Modern Society Archives - Page 15 of 21

Twelve Reasons You Should Not Read This Book

Jared Diamond was once all the rage. His book, Guns, Gems and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies was one of those books about which everyone was once talking. Provocative thesis, well written (though the “word to intriguing idea” ratio was a bit too high), much discussed.

But, that was almost a quarter of a century ago. His subsequent books were not quite the rage. In his latest, Diamond plaintively complains about a review of one of his books casting about for lessons which we can draw from prehistory; the reviewer was unimpressed, ending his review: “We have virtually no credible evidence about the world until yesterday and, until we do, the only defensible intellectual position is to shut up.”

Pity Jared Diamond.

But, Diamond, at the age of 82, tries one more time to regain his celebrity status with Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.

The Table of Contents reveals the theme. Individuals have crises; we can think about how they respond. Here is a chapter on that. Nations also have crises. Here are six case studies of past crises. Some crises are still underway. Here are four more chapters on current crises.

You now have some expectation about what you will find in this book. You imagine what you will discover when reading it. You may even be intrigued to find out what Jared Diamond (the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel!!) can show us about the nature of crises.

But, while you now know what this book is about, you are wrong. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. On page 11, Diamond tells us, “Readers and reviewers of a book often gradually discover, as they read, that the book’s coverage and approach aren’t what they expected or wanted.” A book really means this book. Yeah, Diamond wrote that about his own book.

That sentence in in the midst of the most defensive prologue I have ever read. You can hear Diamond screaming on every page at those “readers and reviewers” who said, “Uh, Jared…what exactly are you trying to accomplish in this mess of a manuscript?”

“You fools,” Diamond indirectly screams:

This book is: a comparative, narrative, exploratory study of crisis and selective change operating over many decades in seven modern nations, all of which I have much personal experience, and viewed from the perspective of selective change in personal crises.

That sentence comes on page 12. I read that and the following 10 pages of defensive explanation of the “comparative, narrative, exploratory” method and I was still surprised that the book’s coverage and approach were not what I expected.

Take the historical case studies. There are six of them. Finland in the 20^th century; Japan in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Chile in the late 20^th century, Indonesia in the late 20^th century, Germany in the second half of the 20^th century, Australia in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Notice a pattern in that set of case studies? They are all modern, but that seems a weak connection. They aren’t even all countries that had an obvious crisis. As Diamond notes: “While Australians themselves may not apply the word ‘crisis’ to Australia, I find it useful to think of Australia as having undergone a slowly unfolding crisis…” A crisis that slowly unfolds over centuries?

So, what does unite these crisis? Fortunately Diamond tells us the secret: these are the countries he has visited in his lifetime. He has lived for extended periods of time in six of them, and he has relatives and colleagues and students from Japan! So, obviously these countries are the best choices for a study of crises!

OK, so the selection criterion is weak (to put it mildly). How are the chapters themselves? For the six historical studies, as long as you set aside the question of why this history is in this book, they are pleasant reading. The less you know about the 20^th century history of the country, the more you will learn. The prose style flows reasonably well, though an editor could have come in handy to eliminate the times when content was repeated within the same chapter.

But, by the end, it is hard to see much meaningful connection between reading about how Finland fought the Soviet Union in World War II, the Meiji Era in Japan, how Allende and Pinochet battled over Chile, the Sukarno and Suharto years of Indonesia, Germany after World War II, and how Australia weaned itself of the British Empire. All interesting stories to be sure…but even still, you are left scratching your head a bit.

Then the head scratching gets much worse when Diamond move to the current crises. Four chapters: one on Japan, two on the United States, one on the whole world.

Start with Japan. What is their ongoing crisis? They have a giant demographic problem, not enough kids. It isn’t clear why Diamond singles out Japan to talk about this crisis. Oh, but wait. The problem is that Japan should really want population decline. And they should have more immigration otherwise they will have that population decline that Diamond thinks they should have, so…I have no idea what Diamond is arguing. Japan also doesn’t treat women like equals. And they really should apologize to China and South Korea. And…what is the crisis here?

