Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

     I'll just say at the beginning that some of the more in-depth inequality talk went over my head. But otherwise, Milanovic writes extremely clearly and honestly just comes off as a genius. His thesis is that the entire globe now operates under the same economic principles that can be broadly described as capitalism. Thet are production organized for profit using legally free wage labor and mostly privately owned capital, with decentralized coordination. This is the first time the whole globe (or at least its major players) has been on the same page. At least some major states or societies, until now, used slavery, feudalism, hunting and gathering, or some other non-capitalist economic system. Today, everyone is practicing capitalism, divided into two forms: liberal meritocratic capitalism and political capitalism.

    The book was amazing, especially chapter two about Liberal Meritocratic Capitalism and chapter 5 about The Future of Global Capitalism. The author is just simultaneously very grounded in quantitative reality but also projecting upwards about social changes, and that makes the book thrilling to read. It is a dense book in a good way, since Milanovic is not wasting words. The writing is great and the ideas expressed are incredibly interesting and engaging.

Liberal Meritocratic Capitalism

    Liberal meritocratic capitalism is defined as the following. "Capitalism" is a system where most production is carried out with privately owned means of production, capital hires free labor, and coordination is decentralized. Also, most investment decisions are made by private companies or entrepreneurs. "Meritocratic" means that there are no legal obstacles preventing individuals from achieving a given position in society. "Liberal" means that there is some egalitarianism to correct for inheritance of property, such as providing free education or taxing the wealthy. This re-equalizes society somewhat. Milanovic argues that systemic forces in liberal meritocratic capitalism lead to the formation of an upper-class elite.

    One interesting observation Milanovic makes of modern liberal meritocratic capitalism is of a major shift in the system. In Marx's time, capitalists were largely a leisure class who made almost all of their money from capital and very little to none from labor. Today, however, they earn large sums of money from both. Most capitalists today also work day jobs and are highly educated such that it is worthwhile for them to earn large sums from their labor as well as their capital that works for them. Milanovic labels this homoploutia, meaning "same wealth" in Greek. Since today's capitalists earn large sums from labor as well, this confuses the political question around taxation. Whereas the voters of the 1870s could easily argue that capitalists did not earn their income because they did not labor, today's voters see that capitalists work a day job, which makes it more difficult to build the political will to increase their taxes.

    Another major observation Milanovic makes about liberal meritocratic capitalist development is about the decline of unions, especially in the private sector. His explanation was a good complement to Cowie's in Stayin' Alive. Whereas Cowie explains the political and social changes that led to a decline in union membership, Milanovic explains more economic changes. He writes that there are two big changes besides politics. First, a shift to a services-based economy meant that workers are now more spread out and have less opportunity to talk to one another and organize. When the United States was a manufacturing-based economy, workers needed to be gathered together on the production line at central locations where dozens if not hundreds or thousands of workers would come into contact with one another. It would be the same in a mine. But if you work at a McDonald's or a TJ Maxx, you don't meet with hundreds of other employees every day, so your ability to organize is diminished. Second, the decline in union power and membership corresponds to a time when China, India, and other developing countries have opened up to foreign investment, meaning that there is now a massive labor pool that capitalists in the developed world can draw from outside their own countries. This effect, however, will likely diminish with time, as this was a one-time opening that cannot be replicated again. But it will take a long time to diminish since there will still be more labor in Asia, Africa, and Latin America willing to work for cheap for a long time.

    In a moment of bluntness, Milanovic writes of the problems facing the United States that, "The bottom line is that a very unequal, or polarized, society cannot easily maintain an extensive welfare state." He proposes two alternative solutions. First, the US can pursue policies that can equalize endowments of both labor and capital, so that welfare is not so necessary. Moreover, this would make it more possible to pursue welfare policies, since a more equal society with an expanded middle class is more likely to vote itself entitlements than an unequal society in which the classes fear or resent each other. Milanovic says that to equalize the distribution of capital and skill endowments, a state can deconcentrate ownership of assets (capital) or equalize returns to approximately the same skill levels, making it so that somehow those who get an education at UC-Riverside can get jobs as good as those who go to UC-Berkley. This would require a lot of investment in public schools and perhaps the withdrawal of tax-free status enjoyed at private schools. Second, the US can fundamentally change migration to make it more like a temporary movement of labor without access to eventual citizenship and welfare benefits; otherwise, people tend not to want to support a welfare regime that may favor perceived outsiders.

