Ben Casnocha: The Blog

One of the Best Anti-Poverty Solutions: Immigration

It is unfair that where you happen to be born matters so much to your potential success in life.

Warren Buffet has said that he won the "ovarian lottery" by being born in the United States -- had he been born into a poor village in Peru, he says, his "talents" probably would have gotten him nowhere. "Lottery" is the right word: luck alone determined Buffet's place of birth.

The process of globalization has leveled the playing field a bit and reduced the relative advantage of being born in a rich country. Information and knowledge and physical goods now flow to the poorest corners of the earth. Over the last 50 years, with the rise of free trade and emergence of technologies like the internet, we've seen an extraordinary reduction of poverty. Hundreds of millions of people, mostly in Asia, now live above the poverty line.

But there is still work to be done, of course. Every night, in 2009, over a billion people in the world go to bed hungry. And just because someone isn't ultra-poor, doesn't mean he has the same opportunities or access as someone born in the United States.

So how do we make further progress toward the ideal of all people of the earth starting the race at the same point?

Here's an answer you won't hear from guys like Peter Singer or Jeffrey Sachs: immigration.

Or, to continue the globalization idea: more globalization, though a globalization that includes the free movement of people, not just goods and ideas. The champion of this cause is the economist Michael Clemens.

I recently met Michael at a conference in Miami and witnessed his presentation on migration issues. He began his talk with a moral question: why is it that a guy who happened to be born in the U.S. can do a certain job and get paid more than 300x that of a guy born in Haiti who's doing the exact same job, working equally hard, equally industrious. Why shouldn't the Haitian have the opportunity to move to the U.S. and receive the higher wage? We don't allow discrimination based on the choice-less facts of race or gender -- why do we on place of birth?

He went on to debunk various myths: such as the idea that increased legal or illegal immigration depress U.S. worker wages or that the so-called "brain drain" hurts the countries exporting their people to richer places. In one jaw-dropping slide he showed a chart showing unemployment in the U.S. being inversely correlated with total immigration.

It's a complicated issue, to be sure. While I'm persuaded by the short and long run economic gains of immigration, I have lingering doubts about a country's ability to weave together floods of people from varied backgrounds. I wrote a long review of Samuel Huntington's arguments about the challenges of assimilating immigrants into the national fabric. Clemens, for his part, praises mongrelization and notes we've assimilated immigrants successfully in the past. (Not all agree with even this. Mark Krikorian bizarrely argues that our past experience with immigration is no longer relevant; he says we're a post-immigrant country.)

Here's Will Wilkinson in praise of the "intellectual rigor" of Clemens' work. Here's Jeff Jacoby on why conservatives have it wrong in their outrage over illegal immigration. Here's another Jacoby piece that Lou Dobbs should read. Here's an extremely simple, easy to understand chart that explains how the immigration system works in America. Here's a photo that should convince any foodie to think twice before protesting against immigration.

Bottom Line: Immigration is one of the best anti-poverty solutions. We need to reform immigration policy to make it easier for (non-terrorist, healthy) people to enter the U.S. Hail Michael Clemens' work on this topic.

Book Notes: From Poverty to Prosperity

From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities, and the Lasting Triumph Over Scarcity by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz sketches out "Economics 2.0" -- economic models to understand a world driven by the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advancing technology. A theme that runs throughout is the centrality of entrepreneurship and innovation to economic growth. The authors explore it themselves and via transcript-interviews with several of the most prominent living economists.

This is a book for people interested in economics first, entrepreneurship second, and globalization third. It's a book for people looking for contemporary insight on the ideas of people like Hayek, Drucker, Schumpter, and Smith.

Entrepreneurship still gets short shrift in economics textbooks. I recently flipped through an international economics textbook and looked up the word "entrepreneur" in the index. It appeared three times in a 300 page book. On each page, it was referenced only in passing and the one definition of "entrepreneur" read: "Someone who takes risks and makes decisions." Yikes.

Also, besides the entrepreneurship theme, Kling and Schulz discuss Masonomics principles such as "Markets fail, use markets" (instead of "Markets fail, use government").