Moving along to the United States. Two chapters of problems. Political polarization is really bad… because if we don’t fix that we are going to have a coup like in Chile or Indonesia. Yes, he really wants us to seriously consider a military takeover of the US. Oh, except he then backs off the military takeover to give us the scenario where “one political party” (zero points for guessing which one he means) using “the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or even army itself to suppress political opposition.” See, not a military takeover!

But wait, there’s more. A whole chapter of other things Diamond thinks are crises in the US. And then we get to the world problems and…well, you are not going to believe this. The number one problem facing the world is…drum roll, please…the threat of nuclear winter after a massive worldwide exchange of nuclear bomb attacks. Yep. Nuclear Winter is back, baby! Then we get the obligatory climate change, running out of fossil fuels (wouldn’t that help with the climate change thing??), and global inequality which is going to cause riots near Diamond’s nice home in LA (his example).

All four of the chapters about the current crises can be summed up in one sentence. There is a crisis because countries in the world are not all doing what Jared Diamond wants them to do.

What is the glue that holds this whole book together? It is back in chapter 2 where Diamond tells us there are 12 “Factors related to the outcomes of personal crises.” I won’t torment you with the list because Diamond doesn’t really care about his list. He then takes that list and morphs it into 12 “Factors related to the outcome of national crises.” And, he keep talking about those 12 factors over and over.

No need to bother with a discussion of the factors, though. It turns out these factors don’t explain anything at all. They are just there to be a faux linking device. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. For example, from Diamond’s conclusion “core values of nations [Factor 11] can make it either easier or harder for a nation to adopt selective change.” “I expect that it usually won’t be profitable for social scientists to generalize about a nation as being uniformly either fixed or rigid [Factor 10].” And so on. The factors never really rise to the level of having any explanatory value.

So, why are they there? The clue comes in the number 12. Diamond is adamant that 12 factors is the right number. He says so in the introduction. If a book has fewer factors, “throw it away without reading any further.” (Yes, that is an actual quotation.) If a book has more factors, “throw that book away also.” (Yep. Also a quotation.) You see, Diamond has found that a dozen factors is the right number.

Which makes one wonder: what is the source of Diamond’s fixation on 12 things? Is there some other book which has 12 factors? Some other book written by a public intellectual who is currently getting all the fame and glory and party invitations that Jared Diamond used to get? A book with 12 factors about how to manage life, maybe?

Oh yeah. Jordan Peterson: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

Suddenly this whole book makes total sense. Imagine a guy who used to be in the limelight. He is aging. He may only have one book left in him. But, he really wants that limelight one last time. How to get it? He sees Jordan Peterson and his 12 rules for life. Suddenly the idea is born. Peterson has cornered the market on helping individuals with their crises. Jared Diamond can go one step better and help whole nations with their crises! Sure Peterson gets to talk to crowds of adoring individuals. But, Diamond can top that, he can talk to crowds of adoring nations! He will be the Jordan Peterson for the nation state. Diamond can help you with your national crisis!

Who is going to break the news to Jared Diamond that he is not going to displace Jordan Peterson on the talk-show circuit?

How Blue are Your Eyes?

One of the first lessons of school: you are not one of the cool kids. You aren’t as beautiful or as charming as those other kids. People like those other kids; they don’t really like you.

The Beautiful Kids grow up to be the beautiful teenagers. And you learn that lesson all over again in high school. You just aren’t that beautiful. You really are not all that popular.

Sure, you watch endless movies where the kids like you end up being popular. Yes, you see the stories where the ugly kid puts on some new clothes or does some moderately good thing and suddenly the most popular guy or girl in school falls madly in love with the protagonist.

But, you always knew those stories weren’t really true. You knew the most popular kid in school was never going to fall in love with you.