    There is also an interesting section where Milanovic describes the characteristics of the ruling elite in the liberal meritocratic capitalist society. It is long, but I'm copying all eight points in full:

1. The ruling class controls most of the financial capital of the country. We have seen that in the United States, the top 10 percent of wealth-holders control more than 90 percent of financial assets.

2. The ruling class is highly educated. Many members of the ruling class work, and their labor income tends to be high (because of their high level of education). Members of the ruling class therefore combine high income from labor and capital—what I have called homoploutia.

3. The elite invest heavily in their progeny and in political control. Investment in their children’s education enables the children to maintain high labor income and the high status that is traditionally associated with knowledge and education. Investment in political influence enables the elite to write the rules of inheritance, so that financial capital is easily transferred to the next generation. The two together (acquired education and transmitted capital) enable the reproduction of the ruling class.

4. The objective of the investment in political control is done not only to improve the contemporaneous economic power of the ruling class, but to ensure its domination over time.

5. The ability of women to access the same level of education as men and to enjoy the same rules regarding inheritance makes women increasingly indistinguishable from men, when measured by income or power. Thus, the ruling class in liberal meritocratic capitalism is probably the least gendered of all historical ruling classes.

6. Increasing economic and educational similarity between men and women leads to family formation of similarly educated and rich couples (homogamy), which also contributes to intergenerational maintenance of these advantages.

7. Because the upper class is not defined according to hereditary or occupational criteria but is based on wealth and education, it is an “open” upper class. It co-opts the best members of the lower classes who are able to become wealthy and highly educated.

8. Members of the ruling class are hard-working and have an amoral outlook on life (see Chapter 5). Everything that enables this class to maintain and reinforce its position and is within the bounds of the law is, ipso facto, desirable. Its ethics are defined by the existing legal framework, and its use of money to control the political process extends to the use of money to change laws. This flexible interpretation of the rules enables it to stay within the confines of the law even if its practices increasingly diverge from general ethical standards.

Political Capitalism 

     Political capitalism gets a good explanation, but I think it is less complete than liberal meritocratic capitalism, which makes sense since liberal meritocratic capitalism is practiced in more open societies. Like liberal meritocratic capitalism is exemplified by the United States, political capitalism is exemplified by China. Usually, writes Milanovic, political capitalism is the result of communist revolutions conducted in societies that were colonized or de facto colonized. Political capitalism is defined by an efficient bureaucracy, the absence of the rule of law, and the autonomy of the state. But it confronts a major contradiction between the endemic corruption inherent to the system and the legitimacy of the system as well as a clash between its bureaucracy and the absence of rule of law. Political capitalism, by tying success in the economy to political connections, requires that the state relax rules for some people while pressing the full force of the law against others.

    What is especially interesting, as I read Fukuyama, is Milanovic's explanation of how political capitalism forms. Milanovic argues that both Marxist and Liberal scholars are perplexed by the fall of Communism. Marxists' confusion is more obvious: it is difficult to explain why formerly Communist/Socialist countries would adopt capitalist systems, which should have seemed like a downgrade. Meanwhile, Liberals have trouble understanding why Communism emerged in the first place, and can only describe it as a historical mistake. Similarly, Liberals, writes Milanovic, cannot easily explain World War One, which ended the prior decades of liberalism that dominated the world. I think that last point is his least defensible, as the system that existed prior to WWI may have been cosmopolitan but it was not liberal. Liberal principles were in force only in a couple of the major players, and the rest were still aristocratic states. All were still colonizers. 

    Milanovic is somewhat defensive of communism, not as a system that is good in its own right as a "final form," but as a means for some countries to escape feudalism. Specifically, Milanovic writes (in his own italics) that, "communism is a social system that enabled backward and colonized societies to abolish feudalism, regain economic and political independence, and build indigenous capitalism. Or to put it another way, it was a system of transition from feudalism to capitalism used in less-developed and colonized societies. Communism is the functional equivalent of the rise of the bourgeoisie in the West." 

