Trash or Treasure: Collusion by Luke Harding

A few weeks ago, I downloaded a sample of Collusion, which I mistakenly thought might shed some light on Christopher Steele and his dossier. Luke Harding, however, write nonfiction like a bad novelist. Mr Harding, I do not give a damn about what you, your editor, and Christopher Steele had to drink during your first meeting.

Nor do I particularly care for your thoughts on the feasibility of pole vaulting into the Queen's private gardens. And I certainly don't give a damn about the decor or Mr Steele's office, the pub across the way, or Stalin's bunker. What I want are important facts, not trivia. But trivia is all you give.

I have to confess, I have immense sympathy for Steele. Cambridge. Cambridge Union President. Grandson of a miner. But none of that changes a thing. Sympathetic people, clever people, get duped all the time. Especially, when they're being sold a story they want to believe.

If there was a meaningful case to make, Mr Harding, you should have led with hard evidence. Instead you engage in sophistry. Your chosen method of persuasion is by appealing to Mr Steele's character. In short, this book is all ethos and no logos.

Verdict: Trash
   

Trash or Treasure: The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg

The Doomsday Machine, despite the source, seems to be well worth reading. Thankfully, you don't have to. Given the importance of the topic discussed, and my own keen interest in the topic, I have decided to start a series of posts dedicated to examining the book in depth and fact checking the claims made.

Frankly, I've always been interested in Nuclear deterrence. My grandfather spent his last few years in the Air Force at NORAD as a staff officer, specifically Joint Systems Integrations Officer, he took a leading role in developing the Minimum Essential Communication Network among other things.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he was still flying interceptors, he was sent up with a nuclear air-to-air rocket, the AIR-2 Genie, to launch at potential Soviet bombers. I always remember this particular story because of he described the maneuver he would have to preform to get out of the blast radius in time. If I recall correctly it was a Split-S.

This brings me to an important point made by Mr. Ellsberg. Many Americans, suffering from the illusions produced by Hollywood, assume that only the president can approve the use of a nuclear weapon. Ellsberg challenges this. I think he's right. The book is well-written and full of interesting details.

Verdict: I'll read it for you.
Read Instead: My blog

Trash or Treasure: The Girl With Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee

From the get go, I was hesitant to read this book, not because I thought it was trash, but because I was wondering how to judge it. In the end, I decided to give it a try. I must confess, it is a very interesting autobiography.

Hyeonseo Lee is my kind of person. She's an unabashed patriot, and her autobiography provides a perspective on one of the most repressive regime known to man. North Korean society, she informs us, is divided into 51 different rankings, depending on perceived loyalty to the Kim family. Your ranking can go down, but it's impossible for it to go up. People in the highest rankings get to live in the capital. People in the lowest ranks spend their lives in prison camps or labor camps.

Your ranking is determined by your family's actions during the Korean war.

Given the hellish conditions they live under, why don't they rise up and rebel? I'll let Hyeonseo Lee answer that one:

I thought life in North Korea was normal. Its customs and rulers only became strange with time and distance.

In short, they've been conned into thinking the entire world is shit, too.

What makes the book appealing is that Lee is her self-evident love for her homeland. She finds it painful living abroad and fears that by the time she is able to return to home:

I will probably be a stranger in my own land.

 Aside from detailing her live in North Korea, she spends a third of the book discussing life as an illegal immigrant in China, and a third of her book discussing life in South Korea. I hope someday she can return to her country, and I hope America does its utmost to liberate the North Korean people.

Verdict: Insufficient Evidence
Related books: The Logic of Political Survival and The Dictator's Handbook  

If you want to learn more, watch the video below.

Comment

In Shanghai, I once went to a Korean restaurant, which was a very uncomfortable experience. My wife and her coworkers were conversing in Chinese. The waitresses Chinese had an obvious accent. So they asked, are you Korean? To which the waitress replied, yes. Trouble is, in Chinese when you ask about the ethnicity of a Korean person, you use the word that also refers to North Korean. So I spent the entire meal wondering if she had said she was ethnically Korean or North Korean.

Happily, I latter clarified the issue, but it was a very uncomfortable, thinking you were being served by someone in such a precarious position. If she had been North Korean and found out, the Chinese would have deported her in a heartbeat.

Trash or Treasure: How Democracies Die by Levitsky and Ziblat

How Democracies Die is two political theorist's attempt to make a bit of money. It is probably a very interesting book to skim, but you shouldn't buy it. 