Toni Morrison wrote a novel about you. The Bluest Eye. Blue eyes are all the rage; everyone loves blue eyes. You will never have the Bluest eyes. You will never be the popular kid.

Now obviously there are a few people out there for whom none of the above is accurate. But very few. Even among the relatively popular kids, there is still that sense of being not quite popular enough. But, those relatively popular kids do alright. After all, they are at least not those really ugly kids.

School, for all its virtues (and there are obvious virtues) is a brutal place for most kids. It is the place where you realize just how much you are not like those other kids. School is where most of us learn our place in society. It is where you learn not only that your eyes are not the bluest, they aren’t even blue.

After such knowledge…what? How do we cope? That is the question which Morrison wants to explore.

This is a novel about the ugly people. The Beautiful People hang around the fringes of the novel as the malevolent forces which drive the characters in the story to despair. Then we watch how assorted people try to make their way in the world.

Here we find the American Dreamers. They aren’t rich or beautiful. They were not born to good families. But, they will do everything they can to fit into the world of the rich and the beautiful. They strive to mask their origins, find work in the homes of the rich and beautiful, constantly strive to impress. Externally, it works. But, at night, they still go back to their own homes and their own despair.

We also find the American Hustlers. They are on the lookout for an angle, constantly trying to figure out a way to make this day just a little bit better. Their dreams are bigger than realistic possibilities. They are doomed to failure. When they fail, what then?

Then there are the Loners. They retreat into themselves, crafting a world divorced from the one in which the rest of humanity lives. They lead secret lives, filled with illicit desires and impotent rage.

All of the above are the success stories in this novel. Morrison deftly creates these characters to draw attention to the last set. The ones who lose.

The child who slowly descends into madness. Impregnated by her drunken father, abandoned by her family, shunned by the world. She was an ugly kid made even uglier by the society around her. She never descends into evil, just more and more ugliness.

Morrison is marvelously relentless. You want to pity this poor kid. But pity is so cheap and condescending.

There really is only one choice here. You have to decide. Is this kid a child of God worthy of being loved or not? If you want to love her, you’ll have to love her not for anything she presents to the world. You just have to love her because she is who she is. You have to love her with the perfect love of God, not with your weak, violent, wicked, stupid or selfish love which really just rebounds onto yourself.

Oh, by the way, there is a cute blue eyed girl standing next to her.

Now be honest with yourself. Which kid do you notice?

That is our plight. As much as we would like to say that we love everyone, as much as we want to say that we care about the downtrodden and the ugly, we notice the blonde, blue eyed girls. They even make the cover of TIME.

In our self-righteous moments, we pride ourselves for noticing the miscreants, the depraved, the violent. We notice the hard-working poor and the indignant poor. We notice the victims.

But we do not notice those people over there about whom there is nothing particularly noticeable. They aren’t vocal, they aren’t in trouble, they don’t raise a fuss. They are just lonely and scared and ugly.

And the world just passes them by. So do you. So do we all.

Financial Crisis Memoirs 2.0

The financial crisis, like any major crisis, of 2007-2008 has a built-in interest in insider memoirs. What were the people at the heart of the crisis thinking?

We have had many such memoirs.

Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, wrote a memoir, The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath.
Tim Geithner, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York also wrote a memoir: Stress Test: Reflections of Financial Crises.
Hank Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury also wrote a memoir: On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System.

So, after three separate memoirs, what next? How about a jointly written book!
Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson: Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons

It is a surprisingly slim volume for covering such an important and complicated event. The authors sell the story as the event of the century, so is this slim volume all there is to say? Obviously, not. The goal is to be a one-stop shop. You can hear the advertisement: Everything you need to know straight from the guys who were there!

While a short version of the insider memoir is not an inherently bad idea, this particular book is even shorter than it looks.

It has 129 pages of text. That is followed by…I kid you not…74 pages of Power Point slides. Why? Because you know you want to read 74 pages of Power Point Slides. Because you know Power Point Presentations are so incredibly exciting.

