Battlers and Billionaires

Battlers and Billionaires (2013) by Andrew Leigh is a solid read by the ALP’s member for Canberra and former Economist about Inequality. It presents a plethora of statistics on how inequality has changed in Australia and conclusions in an impressively short 155 pages or so. The book has extensive end notes that increase the length. It’s definitely very carefully researched.

Inequality is definitely a topic that many people on the left find very interesting. The increase in intra country inequality in many countries in recent decades has sparked debate. Leigh does note that global inequality has been falling due to the rise of China and India.

The book has a great deal of information on inequality through Australia’s history. Leigh shows how the richest Australians according to the percent of national wealth lived in the 1900s. From the 1900s to the 1970s inequality reduced before rising since then and recently rising dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s.

Leigh devotes a chapter to the consequences of inequality and refers frequently to surveys and looks at sporting leagues. Leigh also points out that the effects of inequality have been exaggerated by various people including the book The Spirit Level.

Finally the book makes recommendations about how to reduce inequality. They are first that steps to do so should be done in mind with economic growth, that we should improve education, that the family should be a key part of the program, unions should play a role and that means testing for social benefits should be used and that Australians should recognise that egalitarianism has long been seen as very important for Australians.

I enjoyed reading the book but it didn’t actually motivate me to worry more about equality, indeed it made me reflect more about the whole issue and indeed be a bit less concerned. It is, however, tremendously solid, well written and informative.

The Bottom Billion

The Bottom Billion (2007) is Paul Collier’s look at the poorest parts of the developing world. Collier is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Oxford and director of Centre for the Study of African Economics.

Collier thinks that the world can be divided into the developed world, the developing world and the Bottom Billion, which is 58 countries that have grown very slowly over the years since 1970. He identifies 4 traps that stop these countries developing. They are Conflict, natural resources, landlocked with bad neighbours and bad governance in a small country.

It would be interesting to see if you had written the book in 1980 or 1990 how a grouping of the bottom countries would have looked and to ponder if there had been a bottom 1, 2 or 3 billion if the recent rapid growth of India and China would show that the grouping didn’t really hold.

The traps identified are also interesting. In particular the alleged resource curse is curious. Few people would describe countries with lots of oil that are developing or developed such as the Gulf States as stuck in a resource trap.

The book describes numerous statistical relationships that have been found by Collier and his students. These are not a strong point. They have been described by William Easterly as shaky arguments based on using correlation to show causation.

The book has a great deal of interesting information in it however and some good quotes. It’s remarkable to see how those interested in developing countries are suspicious of growth and trade. Collier writes “And when I give the message to an NGO audience they get uneasy for a different reason. Many of them do not want to believe that for the majority of the developing world capitalism is working” and that “The constituency for aid is suspicious of growth, and the constituency for growth is suspicious of aid”. Remarkably Collier states that the most controversial paper he wrote at the World Bank was one called “Growth is Good.”

The Bottom Billion is very much worth reading for anyone interested in development economics. It’s a well written book by a world expert on development economics.

The Measure of the Years

The Measure of the Years (1970) by Sir Robert Menzies is a series of essays on various topics by Menzies, Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister. The book has essays on the development of education under Menzies, New Social Services that his government created, the development of Canberra, the Morale of the Civil Service, Stability, Capital and Development, relationships with Asia, various aspects of the practice of Law, Cricket and most a fascinating recollection of the Petrov Spy Case and the reaction of Doc Evatt.

Menzies as a writer is a man who, in the 21st Century, is definitely from a different age. The book is written using words and phrases that are now dated. But Menzies does write well, cleverly and with humour that still comes through after many years.

On economic matter Menzies shares fundamentals with the modern day Liberal Party, his statement that “The Greatest function of a democratic government is to create a climate in which enterprise will flourish and productivity will increase.” is one that wouldn’t be out of place in a Liberal pamphlet of 2012 but some of the ways of achieving this have clearly changed. There is a chapter on how the government created the twin airlines policy that is, with retrospect, amusing.

On foreign affairs Menzies says some really interesting things about Asia, pointing out that from the start his government engaged with Asia and entered into important trade agreements with Japan in the early 1950s and also used ‘soft diplomacy’ cleverly with the Colombo Plan to engage with Asia. It is fun in retrospect to discover that Menzies rebutted the often heard claim that Asia has been neglected by the previous government regardless of what that government is.

