Books

Tim Sullivan responds to my post at _OrgTheory._

bq. The point of the AA story, though, was not that organizations are perfectly efficient but that organizations face tradeoffs, and it can be useful to acknowledge those tradeoffs explicitly and to understand the economic architecture of organizations because it makes the situation of the average employee, manager, executive more comprehensible. In the AA case, they had a terrible website (which reflected plenty of other dysfunction within the company), and yet to do the job that AA aspired to (that is, flying people and stuff all over the world), you have to build a big, complicated organization that does lots of things all at once – managing fuel contracts, negotiating with pilots and flight attendants, setting prices, and so on. And organizing all of this involves a lot of tradeoffs. … Ray and I aren’t suggesting that orgs can’t be full of politics, power plays, bad managers, ridiculous HR departments, and so forth. They clearly are — but you have to accept these realities when you decide that there’s something that you want to do that will be best accomplished as a group of bosses and employees. The trick is not to ignore them or pretend they don’t exist, but to understand how and why they are produced, to recognize that sometimes apparent inefficiencies are the result of being organized, and understand the difference between tradeoffs and the _truly_ ridiculous and pointless aspects of organizational life.

I think that the nub of the disagreement is best summed up in one half-sentence here, where Tim suggests that “you have to accept these realities when you decide that there’s something that you want to do that will be best accomplished as a group of bosses and employees.” The point of the alternative perspective I set out is that there _isn’t_ any moment when a collective ‘you’ of bosses and employees, with a common interest in getting something done, decides this. The actual ‘you’ who makes the decisions is a very specific ‘you’ with a very specific set of interests. It is the ‘you’ who is in charge (or, if you want to get all old-style, the ‘you’ who is a capitalist). There is a literature of course in organizational economics, which talks about ‘team production functions,’ and how teams might rationally, if they wanted to get stuff done and minimize shirking, assign oversight to a hierarchically empowered actor. But in an economy which is not organized around cooperatives, very few private enterprises will originate in this way. Instead, they will originate with decisions by owners of capital, who will empower managers (a group which may, or may not, overlap with the owners of capital) to hire workers. The logic will be different, obviously, in non-profits and the government sector, but less different than you might imagine, as both these sectors become more and more like private enterprise.
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Via “The Browser”:http://www.thebrowser.com a “rather wonderful unravelling”:http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1243205.ece of the various identities associated with independent scholar A.D. Harvey, who apparently leaves posers like John Lott spluttering in the dirt. The piece is long but worthwhile: at its best, it reads like a combination of A.J. Symon’s _Quest for Corvo_ and what _At-Swim-Two-Birds_ might have been if Flann O’Brien were a tenured professor of history:

bq. Even for holders of tenured university positions, scholarship can make for a lonely life. One spends years on a monograph and then waits a few more years for someone to write about it. How much lonelier the life of an independent scholar, who does not have regular contact, aggravating as that can sometimes be, with colleagues. Attacking one’s own book can be seen as an understandable response to an at times intolerable isolation. How comforting to construct a community of scholars who can analyse, supplement and occasionally even ruthlessly criticize each other’s work. I’ve traced the connections between A. D. Harvey, Stephanie Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra, but they may be part of a much wider circle of friends. … some of Harvey’s own mystifications leave an unpleasant taste. It is not only that the apparent practice of submitting articles under fictitious names to scholarly journals might well have a chilling effect on the ability of really existing independent scholars to place their work. Nor is it just the embarrassment caused to editors who might in an ideal world have taken more pains to check the contributions of Stephanie Harvey or Trevor McGovern, but who accepted them in good faith, partly out of a wish to make their publications as inclusive as possible.

