From the title, I expected this book to be much like those by Steven Pinker, showing how human life has steadily improved from generation to generation, about how we’ve reduced things like hunger, disease, poverty, crime, and war by implementing the ideas of the Enlightenment. There is some of that in these pages, but Easterbrook isn’t really looking at the broad scope of history here. He is more focused on today, or at least on the last century. His main point is that things today (in general) are far better than politicians, social media, and most news reports might suggest.
Humans, he states, are predisposed by their evolution to suspect threats and be wary of the unknown. Even though most shadows are harmless, treating all as if they are bears hiding in the bushes has survival value because, every once in a while, there really is a bear. Politicians and the media exploit our inherent fears (sometimes intentionally) for their own benefit. His take on how current politicians have done so abound.
This isn’t an objective or scholarly work. There is little statistical data, no graphs, no detailed analysis, and the author freely shares his personal opinions and value judgments (such that Western ideals are moral and that a well regulated market economy is the economic ideal). Despite these differences, he comes to much the same conclusions as Pinker does inThe Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Things aren’t only not bad; they are better than they ever have been. That doesn’t mean we don’t have serious problems. Disease, crime, poverty, and hunger have been reduced, but they haven’t been eliminated. Challenges such as climate change and wealth disparity certainly need to addressed, but history shows that humans are quite good at overcoming challenges. There is every reason to expect that we’ll meet those of today as least as well as we have met those of the past.
Some debts are formal and quantifiable, like the ones you take on in our modern world when you buy a house or a car. Some are not, like when you tell someone you owe them one or that you’re in their debt when they do you a favor. The latter kind came first. Before there was money, people did one another favors and built a kind of social credit based on their honor and their reputation. In close knit communities, most exchanges, even for things like eggs and milk, were based on people swapping favors. Everyone carried a social debt and everyone was a social creditor.
Despite popular myths about the origins of money, there never was an economy based on barter. Direct trades of one item for another were uncommon and only needed between people who did not trust one another. The very first economies were based on a kind of communistic cooperation. Competitive economics, the kind in which people selfishly seek gain or attempt to come out ahead in a deal, came later. In large part, it was necessitated by war.
As the title states, this book is a history of debt. But it’s also about money, wealth, poverty, capitalism, and people. But is all comes back to debt because it’s about what we owe to one another. It’s an informative and enlightening read.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress bySteven Pinker
Since our emergence as a species, we (humans) have faced a great many challenges. We may not be entirely rational creatures, but we are clever, and we are capable of rational thought from time to time, and because of this, humanity has progressed. Our collective ingenuity has been remarkably successful in solving a great many problems, and there is every reason to expect that we will continue to do so.
As with Steven Pinker’s earlier book The Better Angels of our Nature, this one documents human progress. Our lives are far better (on average) than those of our ancestors. Sadly, many people don’t realize this and fail to appreciate how the change in thinking we call the Enlightenment allowed us to successfully combat disease, famine, and poverty.
Sometimes the author’s anger and frustration bleed through in his writing, but I can’t blame him. I often feel the same at how selectively unappreciative people can be for the benefits provided by modern life and of the Enlightened principles that so greatly helped us achieve it. We are safer, smarter, wiser, healthier, better fed, and lead longer lives. War, crime, disease, hunger, and many other ills, some natural and some self-inflicted, are continually in decline. Our ancestors struggled hard to get us to this point. They bravely questioned tradition and prevailing superstitions to understand the world as it really is. In many ways, they succeeded, and they made our lives better. The least we can do is recognize their achievements.
Once upon a time, many economists believed that people were rational creatures, at least when it comes to money. Their idealized consumers and investors based their choices on what to buy, what to sell, how much to spend, and how much to save, on objective data and sound reasoning, with the ultimate goal of personal financial gain. When it came to economics, they believed, people were best seen as selfish, money-maximizing algorithms.
Obviously, those economists had never spent much time around real people. But that’s what they thought, and they constructed economic models and public policy recommendations founded on that fundamentally flawed hypothesis. The results have been less than optimal for real people. Unfortunately, other than for stock bubbles, this book doesn’t address those in much detail.
