Reflection on Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson

               I thought this book would be more of social analysis, but I think it falls more into the self-help category. Manson talks about various dilemmas we find ourselves in but it’s hard to find a unifying theme in the book. Some things I did like, though, were his points about how happiness should not be our goal in life. Happiness is a temporary state and you can’t go through life trying to maximize your joy at all times. What is more important is fulfilling your duties to others. He also points out the difference between variety and freedom. If one person has 2 cereal options and another has 100. The person with 100 does not have more freedom, she has more variety. Freedom isn’t how many choices you have, but rather your ability to make a choice without being forced to do anything by anyone or anything else. Manson has good lessons in the book, but I would have been more interested in what he has to say about broader unhappiness in developed countries. He touches on this on a “micro” level. He discusses how variety doesn’t improve our lives and how we’ll always just look for more problems once our problems are solved, but I didn’t feel like I got any real solutions out of the book.

Reflection on The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic by Akhil Reed Amar

               This book is the third in a long series that Amar is writing about the constitution using different perspectives. I didn’t realize that until he mentioned it at the end of this book, when I found out that the one other book I had read by him was the first in the series. This book starts each chapter by discussing one state’s connection with a constitutional concept and explores a lot of different ideas that have been debated in our country’s nearly 250-year history. It was pretty cool, though not as engaging as the first book in the series. I found myself a little bored with it by the end. My problem is that the book lacked any central, unifying theme. It covered lots of different aspects of constitutional law, but quickly changed subject every 20-odd pages, making it hard to follow and really get into. I think I’ll give it four out of five stars, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I will still be interested in reading more of Amar’s work though. He writes with a lot of clarity.

Reflection on Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

               This book is a thrilling account of the lies of Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 years old to create a company (Theranos) that would invent blood testing devices the size of a phone that would only require a fingerprick of blood rather than an intravenous needle. If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. The technology wasn’t there. Despite that, Elizabeth Holmes allowed whatever sort of complex she has to pus her into bigger and bigger lies about her company until it all came crashing down in 2016. This book is a really exciting and detailed account of her attempts to cover up her lies, silence her critics, and swindle multi-millionaires and multinational companies out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

               Holmes was able to fool a lot of people through various techniques. She imposed intense security regulations on the company, hiring bodyguards and forcing employees to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. While this was seemingly to hide the incredible technology that she had as a trade secret, it was actually to hide the lack of technology and that her multi-billion-dollar company was based on nothing at all. During demonstrations, Theranos would place the finger-stick sample of the visiting VIP in their “miniLab,” wait until they left the room, and then take the sample out to run on a modified commercial analyzer. While Tharons claimed they could use blood from finger-pricks, they needed blood drawn intravenously. While they said that they could do dozens of tests at once, they could only do a few and needed to do them separately. Their lies cost their partners, Safeway and Walgreens, millions of dollars.

               The book is really thrilling, especially the last few chapters when the author starts to tell the story of how he met all the people involved in the scandal. The book tells the tale of Theranos through the perspective of employees who quit or were fired and it’s interesting how they all had pieces of information but needed somebody like Carreyrou to put it all together. Seen individually, it was unclear, but when Carreyrou viewed the whole picture from afar, it came into focus.

Miscellaneous:

• Something I’ve been trying to think of lately is how to describe the importance of patience. I know that patience is a virtue and my gut always told me it was good, but I couldn’t describe it until I read this passage in the book: “Arnav Khannah, a young mechanical engineer who worked on the miniLab, figured out a surefire way to get Sunny off his back: answer his emails with a reply longer than five hundred words. That usually bought him several weeks of peace because Sunny simply didn’t have the patience to read long emails.” There’s a great example of how an impatient manager can be bad for business.
• One astounding thing is that Rupert Murdoch, who invested in Theranos, was able to take the $150 million he invested as a tax write-off. How the fuck is it possible that you can invest all that money, lose it, and still end up fine? Doesn’t that just encourage people to make bad investments?

Reflection on The World of Ice and Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and The Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, Elio M. García Jr., Linda Antonsson

               Now here’s a really cool book that tells the history of Planetos as it is known to the maesters of Oldtown. I loved the illustrations and the descriptions of the faraway lands in Essos. I only wish there was more. The book does a whole history of the world and a history of the Targaryens. It also details the histories of the major regions that make up the Seven Kingdoms. The book fills in a lot of gaps and I really enjoyed it. I would recommend to any fan of the A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Reflection on American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 by William Manchester

               I wanted to read this book because I really enjoyed Manchester’s biography of Churchill. While American Caesar is not as well written, it shares some very interesting thematic similarities. Both books are about men of the West born at the end of the Victorian Age and dying in the Atomic Age. Both men were meant to fight the Manichean struggle of World War Two and both saw themselves as extremely important in the history of the world from a young age. They both became disillusioned with war in their elder years and both dreamed of ending it. They both hated Communism. Both men were patricians, raised to see themselves as above all others, a trait that would have important effects on their leadership abilities.