    Milanovic concludes by writing that political capitalism relies on the ability to insulate politics from economics and the ability to maintain a relatively uncorrupt centralized backbone that can enforce decisions in the national interest, not just the business interest. That is what makes a state like China so successful, because a strong Communist ideology keeps the state above the business interest that would otherwise consume it. I think there may be some requirement for successful political capitalism of a communist or otherwise ideologically charged party or movement at the helm of government. Milanovic believes that political capitalism is not likely to be attractive or mimicked around the world because it will fail in most cases to be economically successful in spite of the model China has provided.

The Interaction of Capitalism and Globalization

    Like how states can use a communist revolution in place of a bourgeoisie to develop into political capitalist societies rather than liberal meritocratic capitalism, Milanovic also asserts that societies may deviate from the Western path of development. Whereas the United States, the UK, and Japan developed through import-substitution industrialization (and were followed by countries like Brazil, South Korea, and Turkey), there is an alternate path by which countries like China and India have developed by simply inserting themselves into global supply chains. Instead of using tariffs to support domestic industry, they can draw money in from developed countries by providing a cheaper alternative. For example, customer service jobs going to India and basic manufacturing going to China.

    In this section, Milanovic also discusses the "citizenship rent" or "citizenship premium." Citizenship gives advantages to its holder, namely (1) a greater set of economic opportunities due to higher wages, (2) a claim over social benefits, and (3) nonfinancial rights like voting or the right to a fair trial. People are less tolerant of mobility today due to the divergence of different countries' incomes and wealths, because we recognize the premium we have and don't want to share it so easily. The conclusion is that either the gaps in economic development between countries must be reduced, welfare states in the rich world must be diminished, or migrants must be granted considerable fewer rights than natives. But at the heart of this is a massive injustice and a massive privilege. Identical individuals who live in different countries have very unequal income streams throughout their lifetimes. And unfortunately, most studies and discussions are based on income inequality in individual countries, not global income inequality. But it is global inequality that is must more severe. Since politicians are elected in nation-states, they don't concern themselves with global issues like this.

The Future of Global Capitalism

    In the final chapter of the book (and also probably the best chapter), Milanovic sounds the alarm over amorality in hypercommercialized capitalism. This chapter is less economic and more philosophical and psychological; it's the point where the book really stands out. Milanovic starts by pointing out that religion and the tacit social contract that encouraged investment no longer exist in today's society. Religion's decline isn't explored in the book, but the elimination of the tacit social contract is. Milanovic writes that our actions are no longer monitored by our neighbors, as Adam Smith imagined. As we have moved from "community" to "society," we are now surrounded by strangers, and we become anonymous. Our coworkers rarely interact with our families. Our families may not interact as much with our friends. Whereas 300 years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, we may have lived in a village in which our co-workers, our friends, and our families all interacted with one another daily (and sometimes were the same people), today that world is gone in developed countries. I don't think it is a coincidence that we are less happy today.

    The effect of being "unmonitored" reminded me of the public perception of Mitt Romney and Donald Trump's tax returns when they ran for President. Our public discourse about the two was too focused on legality and not enough on morality. People asked "Wouldn't you do that if you could?" rather than "How could you ethically pay so little in taxes?" I am not knowledgeable enough about past feeling, but I wonder if a person two hundred years earlier would feel morally unburdened like Mitt Romney did about paying no taxes in some years despite being incredibly rich.

    The modern capitalist society is defined by atomization and commodification. Through atomization, we are all forced to surrender to certain efficiencies of capitalism. Long ago, it used to be more efficient for large family groups to live together and produce certain goods in the home. The family (which was larger and included extended family) would grow food, prepare it, and cook it. The family would clean together, garden together, and take care of babies together. Families made their own clothes and furniture and would come together to build homes. Today, all of those activities have been atomized or commoditized in one sense or the other. First, it became more efficient to live in a nuclear family, and now it may be more efficient to be a household of one. Family gets in the way of moving for a new job or education, both prized under capitalism, and family "internalizes" economic activities more efficiently produced by economies of scale in a factory. There is less space between the family and society than there was between family and community. Whereas the home was once sacrosanct, today private agents may enter it frequently to perform lawncare or cleaning services or to deliver food. Government agents may even enter it to prevent abuse of a spouse or a child. Some of these things may be good, some may be bad, but the change is significant. The home is not what it used to be.