The chapters on education, that show what Menzies thought of education and how his government expanded the system considerably are dry but interesting. The chapter on Canberra is also interesting and has the anecdote that Menzies named the Lake and that had it not been named after Burley Griffin there is a considerable possibility that it would have been known as Lake Menzies.

Menzies had a successful career as a lawyer before entering politics and the book has a few chapters on being a lawyer that show quite a bit of Menzies humour and his deep respect for Sir Owen Dixon.

The Chapter on the Petrov Affair is a highlight of the book stating what happened and how badly Evatt reacted. Menzies calm demolition of Evatt is convincing. He also, very kindly, does not write that Evatt certainly later rapidly declined mentally later and that there is a reasonable probability that Evatt was declining while reacting to the Affair. The central claim of Evatt, that the Petrov defection was timed by Menzies to win an election is demolished.

The book gives some insight into Australia’s longest serving and arguably most important Prime Ministers. It gives an indication of the qualities that Menzies had that made him so successful in politics. The book can drag on a little but it well worth reading for anyone who wants to understand Australia.

Thinking Fast and Slow

Thinking,Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman is a book on how people actually think and their mistakes that has been glowingly reviewed. Kahneman won the Noble Prize in Memory of Alfred Noble for Economics.

Kahneman presents the brain as having an instinctive system one that is used for complex judgements and judgements that must be made quickly and a conscious, reflective system 2 that calculates and reasons through things.

Kahneman goes through the biases and errors due to overconfidence, misunderstandings of what small sample sizes yield and how people construct stories that are based on conglomerations of their biases.

Kahneman’s book has been gazumped by various books that have used the conclusions and rules in the books for other popular books on the subject. Many popular economics have covered the same territory. Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland is the best book I’ve read on the topic. Kahneman may be a prize winner but his book is a bit laboured. It’s still well worth reading it’s just that the adulation in the popular press is overdone.

The Emperor’s New Drugs

The Emperor’s New Drugs (2009) by Irving Kirsch is a book that describes how antidepressants are less effective than advertised and also have considerably more side-effects than is commonly known. Kirsch is a practicing therapist and a research psychologist.

The book shows how for antidepressants the placebo effect is very similar, if not the same as the effect of the active drugs. Kirsch contrasts this to other medicine such as insulin where there is zero placebo effect.

Kirsch points out that the drug companies have a strong interest in maintaining the apparent efficacy of antidepressants and that scientists also have an interest because it allows them to maintain that explainable, chemical models of the brain are accurate. The basic model described of chemical malfunction is that neurotransmitters, the chemicals that transmit signals between neurons are malfunctioning in people with depression. The most commonly known neurotransmitters are serotonin and dopamine. Drugs that inhibit the uptake of these chemicals have an effect on depression, but so do those that enhance the uptake. Both then have a fairly similar effect to placebos.

Kirsch points out that psychotherapy, that has no side-effects, is just as effective as taking drugs. Kirsch discounts the idea that drugs and therapy are even better. According to the Psychologists I work with the efficacy of drugs and therapy is disputed.

The Emperor’s New Drugs is a crisp, informed easy read about an important subject that affects many people. It’s well worth looking at.

 

You are not a Gadget

You are not a Gadget (2010) by Jaron Lanier is a strange, sprawling book where Lanier takes on ‘Cybernetic Totalitarianism” or Technological Utopianism which Lanier sees as people who think the Singularity is soon coming and that the internet has drastically improved everything and led to an explosive improvement in human thought.

Lanier is an extremely accomplished guy, after working at Atari and creating the first successful ‘art’ game he went on to coin the phrase Virtual Reality and has been involved with major universities and companies ever since. I saw him speak at a VR conference where he very intelligently criticized the grand dream of medical VR at the time with aplomb.

The book heavily criticizes ‘Web 2.0’ style collaboration as not producing a lot of great value. Lanier makes the point that if you’d told people in 1980 that an amazing new network of computers was going to write a new encyclopedia with entries on pop culture and rewrite UNIX they may not have been that impressed. Lanier points out that a lack of isolation leads to a lot more group think and the creation of a lot of low value information. Lanier also laments the rise of anonymous trolling, or really griefing, as being a sad consequence of online activity.