“Story at the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/03/iain-banks-gall-bladder-cancer?INTCMP=SRCH, thanks to people in comments below. This is very sad news. He has been a wonderful and prolific writer, whose intelligence and considerable grasp of politics were often concealed by the lightness of his touch. I would have loved it had he written more in the experimental vein of some of his earlier fiction – _Walking on Glass_ is just a lovely book – but am grateful for what he has written. He never got the reception in the US that he deserved – some CT readers may not know his work. Readers interested in his literary side should perhaps start with _Walking on Glass_ or _The Wasp Factory_ (“It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparalleled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it.” – _The Irish Times_), and those more interested in sf should begin with _Consider Phlebas_ or perhaps _The Use of Weapons._ They’re all wonderful novels, in very different ways.

So the Hugo nominees are “here”:http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2013-hugo-awards/. Outside of the novels, the only nominated work I’ve read is Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn’s _Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature_ which I am entirely happy to recommend you go vote for, or, better still, buy. As for the novels, they’re:

* 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
* Blackout, Mira Grant (Orbit)
* Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
* Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, John Scalzi (Tor)
* Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW)

I’ve read five of the six (and I got halfway through the first book in the series which Mira Grant’s _Blackout_ ends), and I’ve got a serious case of the mehs. _2312_ is the only one that I would recommend as doing something interesting. The other five seem to me solid, but not wildly exciting. Ahmed’s _Throne of the Crescent Moon_ is a lot of fun – good sword and sorcery from a non-Christian Europe-centric perspective. _Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance_ is perfectly fine, but while it isn’t the worst of Bujold’s books, it’s not close to being the best either. John Scalzi’s _Redshirts_ didn’t grab me, perhaps because I never particularly liked _Star Trek_, and so was underwhelmed by the pathos.

But in the end, the Hugo nominees are no more and no less than a prestigious crowdsourced recommendation list. Which means that if your taste doesn’t gel with that of the Hugos crowd, you shouldn’t get bent out of shape about it, but also you shouldn’t take it as gospel. CT readers are a different crowd than Worldcon attendees/supporters, and I imagine would generate a different list. If people want to namecheck the books they liked in comments, I’ll undertake to write a follow up post next week that tries to pull these recommendations together in a more useful form. I’ve already listed “some of my favorites here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2013/02/27/hugo-nominations-2/ but take that as a conversation starter, not ender.

I’ve been a big fan of Frank Moorhouse’s Edith trilogy since I first encountered it nearly a decade ago. The first two volumes, Grand Days and Dark Palace dealt with the heroine’s adventures (political and sexual) as a young and optimistic Australian staff member with the doomed League of Nations. That was a fascinating glimpse of a world that had vanished well before I was born, and showed up Moorhouse’s capacity for imaginative recreation of that world, as well as the marvellous character of Edith Campbell Berry.

In the third volume, Cold Light, Edith turns up in early postwar Canberra, and there’s a sudden shift of view for me (and I guess, also for Moorhouse). The story runs into the early 1970s, when I was growing up and going to the Australian National University in Canberra. Edith is an observer and occasional participant in events ranging from the planning of Canberra to Menzies’ attempt to ban the Communist Party. Not only that, but most of the characters, with the exception of Edith and those in her immediate circle, are real people. Notable examples include Australian PMs Menzies and Whitlam, but also some academics from the early days of the ANU. I knew quite a few of them, and some of them even knew me: Heinz Arndt, for example, paid me the backhanded compliment of describing me as “a very dangerous young man” [1].

Reading and visualising a book so close to your own life is an odd experience – I was starting to wonder if I would appear in a crowd scene, perhaps outside Parliament House after Whitlam’s dismissal. For younger readers, of course, the early days of Canberra belong to the same dim past as the Kellogg-Briand Pact. They will, I think, find the book just as rewarding as I did, though in a very different way.

fn1. Arndt had been a leftwing social democrat in his early years in Australia, but moved sharply to the right later. In mischievous moods, I sometimes cited, with approval and without mention of his subsequent evolution, his early work advocating bank nationalization.

