When I first read of the survey (one story on it linked here) of how members of the public consistently overestimate the percentage of gays in the general population, I was not terribly surprised. Dismayed, yes – as it appeared that the younger cohort estimated the proportion of gay to straight at almost a third, which I thought would have run slap up against that cohort’s observation of the world around them. The actual percentage is round and about two percent, which tracks with my own real-world observation – but I can hardly blame the kids for assuming a much higher figure, knowing how many media creations prominently feature gay characters. Looking at TV shows, movies, books, games, the celebrity culture … one might very well assume that ‘gay’ constitutes a much larger portion of public space than they actually occupy, on a strictly numerical basis. The various media reflect ‘gay’ at several times their normal size. Like my neighbor’s basset hounds; it’s not that there are many, but the bassets are so very loud, a casual observer might assume that there are many more, based on the racket.
Month: December 2014
Clowns, Fools, and Generally Unpleasant People of the Week
1) If a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education (excerpted here) is correct, then Rensselaer Polytechnic president Shirley Jackson seems a little…imperious…in her approach to her job.
Having created the very model of an undemocratic, corporate university, President Jackson is appropriately imperious. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, she has a series of rules that are clear to everyone. These include: 1) Only she is authorized to set the temperature in conference rooms; 2) Cabinet members all rise when she enters the room; 3) If food is served at a meeting, vice presidents clear her plate; and 4) She is always to be publicly introduced as “The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson.” Falling into rages on occasion, she publicly abuses her staff and frequently remarks: “You know, I could fire you all.” In 2011, RPI’s Student Senate passed a resolution criticizing her “abrasive style,” “top-down leadership,” and the climate of “fear” she had instilled among administrators and staff. It even called upon RPI’s board of trustees to consider Jackson’s removal from office. But, once again, the board merely rallied in her defense.
2) Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, blocked the nomination of Lt General Susan Helms to head the Air Force Space Command, leading to Helms’ subsequent retirement from the service. McCaskill assailed Helms’ 2012 decision to grant clemency to an officer serving at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., who had been convicted of aggravated sexual assault.
Helms used her judgment and her command authority to prevent what she apparently viewed as an injustice, based on her review of evidence in the case. McCaskill said that the clemency decision “sent a damaging message to survivors of sexual assault who are seeking justice in the military justice system.” Apparently, McCaskill cares much more about “sending messages” than about justice to individuals. The message that she has sent to all American military commanders is this: Do not ever extend clemency in a matter where an individual has been accused of an offense which is of particular concern to the Democratic Party, or your career will be immediately destroyed.
If a governor pardons someone accused of witchcraft, then the governor himself must be a witch. That seems to be the level of McCaskill’s thinking here.
Much more about the case at this link.
3) Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a very courageous woman who was raised as a Muslim and has been attempting, in the face of many threats, to warn the western world about the danger of Islamic extremism. At an event in Washington, Joe Biden informed her that “ISIS had nothing to do with Islam.” Hirsi Ali disagreed. To which Slow Joe responded “Let me tell you one or two things about Islam.”
4) Speaking of Muslims…Omar Mahmood, a Muslim conservative who is a student at the University of Michigan, wrote a satire on political correctness, mocking the current vogue for claiming “microaggressions.” He was denounced by students of the “progressive” persuasion…”people attacked his dorm room door, egging it and leaving copies of his satirical article with notes on the backs including “Shut the f— up!” and “You scum embarrass us” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” along with various others, including an image of a creature with horns and another one of him with his eyes crossed out.” Mahmood was also fired from the student newspaper. He says that “the political environment on campus is radically left-wing and intolerant,” noting that:
“Almost all student clubs have ‘social justice’ wings… some use violent rhetoric, shameless rhetoric, to promote their ideology, and call it ‘liberation.’ They call it ‘tolerance’ and ‘equality’ and ‘creating a safe space’ — which is all very ironic.”
The students who reacted to Mahmood’s satire in this way are not worthy of being university students, or for that matter American citizens, and the administrators of this university should be ashamed of themselves for allowing such a climate to develop. They won’t be, though.
Macro-History: A Few Books
This post was originally published at the Scholar’s Stage on 14 December 2014. Re-posted here without alteration.
The last two months were far busier than I expected them to be. I apologize to the Stage’s readers for the lull in posting–more than once I started post or essay during these weeks only to discover that I did not have the spare time to finish it. Now that the Yuletide is upon us my workload is much lighter and I expect to polish up and publish a few of the things that have been sitting in the queue since October.
Before I get into any of that, however, I would like to make a few book recommendations. Earlier this month Anton Howes—the proprietor of the excellent economic-history blog Capitalism’s Cradle and a PhD aspirant over at King’s College political economy program–asked his twitter followers for book recommendations on global economic history or other related macrohistorical topics. In the thread that followed something close to 70 titles were recommended. Participants tried to avoid the obvious choices (Braudel, Pomerantz, Acemoglu, etc.) for other important books that are easily overlooked or forgotten. If memory serves correct I recommended six or seven titles; at least half came from our mutual blog-friend Pseudoerasmus.