The book starts out with a bit of scaremongering, Is our democracy in danger? Evidently, Levitsky and Ziblat have spent a lifetime studying failing democracies. In their infinite wisdom, they tell us democracy can bee killed off in one of two ways: a) by people with guns, or b) by politicians being politicians. They then proceed to give some anecdotal examples. 

Trouble is, I don't buy the central claim. I don''t believe democracy is in a bad way in this country or around the world. Indeed, looking at empirical data, not anecdotal examples, democracy seems to be doing just fine. According to the people over at The Polity Project, which rates countries on a -10 to 10 scale based on how democratic they are, things are looking brighter than ever. 

If the authors, disagree, they should at least hint at such disagreement at the beginning of their book. Instead they give us a capsular biography of Hugo Chavez and sketches of Pinochet, Mussolini, and Hitler's climbs up the greasy pole. 

And by the way, according to the authors, Chavez was a complete surprise. No one knew he was going to be such a terrible little shit, and no one knew democracy in Venezuela was dead until 2017. Whatever. 

The rest of the beginning is filled with trite pieces of wisdom:

• When politicians abdicate leadership and responsibility, democracy is in a bad way.
• Political parties act as the gatekeepers of democracy, keeping the politically heterodox from threatening democracy. 
• Our democracy depends on two unwritten norms: mutual toleration and forbearance. 

In short, nothing new. At least with Trumpocracy you get the impression that Frum talked to some of the people in the White House, did some legwork. Not the case, I'm afraid, with this book. 

Verdict: Trash
Read Instead: Anything Else

I want to address the second point made above. Yes, political parties are gatekeepers, but they are not monolithic entities. They are coalitions. Trump's brand of politics has been with us in the Republican Party for a very long time. It's not my cup of tea--I am, after all a repentant Free Trading, Democracy Exporting globalist. But I can live with it. I am willing to take some of the points they make. I think they are valid concerns. 

Democrats want to say we failed as a party. Sorry, Democrats, you don't get to say that. If the Republican Party genuinely failed, a new party will arise from the ashes. Quit being sore losers.

The proper course of action is to oppose Trump on policy, not to attack his legitimacy. People, frankly, find the idea of the Russian somehow deciding the election as asinine.

If the Russian's measly $1.25 million a month ad buy decided the election, sign me up for lessons.

Trash or Treasure: Trumpocracy by David Frum

In Trumpocracy, Mr. Frum claims our country is in a crisis and things might go awry if he failed to intervene. He then immediately hedges everything, by saying, It's all to early to tell. What seems important now might be trivial. What seems trivial now might be important, but my publisher's given me an advance, and I'm on a deadline. Mr, Frum, thank you for your honesty.

Democracy, we are told, can end one of two ways in our country: It can be done in by either cunning or incompetence. Trump, Mr. Frum assures us, is mostly incompetent. But whatever he is, he's a threat!

Mr. Frum, evidently, often wonders what might have been, supposing some valiant legislator had fought for hardening airline cockpits before 9/11. If he/she/it had succeeded, we'd perhaps never know the debt we owed for a tragedy averted. Evidently, this is Mr. Frum's way of saying, we might never know just how important his book truly was.

He then presents his charge sheet.

Rather full of himself, isn't he? But he is Canadian after all, and I suppose 9/11 is on the mind. Like so many "Republicans", he no doubt read The Flight 93 Election. So it's only natural for him to wish someone had bothered to properly lock the door.

Verdict: Trash
Read Instead: Political Order and Political Decay     

Trash or Treasure: Political Tribes by Amy Chua

Political Tribes by Mrs. Chua has a simple thesis: America is different, but the identity politics being played by both the Right and the Left jeopardize America's future. I think most people are willing to accept this in principle. But they will disagree over specific examples.

America, Mrs Chua claims, is different because America is a super-group. A super-group is a tribe or tribes, allowing its members to keep their other tribal identities. She goes on to claim that America differs from other countries that are defined on ethnic and linguistic lines.

Because Americans have grown up in a super-group, which downplays the importance of tribal differences, we are blind to the importance tribes play in other societies.

In short, political tribalism poses a double threat. Our failure to recognize the importance of tribalism abroad results in foreign policy blunders. And tribalism's growing power at home threatens our inclusive institutions.

As interesting as these ideas may be, I don't think any of them revolutionary. If you read this book, read it for the examples, not the theory. [I have decided to only rate between 10% to 20% of the books reviewed as Treasure.]

Verdict: Trash
Read Instead: Albion's Seed or American Nations

Quotes and Analysis

• Race has split America's poor, and class has split America's whites.

This is an interesting claim. Do Americans use race to differentiate themselves more than other Americans? How could we measure that? I am endeavoring to find out.