    And Milanovic writes that the reverse side of atomization is commodification. While atomization makes it possible for us to live alone because we can satisfy all our needs from the market (like hiring a babysitter instead of a family member doing it for free), commodification encourages the individual to provide that market service. We satisfy the needs of strangers instead of community members for money instead of social capital or altruism. I think that atomization creates depression and commodification creates anxiety. When we are atomized, we feel alone, and when we are commodified we feel stressed at not being productive. The gig economy is an example of commodification by commercializing our free time. Why sit on the couch when you can be driving for Uber? The result of the gig economy is also that we are not more polite due to our selfishness as Adam Smith imagined. Because we are unmonitored and can switch jobs more easily, there is less incentive to behave well since we won't see many people again. Ratings systems seek to alleviate this, but are not a full replacement. And so Adam Smith's observations are limited to capitalism in a community, and cannot fully describe how capitalism works today, in society. More and more I think I need to read Ferdinand Tonnies on community and society.

    Milanovic finishes by writing about the evolution of Western capitalism. He discusses three types of liberal capitalism that have existed in the past and present. (1) classical capitalism is defined by workers gaining income from labor only and capitalists gaining income from capital only; (2) social-democratic capitalism is defined by a similar arrangement, but differentiated by the fact that not all capitalists are richer than all workers due to significant redistribution through taxes and welfare, moderating inequality; (3) liberal meritocratic capitalism is marked by homoploutia, and discussed above. But there are three different types of capitalism that may emerge as a form of historicist progress. One is people's capitalism, in which everyone has approximately equal shares of capital and labor income (as in each person deriving the same percentage of income from each); people's incomes will still differ, but there is free healthcare and education to help intergenerational mobility and increased capital share does not translate into increased inequality, so inequality does not tend to rise. Then there is egalitarian capitalism, in which everyone has approximately equal amounts of labor and capital income (as in each person getting the same amount of money). This would create very little inequality and the relative equality of incomes would ensure equality of opportunity. It sounds to me like Milanovic believes these would be progress in capitalism, gotten through social democracy. But finally, he points out that it is possible that progress is actually political capitalism. This would be achieved not through social democracy, but by elite capture of government in Western societies to run an efficient economy that allows for very little mobility. The more plutocratic Western democracies become, the more likely that outcome is.

    At the end, Milanovic provides four broad policies that would lead to progress towards people's capitalism or egalitarian capitalism. I am quoting him directly:

1. Tax advantages for the middle class especially in the areas of access to financial and housing wealth, and a corresponding increase in the taxation of the rich; plus, the return to high taxation of inheritance. The objective is to reduce concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich.

2. A significant increase in funding for and improvement in the quality of public schools, whose cost must be low enough to be accessible not only to the middle class but also to those in the bottom three deciles of the income distribution. The objective is to reduce transmission of advantages across generations and make equality of opportunity more real.

3. "Citizenship light," which would entail the end of a strictly binary division between citizens and noncitizens. The objective is to allow migration without provoking nationalist backlash.

4. Strictly limited and exclusively public funding of political campaigns. The objective is to reduce the ability of the rich to control the political process and form a durable upper class.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In 2016 the top 1% of the top 1% contributed 40% of campaign donations.
• John Stuart Mill on the costliness of bribes in 1861: "There has never yet been, among political men, any real and serious attempt to prevent bribery, because there has been no real desire that elections should not be costly. Their costliness is an advantage to those who can afford the expense by excluding a multitude of competitors."
• Interesting quote from Immanuel Wallerstein: "If anyone thinks that without state support or from a position of opposition to the state he can become a capitalist... this is an absurd presumption."
• Apparently China overthrew Robert Mugabe in 2016. 