In Misbehaving, behavioral economist Richard Thaler tells us how this paradigm came to be challenged over the last half century. In the 1970s, he was among a small, outsider group that proposed that since economics is a human activity, one must understand humans to properly understand economics. Not an easy task, for sure, but how people actually behave must be factored into the equation. Economics is as much psychology as math. This isn’t a new idea. One of the most influential economists of modern times, John Maynard Keynes, knew it well, but somehow over the years, it had either been forgotten or intentionally ignored. This book does not provide the history of how this came to be or, perhaps more interestingly, why.
Misbehaving provides a brief history of the emergence of behavioral economics as a recognized academic field. It introduces some of the key players, the basic ideas, and the flaws of the paradigm it seeks to displace. It’s presented as if behavioral economics is a new and revolutionary idea. It may be. I’m not an economics insider. The most surprising thing to me is that a revolution is needed. How could anyone have ever seriously considered an economic theory that ignored how people actually behave in the first place? How did they believe it might provide meaningful insights? Surely they must have known that humans are not inherently selfish, that their behavior is not predominately rational, and that they don’t assign value to things purely in terms of how much money they might be traded for. Assumptions to the contrary are not only wrong, they are blindly ignorant of what humans are.
I’ll admit to being generous rating this five stars on Goodreads, but it’s a rare delight to find a book on economics to be so engaging. There is even a call out to Terry Pratchett and a couple of quotes by Douglas Adams, two of my favorite (sort of) philosophers. It’s written as a kind of Platonic dialogue, a narrative in which the ‘reader’ (or just some guy with a mild interest in the subject) poses reasonable questions and provides appropriate comments while the ‘author’ offers responses that are informative but not overly detailed or technical. So sure, the explanations tend to be fairly superficial and gloss over nuances, but the basics are here. What are the essential differences between Keynesian and classical economic theories? What’s GDP and how does it differ from GNI? Is inflation always bad? How might problems like unemployment, poverty, and economic inequality be mitigated? Is perpetual economic growth possible? I found it all interesting and about as delightful to read as a nonfiction book can be. If you’re looking for a serious, in depth study on macroeconomics, this isn’t it. But for a clear introduction, this is hard to beat.
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett ~ A Fine Fantasy for the Holiday Season
The midwinter holiday on Discworld is Hogswatch rather than Christmas, and the Hogfather is the Discworld’s version of Santa Claus. He climbs down chimneys, gives presents, says, “HO-HO-HO,” and drives a sleigh pulled by four flying pigs. Many children of the Disc believe in him, which is why he exists. (This is a fundamental characteristic of the magical system in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books.) Belief causes the thing believed in to exist, and when belief stops, that existence stops. Teatime, an assassin retained to do away with the Hogfather, plans to exploit this metaphysical law to accomplish his assigned task, but first he must break into the Tooth Fairy’s castle and get control of the teeth stored there. With them, he can influence the belief of their former owners through sympathetic magic. (That’s something of a spoiler, but if you haven’t read this yet, you may be thankful for it.)
Hogfather was the first Discworld book I ever read. This was back in 1999, I think. It could have been 2000. I’m not sure. I didn’t buy it. The book was given to me, not so much as a gift, but as a case of, “Here, I’m not going to read this again, but you might like it since I know you like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
A few months later, I decided to give it a try. I didn’t know what to make of the book at first. It wasn’t like anything I had ever read before. I recall thinking when I was about halfway in that I wasn’t sure I liked it. It was obviously fantasy, but it wasn’t like the epic fantasy stepchildren of Lord of the Rings or the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, which dominated the fantasy genre at the time. Those stories seemed to make a concerted effort to portray their fantasy settings as ‘real’ places, and they were chocked full of dragons, evil warlords and their minions, and powerful magic. Their plots often boiled down to simple, and often bloody, contests between good and evil. The reader didn’t have to think much for most of these. They offered an entertaining escape from reality, but not much else. The plots were often a bit like sporting events in which one side is ‘good’ primarily because it’s from your hometown (although there’s a good chance none of the players are). In some, the biggest difference between the protagonist and the antagonist was the point of view that dominated the story.
In any case, that was the kind of fantasy novel I was used to. Hogfather is none of the above. It’s not even like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, but the person who gave me the book was right in one regard. If you like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, there is a good chance you will like Discworld. Both are satirical, funny, incredibly clever, and mind-bending.
But, back to what I was saying. Halfway through my first reading of Hogfather, I was confused. This book was far more complex than it seems at first glance. There was certainly more to it than the fantasy stories with which I was familiar. The setting was comprehensible but bizarre. I mean—really—a flat world carried on the back of four elephants standing on a turtle? Come on! The plot confused me, and there were subplots and multiple points of view presented by an omniscient narrator. There were even footnotes! This wasn’t like watching a sporting event or a cartoon. I had to pay attention. This book was trying to make me (*gasp*) think! To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was up to the challenge.