• For many working-class Americans, being anti-establishment is not the same as being anti-rich.

This strikes me as quite true. I remember first hearing about the prosperity gospel as modern phenomena in high school. Coming from a Catholic background, the prosperity gospel struck me as peculiar. But I found it curious just how infuriated it made some of my teachers and professors.

This is a point that Leftists don't understand. In England, according to Freeman Dyson, there was an academic middle class and a commercial middle class. These two camps, fought it out, and the academic middle class dominated the system until Thatcher. I think the same is true in this country.

There is an academic elite, people that make their living as professionals but mostly as wage-earners. But there is also a commercial elite, who aren't wage-earners. These commercial elites make their wealth by risking their own capital. Quite a few working-class Americans sympathize with these risk takers but have very little sympathy when the academic elite complain about how unfair life is.       

• For well-educated, well-traveled Americans, cosmopolitanism is its own highly exclusionary class, with clear out-group members and bogeymen[...]

Mrs. Chua goes on to say that patriots are the bogeymen, but this is only half the story. I've spent almost my entire adult life living overseas, working in international schools. The American expats working in this school, particularly the ones that spend just a few years in a country before moving to the next, often strike me as slightly racist. Oftentimes, they look down on the local staff. They often only make superficial attempts to meaningfully engage with the host culture. Indeed, in my experience Americans, because their packages are usually more generous, tend to be worse at this than even the English...

These expats, what I'd call mobals, borrowing a term from Harm de Blij's The Power of Place, loath in almost equal parts the poor [locals] and the rich [globals].
   

Trash or Treasure: What's The Matter With Kansas

Given the amount of information out there, it's essential that you filter. In Trash or Treasure, I will review books based on the first few pages. Today, I'm reviewing What's The Matter With Kansas--a book I picked up for free a couple of years ago but never bothered reading.

Let's start. The first page is full of howlers. For example:

• The poorest country in America isn't in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling rancher and dying farm towns [...] and George W. Bush carried it by a majority of greater than 80%.

Perhaps that was the case when Mr. Frank first wrote his book, but it isn't the case any longer. That dubious honor, according to USA Today, goes to McCreary County, Kentucky. 42.5% of the county lives in poverty and the median household income is $18,972. In contrast, the poorest country in Kansas is Crawford County with a median household income of $37,607. 21.8% of it's residents live in poverty.

More importantly, Mr. Frank contends that Kansas is doing itself a economic disservice by supporting Republicans. Data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve's website sheds some light on this claim. Let's start by examining Real Median Household Income.

Year............Household Income.............Governor.............State House
1985................$48,492...............................D...........................R
1990................$53,303...............................R........................Split
1995................$47,484...........................D to R.......................R
2000................$57,426...............................R...........................R
2005................$51,951...............................D...........................R
2010................$50,698...............................D...........................R
2015................$55,558...............................R...........................R
2016................$56,810...............................R...........................R

Yes, the economy his been rocky, but real income has risen over the last twenty years. In 1984 real income was at $54,208. So it has admittedly been only modest growth. But I think the data speaks for itself. Real GDP figures, however, present a rosier picture.

Year.................Real GDP (in Million $)
1997............................98,817
2002..........................109,000
2007..........................126,143
2012..........................131,320
2016..........................136,591

In short, Kansas has hardly become some wasteland under the Republicans.

• For us it is the Democrats that are the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood.

That last sentence drips with condescension. The writer is saying, if you don't get this, you're a child and should be treated accordingly. Show us you're not a child by engaging in identity politics. How grown up of him! 

• How can anyone who has ever worked for someone else vote Republican? 

This is quite revealing. In a chapter entitled Employment and Independence, Hayek says our society has changed. In the past, most people were self-employed. Today, the majority of people are wage-earners. The self-employed person thinks of money as a resource. The wage-earner thinks of money almost entirely in terms of consumption and status.

• People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.

People may get their interests confused, but why should a man's economic interests trump all other? People have every right to decide what really matters to them. Mr. Frank's whole attitude reminds me of the low opinions the Fabian's had of the masses. This is a quote from Beatrice Webb's diary:

• At present we leave this vital problem of character of consumption to be solved by the appetites of each individual, even to the extent of permitting them to poison themselves and their children. It will not be so very long before a whole system of sumptuary laws--at any rate as regards non-adults, will come into force. That was a brilliant suggestion of H. G. Wells that we should divide the world into adults and non-adults. For some purposes we would raise "the age of consent" to say, fifty!

Verdict: Trash