before returning to China.

To lower prices, we’ll also want to put more boxes on board each boat. But here we run into problems: not all ports can handle monstrous ships carrying thousands of boxes. The Port of New York, as it turns out, was designed for the earlier era when stevedores manually unloaded cargo; they were caught completely unawares by the “containerization revolution.” Elizabeth, New Jersey invested many millions in containerizing their port, and they’re now the busiest port in the United States. New York is history.

Imagine the ships growing larger and larger. As Levinson says at the end of The Box, there will someday soon be ships larger than “Malacca-max,” which is the largest size of ship that can fit through the Strait of Malacca. (Should such a ship ever sink, it would take with it a billion dollars in cargo.) As these ships grow larger, and the cost per ton of goods thereby shrinks, it may become cost-effective to centralize shipping to a single port, say, on the East Coast of the United States, even though the goods would then have to travel a much longer distance by train. Levinson discusses the possibility of building a port on rather remote islands north of Scotland and shipping the goods to London from there; again, all of this becomes possible as the ships become larger.

All is not roses and sunshine and cheap iPhones, however. Throughout The Box, we see the longshoremen’s unions fighting tooth and nail against the mechanization of their jobs. I’ve been unable to find numbers on a quick scan, but Levinson suggests that stevedores have lost their jobs in droves. (What’s unclear to me is whether the increased volume of shipping has made up for decreased per-unit labor costs.)

Now that transportation costs are negligible, manufacturers will choose to locate their factories where labor costs are lowest, rather than locating them, say, in New York or Chicago or L.A. I don’t know enough economics to judge whether this is better for the world overall. It’s certainly brought jobs to China, whose suffering throughout the 20th century was the stuff of legend (“Finish what’s on your plate; there are kids starving in China.”)

As Karl Polanyi taught us, mechanization of everything is part and parcel of capitalism, and it is always and everywhere destructive. This may be “creative destruction,” as Joseph Alois Schumpeter put it, but it’s destruction nonetheless, and every capitalist society has done what it could to slow that destruction. I say “slow,” not “stop,” because it’s likely impossible to slow technological adoption. Stevedores seemed to know that they were eventually going to be automated out of jobs, so they negotiated contracts wherein shipping companies paid some of their savings from containerization into a fund for their employees. In the long term, I don’t know how well this worked out for stevedores — how many of them got help transitioning into new jobs, versus how many became decided to leave the labor force early, versus how many took jobs as supermarket checkout clerks because that was the best job they could find given their age and skill set. This mechanization of jobs happens continuously under capitalism, and we can expect it to continue. Librarians may lose their jobs because of Google and e-books; secretaries may lose them because of Microsoft Word and email. Many of these people have spent their lives doing exactly what we teach them that they’re supposed to do: train to become experts at their jobs and spend a lifetime working hard to gain mastery. They reach age 50 or 55, they get automated out of a job, and now what? A just society helps them either transition with dignity to a new job, or, when that seems impossible (for instance, because they’re too old to retrain), it helps them retire with a decent pension. And a decent society provides a high level of general education to everyone, so that it’s easier to transition from one job to another.

You could imagine a fantasy scenario wherein a perfectly rational, perfect omniscient corporation sees, 40 years in advance, that its business model is going to be rendered irrelevant. Better yet, corporations as a whole might, after centuries of watching the same pattern over and over, see that creative destruction is entirely predictable, and they might plan for it to protect their employees. But you can also very easily imagine the opposite (e.g., companies increasingly don’t expect their employees to stick around for more than five years, so there’s an equilibrium wherein companies don’t invest in their employees for the long term). And the opposite is much easier to imagine than the fantasy. Long story short, I don’t see any institution other than the government that’s in a position to guarantee workers job security or a dignified retirement. And given the GOP’s perennial desire to gut Social Security, I have my doubts even that the government is in a reliable position here.

