This book doesn’t focus exclusively on black swan events, but talks more about human psychology and why we tend to misinterpret events and models of the world. To that degree, the descriptions of errors of heuristics is more useful than the Black Swan, which I found talked well about the phenomenon without doing much to tell people how to take advantage of it. Convincing people to disabuse themselves of their “common sense”, which Taleb points out is a result of countless generations of evolution, is another matter entirely. I can see how his method could be less than convincing, at least in the short term.

The book has a very general map of where it wants to go and sometimes that isn’t always clear to the reader, but it is definitely worth the journey. It won’t, however, make you feel better about our current political and economic situation: it’s clear that the financial elites are still, for the most part, the same people who think that “Ten sigma” events simply can’t happen. You know, like the Asian financial crisis, LTCM, 9/11, the current meltdown… As Upton Sinclair said, however, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” and it is just as true today.

• Current Mood: Automobiled

I’m the kind of person who read books in college about presidential campaigns for fun, so perhaps not everybody will share my interest in the book. But if you are fascinated by Cheney (and it’s hard not to be, given his career and how he became the most powerful Vice President in U.S. history), this book is going to tell you in inside story, and it’s going to hold your attention for all 400 pages. It’s no Harry Potter, but for a book about politics, there’s enough intrigue to make you want to keep on reading.

• Current Mood: Mellow
• Currently Listening To: "Black Mountain Side", Led Zeppelin
• Currently Reading: "Big Winners and Big Losers", Alfred Marcus

One area where it comes up short, however, is in terms of solutions. I can’t really fault him for this, because there is no easy solution. A drastic change in our math curriculum, focusing on real-world applications of mathematical concepts, would probably go a long way to help the problem (it does seem that most American adults struggle with fractions and percentages). Other than that, though, this isn’t the kind of issue that is amenable to instant fixes. If you do want some anecdotes about innumeracy, though, and you feel that you can handle the kind of dismay that books like these will generate, then give it a try.

• Current Mood: Fall
• Currently Listening To: "Black Friday", Steely Dan

The book came out shortly after 9/11 and was rushed to completion to get on the shelves quickly, and this rushed feeling sometimes shows. Also, for me, it didn’t have much new information that I hadn’t already seen before through my studies and other authors like Bruce Schneier. However, it was an enjoyable book, and it’s a good place to start if you are looking for a book to calm your nerves during Shark Summer or Earthquake Summer or Kidnapping Summer or whatever it will be this month.

• Current Mood: Plunging
• Currently Listening To: "Somebody to Love", Jefferson Airplane
• Currently Reading: "Innumeracy", John Allen Paulos

While I already knew the jist of how it happened (housing bubble, derivate and leverage abuse, ratings agency lies), this book went into great detail about each particular aspect of the problem. From the unscrupulousness of mortgage brokers to the large, institutional structures that helped failure turn into a nightmare domino situation, nothing is left unexamined in the book.

The proposed solutions are reasonable and pretty much what everybody is is saying: limits on leverage, aligning incentives with interests so that there is nothing to be gained by gaming the system (especially important for ratings agencies and mortgage brokers). Some of the proposed solutions are very unique, such as taking cues from the Danish mortgage system, which is quite unlike the U.S. system. And while I think that derivatives as a whole are much more dangerous and need much more regulation, or even outright bans, than Pozen suggests, his suggestions are easy to agree with. He also debunks some proposals that would do no good, such as reinstating Glass-Steagall.

The financial crisis isn’t up everyone’s alley, but if you are even remotely interested in what happened, this is the book you should start with.

The main point of the book is the world can be divided into two places: Mediocristan, where things follow a typical bell curve distribution and things that are far outside the mean do not exist (such as people who are 20 feet tall or weigh 300 pounds), and Extremistan, where the improbable can and do exist (stock market crashes, 9/11). Too many people believe things are subject to Mediocristan when, in fact, they are members of Extremistan, and so they underestimate the probability of extreme events.