How did this book happen? Three guys who have already written their own individual memoirs get together and think, “The world needs a joint memoir”? It is genuinely odd.

OK, so maybe there is a market for a quick overview of the financial crisis. Not everyone is going to slog through three different memoirs. How does this book do? Hard to say for sure. My students liked it, but they know some economic theory. I suspect it does not work as an introduction to the crisis for someone who does not already know the basic story or have a working knowledge of money and banking.

What then is the real virtue in this book? Well, at least, it surely can help explain the strangest moment of 2008:
Monday, September 15: Lehman Brother fails
Tuesday, September 16: AIG is bailed out

What happened in between Monday and Tuesday? Monday itself was surprising. A few months earlier, the Powers that Be had arranged a bailout of Bear Stearns. So, why let Lehman fail? And once you have let Lehman fail, why bail out AIG the next day?

It is a curious tale. Lots of speculation about why. Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson offer what has to be the most incredible (literally not credible) explanation I have yet seen.

You see, they didn’t want to let Lehman fail. Really, cross their hearts and hope to die they did not want Lehman to fail. They really, really wanted to bail out Lehman. All three of them, see. They just, you know, couldn’t legally do it. Sure, they bailed out Bear Stearns and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Sure they had bailed out Long Term Capital Management and the entire Savings and Loan industry. Sure they had bailed out Southeast Asia and Mexico. Sure, the very next day they would bail out AIG. But, gosh darn it, there was just no way to bail out Lehman.

Of course to even have a hope to sell that story, they have to explain the troubling fact that the Secretary of the Treasury had actually announced in advance that they had no intention of bailing out Lehman. If you really want to do something and have every intention of doing something if only you can figure out how, why would you announce to the world you will never do it? (And, let’s not forget, they didn’t bail out Lehman, so the claim they wouldn’t do it was right.)

As Lehman entered its endgame, Hank and his team put out the word that taxpayers would not subsidize a Lehman deal. This was a negotiating tactic, not a policy decision. He was trying to motivate the private sector to assume as much of Lehman’s bad assets as possible, to increase the likelihood that a Bear Stearns-like rescue would be possible. But this was one of the few moments during the crisis when we were not all on the same page. Tim thought that telling the private sector it was on its own would intensify the run, and he was concerned that a “no government money” proclamation would hurt our credibility if the Fed did get the opportunity to assist a buyer with a Bear Stearns-type loan.
But Hank said he would gladly reverse his position if we got an opportunity to save Lehman. We all knew that if the government needed to take some risk to get Lehman sold through a Bear-type deal, we would do it even if we didn’t like it, because a Lehman collapse would be far costlier in terms of financial and economic stability that a Lehman bailout. We were determined to avoid disruptive failures of major institutions until we could draw a circle of protection around the system’s core, and at that point we didn’t have the power to build that kind a firewall. Our disagreement was about negotiating and messaging tactics, not our ultimate determination to do whatever we could to prevent a destabilizing collapse of a systemic firm.

Uh…

What exactly are we supposed to make of that? Here we have the Paulson, former Secretary of the Treasury, signing off on a book where he says, “Yeah, I didn’t mean what I said. I was just haggling.” Yeah. Right.

Those two paragraphs undermine the entire book. The rest of the book tries to paint a portrait of three guys who understand the stakes, working hard behind the scenes to save the world. And then they drop in those two paragraphs which make you sit up and realize, this is all ex post rationalization. The world is melting down, they know the world is melting down, they are terrified of what will happen if Lehman fails, they want to bail out Leman…and the Secretary of the Treasury decides it is a good time to haggle by announcing Lehman will not be bailed out…which causes the whole thing to come crashing down? That is a little hard to believe.

Don’t get me wrong. Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson did amazing work in 2007 and 2008. It isn’t clear that anyone could have done a better job. But, that is not the same thing as saying they were these calm, steady hands in the midst of a storm. They weren’t. They were scared. They didn’t know what to do. They made some good decisions and some bad decisions along the way. That is enough to praise them for the work they did.