Another classic capitalist pattern is the race to the bottom among state and national governments, and we see it in the shipping context as well. Ports invest millions and billions of dollars to accommodate larger and larger boats, and they take on the risk that no one will use them — or that some other port, likewise investing billions, will steal away all their business. As soon as it’s economically sensible for a shipping company to move to a cheaper port somewhere further down the coast, it will do so, leaving billions of dollars of wasted port investment.

There’s a concern, when reading a book like The Box, that you’ll get a monomaniacal focus on one single cause: that the author, having spent a decade researching shipping containers, will attribute everything in the modern world to that one cause. The big questions we’d want to ask are:

• how much international trade moves by ship?
• how much has the cost of final goods declined because the costs of shipping declined? How much has the cost of final goods declined for other reasons (like, for instance, because cheap manufacturing labor has become available in China)?
• how much did it cost for a given parcel to move, door-to-door, before and after the containerization revolution?
• how much did the increase in international trade have to do with containerization, and how much had to do with the rise of the Asian Tigers?

Levinson is not really in a position to answer these questions, both because they’re not his book’s focus and because the data aren’t available to answer many of them. It turns out to be hard to count total shipping costs, door to door, when large companies often got under-the-table discounts for bulk shipments. Levinson’s focus on containers sometimes makes him credit them when other causes seem just as likely — for instance, his assertion that Korean exports trebled thanks to the containerization of their ports. It seems just as likely to me that the rapid rise of the Korean economy, the Korean government’s support for domestic manufacturers (particularly export industries?), and massive capital investments had a lot to do with the rise of Korean exports. I don’t know one way or the other, but Levinson doesn’t address these other possibilities; his book leaves little room for that.

The Box is a terrific book indeed, and I think in no small part that’s because of his monomania. It’s a tautly told tale about the men who built up their container businesses before the world even knew that standardization would change everything, and at the same time it presents a flood of data in a highly readable way. It’s one of the few books I’ve read that manages to tell a good story and deliver data well. You’ll love it.

(Attention conservation notice: 1400 words thinking aloud about innovation, Apple-style, and what connection it might have to the standard, boring sort of competition that you read about in introductory economics.)

I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Apple in recent months (see “The iPhone is a gateway Apple product”). They’re an easy company to get obsessed over, because they build the best products. When Google was building the best products, like their search engine or the maps app, I was obsessed with them too. Most of their other products are quite good, but they’re not perfect in the way that the iPhone is, in the way that the Google search app is, or in the way that Google Maps is. Every time I use Google Calendar — and I use it, mind you, a dozen times a day — I’m reminded of all the things it could do better. I never think that about Google search or about the iPhone. They are perfect.

It’s been remarkable to watch Apple’s competitors. Apple invented the iPod 10 years ago, and it has owned the category ever since. Others have tried to compete with them, but haven’t managed to produce anything even comparably good. Likewise with the iPhone. When I remember what preceded the iPhone, my mind is kind of blown. Pre-iPhone phones were thought to be such poor computers that manufacturers decided to invent their own alternate universe, including their own poor substitute for HTML, rather than just put a fast computer in your pocket. Other companies have had four years to respond, including at least one company that makes a lot of money and should, by all rights, have beaten Apple at this game.

Yet they’ve not. Not even close. Android continues to be the technology of tomorrow, just as Linux has always been, and one strains not to say that it will always will be the technology of tomorrow.

I see in this the simplified picture of markets that we read about in introductory economics. Someone starts a company — say, a bakery making artisanal bread in a big city. There’s unmet demand for this bread, so people flock to it. The lines run out the door, and the bakery is habitually sold out by noon. They ramp up their production and add some machines to augment human labor. Maybe they raise their prices. Now the lines are shorter (translation: prices have risen, so quantity demanded has decreased), but the bakery’s total amount of income has increased (translation: price elasticity is less than 1). Now the bakery is making lots of profit.