My review of Mark Blyth’s forthcoming book, _Austerity: A Dangerous Idea_ can be “found here”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_2013/on_political_books/slaves_of_defunct_economists043306.php. After I wrote the review, Dani Rodrik “published a piece”:http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ideas-over-interests arguing that economists needed to pay less attention to interests, and more to ideas:

bq. Interests are not fixed or predetermined. They are themselves shaped by ideas – beliefs about who we are, what we are trying to achieve, and how the world works. Our perceptions of self-interest are always filtered through the lens of ideas. … So, where do those ideas come from? Policymakers, like all of us, are slaves to fashion. Their perspectives on what is feasible and desirable are shaped by the zeitgeist, the “ideas in the air.” This means that economists and other thought leaders can exert much influence – for good or ill. John Maynard Keynes once famously said that “even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist.” He probably didn’t put it nearly strongly enough. The ideas that have produced, for example, the unbridled liberalization and financial excess of the last few decades have emanated from economists who are (for the most part) very much alive. … Economists love theories that place organized special interests at the root of all political evil. In the real world, they cannot wriggle so easily out of responsibility for the bad ideas that they have so often spawned.

Blyth thinks very similarly about how ideas dominate interests, and how we need to take account of this studying the economy. As I summarize his take (building not only on the austerity book, but his previous work too):

Blyth cares about bad ideas because they have profound consequences. We do not live in the tidy, ordered universe depicted by economists’ models. Instead, our world is crazy and chaotic. We try to control this world through imposing our economic ideas on it, and sometimes can indeed create self-fulfilling prophecies that work for a while. For a couple of decades, it looked as though markets really were efficient, in the way that economists claimed they were. As long as everyone believed in the underlying idea of underlying markets, and believed that everyone else believed in this idea too, they could sustain the fiction, and ignore inconvenient anomalies. However, sooner or later (and more likely sooner than later), these anomalies explode, generating chaos until a new set of ideas emerges, creating another short-lived island of stability.

This means that ideas are fundamentally important. The world does not come with an instruction sheet, but ideas can make it seem as if it does. They tell you which things to care about, and which to ignore; which policies to implement, and which to ridicule. This was true before the economic crisis. Everyone from the center left to the center right believed that weakly regulated markets worked as advertised, right up to the moment when they didn’t. It is equally true in the aftermath, as boosters of neoliberalism have moved with remarkable alacrity from one set of bad ideas to another.

“John Scalzi”:http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/02/26/your-2013-sff-award-nomination-awareness-post-readers-and-fans/ reminds me that there are only 10 days left before Hugo nominations close. Three recommendations (one the subject of a recent CT seminar; another the subject of a forthcoming one), and more about other 2012 f/sf books that I liked below the fold. People should obviously feel free to add other recommendations in comments.

Karin Tidbeck, _Jagannath_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9780985790400, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0985790407/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0985790407&linkCode=as2&tag=henryfarrell-20). A lovely and original collection of stories by a Swedish author, most published for the first time in English. It’s hard to pick an individual story, but “Brita’s Holiday Village” is as good as any and “available online”:http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/11/britas-holiday-village. Tidbeck writes in the afterword about the profound influence of H.P. Lovecraft. However, the affect of her work is very different. Her stories are not motivated by self-loathing or disgust with the human race, but by a kind of wary affection. The monsters in her stories are our faintly embarrassing relations, and acknowledged as such.

Felix Gilman, _The Rise of Ransom City_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9780765329400?p_wgt, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765329409/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0765329409&linkCode=as2&tag=henryfarrell-20). Up for discussion soon at _Crooked Timber_, along with its sort-of-prequel, _The Half-Made World._ Like its predecessor, it’s an oblique take on the American Dream, albeit a different version of it – one which perhaps owes less to the mythologies of the West than to Mark Twain, and perhaps O.Henry’s Jeff Peters stories. It’s funny and self-aware in a way that few f/sf books are (another excellent example is Robert Charles Wilson’s _Julian Comstock_).

