Reading – Christopher Wink

Abundance

Democrats should be able to campaign by saying ‘vote for us, we’ll govern like California.’ Instead Republicans campaign by saying ‘vote for us, or they’ll govern like California.”

The American left lacks a central organizing principle, other than slowing progress with an ever growing checklist of rules: they need an alternative. So argues Abundance, a book by prominent, center-left national journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. As a perfect representation of the divided era, the book’s commercial success and the author’s rising popularity has created a backlash from many progressives. Classic liberal Klein in particular just seems to irk a whole class of leftists.

As the authors write in the book: “One way of understanding the era we are in is as the messy interregnum between political orders.”

Their “abundance agenda” is polarizing in part because their interest is in operating the current system, and many of their would-be-allies turned critics are not. The identifiers of “liberal,” “progressive,” “leftist” and “socialist” are discussed tirelessly among smart people with graduate degrees and little serious focus on governing. Many of them contribute to the dismaying see-sawing of elected Democrats, that have for generation focused on appeasing a diverse coalition.

The left, the authors write, “seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will.“ The United States is a big distributed republic, with thousands of layers of government, at town, county and state levels, to experiment and demonstrate an ability to solve problems. Instead, as the authors argue, rather than solving homelessness in some Democratic city, leaders oversee a multi-year research phase to hire a BIPOC-led consulting firm that confers with a full list of constituent groups from identities, environmental and social causes to gather community feedback.

Nothing is solved, everyone complains. Most vote elsewhere next go-round. This has gotten Klein and Thompson lots of glowing praise from centrists, and ferocious pillorying from progressives. One small contribution I kept thinking about while reading the book: Lots of their perspective would play nicely in local political contexts, rather than vicious national conversations.

Meanwhile, public trust continues to decline, and green infrastructure is slowed. Setting aside the Biden administration’s ambitious IRA green energy bill and the Chips and Science Act focused on industrial policy, Democrats long ago gave up “supply side” policies. Their book argues that should change.

Politics today is a fight over what we have, or had — not what we can create.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Maria Ressa

Bullies only respond to strength. Complicity won’t due. When confronting an authoritarian, best to “hold the line.”

That’s from the 2022 book “How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future,” written by Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist-entrepreneur behind Rappler — a respected, digital-first news site in the Philippines. Ressa was jailed and harrassed for her unwavering coverage of Filipino corruption.

The book is memoir and field guide, with a telling mirror for American audiences: the rise and fall of her enthusiasm for social media, and her battles with elected officials disdainful of free press and democratic norms. She’s charming and energetic. I spoke at a recent journalism funders conference where she was the headliner, and she gushed on-stage, effusing advice and perspective and vision. It’s easy to believe in her, and she tells a story of optimism, provided we work for it.

Of building open discourse-use and democratic values in the Philippines, in 2016, she thought Facebook was the solution; by 2018, she thought of them as indifferent and by 2020, she thought that “Facebook was the bad guy.” For all her reporting and operating a fearless news organization, she was jailed.

Why return to the Philippines to be jailed, even though she has American citizenship and family there? “There is no choice,” she wrote — couldn’t turn on Rappler and her employees and community and it’s where she wants to be. This will remind of Navalny, as she writes: “Over time, you get used to fear”

So, how do you stand up to a dictator: “by embracing values, defined early.. you have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence” — and know your lines and stand firm by them.

Below I have notes for my future reference.

What Baltimore’s “Black Butterfly“ teaches the rest of us

Why does there remain a plethora of social ills the disproportionally affect Black people in America over 150 years after chattel enslavement has ended? “The answer: black communities have been subjected to unrelenting an ongoing historical trauma.“

That’s from The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America by Dr. Lawrence T Brown in 2021. He coined the term “black butterfly” to refer to the patterns of racial segregation in Baltimore, which mirrors patterns in other US cities.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It

To understand the economic, cultural and political progress of Black Americans, it helps to look locally.

Brookings researchers released the Black Progress Index with a dozen factors they say are predictive of Black empowerment. It tells a story of entwined issues in American society.

That’s from Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It, the new book from Andre Perry, a fellow of the Brookings Institution.

Below I share my notes for future reference

The Rise and Decline of Nations

Coalitions strengthen a nation, and then strangle it whole.

Or so it’s been argued. In his influential 1982 political treatise called The Rise and Decline of Nations, political scientist Mancur Olson (1932-1998) builds on his earlier work on collective action to argue that stable societies tend to accumulate powerful special-interest groups over time, which in turn create institutional sclerosis.

These groups—unions, industry associations and other lobbying blocs—develop to protect their members’ economic rents, but their growing influence eventually stifles innovation, efficiency and long-term economic growth. Olson argues that this “accumulation of distributional coalitions” explains why some rich nations stagnate while others surge ahead. Post-war Germany and Japan, having lost these entrenched coalitions due to military defeat, grew rapidly in contrast to countries like the UK or the US, which retained their institutional inertia. I share notes from the book below.