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

     In Part One of the book, Fukuyama discusses the development of states across the world, and identifies as the theme of the book that "there is a political deficit around the world, not of states but of modern states that are capable, impersonal, well organized and autonomous." He is certainly a major supporter of the state and believes that a strong state can be the solution to a huge number of social problems humans face. The point, however, is not just to have the biggest state, but the highest quality state, being accountable to the people but not beholden to interest groups based on kinship, ethnicity, tribe, or other fragmented and fragmenting interests.

    Something I hadn't liked about The Origins of Political Order was that I felt like Fukuyama didn't give enough attention to geography and climate. In this one, they get their due attention, although he is sure to make clear that he is no geographical determinist. One interesting observation stood out about how Europe was hard to conquer because it had Britain just off the continent, which was able to gain substantial wealth and power and act to counterbalance Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler, all of whom sought to conquer Europe. This rings true, but it is interesting that the same did not happen with Japan and China. China united very early on and remained united for most of its history, with some large exceptions. Europe on the other hand only ever united ephemerally, never more than a couple of years.

    A very interesting point that came up in this volume is that institutions are not easily gifted. The lesson of colonialism and of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan is that an invader can't just give a country a strong state. They have to create it themselves. This is the difference between two regions colonized for a similar amount of time: Africa and China. China always had a strong state and it could be taken for granted. The real challenge in China has been how to control the state and reign it in to respect rule of law. In Africa, on the other hand, strong states never emerged, and weren't about to form just as a result of a brief European influence. 

    Fukuyama disagrees with Pomeranz that the European advantage over China came primarily from the use of coal. Rather, writes Fukuyama, the Industrial Revolution was not just the result of resource inputs, but also of the integration of a scientific system that could induce general theories from facts, a technological system that applied this knowledge to practical tasks, a property rights system that created incentives for technological innovation, cultural curiosity about the outside world, an education system focused on science and technology, and a political system that allowed and encouraged all of these things to happen at the same time.

    The best chapter of this book by far is Chapter 34: America the Vetocracy. In it, Fukuyama diagnoses specific problems, mostly in the legislative branch. The House of Lords works more decisively than Congress because party leaders can force MPs to vote their way to stay on their party rolls. To bring a vote, they only need a majority, not 60 votes or unanimous consent like the Senate. There is no filibustering in the UK. The UK uses its bureaucracy to make the budget, but the US uses a committee system that takes months to get the budget done. In the meantime, there are countless opportunities for lobbying groups to get their wants into the bill. Fukuyama blames openness and never-ending process for the massive influence of interest groups. There is no point in lobbying MPs in the British system because they have no power. But there is endless incentive to buy US Representatives, who may serve on powerful committees.

    But this complicated and incoherent system doesn't end up limiting government. In fact, it makes it even more unwieldy. Legislative incoherence results in the worst of both worlds: a large and sprawling government that can't get anything done, creating duplicative and overlapping programs or using multiple committees to address the same problem. For example, the Pentagon is mandated to produce over 500 reports for Congress every year, which are often duplicative and consume huge amounts of energy. A more centralized legislature would have a better chance of getting this under control. So that's the irony: a decentralized legislature allows the government to balloon in pork barrel spending and red tape, difficult to cut, but also makes its own state ineffective through redundancy and overly strict prescriptions on what bureaucrats may do.

Miscellaneous Facts and Observations:

• New York State authorized a new courthouse in 1858 that was budgeted for $250,000, but ended up costing $13 million by 1871, at which point it was running years over schedule. It was used by Boss Tweed to funnel huge amounts of money into Tammany Hall, and he even awarded his own printers the costs of printing the special commission's investigation.
• Fukuyama says that the reason Amtrak isn't good is because it is mandated to serve uneconomical areas due to the largesse of the congressmen that approve its budget that are from those areas.
• Argentina had a higher GDP than the United States in 1800.
• Between 1878 and 1914, Europe added 8,653,000 square miles to its possessions, and controlled 84.4% of the land surface of the globe at the start of World War One.
• Africa's population density reached Europe's 1500 population density in 1975. In 1900, Japan had 118.2 people per square km, China had 45.6, and sub-Saharan Africa had 4.4.
• I couldn't help but laugh at a passage where Fukuyama said "The United States is scheduled to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan in 2016..."
• Indonesian language is a standardized version of classical Malay, originally spoken by only a small number of inhabitants. But it emerged as a lingua franca. 
• Interesting: Fukuyama describes a theory by Robert Carneiro that says circumscription is key to state formation. To transition from a tribal society to a state-society, you need to eliminate the option to walk away. In unconstrained geographies, people could just leave the tribe if they didn't like the chief.
• Another interesting contradiction: Fukuyama writes that countries will not grow if they are racked by bloody conflicts, and cites Paul Collier as saying that conflict is driven by weak institutions. I would like to know how Fukuyama squares this with Tilly's view, which Fukuyama seemingly accepts, that war drives state formation.
• The actual size of the US government hasn't exceeded 2.25 million since the end of WWII. But it has expanded, just mostly through contractors.