For those interested in seeing the full list without trawling through twitter’s archives Mr. Howe created an Amazon wishlist that contains all the books recommended to him. The list is pretty neat. However, as I reviewed it earlier this week I realized that there are a few titles I forgot to suggest earlier that deserve a place on it. These are my suggested additions and a few comments on why I think they are worth your time:
Robert Kelly’s Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum.
(If you are to read one book on hunter-gather lifestyles, living standards, or decision-making models, this should be it. Unlike many cultural anthropologists, Kelly is a committed social scientist not afraid to model human decisions or present falsifiable theories. Also, the book teems with data).
Vaclav Smil’s Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems and Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken From Nature.
(It is hard to dig into one of Vaclav Smil’s encyclopedic tomes and see the world through quite the same lens ever again. Smil has a deep appreciation for the physical stuff that civilization is made up of. He bridges the natural and social sciences with descriptions of human society and economic exchange as flows of energy and material. These books should be in your library as reference works, if nothing else).
Mark Elvin’s The Pattern of the Chinese Past.
(This book is almost forty years old. It should be outdated, but I have not been able to find a better one-volume introduction to China’s institutional history or the Song dynasty’s “Medieval Economic Revolution”).
Fransesca Bray’s The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies.
(Both the opening and closing chapters of this book, which discuss the domestication of rice and the “Asian development model,” have been outmoded by newer research. The meat of the book–including a nuts-and-bolts description of rice agriculture in its many forms and a survey of the different agricultural models used to grow rice across East and Southeast Asia over the last two thousand years–is still very useful. Particular strengths are Song China, Tokugawa Japan, and early modern Malaysia).
William McNiell’s The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000.
(I am reading this right now. As is always the case with McNiell’s work, this book is a panoramic presentation of the human past–a bird’s eye view of human civilization, so to speak. It is both a history of armed conflict and a history of market exchange; his thesis is that neither one of these can be separated from the other. It will make you think).
Chester G. Starr’s The Roman Empire, 27 BC-467 AD: A Study in Survival.
(I reread this book once every few years. It is a slim work and the best introduction to the structure of Roman society and Roman imperial institutions I know of. Read it before you jump into anything on the Roman economy).
Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why.
(This book is not about economics or history. However, I think it is important for people working on comparative history, economics, sociology, etc. to be familiar with the research Nisbett summarizes here. For the last three decades social physiologists have performed dozens of experiments to find out if people from different parts of the world think the same way. Turns out they do not. Travelers have always known this, of course, but now there is a large body of replicable evidence to prove the point. Some of these differences are fascinating. Whether or not these differences are related to economic or technological development in these particular regions is still an open question–but people participating in the debate should be aware of these differences. Often they are not.
This field of study has really exploded over the last decade; hopefully Nisbett will publish a second edition that incorporates this newer research. Readers might also be interested in the longer review of The Geography of Thought I wrote for the Stage last year).
That is it! This is the time of year people start posting book lists as Christmas gift recommendations. I suppose this list is good as any I might come up with, especially if comparative macro-history is your thing (and lets face it, if you are reading the Stage it probably is. Macro-history is what we do here).
On the odd chance that macro-history is not your kind of thing, I also invite you to review the books listed in “Quantum Libraries” and the bolded items in “Every Book I Read in 2013” for some excellent books or novels on history, strategy, contemporary affairs, and other topics discussed here.
Are there are any books you recommend for the holidays?
Interview with Jeff Bezos — The Obstacles to Technological Breakthroughs (to America 3.0) are more Regulatory and Legal than Technological
In a recent interview with Jeff Bezos, he notes that drone delivery will be more delayed by regulation than by technological capability.
HB: Drones. You had this amazing “commercial” on “60 Minutes” last year, about this fantastic future when drones are going to fly out and bring me my package, and it’s going to be right there. Immediately, everybody in the country, and probably around the world, was saying, “Great — when?”
JB: That’s a difficult question to answer. Technology is not going to be the long pole. The long pole is going to be regulatory. I just went and met with the primary team and saw the 10th- or 11th-generation drone flying around in the cage. It’s truly remarkable. It’s not just the physical airframe and electric motors and so on. The most interesting part of this is the autopilot and the guidance and control and the machine vision systems that make it all work. As for when, though, that is very difficult to predict. I’d bet you the ratio of lawyers to engineers on the primary team is probably the highest at Amazon.
HB: Is this a situation where everyone else in the world except Americans is going to get drone deliveries?
JB: I think it is sad but possible that the US could be late. It’s highly likely that other countries will do it first. I may be too skeptical. I hope I’m wrong.
It is too bad that the USA is likely to be slow moving in making this — and many other types of new technology — available to the public.
The same will certainly be true about driverless cars, or molecular medicine.
We are going to need entrepreneur and activists and, yes, even lawyers, who are committed to making new technology available to the American people, with the inevitable disruption of existing relationships and expectations.
Getting to a better America is possible, but nothing is inevitable.
There will be many struggles along the way to America 3.0.