Francis Spufford’s _Red Plenty_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9781555976040?p_wgt, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1555976042/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1555976042&linkCode=as2&tag=henryfarrell-20). All you could want to know here, and, arguably one of the best science fiction novels written in the last several decades. I say ‘arguably’ only because one might “claim”:http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1653581.html that it isn’t, and shouldn’t count as part of the genre. The underlying question is whether you think about science fiction as a genre consisting of books about the future, or as a particular method of fictional inquiry. If the former, it plausibly should not be included (although the fact that it is _haunted_ by science fiction, as both Gilman and Holbo suggested in their essays for our seminar, explains some of its power). If the latter, it should be, and should indeed be taken as a model for _how you do_ ambitious sociological science fiction, while retaining an interest in individual human beings.

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“Charlie Stross”:http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html argues that we’re living in a post-democratic system.

bq. Institutional survival pressure within organizations — namely political parties — causes them to systematically ignore or repel candidates for political office who are disinclined to support the status quo or who don’t conform to the dominant paradigm in the practice of politics. … The status quo has emerged by consensus between politicians of opposite parties, who have converged on a set of policies that they deem least likely to lose them an election — whether by generating media hostility, corporate/business sector hostility, or by provoking public hostility. … The news cycle is dominated by large media organizations and the interests of the corporate sector. … Overall, the nature of the problem seems to be that our representative democratic institutions have been captured by meta-institutions that implement the iron law of oligarchy by systematically reducing the risk of change. … So the future isn’t a boot stamping on a human face, forever. It’s a person in a beige business outfit advocating beige policies that nobody wants (but nobody can quite articulate a coherent alternative to) with a false mandate obtained by performing rituals of representative democracy that offer as much actual choice as a Stalinist one-party state. [click to continue…]

“Tom Slee”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2013/01/looking-back.html

The first half of that 15 years was spent writing and studying/researching _No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart._ Whimsley started off as an attempt to promote the book, but soon moved into technology & politics, where it has stayed ever since. The total cost of this writing project to me and my family is now well into six figures in foregone income: several years ago I “negotiated” a four-day working week, largely to pursue this project. On the other hand, it has to coexist with a nearly-full-time job, which means that although much of what I write has a pseudo-academic bent, I doubt that I’m in a position to obtain qualifications relevant to what I write about. … That is not a picture of success, and given the generous support I have received, the responsibility for remaining mistakes clearly lies, as they say, with the author. My major reward from blogging has been to discover a small but select group of very smart people who have continued to read this blog, promote it from time to time, and engage in conversation. Thanks to each of you.

… writing to have an impact at the age of 53 feels very different from writing at the age of 38, and the numbers make it clear that it’s not working. To reinforce that feeling, the traffic for an individual post at the blog depends hugely on whether some of a small number of individuals link to it: I am still dependent, that is to say, on patronage and on chance, and I have not managed to build an audience of my own to sustain significant interest. I write slowly and infrequently, and usually long pieces. Clearly the style and content of my writing has failed to build a significant audience. … I have no credentials behind what I write, I’m terrible at self-promotion, my networks related to my writing are minimal, and although some pieces have been provocative I am uncomfortable in the culture of quickfire debate that drives much political writing. None of those things is likely to change. If anything, the effort has emphasized to me the importance of credentials

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We have a few seminars here at Crooked Timber over the next eight or nine months. The first, which will be coming out in a few weeks, is on Jack Knight and James Johnson’s recent book _The Priority of Democracy_ ( Amazon, Powells). It proposes a pragmatist understanding of how democracy works because, not despite of, the stark conflicts of interest and ideas within it. It’ll make for some good arguments.