Sex With Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House

     Sex With Presidents is a very entertaining book but it should honestly be called Presidents Cheating on Their Spouses because that's a majority of what's going on here. The book obviously focuses on the politicians who have the most to write about, so those are the adulterers even though there were many other Presidents with less interesting romantic lives. But this was interesting and I got a lot of good facts. Here are some of them:

Grover Cleveland 

    President Cleveland was accused of rape back when he was a politician in Buffalo. There was this whole thing where his alleged victim gave birth to a child named after Cleveland's best friend. Later, when she accused him once he gained more notoriety, his goons claimed it was his (late) friend's kid, not his. Supposedly Cleveland objected that because he didn't want to besmirch the memory of his friend, but it's hard to figure out what really happened here. What's even weirder is that after that, Cleveland married his late friend's daughter, who he had been caring for since his death and had known since she was born. She was only 21 and he was 48 when thy married.

Warren G. Harding

    The stuff about Warren G. Harding is just the most ridiculous (until you get to Kennedy). But it's unexpected because you never really hear anything about Harding. But this guy was apparently being chased by tons of women, and sometimes getting together with them in a closet in the Oval Office. Interestingly, Harding spent a bunch of time over a couple visits at the Battle Creek Sanitarium set up by Dr. J.H. Kellogg, of "Kellogg's" fame. He tried eating cereal to lower his "insatiable libido" but it didn't work. Once, Harding even declared to the National Press Club that it was better he wasn't a woman because he'd always be pregnant. What's interesting is that everyone in the press knew about him, but nobody reported on it because it seemed ungentlemanly. Nobody, even his political opponents, would tell on him. It might have been especially damaging since he was the first President elected once women had the vote. Apparently some people attributed his success to his popularity with women. One of his mistresses lived until 1991.

FDR

    FDR and Eleanor both had affairs. Although FDR's mom never wanted him to marry Eleanor, once he did she made sure he didn't divorce her. It's a common theme in these books. The President wants to divorce his wife to marry his mistress, but someone makes sure he doesn't, thereby saving his political career. There's some other information that's good to know in here. For example, although paralyzed, FDR wasn't impotent, according to three doctors who examined him. Eleanor seems to have been bisexual, having affairs with men and woman. At one point she was part of a trio with two other women. FDR must have approved, because he built them all a little cottage to live in together and he embroidered their initials on their linens.

JFK

    JFK's sex lie was crazy. The way Herman describes it is basically him just using women up and throwing them away. And that he was bad in bed, but since power is a natural aphrodisiac, the women kept coming. Some of it is really bad though. Like when he impregnated his daughter's 15-year-old baby sitter and then she got an abortion. Apparently Jackie was in charge of choosing many of his women, which Herman compares to a similar position held by Louis XV's official mistress, Madame de Pompadour.

LBJ

    "Johnson loved to watch homemade videos of animals mating, and during sex with her he would imitate the animals' bellows."

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman

     This was an amazing book that I devoured in just three days. I don't know where I got it from. But I had it and stumbled upon it and it was an amazing read. Postman writes that, "this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. He emphasizes what Marshall McLuhan said: that the medium is the message; that the way we communicate also transforms our way of thinking, which then transforms the content of our culture. For example, a clock recreates time as an independent and precise sequence just as writing recreates the mind as a "tablet on which experience is written" and television transforms the news into a commodity.

