The Boy Who Could Change the World

by Aaron Swartz

Last year, I recommended Good to Great, calling it “actual science.” Dave Bridgeland quickly corrected me and recommended this book, which is vastly better. Not only does it systematically debunk the pretensions to science in Good to Great and the other management bestsellers in an absolutely delightful manner, it provides a short but very thought-provoking discussion of strategy in its own right.

  You can mock the banality of its recommendations, but there’s no question: this book is well worth it just for the way it encourages habits of genuine scientific thought. I knew I never should have fallen so low as to trust a business book!

  The Trial by Franz Kafka (translated by Breon Mitchell)

  A deep and magnificent work. I’d not really read much Kafka before and had grown up led to believe that it was a paranoid and hyperbolic work, dystopian fiction in the style of George Orwell. Yet I read it and found it was precisely accurate—every single detail perfectly mirrored my own experience. This isn’t fiction, but documentary.

  Spoilers follow. . . .

  The bulk of the book is about K trying to find someone to fight his case for him, and failing miserably. As an individual in a world of bureaucracies, he concludes there’s no substitute but to do the work himself.

  This is set against the backdrop of his “day job” at the bank—about as characteristic a bureaucracy as you can imagine. The bank, by contrast, has no difficulty finding people to do its work for it. Even when K slacks off or gets distracted, the bank continues chugging along just fine—as seen in the vice president who leaps to take K’s work from him. (Compare: The independent lawyer is under no such pressure to actually get K’s work done.)

  A vivid illustration that bureaucracies, once they get started, continue doing whatever mindless thing they’ve been set up to do, regardless of whether the people in them particularly want to do it or whether it’s even a good idea. At the same time, individual people have an incredibly hard time executing long-term or large-scale tasks on their own, even when they’re quite motivated.

  But what of the priest? The priest tells K a story about how as an individual in a bureaucracy, it’s a losing game to try to ask permission. You have to persuade your boss, your boss’s boss, and your boss’s boss’s boss (so terribly powerful that your boss can’t even bear to look at him). If you wait for your request to be approved by the chain of command, it won’t happen at all.

  K argues with the priest about how horribly unfair this is: isn’t your boss (the individual) doing the wrong thing somehow? The priest maintains there are many different theories about this question of individual responsibility. But K is missing the larger point: this is just how bureaucracy works.

  K takes the lesson to heart and decides to stop fighting the system and just live his life without asking for permission. It goes well . . . for a while. But it still seems a better option than the alternatives.

  Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

  God, what a book! Poor Economics is a series of tales of foreigners trying to save the far-flung poor, while failing to realize not only that their developed-country ideas are terrible disasters in practice, but also that everything they’ve learned to think of as solid—even something as simple as measuring distance—is far more fraught, and complex, and political than they ever could have imagined. It’s a stunning feeling to have the basic building blocks of your world questioned and crumbled before you—and a powerful lesson in the value of self-skepticism for everyone who’s trying to do something.

  The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

  This book touched me deeply and made me rethink the entire way I approached life; it’s about vastly more than just tennis. I can’t really describe it, but I can recommend this video with Alan Kay and the author that will blow your mind.

  Rick Perry and his Eggheads by Sasha Issenberg

  Sasha Issenberg is a miracle worker. This book (really an excerpt from his forthcoming book) is so very, very good that it just blows me away. Issenberg tells the tale of everything I’ve been trying to say to everyone in politics, but he does it in a real-life three-act morality play that’s so good it could be a model on how to tell a story.

  The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

  Ries presents a translation of the Toyota Production System to start-ups—and it’s so clearly the right way to run a start-up that it’s hard to imagine how we got along before it. Unfortunately, the book has become so trendy that I find many people claiming to swear allegiance to it who clearly missed the point entirely. Read it with an open mind and let it challenge you, so you can start to understand how transformative it really is.

  CODE: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

  A magnificent achievement. Charles Petzold starts with the story of two kids across the street who wish to communicate with each other and, from this simple beginning, builds up an entire computer without ever making it seem like something that should be over your head. I never really felt I understood the computer until I read this book.

  What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer

  Were this just the story of how George H. W. Bush got elected, it’d be one of the few biographies that belonged in the same league as Robert Caro. But it’s so much more than that: Richard Ben Cramer gives the same treatment to dozens of candidates in the 1988 presidential election: Gary Hart, Bob Dole, Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt, and on and on. Even if you didn’t care about politics, this book would be worth reading simply because the writing is so good. But if you do, there’s never been a better exposition of what drives these men who wish to be our leaders and what they have to go through to get there.