For more academic / economic readers who can mine insights from interviews (ie, it's not spoon-fed in bullet points), this is a great read. Here were my favorite bits:

Robert Solow: "It is far from obvious to me that the way to foster competition is to leave the private sector alone. The private sector does not much like competition; it has its own ways of creating monopoly power, restricting access to wealth (and therefore to political rights), and preserving vested interests. It is no easy matter for a society to get the benefits of competition without the disadvantages of oligarchy, and there is no reason to believe that laissez-faire will do the trick."

Paul Romer: "Everyone wants growth but nobody wants change. You've got to have both or you've got to have neither."

Paul Romer on American culture: "It's the kind of culture that can tolerate rap music and extreme sports that can also create space for guys like Page and Brin and Google."

Arnold and Nick: "The three ideal elements of a prosperous society would be self-reliant families, effective institutions of civil society, including business firms; and good government. These elements are more likely to be present together than individually, because they are mutually reinforcing."

Douglass North: "The natural state is a mixture of mutually interdependent economic and political interests that reinforce each other. The economic interests are the elites that produce economic activity. But they tend to support political groups that in turn will protect them from too much competition. The interplay is the elites in the political world protecting the economic elites from too much competition and giving them monopolies, while on the other hand the economic elites provide the funds that support the political elites."

Amar Bhide on what a government can do to promote entrepreneurship: make the basic governmental functions work. Property rights, provision of roads, water, electricity. (BC: Simple, but so true. Screw incentives, tax breaks, etc. Just do the basics.)

William Lewis: Education level of the labor force isn't as important to the overall economic performance of a nation as commonly thought. Processes, culture, etc can be imparted even on uneducated people. One example showed that uneducated people in the U.S. did a task four times as fast as people in Sao Paolo of the same level of education people.

(Full Disclosure: Nick is a friend of mine and Arnold has been generous over email and blogging the past few years.)

Experts Who Predict the Future

This week I witnessed two presentations by New York University professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a noted political scientist and futurist. His latest book is called The Predictioneer's Game and claims to use complex game theory to predict political and economic events. He claims his predictions have been 90% accurate, which is why the CIA and others pay close attention to them. He never told us exactly how his models work, except to say several times that they are "very complex."

As he spoke about the world and proffered future events -- Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon, Colombia and Venezuela will not go to war -- it was clear that Mesquita is a smart man who knows a great deal about international politics. He also is a talented public speaker.

Yet something bothered me. During his talk my buddy Justin Rockefeller (also in the room) texted me, "What do you think?" I replied, "Entertaining but I'm deeply skeptical. Nassim Taleb would have a field day." He replied, "Yep."

In Fooled by Randomness, Taleb talks about "why human beings are so prone to mistake dumb luck for consummate skill." The idea of survivorship bias figures prominently in Taleb's work. If I play the lottery 100 times, and I win every time, this doesn't necessarily mean I've developed the skill to regularly win the lottery. Someone has to win. We ignore those who lose.

Mesquita wasted no breath acknowledging the improbability of developing a mathematical model that reliably predicts world events. He offered no qualifications on how much of his success might be due to luck and randomness. Instead, he dished predictions with breathtaking arrogance and certainty, returning again and again to his 90% success rate. He never once elucidated how this 90% number got calculated (I predict Hugo Chavez will die, eventually) despite it being the source of his credibility.

It took only a few minutes of Googling to find long, detailed criticisms of Mesquita. You'd think such a body of criticisms would temper his certitude. No sirree.

Surprisingly, people in the room seemed taken by Mesquita. He had spot-on observations, to be sure, about the selfishness of Mother Theresa or the self-interest of the Iranian regime. But why didn't more people eye his prediction schemes with skepticism?

Charisma, for one. He was entertaining. We are so often bored by speakers that anyone who can dance a gig on stage gets a vote for "keeping us awake." I hear that. But it is a dangerous heuristic -- equating entertainment with substance.