I was especially drawn in by the part about Platonicism, which Taleb ascribed to small thinkers in Mediocristan. I admit that I am, by and large, a believer in Plato’s forms, and I can sometimes have problems dealing with things that are not nice representation of those forms that I think should exist. Unsurprisingly, this has caused problems in the messy world we live in. I’d like to say that I’m far better at handling these events than I used to be, but I can always be better.

If there’s one problem with the book, aside from the frequent grandiosity, it’s that there is precious little information about dealing with black swan events. Obviously, being improbable, it’s next to impossible to predict these events, but the advice given (be conservative on the downside and aggressive on the upside) isn’t all that earth-shattering.

If you are mildly interesting in the subject of improbable events, then there are at least a few chapters you can take advantage of. It certainly made me think of probabilities in a different way, which is the point.

• Current Mood: Productive
• Currently Listening To: "Around the World", Red Hot Chili Peppers

I can’t remember where I first heard of the book, but I do know I came across it on the internet and it looked interesting. I thought I would check it out despite the fact that Luntz is a big part of the Republican machine, since he is an expert when it comes to these focus groups. This led to the first disappointment with the book: not that he is a Republican, but because he starts off pretending that his book is going to be unbiased despite his political leanings. It unsurprisingly turns out not to be completely on the level (I didn’t realize that only Democrats had bad public love affairs!), and the false promise not to be rang hollow. I’ve long been a believer in the folly of being objective: everybody is biased, and the best thing to do is simply acknowledge it. I know Luntz is conservative, I don’t need an unfulfilled promise to read his book.

The books starts out well enough. The first chapter is about what Americans do in their daily lives, which I found to be interesting since I am definitely not a typical American. Few Americans commute to work via mass transit, for example; few watch as little TV as I do, and so forth. For businesses looking to connect with their customers, there is some good information. Ditto for what Americans really want, which is usually more money. I’d go with time, again because I’m not the typical American who would like more goods. The information about what people want in their jobs isn’t too earth-shattering, but still pretty good.

It begins to go downhill when it comes to two major issues, politics and religion. The section on politics is pretty vague when it comes to solutions, whereas I was hoping for more concrete policy answers based on what the majority of Americans really want. Given the fact that people in this country are typically wildly inconsistent when it comes to politics, though (such as valuing a balanced budget without willing to cut funding for things like education, the environment, and defense) it’s probably not Luntz’s fault that the answers to all of our political problems can’t be found in focus groups. Similarly, the section on religion was vague and had the least amount of new information in my opinion.

The book then moves onto a section on the youth of America, and while I don’t quite fall into the Millennial Generation, I’m close enough that much of it was familiar: although sexting didn’t exist even when I was in college, I’m one of those people for whom giving up the internet would hurt a lot more than giving up TV. Because I can readily identify with people in the Millennial Generation, I didn’t find anything that was terribly new and shocking, but for people older than myself it could be of use.

Something I couldn’t identify as much with was the section on what Americans want out of retirement, which was probably the most depressing part of the book. True, given the recent economic crisis and the resulting devastation to people’s retirement portfolios and plans, it would be hard to write an upbeat section on retirement, but the sense of desperation and defeat that many people express when they voluntarily or involuntarily cease working is somewhat hard to read. Like the section on politics, this section has no good answers simply because there aren’t any. We’ll just have to deal as we go along.

The book then ends with a list of nine priorities that people really want. I won’t get into details so as not to spoil the surprise, but given Luntz’s political leanings you can probably guess what a few of them are. I will say, though, that his slights against atheists, intentional or not, rubbed me the wrong way: he makes it sound that non-belief is a path that leads to certain unhappiness. I’d like to remind him that correlation does not imply causation, and that there are plenty of non-believers such as myself that lead happy, fulfilling lives.

Overall, I’d give this book a B-. It has information about the vast majority of people in this country I am not like that I found to be interesting and possibly useful, but on a few occasions his own personal beliefs got in the way when there was really no need. Like I said, had he not led off professing ideological neutrality in this book it would have been more forgivable, but that kind of statement means being held to a higher standard. That said, I’m sure most people would be able to get something useful out of this book.