               One interesting facet of MacArthur’s reputation is that he was hated by his own troops but loved by American civilians and foreigners. His own soldiers called him “Dugout Doug,” but the author argues that MacArthur was anything but the type of general who liked to stay away from the fighting. While he kept himself comfortable behind the lines, MacArthur frequently sought out danger and exposed himself to enemy fire countless times—this book references at least a dozen. Only once though did MacArthur truly think he would die, and it was when the Japanese seized Bataan with him and his family close by on Corregidor Island. He was sure that they were all dead until FDR ordered him back to Australia.

               MacArthur was a great general due to his “leapfrogging” technique. Rather than hitting every Japanese bastion so as not to leave enemy fortresses in his rear. MacArthur skipped all that he could, frustrating well-trained Japanese troops who wanted to see combat and cutting off their supply lines. By doing this, he achieved the lowest rates of casualties of any general in the war. In the Southwest Pacific, MacArthur advanced nearly two thousand miles in two years and did eleven hundred of them in two months.

               Something interesting about MacArthur was that he was very liberal. Like Churchill, this did not come out of any identification with common people, but due to his patrician upbringing that commanded a sense of noblesse oblige. Entering Manila, MacArthur could have shut off the roads to civilian traffic to speed up military vehicles but chose not to, saying that, “Before I interfere with the civilian population, so hard hit by the horrors of war, things will have to be a lot worse for us.” MacArthur also expressed sympathy for the Hukbalahaps, who dispossessed landlords and created agrarian soviets in central Luzon. He said that, “I haven’t got the heart to dispossess them. If I worked in those sugar fields I’d probably be a Huk myself.” He opposed discrimination by whites against the local Filipinos and was remarkably anti-racist for a white man of his time. As the dictator of Japan after the war, MacArthur gave women the vote, legalized divorce, dismantled the war industry, held free elections, formed labor unions, and opened all schools without any restrictions on instruction except that they must eliminate military indoctrination and add civics classes. The General also banned American troops from eating Japanese food and canceled martial law. He exhibited tremendous generosity and clemency. The Filipinos and Japanese loved MacArthur immensely and probably even more than the American people.

               MacArthur was dismissed for being openly insubordinate to Truman in the Korean War, attempting to escalate the war when Truman wanted to deescalate to a stalemate. MacArthur’s firm belief was that wars are made to be won and that the USA should have launched an invasion of China. He was recalled but remembered by Americans as one of the greatest public figures of all time.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• MacArthur’s father, who had a Medal of Honor. Desired above all else to have died at the head of his regiment. He got his wish when he was giving a speech to them 50 years after the Civil War when he collapsed and died at their reunion.
• MacArthur was hazed hard at West Point. Southern cadets had him freeze still and recite his father’s Civil War record and then beat him so hard that he had a seizure. “During a lull in his spasms he asked his tentmate… to put a blanket under his feet” to keep his movements quiet and another in his mouth for his outcries.
• MacArthur was a model West Point cadet, finishing first in his class with the third highest points ever achieved at West Point.
• MacArthur did not have a lot of toxic masculinity in him—he let his son dress as a ballerina and a princess as a child.
• Manila was the second hardest hit allied city in the war after Warsaw. Manchester writes that, “seventy percent of the utilities, 75 percent of the factories, 80 percent of the southern residential district, and 100 percent of the business district were razed. Nearly 100,000 Filipinos were murdered by the Japanese.
• MacArthur’s land campaign in the Philippines was a work of genius, taking 17 American divisions against 23 Japanese and coming out losing only 820 men to Japan’s 21,000 losses.
• These are the author’s word’s, not MacArthur’s, but I like how he tries to describe MacArthur’s attitude: “…a gentleman did not look upon women as inferiors. To do so was, by definition, ungentlemanly. It was more; it was, he told those who disagreed with him, sacrilegious. Women, like men, had souls. Therefore they should be treated equally.”
• MacArthur also had a genius-level campaign in Korea, where he defeated 30-40,000 North Koreans in a daring surprise landing at Inchon at a cost of only 536 dead and 2,550 wounded to American forces.

Reflection on Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapschott

               I feel like this was a weird book for me to read. At times I liked it, was bored by it, hated it, and loved it. It was really a roller coaster ride because it does a lot. This book tells the life stories of Keynes and Hayek. It explains their work and economic theories. It analyzes their legacies. Lastly, it covers modern economics and politics through the lens of their conflict. I come away with the perspective that these were two great men, both very smart. I would only call Keynes a genius, but both were extremely wise. The fundamental concerns they dealt with were political as well as economic, since they argued over the role of the government in the economy.

               Before I get into the substance of the ideas that each man had, it is interesting to note that Keynes and Hayek had an interesting relationship. Hayek was younger and looked up to Keynes before developing different economic ideas, as Keynes was one of a few who argued that the indemnities placed by the victors of WWI on the losers were too high, an appealing message to Austrians like Hayek. After a long period of disrespect and argument in the 1930’s, the two eventually had a truce on a personal level, though their followers would still duke it out. The two men still argued with one another but forged a deeper respect and even guarded university buildings from firebombs together during the Blitz.