Books like this are attempts to polish reputations. Perhaps it is inevitable that the authors would try to polish their reputations. But, it would sure be nice if they could just come out and say, “Faced with a massive crisis which had the danger of turning into a catastrophe, here were the mistakes we made.” I think we could all forgive them for those mistakes and genuinely thank them for their service.

But maybe I am just being naïve here. Maybe in the current world there really is only room for perfect heroes and dastardly villains. Maybe there is no longer room for the guys who just do good but imperfect work in a very hard situation.

Big Brother Doesn’t Need to Watch You

Big Brother is watching You.
Newspeak.
Thoughtcrime.
Doublethink.
Two minutes hate.

George Orwell’s 1984 needs no introduction.

I read this book with one of my reading groups in the Fall. In this particular group, each of the students sends in a question which crystalized in her mind while reading it. Just a question; there is no obligation to try to answer it.

There is one question which has haunted me since it showed up in my Inbox.

But, first the background. Our hero, Winston, has been captured by the Party and is undergoing his mental retraining exercises (commonly called torture) in the dreaded Room 101. In the midst of this process, his tormentor notes the following:

We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside—irrelevant.

That is a striking claim. Is it true?

Let us first note that in the modern age, everybody talks as if it is true. Well, it is true of other people.

Think about the current discussion about politics. There are many interesting facets of the polarization which is on everyone’s mind, but for now think about how people on the other side of the divide from you get their news and their views on current events. You immediately thought of FOX News/Talk Radio or Mainstream Media (MSM, if you are really hip).

Now what do we know about those people on the other side? They have been brainwashed, obviously. They have been conditioned by Fake and Misleading News to believe a narrative about the world which simply isn’t true.

You, of course, get your news from reliable news sources and you think for yourself. But, those other people are clearly deluded. It’s really quite obvious, isn’t it? Surely, no thinking, reasonable person would ever agree with them.

Those other people are incredibly malleable. They cannot resist the manipulations of the nefarious forces wielding misinformation and lies in an attempt to gain power.

So, yes, the quotation above is scary because you know it is true. You are watching it unfold. Malleable people being blindly led into a world of Newspeak where War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and most importantly, Ignorance is Strength.

You do know those other people think that you are the one who is malleable and misled. But, you also know that is absurd. After all, you are the thoughtful one who reads widely and thinks clearly.

Set aside for a second the question of why you are so certain you are right. (Don’t worry. Of course you are right. It is really rather silly to even wonder if you are. Those people on the other side of the political divide are the hapless sheep following malevolent forces trying to lead us to doom. You, on the other hand, are free-thinking, thoughtful, and right. It’s obvious.)

Here is the question from the student which has haunted me:

In Room 101, hypothetically what would have happened if Winston hadn’t given in? I know that’s very unlikely because of the amount of physical and psychological torture he had already gone through, and the fact that the room contains each person’s worst fear. But isn’t there some possibility that someone would be able to resist even the torture in room 101? Or as Winston thinks later, rebel by hating Big Brother in the last seconds before the bullet hits their head? It just seems like there has to be some way to retain even the smallest amount of independent thought, even after going through Big Brother’s torture and conditioning.

Am I infinitely malleable? Could I retain even the smallest amount of independent thought in the face of a coordinated and systematic attack upon it? Note the start of the last line in that question: “It just seems like there has to be some way…” It must be true? Right?

Why must it be true? The alternative is terrifying. What if the Party is right? What if every last bit of independence in me could be driven out?

And then the real horror steps in: why am I so certain that this hasn’t actually happened to me already? What if I have already been completely formed by people outside myself? Why am I so certain that I do have independent thoughts?

The reason this question has haunted me is not because I am concerned that I no longer have independent thought. Obviously I do. The thing that concerns me is that I am not concerned about that question. After all, actually having independent thought and being infinitely malleable would be indistinguishable to me—in both cases, I would think that I was the one forming my opinions.

