Hillel: If Not Now, When? by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin

    I really liked this book, although it is less of a biography than I anticipated. It turns out that we know extremely little about the life of Hillel, and instead we know much more about his views on ethics and Judaism. I really liked Rabbi Telushkin's approach, and he emphasizes something important: that for Hillel, religiosity was measured not by ritual observance to the strictest degree, but by ethical observance and good morality. Moreover, the Torah has an ethical will and ethical obligations, and sometimes literal adherence to the rule of the Torah may lead to violation of its ethical imperatives. In those circumstances, the ethical and fair should prevail.

    Telushkin is very kind to converts to Judaism, emulating Hillel. He writes of how there are three separate stories of converts seeking out Hillel, and how in each situation, Hillel helped them convert as easily and quickly as possible and then aided them in their Jewish education after. I even learned that in the story of Ruth, Ruth converts to Judaism and that her descendants eventually include David, so he is descended from an "impure" matrilineal line. And if its good enough for the King, then it should be good enough for everyone.

    Hillel also urged less judgment of others. Telushkin writes that as a rule, we generally judge ourselves by our intentions while we judge others by their actions. But Hillel said "do not be too sure of yourself until the day of your death," meaning not to be to confident in having overcome your evil inclinations. Telushkin points out that this may be the reason that Judaism focuses more on a person's day of death than their birthday, since that is when we can fully assess if someone lived righteously. Hillel is also the popularizer of the phrase, "do not judge your fellow until you are in his place."

    There's an interesting relationship explored in this book between Hillel and Jesus. Hillel was old enough to be Jesus' grandfather and there is no evidence that the two ever met, but it seems like Hillel may have influenced him. Jesus preached that "treat others as you would like them to treat you," which is an affirmative version of "what is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbor." Many Christian and Jewish scholars have hypothesized that this reformulation is purposefully taking from Hillel.

    Telushkin ends up focusing on some of Hillel's teachings that come down to four good points. They are:

1. Ethics is the essence of Jewish religiosity.

2. Maintain an openness and receptivity to non-Jews who wish to convert.

3.  Exclude mean-tempered, volatile, and verbally abusive people from the teaching profession.

4. Use tikkun olam to root out any unfairness or unintended cruelty in Jewish law. Tikkun Olam means repairing the world and pursuing social justice.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Hasmonean King John Hyrcanus of Israel was a descendant of Judah Maccabee and forcibly converted the Idumeans (descendants of the Edomites) to Judaism, the only known example of mass forced conversion in Jewish history.
• Later Jewish teachings such as the book of Isaiah exhibit desire to spread Judaism beyond the original tribe of Israel.
• The Jewish marriage ceremony comes from oral law and is not recorded in the Tanakh.
• In the 1930s, City College of New York was 80% Jewish. 
• Apparently the disciples of the School of Shammai one day attacked and killed many of Hillel's students, resulting in increased power for Shammai and literalism for a time.
• Telushkin writes that he knows of no Jewish scholar who believes that Jesus thought during his life that he was forming a new religion. Jesus is even quoted as saying that he did not come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets, which Paul disagreed with and preached that they would change the old rules, like getting rid of kosher.
• The Talmud mandates that "We provide financial support to the Gentile poor along with the Jewish poor."
• Hillel is the first rabbinic stage to speak about an afterlife, but he warned people not to focus solely on the afterlife.
• Sukkot was totally forgotten in Israel and brought back by Ezra.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich

            When Barbara Ehrenreich died earlier this year, I saw a lot of eulogizing about her important role as an advocate for the working class and tons of references to this book so I had to read it. I was really impressed by it. In the book, Ehrenreich describes the experience of working six different jobs in three places (she always needed two at once) to get by in Key West, Maine, and Minnesota. She faces huge difficulties and finds that it is either impossible or that she scrapes by only well enough that she could make it until a crisis came, at which point her savings would be wiped out. There is something patronizing about Ehrenreich engaging in “poverty tourism” but I think that is far outweighed by how important it is for her to be publishing this book. There is something incredibly valuable about a person bringing attention to the issues of working class people by stepping into their shoes, and it reminds me of a similar technique employed by Florida politician Bob Graham to work different jobs across the state.

Ehrenreich also observes that she was certainly no better than anyone else for having a Ph.D. or experience as a higher earners. Instead, she fits in normally with everyone and is perfectly average at businesses full of low and high performers. Ehrenreich ends up focusing on two white areas: Maine and Minnesota, because she realized in Key West, which was more diverse, that she couldn’t get certain jobs because they became reserved for certain ethnic groups. As a white woman in the restaurant business, she was always moved to waitstaff in the front of the house, and she couldn’t get a job as a housekeeper- those went to African-American women or Spanish-speakers.

            For all the privations Ehrenreich was able to suffer through (which I don’t) such as living in poor accommodations, eating rarely, and having to suffer through menial and difficult labor, one thing she couldn’t do without was something I live without: a car. I certainly don’t suffer in my life, but not having a car is such a huge divider of people in America. So much of life requires a car, and Ehrenreich can’t even avoid it. She mentions many times that it costs her a lot of money to keep the car, but it keeps lots more jobs open to her in different places. At one point she even references a Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard. In it, a man crashes his car into a median and gets marooned in traffic. Unable to weave through the never-ending cars, he is stuck surviving off of whatever happened to be in his car.

            I think that one of the best observations the author makes (a few different times) is that managers just get in the way of a good product or service a lot of the time. She writes, “Cooks want to prepare tasty meals, servers want to serve them graciously, but managers are there for only one reason—to make sure that money is made for some theoretical entity, the corporation, which exists far away in Chicago or New York, if a corporation can be said to have a physical existence at all.” This is the loud sucking sound of money flying out of worker’s pockets and into shareholder values. The managers can make more money for the company by improving things, but they can also make more money by economizing, laying people off, and making life miserable, and they often choose the latter. Whereas the maids that the author works with want to do a good job, it is their manager who encourages them to be quicker. He shows them training videos focusing them purely on the visible grime that a customer can inspect, completely ignoring the most important part of the job: actual sanitation and hygiene. The effect of the manager-mindset pervades society-at-large. We cut public services for the poor and invest more heavily in cops and prisons, condemning us to greater inequality from which the only beneficiaries are usually the agents of repression themselves.