Improve not just your life span, but your health span too

Today’s medical and pharmacological systems have been successful in responding to trauma — reducing childhood mortality and fatalities from any number of catastrophes.

But as we live longer, more of us face chronic diseases that need more prevention, sometimes decades before any given catastrophe. That’s “Medicine 3.0,” and before the systems ever get an overhaul, there are lessons for us. Improve not just life span, but health span.

That’s the argument of the popular 2022 book “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity” by physician and longevity expert Dr. Peter Attia. It’s no fad diets or quirky health plans. It’s a bit more like a contribution to health like what economist Emily Oster did for pregnancy — ripping through research to piece together a more commonsense and modern approach to the world.

Below I share a few changes I’m trying to incorporate into my lifestyle and other notes from the book.

The Technological Republic by Alex Karp

The freedom, peace and security that allowed Silicon Valley to flourish was quietly underwritten by an American military that these same Silicon Valley technologists are ambivalent about supporting.

Far from its origins in the Second World War, Silicon Valley focused on consumer technology, which gave it no greater ideal than profit and comfort. This must change, or so argues Alex Karp, the cofounder-CEO of the controversial defense contractor Palantir Technologies, in his new book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”

Why, asks Karp, are technologists and knowledge workers ambivalent about working to support invasive corporate advertising, but ardently opposed to (militaristically) defending the Free World?

Writing of Silicon Valley engineers, but no doubt thinking also of millions of other complacent American professionals: “They exist in a cultural space that enjoys the protection of the American security umbrella, but are responsible for none of its costs.”

Palantir and Karp are entwined with a techno-libertarianism that sounds increasingly unhinged: company cofounder Peter Thiel just recently gave a bizarre interview with the New York Times in which, among other quirks, he gave a long, extended pause when he was asked whether humanity “should” survive. Karp might respond the strength and security of the United States affords a diverse array of perspectives, including eccentric billionaires.

Karp reminds, though: “The victors of history have a habit of growing complacent at precisely the wrong moment.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

We are a “storytelling animal”

Watch a human brain while engaged in a story and that brain looks as if that person is actually experiencing the story, rather than observing it.

That’s why stories are so sticky: why we eavesdrop on other stories, watch movies, listen to music, read novels and gossip. It’s a defining characteristic of humanity.

That’s the thrust of the 2012 book “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human,” written by professor Jonathan Gottschall. Though he argues examples of story’s power shows up all over the place, from effective marketing to biography books and new journalism, this book centers around fiction. Fiction appears better at convincing than nonfiction, exactly because fictional stories put us in a kind of trance, lowering our defenses. How nations and cities, friends and companies, organize are all reliant on stories. (I referenced Gottschall’s work in my recent ‘case for storytelling’ conference speech.)

“Story is the grease and the glue of society,” wrote one psychologist. “Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold”

However the future of fact-based storytelling goes, there appears to be no decline in story in our lives, as disinformation campaigns and bestselling video games both show. As one gamer puts it in the book: “the future looks bleak for reality.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

What is Fascism?

In 1946, George Orwell wrote that “the word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”

That sense is back, and since the word is used so often again, I wanted to return to a foundation. I didn’t have clear memories from my undergraduate political science reading so I picked up Fascism, an influential, well-regarded, thick, dense, 400+ page collection of writings on the topic published in 1995 and edited by Oxford political theorist Roger Griffin.

It was a slog but a firm foundation, in which the point is argued that the word was almost immediately stretched and packed with various meanings from its modern launch in the 1920s. In the simplest interpretation I can put together, fascism is a political strategy “idealizing abstraction” that uses power to protect a “mythic core” of kinship around a nation from out-groups.

Judging by the 400-page book, and oodles of dissertations and academic writing, that’s of course incomplete. I have more listed below for that matter. But it does arm me with a clearer picture, grounded in academia and without cartoonish exaggeration. Below I have other notes from the book for future reference.

How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

We assume more information means we’ll like people more because the people we know best tend to be people we know the most about. For ages, we’ve predicted more and faster information would end war. But we forget the many people whom we spend less time with once we learn more about them.

This is a very normal human process that has been industrialized by social media. The “online disinhibition effect,” in which we share more online so there’s no small talk like neighbors but rather ” “deep cascading dissimilarity.” This is Wilder’s sense of proximity.

That’s from Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, a new book from journalist Nicholas Carr. As Carr writes: “By turning us all in the media personalities, social media has also turned us all into rivals.”

Chart communications technologies over time, and Carr says they came in three stages. First, the machines were just carriers (telephones, telegraph, early internet), then they began to exert editorial influence by social media algorithms curating, and now AI threats to also create the content. This gets us more and more, but runs in the “naive view of information” problem that historian Noah Yuval Harari has also argued: “Information has no essential link to truth,” and so more information does not necessarily lead to more truth.

Carr’s Superbloom is enjoyable and enlightening. I recommend it. Below my notes for future reference.