Lanier goes further and launches into an attack on Singularity type folk and people who see the internet as being everything.  Lanier is here arguing against something that most don’t come into contact with. Lanier himself lives in a world where these ideas are more strongly put forward and doesn’t seem to realise the lack of impact that these ideas have had outside a small clique. He goes on to argue that the elevation of computers in this clique makes people less human in a meaningful sense.

The book is difficult to read as it zooms from one topic to another and the thesis seems to be an aside at some parts of the book. The headings of the sections feel like a strange game of buzzword bingo of some kind. They really are quite clever. Lanier also clearly has a huge ego, few books are peppered with as many ‘I and famous person’ as this one. Lanier does, however, have something to say. It’s a pity the book isn’t shaped better. It may have been edited into the current form from something even more strange but even as it is it could really do with refinement. It is, however, well worth reading for people who are interested in the internet, computers and who are skeptical of the hyperbole that surrounds them.

In the Plex

In the Plex (2011) by Steven Levy is a detailed look inside Google, the company that drastically changed internet search and advertising. Levy is a longtime writer about computers and technology and wrote the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution in 1984. For this book he has had a lot of access to Google.

The book goes over the start of Google, as the creation of two brilliant Stanford grad students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the late 1990s. They created a search engine that gave more relevant results. They also managed to scale their search engine better than other companies had by using open source software and cheap commodity parts. Levy goes over how the company started and managed to recruit so many talented engineers.

Having a powerful search engine was a profitable business, but to become really profitable a way had to be found to monetize this and Google did this spectacularly using AdWords that added relevant advertising to searches and Adsense that added advertisements to anyones website. Google’s massive amounts of data and algorithms that determined and improved relevance made this an extremely profitable business.

This money-making machine has been used by Google to improve their own data gathering and also to expand into new areas. Google’s ventures into video by itself with Google Video and then the purchase of YouTube has enable Google to grow and become even more important on the internet. Their purchase of Android, the mobile phone OS company and their expansion of it has enabled them to be a major play in the phone market and stop the Apple from dominating the market.

Levy’s book goes over all these events with a good eye for a story and with understanding. The book certainly gives a good sense of the remarkable achievement of Google in creating such a staggeringly large corpus of data. Levy also manages to paint good portraits of the founders and some of Google’s major figures. However the number of names becomes overwhelming. But this is really because there are so many people involved. Levy also provides an insight into Google’s culture. It would be interesting to talk to Googlers to see how accurate it actually is. Levy presents the founders as people who really believe that amazing things are possible and as people who have repeatedly done such things it’s impressive.

The book looks at Google’s ethics and their philosophy of not doing evil. Levy is skeptical but does give them credit for being reasonable about this. Google’s entry and departure from China is given a long chapter and is set up as being the great test of Google’s ethics. The way Google interacts with people now as an internet behemoth in their book digitization effort is also examined. An interesting view of Googlers being genuinely surprised by the views of others that they are doing something wrong is well written by Levy.

The book also looks at how Google engaged with some politicians, in particular with Barack Obama and how the culture of Google compares to the culture of Washington.

Finally the book looks at how Google is now, in some ways, becoming something ‘old’ as  MySpace and then Facebook have overtaken Google in social networking and Twitter is ‘new’ while Google is old.  Google’s social efforts are outlined. The book also provides a quick mention of Google’s new investments in driverless cars that are initially aimed at their Streetview project but that clearly have further implications.

The book is, as would be expected by a book where the author has had so much access, quite positive about Google. It’s interesting to contrast the attitude of many toward Google toward that of the attitude of people toward Microsoft, IBM and Apple. Google has long been better regarded, perhaps because stopping using Google has long been just a click away. Levy has a longtime interest in technology and this book furthers his reputation. For anyone interested in the internet, computers, Silicon Valley the book will join other books like Accidental Empires as something well worth reading.

The Development of Jet and Turbine Aero Engines

The Development of Jet and Turbine Aero Engines (2006) by Bill Gunston is an interesting, thorough detailing of how jet engines work and the book also provides a long history of the development of such engines.

The book is divided into two parts, the first, on how gas turbines work goes over the principles and then the parts of jet engines. Compressors, Combustion, Turbines, Jetpipes, props and fans, systems construction and installation make up the chapters. The explanations are dense and usually clear and there is little math used.