  Guest Review by Aaron Swartz: Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of the Elites

  http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/18/guest-review-by-aaron-swartz-chris-hayes-the-twilight-of-the-elites/

  June 18, 2012

  Age 25

  In his new book, The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, Chris Hayes manages the impossible trifecta: the book is compellingly readable, impossibly erudite, and—most stunningly of all—correct. At the end, I was left with just two quibbles: first, the book’s chapter on “pop epistemology” thoroughly explicated how elites got stuff wrong without bothering to mention the non-elites who got things right, leaving the reader with the all-too-common impression that getting it right was impossible; and second, the book never assembled its (surprisingly sophisticated) argument into a single summary. To discuss it, I feel we have to start with remedying the latter flaw:

  Our nation’s institutions have crumbled, Hayes argues. From 2000–2010 (the “Fail Decade”), every major societal institution failed. Big businesses collapsed with Enron and WorldCom, their auditors failed to catch it, the Supreme Court got partisan in Bush v. Gore, our intelligence apparatus failed to catch 9/11, the media lied us into wars, the military failed to win them, professional sports was all on steroids, the church engaged in and covered up sex abuse, the government compounded disaster upon disaster in Katrina, and the banks crashed our economy. How did it all go so wrong?

  Hayes pins the blame on an unlikely suspect: meritocracy. We thought we would just simply pick out the best and raise them to the top, but once they got there they inevitably used their privilege to entrench themselves and their kids (inequality is, Hayes says, “autocatalytic”). Opening up the elite to more efficient competition didn’t make things more fair, it just legitimated a more intense scramble. The result was an arms race among the elite, pushing all of them to embrace the most unscrupulous forms of cheating and fraud to secure their coveted positions. As competition takes over at the high end, personal worth resolves into exchange value, and the elite power accumulated in one sector can be traded for elite power in another: a regulator can become a bank VP, a modern TV host can use their stardom to become a bestselling author (try to imagine Edward R. Murrow using the nightly news to flog his books the way Bill O’Reilly does). This creates a unitary elite, detac
hed from the bulk of society, yet at the same time even more insecure. You can never reach the pinnacle of the elite in this new world; even if you have the most successful TV show, are you also making blockbuster movies? Bestselling books? Winning Nobel Prizes? When your peers are the elite at large, you can never clearly best them.

  The result is that our elites are trapped in a bubble, where the usual pointers toward accuracy (unanimity, proximity, good faith) only lead them astray. And their distance from the way the rest of the country really lives makes it impossible for them to do their jobs justly—they just don’t get the necessary feedback. The only cure is to reduce economic inequality, a view that has surprising support among the population (clear majorities want to close the deficit by raising taxes on the rich, which is more than can be said for any other plan). And while Hayes is not a fan of heightening the contradictions, it is possible that the next crisis will bring with it the opportunity to win this change.

  This is just a skeletal summary—the book itself is filled with luscious texture to demonstrate each point and more in-depth discussion of the mechanics of each mechanism (I would call it Elster meets Gladwell if I thought that would be taken as praise). So buy the book already. Now, as I said, I think Hayes is broadly correct in his analysis. And I think his proposed solution is spot on as well—when we were fellows together at the Harvard Center for Ethics, I think we annoyed everyone else with our repeated insistence that reducing economic inequality was somehow always the appropriate solution to each of the many social ills the group identified.

  But when talking to other elites about this proposal, I notice a confusion that’s worth clarifying, about the structural results of inequality, rather than the merely quantitative ones. Class hangs over the book like a haunting specter (there’s a brief comment on p. 148 that “Mills [had] a more nuanced theory of elite power than Marx’s concept of a ruling class”) but I think it’s hard to see how the solution relates to the problem without it. After all, we started by claiming the problem is meritocracy, but somehow the solution is taxing the rich?

  The clue comes in thinking clearly about the alternative to meritocracy. It’s not picking surgeons by lottery, Hayes clarifies, but then what is it? It’s about ameliorating power relationships altogether. Meritocracy says, “There must be one who rules, so let it be the best”; egalitarianism responds, “Why must there?” It’s the power imbalance, rather than inequality itself, that’s the problem.

  Imagine a sci-fi world in which productivity has reached such impressive heights that everyone can have every good they desire just from the work young kids do for fun. By twiddling the knobs on their local MakerBot, the kids produce enough food, clothing, and iPhones to satisfy everyone. So instead of working, most people spend their days doing yoga or fishing. But scarcity hasn’t completely faded away—there’s still competition for the best spots at the fishing hole. So we continue to let those be allocated by the market: the fishing hole spot is charged for and the people who really want it earn the money to pay for it by helping people with various chores.

  In this sort of world, inequality doesn’t seem like much of a problem. Sure, some people get the best fishing hole spots, but that’s because they did the most chores. If you want the spot more than they do, you can do more work. But the inequality doesn’t come with power—the guy with the best fishing hole spot can’t say, “Fuck me or you’re fired.”

  This sci-fi world may sound ridiculous, but it’s basically the one Keynes predicted we’d soon be living in:

  Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes—those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs—a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

  [. . .] But, of course, it will all happen gradually, not as a catastrophe. Indeed, it has already begun. The course of affairs will simply be that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed.

  And that’s what a reduction in economic inequality could achieve. The trend in recent decades (since the fall of the Soviet Union and the ruling class’s relief that “There Is No Alternative”) has been for the people at the top to seize all the economic gains, leaving everyone else increasingly insecure and dependent on their largesse. (Calling themselves “job creators,” on this view, is not so much a brag as a threat.) But with less inequality, it could be otherwise. Instead of a world in which there are a handful of big networks with the money to run television shows, everyone could afford to have their Sunday morning conversations filmed and live-streamed. Instead of only huge conglomerates having the capital and distribution to launch new product lines, everyone could make and market their own line of underwear or video games (instead of just elite Red Sox pitchers).

  Even on strict efficiency grounds, this strikes me as a more alluring view than the usual meritocracy. Why put all your eggs in one basket, even if it’s the best basket? Surely you’d get better results by giving more baskets a try.

  You can argue that this is exactly where technology is bringing us—popular kids on YouTube get made into huge pop sensations, right?—and the genius of Hayes’ book is to show us why this is not enough. The egalitarian demand shouldn’t be that we need more black pop stars or female pop stars or YouTube sensation pop stars, but to question why we need elite superstars at all. I hope Hayes’ next book shows us what the world without them is like.

  Freakonomics

  http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001688

  April 23, 2005

  Age 18

  I happen to be taking a class on sociological methods. The other day we had a section where the TA showed us how to use SPSS, a GUI statistical analysis program. Usually such computer demos are pretty boring—pull down this menu here, click this button here, and so on—but this demo was magical: it used real data.

  The TA downloaded a listing of venture capitalists from the state of California. Then he downloaded the records of political campaign contributions from the Federal Election Commission. He merged the two files and calculated an index of party loyalty—how likely each person was to donate to the Democrats or Republicans. Then he graphed it. He found an anomaly in the data and went back and investigated it.

  The whole performance was oddly enthralling, and I went up to ask him questions afterwards. “So you’re interested in statistics?” he asked me, and I said yes, and began to think about why. I’ve decided it’s because I like truth. If you like finding out the truth—which is often surprising—the best technique to use is science. And if you want to do serious science, sooner or later you’ll probably need statistics.

  In the field of surprising statistics, one name comes up frequently: Steven D. Levitt. And—surprise, surprise—Levitt has a new book out, Freakonomics. (As an aside, Levitt must have a great publicist, because the book has been receiving tons of hype. It’s a good book, but not as good as the hype would make it seem.* Nonetheless, I will put this aside in reviewing it.) The book consists of a popularization of the papers of Levitt and other interesting economists.

  The stuff that Levitt is interested in—the reason why his book is interesting—is society, the field studied by sociology. In this sense, Freakonomics is really a sociology book. Yet its attitude toward sociologists could be parodied as “And thank goodness a sociologist risked his life by spending four years embedded with a drug gang because he managed to find a couple notebooks of business transactions
that he could give to an economist!” One might expect that the picture of a drug gang resulting from four years of embedded research might be more interesting than a couple of notebooks, but apparently no.

  Sociologists write many amazingly well-written and fascinating books, even without the help of a professional co-author, yet none of them have seen anything like the publicity this book has. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it took an economist to write a sociology book before it could be given publicity. Sociology raises too many problematic questions about society, but an economist can do somewhat interesting things while continuing to endorse the status quo. (Even Levitt’s most radical finding—that legalizing abortion cut crime rates in half—leads him to insist that the finding has no direct relevance for public policy.)

  As a result, the book doesn’t have much of a theme but covers a bunch of bizarre topics: how school teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat, how bagel eaters don’t, how real estate agents and surgeons don’t have your best interests at heart, how to defeat the Ku Klux Klan, how The Weakest Link contestants demonstrate racism, how online daters lie, how drug dealing works like McDonald’s, how abortion overthrows governments and fights crime, how to be a good parent, and what you can learn from children’s names.

  Despite his unusual interests and open mind, Levitt remains an economist and has the economist’s typical right-wing assumptions: most notably, a strong commitment to incentives and an unquestioning faith in societal order. For the former, it makes fun of criminologists by insisting the evidence that punishment deters criminals is “very strong,” but fails to provide a single citation (almost everything else in the book, even well-known facts, is scrupulously cited). For the latter, they simply assume that IQ is an accurate and inherited measure of intelligence, despite a rather glaring lack of evidence for this.

  Furthermore, in a section that uses parental interviews to pick out which parenting techniques are most effective, the authors almost entirely ignore the possibility that parents are lying—an omission they don’t make elsewhere. For example, they find no correlation between saying that you read to your children and your children doing well in school. From this they conclude that reading doesn’t matter; a far more likely explanation seems to be that nearly all parents claim they read to their children. (Thanks to Brad Delong for this criticism.)