In addition, we have advanced plans for the much delayed Erik Olin Wright _Real Utopias_ event, for Ken MacLeod’s various novels, for Felix Gilman’s _The Half Made World_ and its about-to-be-published sequel, _The Rise of Ransom City_, and Strongly Formulated Intentions for a couple of other events to be announced at a later date. Those who haven’t read Gilman’s book yet may want to take advantage of a Tor deal for the e-book edition – for this week, and this week only, it can be purchased for $2.99 at “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/The-Half-Made-World-ebook/dp/B003P8QSAA/ref=redir_mdp_mobile?redirect=true&tag=henryfarrell-20, “Barnes and Noble”:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/half-made-world-felix-gilman/1100357766?ean=9781429949248&itm=1&usri=half+made+world and “Apple”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-half-made-world/id376226529?mt=11. In Cosma Shalizi’s words:

A splendidly-written high-fantasy western. (It is by no stretch of the imagination “steampunk”.) Gilman takes great themes of what one might call the Matter of America — the encroachment of regimented industrial civilization, the hard-eyed anarchic men (and women) of violence, the dream of not just starting the world afresh but of offering the last best hope of earth — and transforms the first two into warring rival pantheons of demons, the third into a noble lost cause. (I think Gilman knows _exactly_ how explosive the last theme is, which is why he manages to handle it without setting it off.) Beneath and behind it all lies the continuing presence of the dispossessed original inhabitants of the continent. A story of great excitement and moment unfolds in this very convincing world, tying together an appealing, if believably flawed, heroine and two finely-rendered anti-heroes, told in prose that is vivid and hypnotic by turns.

I was amused by this Tor piece: most citizens of the Star Wars galaxy are probably totally illiterate. And then life imitated art: Amazon ate Audible, that is. A while back, Amazon acquired Audible (the audiobook store) and now they have added a whispersync for voice service which, I confess, is just what I’ve been waiting for. You buy the kindle book and then, for a few bucks extra, add the audiobook. Now I can do what I couldn’t: listen, add bookmarks, and later consult/cut&paste text for the usual scholarly/bloggy reasons. Your progress point in the book is synced, so you can listen on the bus, read when you get home. I realize this post is reading like a sponsored ad for the service but, for me, it’s going to make a significant difference. I consume a lot of audiobooks, and I like nonfiction titles. But there are reasons why scholars – or just plain thoughtful people – like to work with text, not audio, for study and reference purposes. Also, if there are tables or illustrations, it’s nice to be able to see them. For our Debt event, I bought the audiobook and it really wasn’t a full enough format, on its own, although I made do.

I find myself drifting further and further from traditional print culture into a weird sort of audio-visual mix. (But, then again, I’m a professor. What’s school like, after all?) But I’ve done this, in part, as a defense mechanisms against the much-lamented distractions of hypertext. I’m a less distracted listener than I am a reader, these days. (Memo to self: someone ought to write a theory of the book along the lines of the theory of the firm.)

Death of the book-wise, I hold the line these days at Chris Ware [amazon]. Charles Burns, too. And Seth, and a select few others. Mostly I read even comics on Comixology. I’m increasingly of the opinion that comics – but only the best ones – are the last argument for the old-fashioned book. As its plain utility wanes, the swansong of the printed book will be a series of preposterously beautiful art objects.

When I was in Texas I met Carl T. Bogus, law prof. and author of Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism [amazon]. He and I turned out to have something in common: affection for Clinton Rossiter’s forgotten Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion [amazon]. I was trying to baffle someone else at the conference, saying ‘Look, the thing you think conservatism should be is the thing the conservatives made a point of writing off in the 1950’s. You’re a neo-Rossiterian.’ Carl’s ears pricked up. We hit it right off.