The second part of the book goes over the history of jet engines. It’s quite amazing in a way in that Gunston has been involved with aircraft and jets for almost their entire history. The history section has a weakness in that Gunston is overly British centric, but the coverage is thorough and the detail remarkable.

The book is a good read for anyone who is interested in getting some understanding of jet engines. They are one of the most amazing things that humans build and this book provides an overview and a history of them with enough detail for any layman.

Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency

Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency (2011) by Micah Sifry is an interesting but flawed book about Wikileaks and how the internet is changing politics. It uses the fame of Wikileaks to promote the author’s own agenda.

Sifry is a successful and interesting person who set up the Personal Democracy Forum and works with Techsoup in similar domains. The book refers to his endeavors repeatedly.  It’s a serious problem with the book that it is annoyingly self-promoting.

What’s good about the book is that it places Wikileaks in context which is so important and is often so lacking in discussions about Wikileaks. Sifry points out that Crypthome was doing what Wikileaks does long before it did but hasn’t had nearly the impact that Wikileaks has had. In addition to this Wikileaks is just one of a myriad of sites and movements that the internet has made possible. Sifry discusses the Move On movement, the Tea Party and the uprisings in the Middle East and points out that they have a lot in common.

Sifry writes about how the internet means that far more government, corporate and non-profit information is now available easily to people. He also writes about how various government have repeatedly made noise about how they would put more information online and then have usually backed off.

Sifry also makes good points about Wikileaks and points out that what it is doing is providing information that causes foreign regimes problems with openness, such as with Wikileaks role in Kenya and other places, but that it is also doing it to Western democracies.

The book contains a lot of good ideas but is flawed. It would be great if the author, or someone else, wrote another more considered, less self-promoting work about how the massive increase in electronic information that is happening is changing politics. This book is still worth reading but is ultimately unsatisfying because it fails to put together a really coherent, deeper and more considered view.

Inside Wikileaks

Inside Wikileaks (2011) Daniel Domscheit-Berg is an interesting read about what the start of Wikileaks was like, the successes and problems of the organisation and what the people were like who worked there.

Berg worked for a large corporate IT firm, presumably EDS, but had kept links to the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin and was an anarchist leaning intelligent IT worker who found Wikileaks and found that it gave him purpose. He joined in at the end of 2007 and began helping Assange with the setup of Wikileaks. He also mentions the older, similar site Cryptome that, in part, did similar things to Wikileaks and had been around since 1996 but had far less impact than Wikileaks has had.

In November of 2007 Wikileaks published the Guantanamo Bay handbooks and then in January 2008 the Julius Baer bank documents were published. This was a huge leak for Wikileaks. The Scientology handbooks  were also released around this time. It’s also clear that around this time Wikileaks was already receiving large amounts of information. Regardless of the fate of Wikileaks it is clear from the book that large scale releases of such documents are now a fact of life. The digitisation of documentation coupled with the internet means that this torrent of information is here to stay. The book reveals that part of the reason that Wikileaks hasn’t published a lot that wasn’t in English is that they lack people to review the documents.

The book deals extensively with Julian Assange and his personality. It is a very interesting read. It is not damning. Assange is presented as an extraordinarily driven and smart person. However, unless Berg’s account is entirely fictional, he’s also paranoid and a bit nuts. Berg does give him credit, although perhaps not enough, for being the person who was driven enough to bring large scale attention to the power of document release.

Assange is presented as a pretty difficult person to get along with. His habit of turning up and living at people’s places is something that few would tolerate. Berg’s view of this is corroborated by other accounts of people with whom Assange has stayed.

The story of Wikileak’s growing fame Julius Baer documents to the Icelandic bank documents and then the huge rise of the ‘Collateral Murder’ and the Afghan War diaries and cables is really interesting. It’s surprising that Berg actually retained a job for a year while working for Wikileaks.

The story of Assange’s trial in Sweden and his later decision to suspend Berg is interesting. Berg’s account of Assange being dictatorial presumably has merit as the main author of Wikileak’s software setup left as did Birgitta Jonsdottir who was an important spokesperson for the group.

The book does not contain much insight into where Berg sees online information dissemination going which is a pity. However, as a document of what Wikileaks was like in its founding it’s good. Assange will, presumably, fairly quickly write his own book which will challenge the information presented in this one. For anyone interested in Wikileaks the book is well worth reading.