Like I said, I am not really worried about that. But, this generated another question, also implicit in my student’s question. In an age when everyone knows that those other people are mindless, infinitely malleable sheep, why have I been able to so firmly resist the siren calls of the Party? If everyone else is so susceptible to losing independence of thought, then what is the secret to resisting it in the face of exactly the same pressures everyone else is facing?

Another way of putting it: If many people are infinitely malleable and have lost independence of thought, what is the thing that allows the free thinkers to avoid that trap? Curiously, the first thought is that the free thinkers have found all the other free thinkers and are influenced by those people rather than the brainwashers…but, that rather begs the question doesn’t it?

I don’t know the answer to the question of how to preserve independence of thought in an era when so few people seem to have it. Like I said, my student’s question has haunted me.

But, I suspect the answer has something to do with the Great Books and a genuine liberal arts education. Reading and thinking deeply about a range of books which were not written in the current era but speak timeless truths has to help. Most importantly, the fact that the authors of all those Great Books agree on precisely nothing also helps. When you struggle with Plato and Nietzsche and Orwell, you have to think about deeper things and you realize that no matter what you conclude, hard thinking requires humility. What if this author is correct?

What is the way to preserve independent thought? I have no idea if it would work in Room 101 (and I hope to never find out), but surely treating Great Books authors seriously, even when (or especially when) you think they are wrong, has to work. It just seems like this must be true. Right?

The Future of Charlie Brown

From Peanuts: The Complete Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz, 1953-1954.

Scene: Schroeder at his piano, Charlie Brown leaning over the piano facing Schroeder, handing him a piece of paper.

Panel 1: Charlie Brown: “I want to show you my new comic strip, Schroeder because I think you’ll appreciate it.”
Panel 2: Charlie Brown: “This one musician asks the other if he can play the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ See? And this guy says, ‘Oh, I guess I can Handel it!’”
Panel 3: Charlie Brown: “Get it? Get it? Pretty good, huh? Huh?!!’
Panel 4: (Charlie Brown alone, walking away): “It’s sort of sad when you think of a kid like that going through life without a sense of humor.”

One of the interesting byproducts of the demise of printed newspapers is the looming end of the Comic Strip. Once upon a time, the Comic Strip was a cultural landmark, the sort of thing everyone read. The Peanuts were as well-known as anyone could be.

Take the strip above, for example. What kind of piano is Schroeder playing? Why would Charlie Brown assume Schroeder would appreciate the Handel joke? Why didn’t Schroeder appreciate the Handel joke? What does Charlie Brown mean when he says “a kid like that”? The whole joke of the comic strip hinges on the reader knowing the answers to those questions. There is nothing in the strip itself that explains why it is funny.

The comic strip as an art form is actually quite amazing. Four panels on Monday through Saturday; a larger set of panels in three rows on Sunday. The Sunday one had an extra feature; the first row had to be detachable; it needed to relate to the second and third rows, but the second and third rows had to be standalone because not all newspapers printed all three rows.

Now do that every single day of the year. You can’t skip a day. Every day a new little story with a punch line. You can reuse punch lines if the setup is slightly different, but you can’t just reuse the whole strip. And, if you are serious about it, you never miss a day.

Over his career, Schulz created 17,897 comic strips. Think about that for a second.

That is a prodigious achievement. Stunning, in fact. There really isn’t anything like it. Calvin and Hobbes is probably the second most well-known comic strip. There are 3,160 strips in that series.

And, as noted above, with the demise of newspapers, it is a feat which will never be matched. There are on-line comics, but it simply isn’t the same. The newspaper imposed a structure on the form. It is much like the rules for creating a sonnet. There are other kinds of poetry, but to be a sonnet, it has to follow the rules.

Peanuts stands alone in this art form. Yes, there are other great comics which expanded the possibilities of the art form (e.g., Calvin and Hobbs, The Far Side, maybe Dilbert or Doonesbury). But, nothing had anywhere near the cultural reach of Peanuts.