Other bakeries see this profit, and they want in. So they move into the market and try to do the same thing more cheaply. Maybe doing it more cheaply is harder, because the incumbent bakery makes its artisanal bread using giant machines that can produce individual loaves for not very much money at all (translation: high fixed cost to buy the machines, low marginal cost per loaf). Anyone who wants to move into the market would either have to make better bread for the same or higher price (think of Starbucks moving into a world of Maxwell House), or make equal-quality bread more cheaply. (Translation: high fixed costs are a barrier to entry, and make monopolies more likely.)

But if the incumbent baker makes money consistently for years, it may eventually happen that banks take notice and loan someone the money to start a competing bakery at scale. (Imagine here AMD moving into a world dominated by Intel.) Now the incumbent has to lower its prices. In some perfect-competition models, every last customer flocks to the cheaper bakery. The bakeries alternate investing huge amounts of capital to produce at cheaper prices at larger scale. We’re in a price war.

This may be a good thing — we get cheaper bread — but it’s not what Apple is doing. Instead, they’re innovating. They’re not running down the slippery slope of a price war. Instead, they’re making products that no one had and no one knew they wanted before. (I still don’t really need an iPad, though it would be handy for reading academic PDFs.) If they were a different kind of company, they could instead try to make cheaper widgets than their competitors, but where’s the joy in that? If that’s how companies operated, we wouldn’t even have BlackBerrys by now; we’d just have cheaper little knock-off LG or Nokia “feature phones.”

There are some models I remember learning in college that tried to capture this. They usually fall under the labels ‘imperfect competition’ or ‘monopolistic competition’. Coca-Cola has a legally enforced monopoly on the term ‘Coca-Cola’, for instance. But that doesn’t really capture innovation. Most of the models I remember learning, and nearly anything captured under the term ‘perfect competition’, don’t describe the sort of market where companies innovate.

I still need to finish reading Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, but he touches on a similar idea in there. His famous term from that book is “creative destruction”: capitalism’s great contribution to the world is that it constantly destroys industries and replaces them with new ones. No one laments all the horse-and-buggy drivers put out of business by the automobile. There are legitimate reasons to lament the end of businesses built around physical newspapers, and a just society will try to help laid-off newspaper workers land on their feet. But the innovation of the web, which gave rise to an entirely new industry that caught incumbents unawares, makes life better in many well-known ways.

One of Schumpeter’s main arguments (the book contains many arguments and ranges far afield; it argues, for instance, that soon capitalism will be destroyed when its large corporations turn into mere offices for the filling out of forms in triplicate) is that capitalist enterprises shouldn’t mainly fear that a new competitor will produce the same product for cheaper, but rather that an entire industry will come into being that renders the incumbents’ whole reason for being moot.

There’s an “innovation through cheapness” argument along these lines, most famously laid out in The Innovator's Dilemma. It goes like this: there’s some incumbent that makes a big, expensive product that’s the cream of the crop and whose lead seems impregnable. Think of Oracle databases, for instance, or the Sabre airline-reservation system, or Microsoft Windows. Some cheap competitor comes along, producing a product that doesn’t do most of what the big guys do, but does it for much less money (MySQL databases, Internet airfare searching, Linux). Initially, the big guy couldn’t care less about the newcomer — might not even notice the newcomer, in fact. The newcomer may have in fact taken away the big guy’s most annoying customers: those customers who care mostly about price, or those who demand a lot of features for not a lot of money. Good riddance, says the big guy.

Now that the newcomer has some customers, it can start adding features. Because the big guy has been around for a while, competitors have had a while to look at what customers are buying. The newcomer can bring fresh eyes to an existing market, too: the big guy has established sales forces that are trained at selling a specific kind of product, has a large bureaucracy that’s specialized in making their current product lines, and is slow to move in response to change. The newcomer is small and can be more agile. They keep adding features and taking away increasingly important customers from the big guy.

Eventually the big guy takes notice, but by this point it’s too late: the world has shifted entirely to the fresh, cheap product that the new guy is making. This hasn’t happened yet with Windows, of course. Oracle bought MySQL. A quick scan suggests only modest declines in travel-agent employment over the next 7 years. I should try to think of some other examples.