• Current Mood: Relaxed
• Currently Listening To: "Dream On", Depeche Mode

I’m now back to my old ways and reading Influence by Robert Cialdini. So far a fascinating book.

• Current Mood: Sweaty

The central tenet that New York would have been a very different place if not for Bob Moses is quite true, and there was much evidence of that during my recent visit. A prefect example is the Second Avenue Subway, which was desperately needed back in the 1950s, still desperately needed when the book was written in the 1970s, and just getting underway in this decade: had money been put for this project back when Moses was in power, New York would be much different.

Although the book doesn’t take explicit sides, in my opinion, the good that Moses did at the beginning of his career with parks came to be greatly overshadowed by the destruction he caused later in his career with his single-minded focus on cars and the infrastructure to support them (seeking a place in history, he wanted to build great suspension bridges that would outlast him by centuries, not subway tunnels that no one could see). But even his early accomplishments had their downsides, such as the parkways that had bridges that were deliberately built to prevent buses from being able to use them, thus sparing his precious parks from being overrun by poor people who did not own cars.

The thing that probably struck me as most interesting, though, did not have to do with Moses at all. Rather, it was the fact that traffic generation, the idea that building roads encourages more travel and more congestion, not less, was well known more than 50 years ago. It was my admittedly ignorant presumption that the somewhat counter-intuitive notion of traffic generation was a more recent discovery, but in fact it was clear to engineers generations ago. It certainly makes the argument for highway expansion even less defensible.

The necessity of transit, and the folly of focusing only on roads, is the main message I took away from this book. Not that I didn’t believe that before, but this book made it all the more imperative. Moses did not care for transit one bit, and as a result, he built roads known mainly for their congestion, cost, and destruction of the community more than anything else. Instead of extending subway lines to newly-developed areas, he just built expressway after expressway, bridge after bridge, even when building the next new highway made congestion on the older highways that much worse. Roads do not have the capacity that mass transit does: as one blogger calculated, the subway moves a couple hundred people into Manhattan’s Central Business District every second, a far cry from what highways can do.

Robert Moses was clearly a genius, and the title “Master Builder” does suit him well, even if many of the artifices he built turned out to be solutions to the wrong problem, or not solutions at all. Nevertheless, after an early bout with idealism that led to nothing but disappointment, he was able to figure out how to manipulate the levers of power to get things accomplished. I’d like to think that there must be a happy medium between the abuse of power for the wrong ends that typified Moses’ later career and the paucity of improvement that took place afterward (remember that Second Avenue Subway?) If there is, though, the book doesn’t shed any light on how to make that come about.

History books generally gloss over subjects that are not part of the contemporary ruling elite, if they don’t make outright falsehoods. Zinn writes about those people who are usually romanticized, lied about, or forgotten altogether in the history books. He starts with the devastation of Native Americans wrought by explorers, which he describes with far more detail than most history books do, if they mention it at all. He then moves on to the plight of slaves and free blacks, along with poor, landless people of all colors, women, unions, left-wing organization, pacifists, and other groups that rarely get the spotlight. The book is full of events, people, and groups that I (and most other people) had not heard of before reading this book, and for that reason alone it is a great read.

Like any book, you can’t read it without understanding its context, and to use it as the sole source of information about the United States would be an error. It focuses heavily on class distinctions, and certainly paints the upper class in a negative light. Much of the book, in fact, focuses on the bad things that the government of the U.S., and the people that controlled it, did to already repressed and marginalized groups. However, given that most U.S. history, especially as taught in elementary and high schools, is portrayed almost uniformly positively, this book serves as a very good counterpoint. The real impact of U.S. history is certainly not as rosy as most history books make it out to be, and probably not quite as negative as Zinn portrays it. I would argue that this book should be part of any high school-level U.S. history course at the very least.

I’m now reading “The Power Broker”, Robert Caro’s book about Robert Moses, the one man who shaped New York City more than anybody else (and apparently almost all urban design, which I’ve learned in just a few pages). Should be very interesting.

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