               The motivations of each of the great economists were different and led to different thinking. While Keynes was an economist to apply solutions to peoples’ lives, Hayek was much more interested in economic theory for its own sake. This reasonably led to the development of macroeconomics from Keynesian theory and microeconomics from Hayekian theory. It’s also probably the reason that libertarians in the vein of Hayek (and Milton Friedman) tend to be more idealistic and utopian in their ideas. Some argue that they’re even religious. It’s because Hayekian thinkers/libertarians are really not thinking about the world as it is, but rather as it could be. Keynes used an analogy that’s informative. The following idea is ugly and a sort of “so-stupid-it-just-might-work” strategy that is useful in the real world, but could never conform to Hayek’s ideals about how an economy should run. The author of the book writes, quoting Keynes:

“If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again,” he wrote, “there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.” To emphasize how a commonsense grasp of economics differed from how economics worked in real life, he repeated his ominous conclusion that “just as wars have been the only form of large-scale loan expenditure which statesmen have thought justifiable, so gold-mining is the only pretext for digging holes in the ground which has recommended itself to bankers as sound finance.”

               One reflection I’ve had while reading this book (which is not an original thought) is that economics is politics. When you think about other sciences, biologists, geologists, and mathematicians get into their fields to discover truths. Economists generally don’t. They usually have some sort of preconceived political idea or allegiance that they seek to prove. I am not saying this is everybody, but the field is so tied into politics that I really can’t see it any other way. Hayek’s political observations, which Keynes generally agreed with, are in my opinion his wisest ideas. Hayek’s primary concern with government spending is not to dispute that it will have positive effects on the lives of ordinary people. Rather, as an Austrian in self-imposed exile, he identified a serious negative impact of the increased power of the state that is caused by its increased spending: totalitarianism. Being from Austria, a country trapped between Hitler and Stalin, it was clear for him to see how a strong and powerful state could be used for evil. To me, the most critical facet of that state is then its connection to democracy. The Road to Serfdom is a product of its times in alleging that high government spending leads to tyranny. That correlation has been mixed up in modern Europe, where non-tyrannical, democratic states spend more than ever before. So long as the state adheres to the rule of law and the will of the people, tyranny is avoidable.

A strong state is just a tool that can be used for good or for evil, and if it is tied to a free and fair democracy where one person equals one vote, it should act in the interest or at least the desires of a majority of its people. The popular approach posed by followers of Hayek and “the enemies of big government” is to reduce the size of the state so that none can wield that tremendous power. If this could be done in the utopian way that libertarians dream of, such that democracy and representative government could be preserved, I would support it. However, I think this is an idea that’s better on paper than in reality. Because a weaker state cannot regulate the economy, I think that markets move towards monopoly. With no power to break up these monopolies, the power of the state is no longer the relative power that can produce oppression. After all, what libertarians often fail to acknowledge is that the state is not the only source of oppression. Instead, the natural tendency is for corporations or wealthy elites to take power, hijack the state, and diminish the power of the majority of non-rich people. This leads to the opposite of the other utopian dream-world: communism. While the communist utopia ends in a massive and oppressive state, the libertarian utopia ends in massive and oppressive corporations. Tyranny can further be imposed from outside in the failed libertarian utopia since other states that are stronger could enter such a fractured country and conquer it.

               The author is kind of unclear on who’s side he is on throughout most of the book, but in the final chapters, he shows that he is clearly a Keynesian in most respects. At the very least, he has strong condemnation for the neoliberal consensus that is represented by the economic policies of Reagan, Thatcher, Bush Senior, and Clinton. Woohoo, I’m just reading more books by authors who agree with me. But that said, these facts are damning. Wapschott writes that “public debt grew from a third of GDP in 1980 to more than half of GDP by the end of 1988, from $900 billion to $2.8 trillion.” He writes that Reagan entered office when America was the world’s largest creditor and left us the world’s largest debtor. The irony is that that was just Keynesianism for the rich. For all the talk of reducing the size of government, Reagan just cut taxes on the rich and moved money from social welfare programs to military spending. That has been the modus operandi of the Republican Party ever since. Nobel Prize-winner Robert Lucas was once quoted as saying that, “Everyone’s a Keynesian in a foxhole.” It has special application to Republicans, especially Reagan and Bush Junior, who despite entering office with Hayekian ideals, almost immediately abandoned them when the going got tough. It is easy to be a utopian until you actually have responsibility for the economy.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Both Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises were inhibited by their poor English, though Hayek was at least understandable and much better than his mentor Von Mises, who failed to impact the English-speaking world as much as his student.
• John Kenneth Galbraith summed up his interpretation of supply-siders’ arguments: “The poor do not work because they have too much income; the rich do not work because they do not have enough income. You expand and revitalize the economy by giving the poor less, the rich more.”

Reflection on The Last Lion Volume 3 by William Manchester and Paul Reid

               I’m not really going to do a reflection on this one because I’ve been busy/procrastinating for a while and I just wanna read new things. Overall it was good, though probably the worst of the three volumes. I have one real reflection in that it’s interesting how aristocratic types like Churchill tend to believe more in the social safety net than pure middle-class or upper middle-class capitalists. I think people of aristocratic lineage see themselves as having a lofty responsibility over “the realm,” and I think that leads to interesting political decisions.