            The class division has huge effects on women that Ehrenreich analyzes in depth (which is probably because she is a woman). In one of the places she lives, her window is right on a road, open to anyone’s view from outside if she wants any light. And her lock doesn’t work too well, leaving her feeling vulnerable. Just having a safe shelter is such a big deal. While working as a housekeeper, she works for the wealthy alumna of an important women’s college. She sees in her client’s home that the alumna is now spending time monitoring her investments and her baby’s bowel movements. There are special charts for the baby, with spaces for time of day, fluid intake, consistency, and color. There are books in the house about pregnancy, breastfeeding, and everything involving the early years. While I expected Ehrenreich to write about how disappointing it was for an accomplished woman to be reduced to child-rearing, she saw it another way. Instead, Ehrenreich compares her to Maddy, another housekeeper who struggles with childcare and pays her sister-in-law to watch her toddler. Meanwhile, another of the housekeepers is pregnant and inhaling cleaning chemical fumes all day long. Ehrenreich writes, “Maybe there’s been some secret division of the world’s women into breeders and drones, and those at the maid level are no longer supposed to be reproducing at all. Maybe this is why our office manager, Tammy, who was once a maid herself, wears inch-long fake nails and tarty little outfits to show she’s advanced to the breeder caste and can’t be sent out to clean anymore.” I found this to be harsh and somewhat sexist, but I can understand the bitterness.

            Some of the most difficult things that Ehrenreich faces in her experience are the small difficulties beyond low pay. She describes how difficult it is to change jobs since each new job requires an application, an interview, and a drug test, which requires a lot of running around town when you could be working. And the whole application process works to grind you down. In fact, it is designed to do so at places like Wal-Mart or other big corporations that have it down to a science. When she works at Wal-Mart in Minnesota, Ehrenreich describes how the hiring process never even gives her a point at which she can ask about her wage. She just goes right from the application to orientation without any discussion of the wage or a negotiation. The orientation is long and includes significant portions bashing unions. Ehrenreich quotes the AFL-CIO ask saying that ten thousand workers a year are fired for participating in union organizing drives, always for minor infractions since they can’t be fired for unionizing- that’s the reason for rules against profanity, which serve as a good fig leaf. But it is amazing how even in the late 1990s, when Ehrenreich was writing and the economy was supposedly good for workers in a tight labor market, employers could still make applicants feel like supplicants.

            As Ehrenreich puts it, “Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.” One problem with living in a tight labor market is that once everyone is employed, wages rise, and housing costs get higher. Unfortunately, official records don’t record housing costs when calculating poverty, only taking the cost of food and multiplying it by three to determine the poverty line. That’s a problem because in the 60s, when the measure was adopted, food accounted for 24% of an average family budget and housing was 29%. By 1999, food was only 16% of the average budget while housing reached 37%. This is even worse for renters (the poor) because they don’t get the large mortgage-interest deduction on their taxes that homeowners do. At the time of publication, Ehrenreich cites an estimate from the Economic Policy Institute that the living wage for a family of one adult and two children was $30,000, or $14 an hour. This was calculated to include enough for health insurance, a telephone, and childcare, but did not include going out to eat, video rentals, internet access, cigarettes, wine, or very much meat. It is a life of privation. And at the time of publication, 60% of American workers earned less than that. It all comes down to some of the final words of the book, which are probably the most famous that Ehrenreich has ever written:

When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice to you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.

 

Miscellaneous Fact:

• When Ehrenreich works as a waitress in Key West, she makes $2.43 an hour plus tips. I was blown away since this is still above the tipped minimum wage federally!! I am shocked we’ve gone almost a quarter century without an increase. Instead, it seems like the amounts that we tip have grown, now that the minimum prompt on the payment iPads is usually 20%.

Mussolini by R.J.B. Bosworth

            I found Bosworth's book on the Duce to be a really good informative piece about the dictator, and a lot of it really surprised me. I think that Bosworth was a little too generous at times with Mussolini, although he clearly views the dictator with contempt. It might just come from the fact that Mussolini looks a lot better when compared to Hitler. Hitler was just such an irrational and stupid man, whereas Mussolini had much more substance by comparison. Mussolini was a thug, but he was also an aspiring intellectual, and had some complex thoughts, although they were contradictory and he knew little about how people actually worked beyond what was necessary to manipulate them. By the end, Mussolini comes across as a small and bitter man. I only wish that this book was told more like a novel and Bosworth got more into telling events as they happened, instead of focusing on his commentary. It makes the book less fun to read since the author specifically makes an effort to dull the most interesting parts of Mussolini's life.

             Mussolini was born in a small town in northern Italy to a politically active father who was a socialist. The young Mussolini was considered smart, and spent time as a teacher before becoming a writer for various political papers. He eventually became the leader of Il Popolo d’Italia, a socialist newspaper, and that’s where he was working in the 1910s as war appeared on the horizon in Europe.

On the eve of World War One, most Italians supported neutrality, including Giolitti, the leading Italian politician of the time, the King, big business, the Army, the Pope Benedict XV, most of the peasantry, and most women. Most Italians were not part of the “short war illusion” that predicted the end of the war by Christmas 1914.  But many Italian intellectuals like the young Mussolini (in his early thirties) supported entry into the war as a means of expansionism. Il Popolo d’Italia was not popular at all at this time—it had just 1,600 subscribers—but it was pushing Italy to intervene, claiming it was critical for Italy’s development into a major power.

Italy ultimately decided to go to war in May 1915 with the goal of taking some territory from Austria, not declaring war against Germany until 1916. Italy fought a mountainous campaign against Austria in which five million Italians saw military service, with half a million dying and another half million wounded. Most of the soldiers were peasants, and by 1919, 63% of war orphans came from peasant families. In October-November 1917, Italy suffered a major defeat at Caporetto, bringing Austrian and German troops onto the plains near Milan, but by the end of 1918, Austria surrendered (on November 4, a week before Germany surrendered). Italy’s victory was ambiguous, but helped it gain some territories from Austria. But Italy did not emerge as a modern political state after the war like many other European powers. Whereas England, France, Russia, and Germany all ended the war with more politically activated populations that were bound to the state with new social programs, that never happened in Italy.