That’s at least two distinct types of innovation: innovating through inventing entirely new product lines that render existing products moot, and innovating through producing simplified subsets of existing products. The latter seems different than merely making a lower-cost version of the same product; that’s classic price competition.

Now, I’m pretty sure I never heard any coverage of innovation when I took economics classes in college. Is there any good modeling of this sort of thing?

See Grist, Krugman, Yglesias. The money quote:

So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons — to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

There are many obvious things to say about this, and many good things that the esteemed gentlemen above have written. Here’s what I’ll add: the problem with cars is that they offer the illusion of freedom even while they demonstrate collective insanity. They are a perfect illustration of what can go wrong in markets.

Obvious observation: what does a traffic jam have to do with freedom? You and a few hundred of your closest friends, each in your automobile, are each enjoying your own freedom, sitting in traffic for hours at a time. I hope you enjoy that freedom.

The point that Yglesias has been making forever is that, if we watched a video of Soviet citizens lining up for their free bread, the shelves empty and the lines stretching for blocks, we would know right away what the problem is: the price of bread has been set incorrectly. We see — we live! — traffic jams and we don’t immediately think, “pricing problem,” when that’s precisely what we should think.

Driving imposes costs on others around us. Think of your decision to drive into Manhattan at rush hour: your extra car makes traffic just a little bit worse for everyone around you. In particular, one fellow estimates that each additional car on a weekday imposes a total of more than 3 hours of delays on everyone else.

From here, George Will then has two options available: either 1) insist that car drivers be made to pay the full cost of their effects on those around them, both in terms of ecological damage (the smoke that belches into the atmosphere while you’re idling in traffic) and in terms of time wasted by others, or 2) somehow insist that people have a right to impose costs on others for free.

Republicans’ habitual support for option 2) has mystified Yglesias for a long time. By what libertarian theory do people have a right not to pay for the damage that they cause?

One potential response is that we cannot trust the state to properly estimate the damage we cause others. And even assuming we can trust the state to do that, we cannot trust it to tax the people properly. Maybe the state will have every incentive to overtax, for instance. Or maybe the state will cater to certain interest groups: focus on the needs of train riders or car drivers to the exclusion of everyone else, for instance.

That’s just the point: the state already massively favors car drivers, for the reasons listed in my review of Triumph of the City. If George Will wants to get into a debate about the proper role of the state, I’d be happy to do that; but his first step will have to be answering the question: do people have a right to cause harm to those around them without paying for it? His second step will have to be to admit that the state already plays a massive role in Americans’ use of automobiles. The first is a principle that I hope everyone can agree on; the second is a blindingly obvious observation about the world around us. If he’s not willing to do these things, then it’s not a good-faith debate.

It’s perfectly legitimate to ask why we should want state involvement in transportation policy at all, given what a hash the government has made of things already. Gas taxes are perennially off the table, because politicians expect that they won’t sell; why should we expect that the government will ever properly tax people for the damage they do to the people and environment around them?

Again, this is a fine, legitimate question, and I’d be glad to discuss this with George Will. In particular, I’m more than willing to ask him if he has a free-market solution to the problem of people imposing costs on those around them. If there is such a solution, I’d love to hear it. But Will should know that the idea of taxing people for the damage they cause has been utterly mainstream in economics since the early part of the 20th century.

It feels a little silly to treat Will’s ideas with this sort of respect, and to invite him into a polite debate. Will’s job is to carry water for the Republican Party. He wears a bowtie and has a Ph.D. in political science; he’s the intellectually respectable face of the party, even when what he writes (as in this case) is utter garbage. I’m not going to be intellectually generous or gracious to Will; for whatever reason, he’s chosen not to offer that kind of generosity to my side.

To the contrary. What I’m arguing is that, if we actually had a fair debate, Will would be forced — this is not controversial in the least — to start from some premises about state intervention that he would hate. State intervention in the market is inevitable, if people are going to pay for the messes they make. Will wants that, doesn’t he?