When I got home I bought and read Bogus’s Buckley book. I liked it, and it filled in some blanks for me, history-wise. Going back and reading the reviews, I see TNR’s reviewer thought Bogus didn’t much improve on John Judis’ earlier Buckley book. I can’t say. Haven’t read it. (But Judis is a good writer so probably his book is good.) But the reviewer does grant that one area in which Bogus really distinguishes himself is in handling the dead and forgotten ‘new conservatives’ – Rossiter, Viereck and Nisbet, in particular. (Kirk was another, but not one who has been forgotten.) [click to continue…]

A coda to the coda – Mike Beggs’ [piece](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/) on Graeber’s Debt in _Jacobin_, and the ensuing discussion in comments [here](https://crookedtimber.org/2012/08/29/debt-the-first-five-hundred-pages/) at CT, has given rise to a further exchange in which J.W. [Mason](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/09/in-defense-of-david-graebers-debt/) defends Graeber on money, and Mike [Beggs](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/09/on-debt-a-reply-to-josh-mason/) restates and extends his position.

Mason:

> Mike sees _Debt_ as “a move in an interdisciplinary struggle: anthropology against economics.” But most of the key arguments of Debt are better seen as part of an intradisciplinary struggle within economics. Admittedly it takes some unpacking, but Debt‘s key themes are in close harmony with the main themes of heterodox economics work going back to Keynes; while the “economics” that Beggs opposes to him represents only the discipline’s more conservative wings. … Debt‘s demonstration that money obligations are historically prior exchange of goods maps onto the insistence of Marx, Keynes and their successors that under capitalism, money values are logically prior to the production and consumption of real goods and services. … Debt‘s distinction between money and credit systems is not just an exercise in classification, but corresponds to a distinction that has has preoccupied many classical and modern economists, and has important implications for monetary policy in addition to the vaster cultural and political-economic ramifications Debt focuses on. … when Mike says that Debt exaggerates the importance of the system of payments, it is because he is coming from a narrowly orthodox view of what monetary economics is about, and why money matters. If your economic vision is shaped by more heterodox traditions — or by the responses to the financial crises of the past few years — the economics of Debt will seem more congenial.

Beggs:

> The debate between Josh and I centers on the question of whether or not the distinction between a ‘commodity/fiat money economy’ and a ‘credit money economy’ is a useful one in understanding our present economic system and its history. He thinks it is so useful as to be the central dividing line in economics; I think it is liable to mislead. The rest of the disagreement comes, I think, because Josh conflates the commodity/fiat-credit money economy divide with other divides in economic thinking. So he seems to that if I challenge that distinction, I must be a quantity theorist, must believe that money is simply a veil, neutral in its economic effects, and must misunderstand how banking works. In fact we are on the same side in all those other dichotomies, but Josh for some reason continues to maintain that if I disagree over the core distinction, I must be standing on the other side of all the others. … I think the ‘commodity/fiat money economy’ – ‘credit money economy’ divide is a problem; and … that the rest of his criticisms rest on the conflations with other theoretical dichotomies.

So, some celebrities got married: Blake Lively, who was in the TV show Gossip Girl, and Ryan Reynolds, who was in the Green Lantern and is one of those dudes who is stipulated to be handsome but his eyes are too close together so he just looks moronic. Like a younger…thingface. Whoever. Lively herself is an off-brand Gwyneth Paltrow so it’s suitable.

They had the wedding, which was all perfect and arranged by actual Martha Stewart with color-coördinated jordan almonds (OK I made that detail up, but almost certainly yes), at Boone Hall Plantation, outside of Charleston in South Carolina. Boone Hall almost alone of the pre-Civil War plantations has its slave quarters intact. I think this is actually awesome about Boone Hall. At all the other plantations, you go, and some nice white volunteer shows you around, and you have to just use your imagination. The main house is now surrounded by vast lawns, and live oaks and azaleas, wisteria and breath of spring, tea olive, daphne odora, gardenias, and mounds of Lady Banksia roses. Mmmm, up in Charleston that Lady Banksia will get up to one-and-a-half stories high. I’m not sure why it doesn’t grow so well in Savannah. Pretty little yellow roses on a climbing vine, heaping up on itself, all up around old fenceposts. But no hovels! No wood fires, no chickens, no foundries! No crying babies, no foremen, no one making grits, no one getting beat the hell up, no black people!
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