Over the years, readers would get to know these characters. The present volume for example starts with Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Violet, Shermy, Patty (not Peppermint Patty) and Snoopy all as staple characters. Pigpen shows up. (So does Charlotte Braun, whom I had never seen before—thankfully, Schulz ditched her in 1955—a character whose sole features are that her name was similar to Charlie Brown and she shouted all the time. Zero potential there.)

All these characters are clearly in their infancy; later on they grow and change. Snoopy, for example, is an amusing and playful dog, but there is no hint here that he will develop an intense inner life and end up in battles with the Red Baron. Lucy has not yet opened her psychiatrist booth. Linus does not yet have his security blanket. Charlie Brown has not become fully Charlie Brownish. Sally and Woodstock and Peppermint Patty haven’t arrived. And yet, even here in the early years of the strip, the format is set. It is homey.

The odd part of reading a collection of comic strips is that it changes that homey feeling just a bit. It was quite different when every day you woke up and read the next installment in the life of the Peanuts. Collected together, you can breeze right through them, one after another. All the charm is there, but again, the form of the daily comic strip imposed its own way of reading. At the end of each strip, you necessarily had to pause for a whole day before moving on. That left a feeling that you were moving through life with these characters. You just can’t get that same feeling in a collection.

(The same thing is happening in TV these days. Binge watching means you don’t have to wait a week to see what happens next.)

All of this presents an interesting problem. I love Peanuts. I found this collection utterly charming. A marvelous book to read slowly, a few pages a night. But, if you didn’t grow up with Peanuts, would the book have anywhere near the same charm? Consider:

Charlie Brown sitting next to Violet on the curb
Panel 1: Charlie Brown, “Nobody loves me.”
Panel 2: Charlie Brown: “Nobody even Likes me.”
Panel 3: Carlie Brown: “In fact, nobody even Tolerates me”
Panel 4: Violet: “We do, too!”

That is funny. But imagine you had no idea who Charlie Brown or Violet are. Imagine you just saw that strip out of the blue as two kids sitting on a curb. Then, it is not funny at all; in fact, it is really mean and depressing.

So, will the next generation ever discover Peanuts? I asked a few students about it. One remarked, “Oh yeah, my grandparents read it.” Sigh. My own kids are no better. “Schroeder? Is he the one with the piano?”

Read some Peanuts today. Or at least watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special this year. This is a cultural heritage; it is incumbent upon us to ensure it is not lost.

Bad Blood

There are two competing narratives about the financial sector in America. It has always been this way. If there is one societal institution which has sharply divided Americans since the Founding, it is banking and finance. From Andrew Jackson’s War on the National Bank to Operation Wall Street, it’s the same argument over and over.

On the one side, we hear that America is secretly being run by a very clever set of nefarious financiers. These evil masterminds control large sums of wealth which thy use to create large businesses, bringing them ever more profits while destroying the small businesses and jobs of regular Americans. Wall Street dominates Main Street in every way possible, both financially and politically.

On the other side we hear about the American miracle of growth driven by a free and open economy which allows funds to flow to businesses which will make the best use of those funds. The noble financier makes this all possible. Through the purchase of stock, a hard-working laborer in Nebraska can easily become an owner of Apple. America has grown because the system works so well, rewarding the industrious and clever and eliminating the outdated and failures. The financier makes this all possible.

These narratives are everywhere. It is likely you subscribe to one of the other.

Here is the funny thing. Pick your favorite narrative. Then try to explain Theranos.

John Carryrou’s Bad Blood is a rollicking tale about a fledgling startup company which rocketed to the top and then crashed and burned in the most spectacular manner possible. I learned about the book when I was the moderator on a panel of alums at Mount Holyoke who had come back to give tips to the students on how to get started in business. One of the questions I asked was what book each panelist would recommend. Two of the five panelists suggested Bad Blood; both clearly loved the book. So, I assigned in in my Introductory Economics class this semester. It was indeed a riveting story.

Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford to pursue her dream of founding the next Great Tech Company. The company was Theranos. The idea: build a small, easily portable device which could take a mere few drops of human blood and run just about every blood test in existence.

The possibilities of such a device are endless. If you need to do regular blood tests, you could have one in your home. Drugstores and supermarkets could have blood testing stations in the corner of the market. The military could put them in the back of a Humvee. Instant analysis of your blood, any time, any place. No needles necessary; just prick your finger and this marvelous little machine will do the rest.

It is certainly an attractive idea. Everyone agreed about that.

Now to build something like that, you need money. And Elizabeth Holmes was very good at convincing people to give her company money. Lots of money. Staggering amounts of money. She was young, perky, dressed like Steve Jobs, and had an intense gaze and boundless self-confidence. People were lining up to fund her company.

There was just one problem. The machine didn’t actually exist. Not only that, but nobody in the company could figure out how to actually create the machine. Not only that, it didn’t take long for everyone who showed up to work for the company to figure out that there really wasn’t any way to get a machine to do all these tests with so little blood. Not only that, but every prototype of the machine was an absolute disaster. The results generated by the machines were all over the place; there was absolutely no reason to trust the results of these machines.

So, how was Holmes able to convince so many people that Theranos was on the verge of rolling out this marvelous product? The prototypes she used for her presentations were fakes. They pretended to analyze the blood, but they weren’t actually do it.

Eventually, Theranos started rolling out their product into Walgreens stores. The whole thing was a sham. For many of the tests, instead of taking a drop of blood, they would get the blood the old fashioned way—with a needle. They would then send the blood to a regular lab with regular equipment. You were lucky if they did that, by the way. If they used their machines, then you might well find out you had some terrible disease which you didn’t actually have.

Yet, the company kept growing. At one point, the Theranos Board of Directors had the following people on it: Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, Sam Nunn, William Perry, Gary Roughead, and George Schultz. Two former Secretaries of State, a former Secretary of Defense, two former high ranking military commanders, and a former Senator. If a company with that Board of Directors tells you they have this neat new product, why wouldn’t you believe them?

And wow, did people believe it. Tim Draper, for example, invested a million dollars in the early years. Rupert Murdoch invested $125 million in the later years. Over all, the company raised $700 million. And remember, there was never a functioning prototype or even a realistic schematic of a prototype that might actually work. There was nothing at all.

Eventually, Carreyrou, a Wall Street Journal reporter, got wind of what was going on at Theranos, and exposed the whole company for the fraud it was. The house of cards crumbled. Bad Blood is the story.

The amazing thing about the book is that by the end of chapter 2, you know the end is about to come. The rise of Theranos goes on for another chapter, and you know this has to be the end. Then, chapter by chapter, Theranos just keeps getting bigger and bigger. All the signs of the problems were there right at the outset. But, that did not stop Elizabeth Holmes.

How did this happen? And here is where those conflicting narratives about American finance get stuck. If financiers are such evil or clever geniuses, why did they fall for the spiel of a young Stanford dropout? People lost a lot of money here. Why?

The reality is that far from being omnipotent forces for good or evil in the world, the modern American financier is just a person with large ambitions and the same range of insight and intelligence as the rest of the population. The reason they seem so much more brilliant is selection bias.

Imagine average people each picking an individual company as the wave of the future. Some of those companies will fail and we will never hear about those investors again. But some will succeed and we will hear about those investors. They will naturally attribute their success to their cleverness and brilliance. But, was it?

That is an answerable question, by the way. All we have to do is look to see how the investors who made successful choices in the past do on their subsequent investments. It turns out they look very average. In other words, having had one success has no predictive value on whether they will have future success. We just hear about the ones with the lucky streak. The unlucky ones vanish.

Elizabeth Holmes was perfect for this world. She was the type of person every 60 year old successful man wanted to believe in. So, they believed in her. And they lost.

Elizabeth Holmes’ trial on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud is slated to begin next year.