It took me a while to understand why an economist was exactly the right person to write this book. It’s not that economists are the only people who can understand certain busted aspects of how the government subsidizes places to live; lots of people think about that. Hardly a week goes by, for instance, when Matt Yglesias doesn’t mention the insanity of American land-use policy. Rather, it’s that economists are specially trained to spot cases when what we think we’re doing is exactly the opposite of what we’re actually doing. And they’re trained to look at that sort of reversal in the context of large groups of people.

Take, for instance, everyone’s desire to live in bucolic wilderness. Everyone heads out to be among the trees in, say, Long Island. (Read Caro’s The Power Broker to hear what Long Island was like before Robert Moses made it what we know and don’t really love.) Soon enough there are highways leading out to where everyone wants to go. Soon after that, Dunkin’ Donutses and Fuddruckerses form along the highways that cater to the automobiles that brought people to their bucolic paradise. And by this point Long Island is no longer bucolic. The end.

That’s a commonplace sort of observation in the crowds I travel in: those desiring suburban living, away from the grittiness of the city, destroy the thing they were chasing. Observations like it are lurking beneath most of Triumph of the City, and at the start I found it a bit of a yawn for that reason. Surely everyone already knows this.

But everyone doesn’t already know this, and I don’t know many popular books that make the point. It would be better if everyone did know this. A harsher, more-direct way to put the point is that those who live in the supposedly dirty city among the asphalt and concrete are the real environmentalists; those driving their cars off into the hinterlands to find nature are thereby destroying it.

This sort of paradox of individual behavior leading to collective destruction is the stock-in-trade of economists, and Glaeser deploys many arguments of this sort. The most surprising, for me, was Glaeser’s observation that environmental-impact statements are flawed because they’re not wide-ranging enough: when a building gets rejected in temperate San Francisco Bay, whose residents drive relatively little and rarely need to use heating or air conditioning, that building will eventually get built — in a different, less-green city, like Vegas or Houston or Phoenix, that has more-flexible land-use policies. Which is to say that good regulation needs to focus not only on the immediate environmental devastation (or ruined lines of sight from nearby small buildings, say), but on the big economic picture. Rejecting a building because of its environmental impact may, again paradoxically, be worse for the global environment than allowing it.

The other main reason you want an economist to look at housing problems is that those problems are fundamentally about supply and demand. If you think it’s too expensive for a middle-class person to own a house in Boston (which it is), you need to increase the supply of houses. Raising supply, for a given level of demand, means lower prices. But cities like Boston and New York are basically full: there are no more parcels of land to build on. So the only option to increase supply is to build up rather than out. In many cases this will mean demolishing an old building that has some historical appeal for those around it, and replacing it with a taller building that houses more people. But as the decades have gone along, Glaeser tells us, regulation has made it harder and harder for cities to modify old neighborhoods. The inevitable outcome is that supply doesn’t increase as rapidly as demand, and housing prices rise. When housing prices rise, many people decide they’d rather live somewhere where they can own a bit of land without sacrificing their firstborn children. And the Sun Belt boom is born.

People do continue to move into Boston and New York City. The combined population of Middlesex and Suffolk counties in Massachusetts — containing two of the Commonwealth’s two most populous cities and many of Boston’s suburbs — rose by a healthy 4.7% from 2000 to 2009. People moved here despite the high home prices, because cities offer them something they can’t get anywhere else: dynamism and excitement that can only come from putting a lot of people near one another and watching the combustion that results.

That’s Glaeser’s central argument: that there is fundamentally no replacement for cities, because no other institution humanity has constructed is as good at harnessing our creative energies. The world continues to urbanize, and all indications are that the pace of urbanization will only increase as China and India move to their great cities. In many cases (think of Rio’s favelas) they crowd into slums, and that may look terrible to us, but they’re moving into seemingly terrible slums because the rural lifestyle they’re leaving was so much worse. People’s own behavior indicates that urban life, for all its gritty lack of charm, is humanity’s best hope for a better life.