    At his worst, Postman is a luddite who sees nothing of value in television (and probably wouldn't see much good in the internet either). But he is also a great lover of the written word. He writes that the age of print created a definition of intelligence that gave priority to objective, rational use of the mind and encouraged logic in public discourse. Contrast this with oral cultures that value proverbs and long memories. He writes that "It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistence with the growth of a print culture..."

    The problem, for Postman, began with the telegraph. He quotes Thoreau, who wrote that "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate..." And so the telegraph diminished the quality of discourse by introducing irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. You become impotent because the news gives you a bunch of opinions about issues that you can't do anything about because they are irrelevant to your life. Then, the public discourse becomes incoherent-- it can only move information, not collect, explain, or analyze information. So he writes that telegraphy is the opposite of typography, which has the capacity to do all three of those things without actually sending the information. He also criticizes photography, which diminishes discourse by taking things out of context. 

    The worst thing about television, for Postman, is not the junk TV. He loves junk TV and says that it is better since it is pure entertainment. The real problem is TV that purports to educate or inform: 60 Minutes, Sesame Street, Nova, and more. The problem is that everything on television must entertain the viewer to keep their attention and be successful, but some higher forms of discourse are harmed by excessive influence of entertainment. Postman writes:

That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by newscasters to 'join them tomorrow.' What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights. We accept the newscasters' invitation because we know that the 'news' is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say. Everything about a news show tells us this-- the good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the attractive commercials-- all these and more suggest that what we have just seen is no cause for weeping. A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection, or catharsis.

It is the natural endpoint of using the medium of television that everything on it must become a form of entertainment. The sad thing about it is that Postman was so right 40 years ago and that it's all gotten worse. The news just kept going on and the state of our discourse is worse than ever. Postman thought it was ridiculous that an actor, Ronald Reagan, was President. We can only imagine what he would have thought of reality TV star Donald Trump.

    The news doesn't suggest that any story has real implications. Newscasters most frequently describe major legislative actions as a "victory/defeat for Democrats/Republicans." Because anything that would require the viewer to stop and think would disrupt the viewer's attention to the next segment. When reading a newspaper or a book, the reader can pause and reflect. A television viewer's moment of reflection is immediately interrupted by the bright lights and loud sounds of the next segment or a commercial. And so the newscaster plays a role as a "character who is marginally serious by who stays well clear of authentic understanding." The commercials are the most ridiculous part of the news or any "serious" program. In what might be the best illustration of the whole book, Postman writes the following:

What would you think of me, and this book, if I were to pause here, tell you that I will return to my discussion in a moment, and then proceed to write a few words in behalf of United Airlines or the Chase Manhattan Bank. You would rightly think that I had no respect for you and, certainly, no respect for the subject. And if I did this not once by several times in each chapter, you would think the whole enterprise unworthy of your attention. Why, then, do we not think a news show similarly unworthy?

    And television education, like Sesame Street or nature documentaries, can never replace real education. Postman says there are three commandments for educational programming on TV: (1) thou shalt have no prerequisites, (2) thou shalt induce no perplexity, and (3) thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt. Prerequisites are not possible, since, to reach a broad audience, TV programming must be accessible to a wide number of people. It does not pay to tell a viewer to come back after he or she has seen some other, more foundational programming. But as we know, some education requires prerequisites: a student cannot learn calculus without prior understanding of algebra. TV may induce no perplexity since that would induce time spent not watching TV. Learners must become perplexed to gain understanding, but TV viewers have no time to do so since they can't (in 1985) pause the TV. But even now that we can pause videos, we rarely do so. And without a teacher to ask questions to, the gains are limited. Worse, there can be no exposition. Television requires drama and storyline. Everything must be visualized and placed in a theatrical context, and viewers eschew long exposition.

    The big thing this book makes me think of is how much has changed since it was written. The book is all about television, but much of it can apply to the internet and cell phones. With the gift of hindsight, it looks more like television was a transitory stage to the internet, which may itself be a stage on the way to something else. But the internet it much broader. Our attention spans are even shorter than before, but at least the internet can provide us with more articles and writing than television does. While television offered us many channels controlled by only six corporations, the internet offers us billions of voices controlled by a few platforms and algorithms. No matter what the medium is, it deeply impacts the messages sent and the discourse that follows.