Mussolini was a corporal during World War One, and seemed to have been competent on the front. He published his war diary between 1915 and 1917 in Il Popolo d’Italia, speaking in short lines, as one does at war: “It is war time. So you go to war.” “ Trench life is natural, primitive life.” In March 1917, Mussolini was wounded by shrapnel during a grenade exercise behind the front and ran a fever of 40.2 degrees Celsius. By happenstance, Mussolini met King Victor Emmanuel III, who was on an official visit to a military hospital. They exchanged greetings there. When the war ended, Italy was in flux, and Bosworth writes that two words dominated Italian politics: national, describing the nationalization movement, and fascio, an Italian word meaning faction, or league. Fascio became relevant due to the Fasci di combattimento (ex-servicemen’s leagues) that were springing up across Italy, of which Mussolini was a leader. In March of 1919, Mussolini summoned the fasci to Milan along with other former interventionist thinkers, and the Fascist movement was born.

In the aftermath of the war, Italian socialists were triumphant, but forces hostile to socialism could rely on a natural electorate of those who craved a positive memory of the war in contrast to the socialists’ condemnation of it. Mussolini had a political transformation throughout the war. Whereas before the war, he had been a socialist, during the buildup to war he became more nationalist and more interested in what Italy could do on its own, unified. By the end of the war, Mussolini had renounced socialism, and argued that socialists had taken Italy into a civil war based on class war, and that the real conflict was not the socialist one between rich and poor, but the one between national and “anti-national” forces. Mussolini did what all conservatives must do to counter the strength of the poor masses, he had to siphon some of them off by changing the debate to be not about economics but mentality, “not material but spiritual,” as Bosworth writes.

But even though socialists couldn’t count on supporters from those with fond memories of the war, new members were joining socialist unions across the country, and elections in November 1919 gave socialists a majority. At this time, the fasci di combattimento were still divided and small, with 16 different fasci across the country with completely different ideologies. But there was still movement happening on the political right. In August of 1919, Mussolini found the funds to create a new journal, Il Fascio, and in September, the poet Gabriele Annunzio marched 1000 men into the town of Fiume on the Slovenian border and established a “lyrical dictatorship,” declaring himself the defender of the city’s Italian-ness.

In May 1920, there was a second Fascist congress, and Mussolini tempered some of his anti-institutional instincts. He now said that the Vatican was good, and Catholicism could be tied to the state. He was more willing to accept the monarchy as well. The new Fasci directorate had swung to the right. In January 1921, D’Annunzio and his men were forced out of Fiume, which they had taken over a little over a year before, eliminating a major rival for Mussolini. D’Annunzio had shouted “Fiume or death,” but found out that fleeing was always an option.

The instability of Italian government led to new elections in May 1921, and Fascists proclaimed themselves to be outside ideological dogmatism, being both conservative and progressive, reactionary and revolutionary, and aristocratic and democratic, and so on. This made the Fascists acceptable to the Prime Minister, Giolitti, who added them to a national bloc, resulting in wins for the national bloc over the socialists and the presence of Fascists in parliament. Giolitti had unjustified confidence, stating that Fascists were like fireworks: “they’ll make a great deal of noise, but only leave smoke behind.” But they betrayed Giolitti, the 35 Fascists elected immediately abandoned the government, sat on the far right of the chamber, and associated themselves with the opposition. Giolitti’s government collapsed on June 27, 1921, and on August 2, the Fascists made an agreement with socialists and trade unions, and on February 26, 1922, the next government collapsed. All the while, Fascists were marching through the countryside and terrorizing left wingers and strikers, and there was a possibility of a Fascist attack and occupation of Rome, led by Fascist Italo Balbo. Other Fascists pressed for more action. Under the threat of Fascist attack, King Victor Emmanuele III was pressured into offering that Mussolini form a coalition government on October 29. Mussolini proceeded to the capital with wearing his black shirt with 300,000 men and was sworn in as Italy’s youngest prime minister at 39 years old on October 31, 1922. He had risen from being a nobody to being prime minister in under three years.

Once in power, the Fascists grew their party membership, rising from 200,000 in October 1922 to 780,000 in December 1923. Most of this growth came in the south. Once in power, Mussolini put out the word that fascist violence should end, stating in November of 1922 that it "bloodies and dishonors the nation." But it is unclear how serious he was about actually stopping the roving gangs of fascists terrorizing leftists. On December 15, Mussolini formed the Grand Council (Gran Consiglio), which was a sort of parallel cabinet outside of parliament that met in Mussolini's private apartment. The most powerful Fascists were in the Grand Council and not the cabinet, including Italo Balbo, Cesare de Vechi, Michele Bianchi, and Emilio de Bono. The first act of the Council was to create the "Voluntary Militia for National Security," which was a party-led militia ready to stop any Anti-Fascists that would threaten Fascist government, essentially a revolutionary guard. The Council was a major part of early Fascism, meeting 106 times between 1923 and 1929, but reducing in scope, meeting 56 times between 1930 and 1936 and then just 23 times between 1937 and 1940. By the mid-1930s, they met just to be harangued by Mussolini.

In August 1923, Mussolini began his first imperial ventures, conjuring up an international incident over the Greek-Albanian border. In a clash between Italians surveying the border and unknown assailants, and Italian general was killed. The Greeks alleged that bandits did it, but Mussolini claimed it was the Greek government. Mussolini ordered the Italian fleet to ready itself to seize the island of Corfu unless the Greeks accepted severe demands in 20 hours. Some of the demands included that the Greek government attend a funeral ceremony in a Roman Catholic church for the dead and publicly honor the Italian flag as well as paying a large indemnity. The Greeks "were conciliatory," writes Bosworth (whatever that means), but Italy landed troops on Corfu on August 31 anyway and took over the island quickly.

Meanwhile, in November of 1923, a little-known rabble-rouser named Adolf Hitler launched the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Mussolini apparently showed some interest at the time, but was briefed that Hitler and his associates were "buffoons." But where his comrades failed in Germany, Mussolini sought to strengthen his hand in Italy through elections. The Fascists pushed through the "Acerbo Law" with conservative support, which gave additional seats as a reward to a party that won a majority and over 25% of the vote. While opposed by the liberals, it was had enough support from conservatives who argued that it would unify the nation. In January 1924, parliament was dissolved and elections were scheduled for April 6. While this was constitutional, illegal violence had not stopped outside Rome. The Fascist gangs, known as squadrisi, killed a left-Catholic priest, Giovanni Minzoni, near Ferrara in August 1923, and provincial Fascists continually advocated violence against those who doubted Fascism. By the time parliament was dissolved, it was clear who had the momentum. Elite men from all over the country joined the listone (big list) of Fascist party candidates for the election, and Mussolini cheerfully accommodated the old elite. Mussolini suppressed violence in the run-up to the election and the Fascists appeared to be an establishment party now that they had all the establishment players under their tent. They ended up not even needing the Acerbo Law to gain a majority, but it certainly didn't hurt. Whereas 18 months earlier, Fascism had barely existed, it won half the votes in the north, 76% in the center, and 81.5% in the south. It was the biggest victory in the history of unified Italy, and followed the classic tactic of aligning with Conservatives. Shortly after the election, Fascists kidnapped reformist and liberal Giacomo Matteoti and killed him.

The Matteoti affair became a major scandal. It appears that the Fascists who killed him hadn't planned to kill him, as they dumped him in an easy-to-find spot on the side of the road. Bosworth thinks they may have intended to kidnap him and rough him up but got carried away. It also appears they were not acing on orders, but rather "working toward the Fuhrer," to borrow a phrase from Ian Kershaw. For months the scandal grew, but surprisingly sort of fizzled out when Mussolini took responsibility for running a vicious propaganda campaign. By January 1925, it was over and the King approved a new cabinet. Mussolini was Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of War, Minister of the Navy, and Minister for Aviation. He later became Minister of Corporations from 1926-29, Minister of Colonies from 1928-29, and Minister of Public Works in 1929.

Mussolini was unique in forming Fascism as a political religion, connecting his party to the people in a way never done before. Mussolini developed a public image of charisma and a sort of savagery and athleticism. He was regularly photographed swimming, playing sports, and otherwise looking manly. Bosworth writes of how often he was seen and photographed in the "extrusion of bodily liquids." Mussolini was always sweating, shaking off water during a swim, seen taking off his shirt to ski or join a harvest, all of which was unimaginable to his political contemporaries. Within the state, the Fascists practiced a sort of "institutional Darwinism," in which it was assumed and even encouraged that Fascists in government be in conflict with one another to rise to the top. Public reports about Fascists on the rise usually included details about who supported them and who opposed them. But for all of his ability to bring his persona to the masses, Mussolini did little for them materially. Bosworth writes that, "Just as their fathers had done in 1915, peasants from the Piedmontese mountains thought they had entered paradise when they were conscripted in 1935, because military rations included meat. In the northern Alps, those who stayed at home told an interviewer with some wistfulness in the 1970s: 'Fascism brought us neither gain nor harm. It is as though it had never been.'" I think this is very reflective of what the right wing has to offer: personal connection to the leader and cultural victory over "the left," but little of material value. 

Mussolini's public persona took up most of his life. The Duce took advice from counselors in the morning and made most decisions at night. In his family life, the Mussolinis were becoming more respectable publicly and his children were sent to expensive private schools with the children of the aristocracy. Mussolini kept making more babies too, ending up with six children. But he remained a distant father to those children, preferring the family cat to his own children. His sons became quiet teenagers, and Mussolini usually ate alone. The family did not chat often. Mussolini was also a misogynist, something that got worse and worse as he got older. He would frequently advise young men to avoid the influence of women, and once rhetorically asked an interviewer, "During all the centuries of civilization, has there ever been a woman architect?" While he still enjoyed having sex with women (a lot it seems like), the dictator rarely longed for the company of intelligent women, and became a man's man.

Mussolini and the Catholic Church were not natural allies, but drew close throughout his reign. The young Mussolini viewed the church as a relic; but as a ruler, El Duce saw a use for the Pope. In February 1929, in an opulent ceremony at the Lateran Palace, Mussolini and the Pope Pius XI signed accords making the Vatican City and independent enclave within Rome, and the Church recognized (finally) the unification of Italy, after having been upset about losing Papal territory in Emilia-Romagna. The Church was confirmed in its authority over marriage as well as discipline of dissident priests, and the Fascists agreed to reinstitute compulsory religious education. There was another conflict in May 1931, when the Fascist regime banned the Catholic Action youth organizations, but a compromise was reached by the end of the summer, as the Pius XI recognized the uses of this conservative regime.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany, an event that would dramatically effect the course of Mussolini's life. Bosworth explains that at that point, Mussolini had considered a 14 year rule, that would have led to his retirement in 1932. If he had done so, he would hardly be remembered as the monster we see him as today. "He might have entered history as a figure of some light and some darkness." But the rise of the Nazi party to the north changed everything. While the Fascists had spent most of the 1920s ignoring the Nazis, who were just one of many far-right parties in Europe struggling for power, the Nazis certainly spent a lot of time looking to Italy, a potential model of their government. But despite their ideological similarities, the Nazis were lukewarm about Italian Fascism. For one, they considered Italians to be Mediterranean, and therefore the lowest of the European races. One of the leaders of the Nazis, Anton Drexler, even said Mussolini was "probably" a Jew, and declared Fascism to be a Jewish movement (which the Nazis didn't really like lol). Moreover, Italy had taken the side of the allies in World War One, largely viewed as a betrayal by the Germans, and as a result, Italy had gained German territory in South Tyrol at the Versailles peace conference. But Hitler was different from the rest of the party, he saw in Italy an opportunity, and, writes Bosworth, "fanatically driven by Anti-Semitism, Anti-Communism, and Anti-Slavism, Hitler had no room among his prejudices to be Anti-Italian as well." The initial stage in their relationship culminated in 1934, when the two dictators met in June (in Venice), but nothing was set in stone yet. Mussolini still criticized Nazism in his political commentaries, especially its nonsensical race "science."

Economically, Mussolini was a poor leader who also faced difficult circumstances. Italy had long been the weakest of Europe's major powers, and Mussolini had done little to change that when the Great Depression struck in 1929. He displayed little interest in economic matters, and left most of his to his various Ministers of Finance. Like in most fields, he let the experts do their work. But the economy got very important after the Depression, when the Italian stock market lost a third of its value between 1929 and 1932. Italy did worse than most European countries, with its economic output declining from 8.2% of the European total to 8%. Whereas Liberal Italy had grown at 2.7% annually between 1897 and 1913, Fascist Italy grew at just 1.9% annually from 1922-1938, whereas Britain was at 2.2%, Germany at 3.8%, and Sweden at 4.1%.

 Mussolini reached the peak of his power in the mid-1930s, specifically in 1935, when he achieved his great victory in the conquest of Ethiopia. Bosworth differentiates Italy from Nazi Germany by explaining that Nazi Germany's wars of conquest were squarely of the 20th century. They were about getting territory connected to Germany, expelling the residents, and putting Germans on that soil to expand Germany. Italy, on the other hand, was squarely from the 19th century, simply seeking to conquer the last part of Africa not controlled by a European power. Unlike Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy never established a "mass base" of support of expansionism, and its aggression, while heinous and evil, never acquired the "murderous determination" of Nazi Germany. It was more about coloring the map green, more Theodore Roosevelt than Adolf Hitler.

By the time the Fascists came to power in 1922, Italy already controlled Eritrea and most of modern Somalia since the 1880s, and had won Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, combined and renamed Libya, in conflict with Turkey in 1911-12. Italy also won the Dodecanese islands between Greece and Turkey during that war. That said, the conquest of Ethiopia was still a massive new expansion to Italy's Empire. It should just be noted that it sometimes overshadows other evils of Italian imperialism. After all, the death toll of the Ethiopian conquest was lower than that of Libyan "pacification" from 1928-33. That policy of ethnic cleansing drove a population of 100,000 from the interior into concentration camps near the coast where many Libyans died of hunger and disease. Fascist rule killed some 90% of the livestock in Cyrenaica. Only half of the original deportees survived to the point when the camps were broken up in 1933.

Critically, the invasion of Ethiopia cast Italy out of Europe, showing Italy to be hungry for power in a way that isolated it from other powers. Only Germany, thanks to the personal beliefs of Hitler and the ideological similarities between the two, would support Italy's endeavor. The growing distaste for Mussolini was not just in the halls of government; political journalists also condemned Mussolini's adventurism, and Mussolini responded by expelling the more critical journalists. Italy invaded in October and marched into Addis Ababa in May 1936. Italy suffered just over a thousand casualties while Ethiopia was overwhelmed by bombing and poison gas, despite treaty obligations to avoid it. Once in control, Mussolini ordered a "systematic policy of terror and extermination against rebels and any in the population who favor them," and after the assassination of the local Fascist chief, Fascists responded with massacres that may have killed as many as 30,000. Through the blood of Ethiopians, Mussolini stood on top of the world.

But the "adventure" in Ethiopia was also the basis of Mussolini's downfall. Now pushed further into the arms of Hitler, Mussolini set events in motion that would tie their fate together. As early as 1936, Mussolini told the Austrian Foreign Minister that Italo-German relations were much closer since Germany had not joined the sanctions bloc on Italy after his invasion of Ethiopia. In November of that year Mussolini declared Germany and Italy to be "an axis around which all European states... can revolve." Italy also became the power most involved in Spain, supporting Franco in becoming the dictator in a war from 1936-38. Between 1935 and 1938, Italy spent almost as much of its GNP on military as Germany and spent twice as much as Britain and France. From 1934 to 1940, the military and colonial budgets of Italy took up 51% of government expenditure.

And Germany was a horrible ally. After promising Italy that he would not act in Austria without mutual agreement, Germany invaded Austria without telling Italy in March 1938, expanding German territory to border Italy in the northeast on the River Brenner. Mussolini was embarrassed publicly, and later commentators have identified this as the moment that Italy was made completely dependent on Germany as the junior partner. And Germany kept acting aggressively and irresponsibly, taking Italy along with it. Germany also seized the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939 (Mussolini was not informed). It was at this time that Mussolini began to adopt more German ways of thinking, and became more racist in his speeches. He even claimed privately that his family was "nordic" because they were from northern Italy and his children instinctively married other northerners. He declared that they wouldn't be known as Mediterranean, but Aryan. Mussolini unconditionally supported Kristallnacht, and passed laws banning marriage with Jews in the style of the Nuremberg laws. Of course, like most other racists, Mussolini and his followers all had their "good Jews," who they thought were exceptions, and it seems like the majority of the Fascist elites were protecting a Jew or helping a Jew escape the country or Europe. All in all, Mussolini's racism, and that of the government, was always somewhat half-hearted, doing as the Germans told them, but not complying to the extent that Eastern Europeans did with gusto in the wake of German invasion.  

Italy was forced to be the junior partner by not only the massive demographic differences (a German population of 80 million compared to 40 million Italians), but also because Mussolini, in nearly two decades in power, had failed completely in the economic sphere. By 1942, Italy would only be able to produce the number of planes in one year that the United States could make in a week, and Italians were starving as GDP actually fell during the war. Italy was still a poor country, and Italian officials begged Hitler not to take them into a war. And he replied that he wouldn't. And then he did anyway. By this point, Italians felt paralyzed by fear of the Nazis, and once again, when the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was signed, no one told Mussolini. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Italy continued to ask for delays through the spring of 1940 until Italy joined Germany in June, the absolute high point of German power after the blitzkrieg conquest of France, truly buying high and then selling low. They had no idea that in just a year Germany would invade the Soviet Union and bring it all crashing down on them. Bosworth points out that really Mussolini was very patient, more than Italian politicians were patient in World War One. He waited until it was clear that Hitler had won the war against France, and joined right before the Battle of Britain began. It seemed like brief participation in a short victory. 

On October 28, 1940, Italian forces tried to invade Greece to seize some territory like the Germans had, but they were immediately revealed to be incapable. Their clothes fell apart in the rain, thye had no mechanical or logistical support, and within six weeks they had lost all momentum. Meanwhile, the Italian "Empire" in Libya and Ethiopia crumbled and Haile Selassie was back in power by 1941. Spain played the whole situation much smarter. Franco had the excuse that he was still recovering from the Civil War and said that bad harvests made it impossible to go to war. That was clearly the right move, and by the end of 1941, he must have been sure he chose correctly.

Once Allied forces were seriously bombing Rome, it was over for Mussolini. The Grand Council ended up voting him out of power, and he was relieved of his office by the King. It is here where I am most critical of Bosworth's writing style. He sometimes writes as if all the actual events are something for the reader to look up elsewhere, while he is just a commentator. But we could use some drama! We could use some narration of what happened. Mussolini's death is introduced in the prologue, but when it happens chronologically in the book, we just skip over it. What a mistake! But that said, Bosworth is best in his analysis of the emotions and the character of the individuals he describes. Speaking of Mussolini's affair with Claretta Petaci, Bosworth writes, "Mussolini's craving for such solace was no doubt meant to counter that brutal misanthropy which came so easily to his lips when he was at the office - in his search for a soft escape from the cruel public world, Mussolini was doing what many a male executive in his fifties has done before and since. Playing the part of sentimental sugar daddy with Elena and Claretta, he could fudge the grim memoranda piling up on his desk and forget the lack of human content left in his relationships with his colleagues. There he could try to resuscitate a 'real' Mussolini, and forget for a moment the burden of his charisma." And then there's another great passage desribing his bitterness: "Back in May 1941 Mussolini had angrily dismissed Roosevelt as a statesman: 'Never in history', he told his son-in-law, 'has a people been ruled by a paralytic. There have been bald kings, fat kings, handsome kings and even stupid ones, but never a king who when he wants to go to the toilet or to dinner must be assisted by other men.' It was a typically brutal outburst. However, by the end of 1941 Mussolini had allowed the underdeveloped Italian economy and fragile and divided Italian society to be pitted against both the USA and the USSR. In such an uneven contest, it was Benito Mussolini who was to learn the meaning (and the cost) of paralysis."

Bosworth ends the book by writing that Mussolinian Fascism is fundamentally of its time and is not reproduceable today in anything like its original form. The problem is that the right wing must always make compromises with the market, and that is why Fascism could not succeed as an ideology. Fascists can't achieve the autarchy they seek, so they end up just being a movement all about image and bluster without substance. And Mussolini's true legacy is being one of the first of a new generation of politics based so much more on propaganda and appearances than ever before. Bosworth rights of the dictator that "he turned out to be no more than an ambitious intellectual from the provinces who believed that his will mattered and who thought, as did others, that he was a Duce and could lead a state like Italy towards a special sort of modernization. His propagandists declared that he was always right. However, in the most profound matters which touch on the human condition, he was, with little exception, wrong."

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Rome fell on June 4, 1944, which was the original date for D-Day, delayed until June 6. Naples had fallen much earlier on October 1, 1943.
• Mussolini was named Benito after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez.
• When Italy was unified in 1860, only 2.5% of Italians spoke the national language rather than a regional dialect.
• Mussolini learned to fly in 1920, and survived a crash in March 1921. Later on, he piloted a plane with Hitler on it in August 1941, terrifying Hitler.
• Almost all the characteristic symbols of Fascism came from “below.” The use of the Roman salute came from Verona, the wearing of the black shirt coopted from the Arditi, and the scouting movement came from the Balilla at Piacenza.
• In 1928-29, Mussolini collaborated with dramatist Giovacchino Forzano on a play about Napoleon, and was cited as co-author when it was performed outside Italy. Apparently it did very well in Budapest.
• Mussolini was not nearly as interested in race as Hitler. He was casually anti-Semitic, but did not stand out among the Italians of the time. In fact, at a meeting with Pope Pius XI in 1932, it was the Pope who was far more anti-Semitic, blaming all the world's problems on the "anti-Christian spirit of Judaism." Interestingly, Pius acknowledged that "In Italy, however, the Jews are an exception." There seems to be a lot of exceptionalism among Italians of the time who were anti-Semitic but still found room for Italian Jews, who they liked.
• There's this weird "Four Power Pact" that Mussolini tried to push with Britain, France, and Germany to solidify European borders (probably so that he could divert his forces elsewhere). The Pact was signed in July 1933, but it was never ratified.
• While many Italian Fascists felt they were fighting against Bolshevism, but the Italian Fascist state still maintained a relationship with the USSR, succeeding in making arms deals throughout the early 1930s.
• Just something interesting: Bosworth identifies a similarity between the Italian conquest of Libya and the conquest of Ethiopia. Both were marked by years of stability coming to an end, and Italy seizing colonial territory just before the outbreak of a World War.
• Mussolini described his Fascist ideology well in a letter to the Greek General Metaxas, who staged a coup in the 1930s. Mussolini advised him to create a single governing party, a single youth organization, a single organization of employers and employees, and a dopolavoro, or an organization dedicated to entertaining the masses after work.
• Germany got an early start on deporting people, taking Germans across the border from Italy to Germany to change the ethnic makeup of border regions.
• Mussolini didn't like Christmas since it celebrated the "birth of a Jew who presented the world with theories which weakened and emasculated it."
• Mussolini's son Romano became a jazz pianist and married Sophia Loren's sister. They had a daughter who is Alessandra Mussolini, a right-wing Member of European Parliament and a member of the same successor-to-Fascism party as Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister.

Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

     What I really liked about this book was its accessibility. The whole point of the book is to take complex emotions and separate them out to more narrowly identify what one is actually feeling. It uses the concept of emotional families like a sort of "emotion wheel" to help us narrow down what we actually feel. For example, resentment is not part of the anger family, but part of envy, since we usually feel resentment towards those who have what we want. In my own thinking, resentment is like the other side of contempt. Whereas resentment comes from a place of inferiority, contempt comes from a place of perceived superiority, since you often feel contempt for someone you think is dumber than you, weaker than you, or otherwise worse than you.

    Something else that is interesting is that we gain emotional complexity as we grow. Like how children are unable to distinguish between sarcasm and irony (according to some researchers cited in the book) until they are ten or eleven years old. Then, after understanding the difference, it is a few more years (usually) before individuals begin to understand the humor in sarcasm as teenagers. 

    Another good distinction in the book that stood out to me was the difference between compassion and pity. Whereas compassion feels open, pity sets up separation between the person and the other that they feel bad for. Pity is marked by a sense of distance, whereas being compassionate is about closeness. Pity involves a belief that the other person is inferior, a self-focused reaction, a desire to maintain emotional distance, and an avoidance of sharing in the other person's suffering. Then there is shame, which is focused on the self, compared with guilt, which focuses on the act. We feel shame about ourselves as we are, whereas guilt is about what we've done. Whereas shame is correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, and depression, guilt is negatively correlated with those behaviors. Humiliation, on the other hand, is imposed from another, and is usually undeserved. Embarrassment is imposed by ourselves, and is usually smaller than humiliation. 

    There is also a lot of very useful advice and some good techniques in this book. Some are good for just thinking about ourselves, and others are useful in relationships. One technique useful just as an individual is self-compassion. Self-compassion uses self-kindness instead of self-judgment, common humanity instead of isolation, and mindfulness instead of over-identification. That means that to be self-compassionate, we focus on forgiveness of ourselves, acknowledgment of the difficulties all people face, and recognition of the emotions passing through us rather than identifying as a person who always feels that way. In relationships, Brown discusses the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" that can doom a marriage or a relationship, citing John Gottman. The four horsemen are criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt. But we can convert each of these into something better. Criticism, using "you"-focused language, can be converted to "I" language. So instead of saying, "why do you always make us late?" you can say "I feel frustrated that we keep arriving late." Then, instead of victimizing oneself by being defensive, you can take responsibility. Just apologizing goes a long way where being defensive can aggravate a situation. Then, instead of stonewalling and simply withdrawing from interaction, it can be better to self-soothe, which involves announcing that you need a timeout to calm down. It can be productive to temporarily end an argument and come back to it later. Finally, there is contempt, which is the most dangerous feeling. Instead of attacking your partner as a person, it is better to describe your own feelings and needs, and eliminate the feelings of superiority that can develop contempt.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

     The Code of Capital is a cool book that is all about the interactions between the law and the economy. Pisotr writes that contract law, property law, corporate law, bankruptcy law, and trusts are the building blocks that give the attributes to assets that privilege its holder. The law goes on to rank competing claims to assets, extend those claims over time and space, and allow holders to claims on assets into state money on demand, protecting their value. The book is very theoretical at times, but then also very grounded when she gives examples throughout. Critically, Pistor is constantly coming back to the fact that there is no capital and no capitalism without the protection of the state, and that without state power to enforce claims to capital, the capitalist economy could not function. She even quotes Adam Smith, who wrote that "Property and civil government very much depend on one another. The preservation of property and the inequality of possession first formed it, and the state of property must always vary with the form of government."

    With regard to corporations, Pistor is critical of how the trust and corporate structures allow individuals to hide behind the corporate veil, and identifies corporations as capital minting operations that can partition assets and shield them to access low-cost loans and find favorable tax and regulation regimes. She compares corporations to partnerships, writing that because partners put their own money at risk, they tend to be more cautious since they aren't investing other people's money like corporations do. However, partnerships tend not to last as long because they only last as long as the partners want to cooperate and have the resources to do so, whereas a corporation may outlive all of its founders.

    I found the section on intellectual property to be very interesting. Pistor started by quoting Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who claimed that "the noblest of human productions-knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas-become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use." But that idea has been completely flipped on its head since he said it in 1918. In fact, the Supreme Court decided in 2013 that merely isolating DNA sequences may not be a patentable process, but distinguished some more artificial forms of DNA manipulation as patentable.

    One of the most significant points that comes up over and over in the book is how the legal systems of New York and the city of London dominate the world economy. Today, 40% of all contractual disputes in the world are governed by English law with another 17% governed by the laws of New York. But is it because of the unique aspects of the common law, or for some other reason, like the fact that the UK and the USA have both been great sea powers? Pistor writes that common law systems tend to have bigger and more liquid financial markets than civil law countries like France, but I am not sure there is a causal relationship there like she implies. Bu she gets into some interesting comparative law in the book. Pistor writes that in the UK, litigants usually don't have client contact and are known as barristers, whereas the transactional lawyers are known as solicitors. Meanwhile, Germany trains young people in the legal profession to be judges first, and then they may enter private practice as attorneys.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Between 2002 and 2015, the US Patent Office granted 4.6 million patents. Only 12% went to individuals while 43.5% went to foreign companies and 44.1% went to US companies.
• Ther Netherlands abolished patents in 1869.
• In 1984, the top fifty law firms in the USA had on average 259 attorneys and an average revenue of $3.4 million. But by 2006, the average top-fifty law firm employed 974 attorneys and brought in revenue of $40 million annually. Whereas the average partner in 1984 made about $300,000 annually, the average partner in 2006 made $1.5 million.

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner

     Cadillac Desert is all about the damming of the West, done mostly by the Bureau of Reclamation. Reisner is a concerned environmentalist, and a strong critic of New Deal waste. He identifies a critical problem with spending plans- that they can't ever stop. Once a congressman gets funding for a major project in his district, another congressman wants the same. Reisner writes that "Congress without water projects would be like an engine without oil; it would simply seize up." The even more critical problem is the combination of the tremendous desire of Americans to move West and tame the high plains and deserts with agriculture with the unyielding power of nature to destroy those plans. Simply put, there are some places that nature forbids to man, and while we can make them work for us for some decades, we cannot do so in the long run. That is what this book is about.

    This book details what goes on beyond the isohyet (line connecting regions of equal rainfall) running through Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, where satellite maps show a quick transition from green to brown. The book proceeds in a more or less chronological order. The stories told stretch back into the later nineteenth century, but some of the difficulties in dealing with nature stretch back into eternity. For example, the Laramie Plains of Wyoming, imagined by pioneers as fertile, virgin land for farming like in Ilinois, are actually five thousand feet higher than comparable lands in Illinois, have a growing season fifty days shorter, and receive only a third as much rainfall. Naturally, when farmers settled these lands, they became dependent on lobbying for massive federal subsidies to maintain their existence. The results were a massive federal irrigation program and a half-century "rampage" of dam development at public expense. Reisner writes that, "The permanence of our dams will merely impress the archaeologists; their numbers will leave them in awe." He notes that a quarter of a million dams of one size or another have been built in the United States in the 20th century. Most are just small earthen plugs cross streams to divert water or raise fish. Fifty thousand are "major works" that dam rivers of real size, and even without those, there are still a few thousand truly big dams that stagger the imagination when one tries to conceive of their construction.

    Early portions of the book feature John Wesley Powell, a geologist of great influence of the later 1800s. But his influence did not control Congress. Whereas he recommended that inhospitable regions of the West be used for raising livestock, giving settlers 2,560 acres of land but water enough to only irrigate twenty, Congress passed the Reclamation Act in 1902, giving everyone 160 acres (or 320 for a man and wife) regardless of whether they settled in Mediterranean-like regions of California or the cold, high plains of Wyoming. You could grow a lot on those 160 acres in the central valley of California, but in Montana, you would come to nothing. Even in parts of California, there is more desert than people realize: Los Angeles is drier than Beirut and San Francisco is just slightly rainier than Chihuahua. There was not a single tree growing in San Francisco when the Spanish arrived- the aridity and the wind saw to that.

    To solve some of California's water issues, the state worked with the federal government on the Central Valley Project starting in the 1930s. Using dams, canals, wells, and pumps, the project sought to irrigate the area from Redding to Bakersfield. The project doesn't have any "end," and it has been a massive success in many ways. But its success has also been its failure. Through induced demand, California is no more water secure today than when the project was initiated. Take one test well in the southern Tulare Basin for example, where the aquifer had dropped sixty feet between 1920 and 1960, when the first CVP water arrived. From 1960 to 1969, the water table rose twenty feet, but just three years later, it had dropped by thirty-three feet. Why? Because farmers had just become accustomed to using more water and more farmers had moved in. In Kern County as an example, the average famer went from pumping from 275 feet during WWII to pumping from 460 feet by 1965. There was three times as much irrigated land in production in the 1960s as there was in the 1930s. The effect of the CVP was essentially not to make better use of water, but to dramatically expand water usage along with its availability. Induced demand!

Miscellaneous Facts: 

• During the four decades following the Civil War, 183 million acres were sold or given by the federal government to railroad companies
• If the Colorado River stopped flowing, people could survive four years based on the carrying capacity of reservoirs before people would need to evacuate from California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah. 
• The Colorado River is not a big river in terms of annual flow, by which it does not feature even in the top twenty-five in the United States.
• Hoover Dam was originally called Boulder Dam.
• The Hoover Dam was so large and heavy that the dam's size and weight would create superpressures inside of it that would generate and retain heat such that, left to its own devices, the dam would take over 100 years to cool down and settle, remaining a superhot liquid on the inside until then. To solve that problem, engineers filled the dam with pipes that ran cold water through it as they built the dam.
• There is some significant NIMBYism present in California water law. Former Governor of California Edmund Brown Sr. admitted that part of why he wanted to send water south to LA was because he was from Northern California and he didn't want more people moving up north.
• Part of the reason that Louisiana and New Orleans are sinking into the sea (which I read all about in The Control of Nature by John McPhee) is that all the silt that used to travel down the Mississippi River is now trapped behind dams, which may also have an effect on the Mississippi River trying to change course down Athafalaya way.
• British Columbia has the 3rd, 4th, 7th, 8th, and 19th largest rivers in North America and holds between four and ten percent of the world's accessible and renewable fresh water, receiving over 200 inches of rain annually.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

     Never Split the Difference is an extremely readable guide to winning negotiations. Voss mainly focuses on techniques that seek to ask questions that identify the main obstacle to a deal and empathizing between the parties at a negotiation. Voss is a former FBI hostage negotiator, so he teaches a strategy of negotiation that is not about getting to something in the middle for both parties-"splitting the difference"-rather, Voss wants to win negotiations, since you can't get half a hostage.

    One technique that came up a lot is "mirroring." Mirroring is when you repeat back the last three words or one to three critical words that a person has just said. It is highly effective on aggressive or powerful people, such as when you are negotiating a pay raise with your boss, because they want to feel heard and they want their authority acknowledged and respected. It works by using a calming tone, and saying something like, "I'm sorry..." as in "I'm sorry, 3% this year?" And then silence of at least four seconds. And repeat. This works to get the other party to reconsider what they just said or proposed without you having to say a solid "no."

    Another important technique is "labeling." Voss writes that labeling emotions is an effective way to get the other party to reveal how they feel in a negotiation and give up valuable information. IT may sound like saying, "It seems like..." or "It sounds like..." and avoids using the pronoun "I" because it can get people's guard up when they remember that you are two different individuals negotiating across a table. This is honestly a really good technique I think just for daily life since people can relate better to each other when they label one another's emotions. I think Buddhists teach that in meditation you're supposed to label your thoughts as well.

    Voss also emphasizes empathy as a way to get what you want. In many conversations, someone just wants to be able to express their opinions or feelings. If you can understand what they're saying and show that you understand it, they are much more willing to give you what you want. I imagine this could work in a plea negotiation for a criminal defendant in which the defendant's lawyer acknowledges the prosecutors worldview by saying identifying why the prosecutor does what they do or why they feel strongly about prosecuting this crime. 

    It is also valuable to use "how" questions to get to a better result. In hostage negotiations, this sounds like "How are we supposed to know she is alive?" or "How am I supposed to pay you?" This can help you get more time and makes the other party feel like they are in control. Their answers may also reveal valuable information. In reality, your questions may constrain your counterpart, but they will feel like they are in control and feel comfortable giving you what you want since they think its their own choice. There's a really good question-asking script that Voss uses in the book that lets you use "how" questions to say no or something otherwise negative as well as some of the other techniques:

1.A “No”-oriented email question to reinitiate contact: “Have you given up on settling this amicably?”

2.A statement that leaves only the answer of “That’s right” to form a dynamic of agreement: “It seems that you feel my bill is not justified.”

3.Calibrated questions about the problem to get him to reveal his thinking: “How does this bill violate our agreement?”

4.More “No”-oriented questions to remove unspoken barriers: “Are you saying I misled you?” “Are you saying I didn’t do as you asked?” “Are you saying I reneged on our agreement?” or “Are you saying I failed you?”

5.Labeling and mirroring the essence of his answers if they are not acceptable so he has to consider them again: “It seems like you feel my work was subpar.” Or “. . . my work was subpar?”

6.A calibrated question in reply to any offer other than full payment, in order to get him to offer a solution: “How am I supposed to accept that?”

7.If none of this gets an offer of full payment, a label that flatters his sense of control and power: “It seems like you are the type of person who prides himself on the way he does business—rightfully so—and has a knack for not only expanding the pie but making the ship run more efficiently.”

8.A long pause and then one more “No”-oriented question: “Do you want to be known as someone who doesn’t fulfill agreements?”

    When its time to get down to brass tacks and negotiate specific numbers, Voss uses something called the Ackerman method, which has a few steps designed to get you to a good number. You set a target number that you want to reach of the thing you're buying. Then you set a first offer at 65% of your target price and calculate three raises of decreasing increments (85%, 95%, and 100% of the target price). Use lots of empathy and different ways of saying no to get the other side to counter before you increase your offer. Then, when calculating the final amount, use a precise, nonround number. That gives your number credibility and weight. And on your final number, throw in some nonmonetary item that they probably don't even want. That will show them that you're at your limit without you having to say it.

    At the end of the book, Voss emphasizes that even though the goal of this book is to teach you how to win negotiations, it is important for everyone to embrace regular, thoughtful conflict as a way to live. Genuine, honest conflict is productive and helps people solve problems in a collaborative way. Looking out for your own interest is not selfish as long as you are an honest, decent person.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Voss says that the more your counterpart uses "I," "me," and "my," the less power they actually have to make a deal. But if they use "we" a lot, you are probably talking to someone who is a decision-maker.
• In the same pronoun-theme as the above, using your own name can be helpful if you can naturally squeezing it in. People like you better and see you as human if they know your name. Voss calls it the "Chris discount" because he can ask at a store if they have any discounts, and if they say no, usually he can get away with a discount if he asks for a "Chris discount." They think its funny and try to help him out.