When does people’s own behavior not reflect their natural evaluation of what’s best for them? When government policy shifts their choices in a different direction, and when the prices they pay for their choices don’t reflect the true social cost of those choices. Americans live in the suburbs, for instance, for some natural reasons and some less-natural ones. Among the natural ones: schools are often better in the suburbs, their kids have a bit of lawn to play on, and homes are cheaper. Among the less-natural ones: the government subsidizes the Interstate Highway System, and encourages (via the mortgage-interest deduction) homeownership over renting.

Plus the price we pay for gas doesn’t cover the damage we do when we belch smoke into the atmosphere. Glaeser tosses out some numbers toward the end of Triumph of the City suggesting that American gas taxes ($1 or so per gallon) don’t nearly cover the social cost of burning gasoline, while European taxes (averaging $2.30 per gallon) may be too high.

(I’d want to read the research backing this. A lot depends upon how you model the environmental cost of a pound of carbon. If the greenhouse effect’s response to an additional pound of atmospheric carbon is highly nonlinear — if we eventually cross a point of no return — then this would strongly encourage us to stay away from that point. If, instead, the response is very smooth — if increasing carbon by a little increases damage by a little — then that would seem to make policymaking somewhat easier. Or rather, would make the required policies less drastic.

We should add another important angle to this, namely how our policies should react in the face of our ignorance. What if our models of how the greenhouse effect responds to an additional pound of carbon are wrong? If the atmosphere is more fragile than our models predict, then undertaxing carbon is really, really bad. If the atmosphere is less fragile, on the other hand, is it really so bad to overtax carbon? This isn’t just technical noodling: if the point is to charge people the actual cost of the pollution they’re causing, you’d better figure out what “actual cost” means.

Triumph of the City doesn’t pursue this sort of direction. The book as it stands is about lightly exercising our intuitions about cities to lead us to surprising conclusions. It’s not about running off into the weeds with technical details. If you want those, the book is very well-footnoted.)

If anything, Glaeser is too conservative in his lambasting of American anti-urban policy. The true cost of gasoline includes the cost of invading foreign countries whenever our supply of oil is threatened. And surely those who buy and sell crude-oil futures know that the supply of Middle East oil is unlikely to drop so long as the U.S. government stands ready to secure it with guns. So a true accounting of the price of oil would include much of the cost of maintaining the U.S. military even in peacetime.

Glaeser doesn’t mention this sort of detail. It must be because he’s aiming his book at people quite unlike me — people who are starting from an anti-urbanist background. The main battleground he’s chronicling in Triumph of the City is urban v. rural rather than urban v. suburban. In part that’s to avoid charges of hypocrisy: to get better schools and a lawn, he and his wife and kids moved a few years back to MetroWest, while he continues to commute into Cambridge via Interstate 90 to work at Harvard.

That commute indicates probably the more important reason that Glaeser doesn’t hate suburbs: the suburb is still within reach of the city, and therefore makes it part of the engine of economic dynamism that he lauds. People are still near enough that they can sit down face to face (after a short drive, perhaps) and build the great works that cities produce. The point is human interaction, which is not available to nearly the same extent within rural areas.

What about the Internet, then? Doesn’t the Internet make physical proximity obsolete? This is clearly the major difficulty that Glaeser is going to encounter with his thesis, and I don’t think he really resolves it. He asserts that the Internet makes person-to-person interaction more valuable, and that certain work just needs a handshake and two people sitting together hashing something out. I certainly agree, but this doesn’t have the same rigorous economic grounding that he brings to the rest of his book.

The bulk of the book is organized around some axioms of economic thinking. Let people choose whatever they want to choose — if they want to live in suburbs, fine; if they want to live in cities, fine — but make them pay for their choices. Let the supply of housing rise to meet its demand. And bring some economic discipline to the way we educate our kids: let poor schools fail, let poor teachers lose their jobs, and let great teachers be paid well. With the market allowed to work the way it should, Glaeser has no doubt that cities will continue to be vibrant centers of innovation. If you’d like a rather breezy yet informative take on cities, Triumph of the City is a good use of a few hours of your time.