Then, about halfway through, I got it. I can’t recall exactly what scene or phrase caused my epiphany, but I finally caught a glimpse of what this story was doing, and it floored me. The author wasn’t trying to draw me into the story to the point of total immersion. The setting was absurd because I wasn’t supposed to believe it was possible. The story was fiction, and I wasn’t being encouraged to suspend disbelief to the point where I felt for a moment that it wasn’t. There’s a kind of honesty to that that I still find refreshing. Yes, the story is set on a fantasy world starring a recognizable parody of Santa Claus and an anthropomorphic personification of Death, complete with black cloak and scythe, but it’s not ABOUT them. It’s about us!
But at the same time, this ridiculous setting was rich and textured. It was unbelievably believable. And the characters, although they seemed exaggerated caricatures at first, had surprising depth and personality. I recall thinking that this Terry Pratchett fellow must be some kind of genius.
I’ve read all forty or so Discworld books since, all them at least three times, and I still think this is true.
Hogfather, like many of the Discworld books, is multifaceted. Here are a few things I noticed:
• It is, of course, a parody of the Santa legend.
• It’s a cultural satire about our traditions and philosophies.
• It’s a not-so-thinly veiled criticism of holiday commercialism.
• It’s a morality tale about duty and the importance of family ties.
• It’s a philosophical statement on the nature of humanity.
• It contrasts rational and irrational ways of thinking.
• It provides a brief comment on emergent artificial intelligence.
• It’s a fantasy story that pokes fun at fantasy, while, at the same time, explaining why fantasy is both meaningful and necessary.
• Oh yeah, and it’s funny.
If you have not read any Discworld books yet, you should. Actually, my advice is to read them all and then to reread them. When reading Hogfather, one key point to remember is that time is not necessarily linear where Death (the Discworld character) is concerned. It can be frozen, and causality can work in reverse. The future can change events in the past or cause them not to happen at all.
Hogfather, however, is not the Discworld book I would recommend to newcomers to the Disc. Yes, it was my first, and each book can stand on its own, but Hogfather is a tough go without the background provided by some of the others. I hesitate to recommend any particular Discworld book to start with. I’ve seen some forums in which people can become quite heated about this, believe it or not. I highly recommend all of them, but I will say again that Hogfather probably shouldn’t be your first.
If you are familiar with Discworld, but have not yet read Hogfather, I suggest doing so now. It’s a great book for the holidays. If you have read Hogfather before, it’s a great one to reread for the Holidays.
The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives byLisa Servon
Taking jobs at a check cashing service in New York, and at a payday lender in California, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania (and a writer and lecturer on consumer financial services) attempts to obtain some ground truth on the plight of financially insecure Americans.
I think it comes as no surprise that a great many Americans are struggling financially. The economy isn’t what it once was. Adjusted for inflation, wages have declined since 1972. Secure jobs with benefits are relatively scarce. Although productivity has increased over the past few decades, most of the resulting benefits have filtered up to CEOs, managers, and stockholders. They no longer trickle down as pay raises or benefits for average workers. Personally, I don’t see how this situation is sustainable. Too many people are living paycheck to paycheck, saving little, and are unable to cover contingencies such as medical expenses or car repairs, let alone luxuries. What may come as a surprise to some is how pervasive economic insecurity is. It’s not just for the poor anymore. It’s now affecting the middle class. Far too many find themselves marginalized in an economy that still hinges on consumer spending. With so many consumers effectively excluded, how can the system endure?
Anyone interested in this subject has seen the statistics. The author of this book goes beyond those to the personal level, showing what the impact is on some of these excluded individuals and relating how they cope. Many have turned away from banks to alternative financial services such as check cashers and payday lenders. When you simply look at the numbers, these services may seem predatory. Paying close to 2% of the value to cash a check, or 400% annual interest on a payday loan certainly seem excessive. But for some, this turns out to actually be less expensive than similar services from traditional banks, which do not offer small, short-term, unsecured loans, and charge exorbitant fees for maintaining low balances and for overdrafts. It’s an interesting read about a subject that I think should be getting more political attention. There is a problem here that needs to be addressed.
It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook
