Everybody Lies

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Will the availability of Big Data permit the social sciences to collect objective information, test hypotheses, and provide predictions in ways traditionally possible only for the hard sciences? In this book, a bright young economist argues that that the answer may be yes.

The title, Everybody Lies, refers to the fact that people lie, a lot, about all sorts of things. They lie in interviews, on surveys, and even on anonymous opinion polls. They even lie to themselves. Until recently, the best way for social scientists to understand what people were thinking and feeling was to ask them. But because people lie, the information collected was unavoidably flawed. Enter Big Data. It seems a person’s internet searches and online activity are better predictors of their behavior than what they are likely to tell you. Mining such data is becoming not only a powerful tool for the social sciences but also a big business.

Despite the author’s undergraduate degree in philosophy, he doesn’t address the question of whether or not this is a ‘good’ thing. He makes few value calls. He simply demonstrates that these data are out there, and they can be used to understand, predict, and even manipulate human behavior. But there is an an unaddressed ethical question here. Can special interests successfully manipulate human attitudes and behavior for selfish economic or political gain? Are they doing so already? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. Advertisers and politicians have been waging wars of domination for the minds of people for years, but now with Big Data, they’re better armed. My cynical soul quivers at the thought.

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Convergence

Convergence: The Idea at the Heart of Science by Peter Watson

Carl Sagan once said that science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. In Convergence, historian and journalist Peter Watson demonstrates one important aspect of this profound insight. Individual scientific disciplines once regarded as separate are converging, influencing and fueling one another to reveal a clearer and more detailed picture of reality. The findings of geology help answer questions in biology. Discoveries in physics shed light on issues in cosmology. Assuming the existence of an objective reality, science is how we learn about it. A fact discovered by one scientific discipline remains a fact across all. This is why the inability of quantum mechanics and general relativity to play well together is so bothersome. Each works remarkably well in its own realm. Each makes accurate predictions. But if both theories are describing different aspects of a single reality, it means that at least one of them still needs a bit of work. Watson touches on this quest for a unified theory in this book, but it is mostly a broad overview of the science of the last 150 years or so with a focus on how separate disciplines have come together. It’s an informative read.

Glass House

Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town by Brian Alexander

The business of business is to make money. That’s the basic premise of an economic theory advocated by the late Milton Friedman and embraced by politicians from Reagan to Trump. Investors entrust companies and corporations with money with the expectation of receiving even more money. Investor value is therefor the primary concern of businesses. It’s not about producing goods and services, at least not primarily. Those are simply a means for making money. It’s certainly not about creating good-paying jobs. Employees are human resources to be used as needed and discarded when not, just like any other resource. An efficient business creates as much product as it can sell while employing as few people as possible, paying them only what it must. Anything beyond that cuts into profits that could otherwise be returned to investors. Generating more money at less cost makes a business efficient. It makes it successful. It increases its value and attractiveness for even more investment. It raises the price investors can get when they want to sell their shares. It’s a fairly simple idea. Investors provide capital to fund businesses in which workers create wealth, and then the investors extract the wealth beyond that necessary to maintain the business. It’s a great mechanism for making money, and somehow, through the magic of the invisible hand of free market capitalism, it brings prosperity to all. Or so the theory goes.

Glass House provides a case study of how the theory has worked for Lancaster, Ohio. It’s a compelling account of the Anchor-Hocking glass company, once a major U.S. producer of glassware and the lifeblood of this small city. The company has generated a lot of wealth for investors over the last half century, but there has been a cost. This is the story of those who paid it.

Why Wall Street Matters

Why Wall Street Matters  by William D. Cohan

There’s a lot of pro-capitalist ranting in this book. There’s even some name-calling. It’s hardly a scholarly or objective work. It is, however, a succinct but superficial overview of banking and Wall Street. It reminds us (repeatedly) of the legitimate purpose of banks—saving and lending money. I doubt many people would claim otherwise. What most, including myself, are upset about are the abuses, the clever manipulations, the deceptions—what amount to high stakes versions of shell games and pyramid schemes, and of course, the impact of all these on people who may not even realize they’re in the game.

The root cause of all of these, Cohan claims, is that when investment banks went public (starting in 1970 with the IPO of DLJ), investment bankers could make big personal profits without much personal financial risk. As many have pointed out before, this allows them to privatize gains and socialize losses. “When people are rewarded to take big risks with other people’s money, that’s exactly what they will do. The problem is that the top bankers, traders, and executives on Wall Street collectively no longer have enough of their own skin in the game to make a difference to them when the things they do go awry. They get rich either way.” (page 114) That, he says, is pretty much they only problem. Don’t blame Wall Street per se, the problem is a system that shields those making unwise, even knowingly bad loans from the consequences. Worse, it rewards them for it.

Well, maybe. This definitely is a problem. He doesn’t believe the solution is financial regulation, though. He’s clearly opposed to such things. “The fix for Wall Street should be directed at its compensation system, not at the functioning of Wall Street itself. It’s really as simple as that. Fix the compensation system—make bankers, traders, and executives fear for their art collections, their co-ops, and their homes in the Hamptons—and sit back and watch how quickly it works to change people’s bad behavior.” (page 146) As simple as that, huh? It doesn’t sound simple to me. There are a lot of people, people with power, people with influence, people with heaps of money, who are getting more of all of the above through this system. They’re going to resist attempts to stop this gravy train. I certainly don’t see them doing it voluntarily.

I disagree with much of what Cohan is saying in this book, including a couple of his underlying but unstated assumptions (concerning the ‘value’ of money and the desirability of perpetual economic growth). I do, however, agree that those who make risky investments must be held responsible for their actions. There is no prudence if there are no consequences.

New York 2140

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

This book firmly stands in the tradition of cautionary tales of the future that have been told in such classics as Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. The title, New York 2140, tells you when and where the story is set, and the cover art suggests one of the two great threats to human civilization it is warning us about. That’s right. It’s climate change. Our imaginary descendants in this this book are muddling through that, as humans tend to do. We’re innovative and adaptive creatures, after all. We may not have a lot of foresight when it comes to avoiding self-inflicted injuries, but when we do harm ourselves, we’re quick to apply a bandage and get on with life.

The other existential threat featured in this story is—
No, not terrorism.
Not another large asteroid.
Not religious extremism.
Not alien invaders.
Not renegade robots or homicidal artificial intelligence.
No, Not even Donald Trump.
As scary as those are, the threat Kim Stanley Robinson warns us about here is far more insidious, and it’s real.

Wall Street.

The author obviously did some background reading in economics as he was drafting this fictional book because the kinds of financial manipulation he describes are far from fictional. They have gone on and are going on still today. (I’ll list a few recent and popular books on the subject that he may have consulted below. You may want to read them. But I’ll warn you; they’re scary.) But New York 2140 book isn’t just a warning, or an apocalyptic thriller, or a tale of likeable characters overcoming adversity. It’s not even just a painless lesson on macroeconomics. It is all of those, but it also proposes a course of action that could, conceivably, change things. To say what that is would be a spoiler, so I won’t. I will, however, recommend this book.

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Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
The New Grand Strategy: Restoring America’s Prosperity, Security, and Sustainability in the 21st Century
Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few
Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

It is obvious that the economic system we have now is not working as well as it might for most. The US is an incredibly wealthy and prosperous nation that is filled with people struggling to get by today and who are uncertain about the future. In this book, Douglas Rushkoff, a professor at Queens College, CUNY, explains why. He summarizes the problem succinctly in this sentence: “People who work for a living are suffering under a system designed to favor those who make their money with money.” (Page 138) This isn’t a new insight. Karl Marx made it in the 19th Century. Rana Foroohar showed how it applied to today’s world in Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business.

Rushkoff proposes a new business model that focuses on sustaining value rather than on extracting value. This, too, has been suggested before. (See The New Grand Strategy: Restoring America’s Prosperity, Security, and Sustainability in the 21st Century; Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, and Capital in the Twenty-First Century.) Digital currencies and peer to peer trading facilitated by digital technology could be a part of this. (See The History of Money.)

As with many books on this subject, there are valid insights about the problems of our current economic system. The perpetual growth it demands is unsustainable. A system that prioritizes extraction of wealth rather than creation of value is ultimately destined to collapse. I’ve yet to read a book on this subject that I thought provided an achievable way out of the problem, though, this one included. Top down solutions require a far more functional (and possibly dictatorial) government than we have, and bottom up solutions rely on a seemingly impossible mass enlightenment of people who suddenly and miraculously decide it is now time to act for the common good. Call my cynical, but I doubt that’s going to happen.

Homo Deus

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

Advances in human knowledge and technology are rapidly changing our society. What we value and what we believe are all in transition. That’s nothing new, of course. Our concept of the universe and of our place in it has changed throughout time—from trembling in awe at the power of thunder gods to challenging the heavens in rocket ships. In the near future, however, we may not only change how we see ourselves; we may change what we are.

This, I think, is the point Yuval Noah Harari, a lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is trying to make in this book (which, by the way, is beautifully produced, with thick, glossy pages and color pictures). By speeding through history, he attempts to show that people have often shifted their beliefs, priorities, and goals, which he attributes to changes in ‘religion,’ a term that I think he uses far too generically. (He did the same in his previous book, Sapiens). For Harari, ‘religion’ refers to not only theistic religions, but to things that I would call ideology, philosophy, paradigm, or theory. Nazism, fascism, communism, capitalism, humanism…pretty much any overarching idea that provides a template for human understanding is a religion. I think his historical analysis suffers by conflating them. There are important differences, not least of which is how susceptible they are to revision in the minds of their subscribers. Some of these can change far more easily and quickly than can others. It is not until page 182 that he provides his definition: “Religion is any all-encompassing story that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms and values.” Personally, I think he should have used a different word.

He also applies seemingly broad definitions for words such as ‘worship’, ‘spiritual’, ‘dogma’, and ‘divinity’. Whether he uses religious terminology to annoy traditional theists or simply for the shock value, I’m not sure, but it may be a bit of both. What his ultimate (and laudable) goal seems to be is to get readers to question their assumptions.

He eventually describes a new, rising ‘religion’ that he calls Dataism. This one manifests itself as a ‘worship’ of data. We create it, share it, and depend upon it. Under this ‘religion’, the value of data supersedes previous values of privacy and free will. Well, perhaps.

As an analysis of history or as a futurist prediction of things to come, I found this book just so-so. But then I tend to read a fair amount in both subjects, so there wasn’t much new here for me. Harari does close with three questions, though, that I think are worth pondering:

1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-sentient conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

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My Review of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1252063767