He wasn't just charismatic; he was an "expert." In general, people are too deferential to experts who make predictions inasmuch as experts sometimes do no better than laypeople at predicting. In particular, people are too deferential to experts toting fancy credentials (such as a PhD), even if those credentials have little to do with the topic at hand. We should be especially skeptical of experts who feel a need to remind us again and again of their expertise, as Mequita did.

Look, Mequita is more than qualified to riff on current affairs and the state of the world. He has written a dozen plus books on international politics and economics and he is more knowledgeable than me on most of the issues he discussed. But it's unimpressive to commentate under the vague guise of "complex game theory." Do analysis and make assertions as an informed pundit, like everyone else, not some mathematically gifted prophet whose models only the CIA understands.

Bottom Line: Nassim Taleb's popularity notwithstanding, there are still intellectuals who take their knowledge too seriously, confuse luck and randomness with skill and foresight, and pontificate with inappropriate levels of certainty in an uncertain, complex world.

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Seth Roberts takes Elizabeth Kolbert to task for putting faith in scientists over science. Seth writes about "practically all science journalists":

They take the consensus view too seriously. In case after case — so many that it’s hard not to draw sweeping conclusions — the consensus view about difficult topics is more fragile than an outsider would ever guess. It’s not necessarily wrong, just less certain.

Quote of the Day from Cormac McCarthy

Continuing the James Ellroy theme of talented people being obsessed, here's writer Cormac McCarthy in a rare interview with the WSJ:

I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

The pointer is from Roger Ebert's very interesting Twitter feed. Elsewhere in the interview McCarthy explains why he doesn't travel.

Of course, most Americans are not working on activities that drive them to suicide. The average American spent nearly five hours a day watching television in last year's TV season. It's the highest ever -- up 20% from 10 years ago.

Book Review: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a marvel of a memoir: a remarkable story of a materially impoverished yet highly intellectual family, told in the humane and empathetic voice of one of the daughters, Jeannette.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who loved it: more than 2.5 million copies are in print, the book spent over 100 weeks on the NYT Bestseller List, and it has 1,330 mostly five-star customer reviews on Amazon.com to boot.

Here's the description:

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.

Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.

What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

It will resonate with different types of people: those who were raised in poverty, those who feel at once very angry and very grateful about their parents, or simply those who can appreciate good writing and feel grateful anew for their favorable number in the ovarian lottery (that's me). I highly recommend it.

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Here's Laura Miller on a new book on the history of memoirs. It touches on the two questions I always ask myself when reading memoirs: Is it true? How much does truthfulness matter?

Benjamin Kunkel three years ago wrote about memoirists. He says the motto of the typical contemporary memoirist is: "I survived that. Unwittingly, I had earned a Ph.D. in survival."

Reasons to Follow Sports (and Bill Simmons)

Over the last ten years my interest in sports has shifted away from closely following teams and players and towards:

1) maintaining cultural literacy and facilitating social bonding by understanding the basics of the most popular sports and the most important facts associated with them (e.g. who Lebron James is or which teams are in the NFL Superbowl).

2) following how sports generally affects culture and the economy. What's the economic impact on a country when its team wins the World Cup?

3) using the rich examples in sports to learn about widely-relevant ideas.

#3 is most important to me. For example, I'd rather read about how Baron Davis manages side projects than follow the Warriors' specific wins and loses. Other examples:

• One way to think about the general idea of whether you'd want to be universally loved or loved and hated to a greater degree is to compare Kobe Bryant and Steve Nash.
• One way to think about the general idea of how superstar contributors affect group dynamics is by pondering Barry Bonds' impact on the Giants.
• You can discover the power of framing by reading about the non-differences between dog fighting and the NFL.

General ideas found in sports are served up regularly by some excellent sports journalists whose writing you can admire even if you can't keep up with all the details. Frank Deford has interesting things to say on NPR. Gregg Easterbrook mixes smart commentary on sports with nuggets on economics and finance. Even if Rick Reilly is past his prime, he's wise and still finds inspirational stories.

But the most famous sports writer of today is Bill Simmons, who writes for ESPN.com. Here's a quick take on Bill Simmons' new book with this interesting nugget:

Mr. Simmons may be the first sports writer to see the games purely from the view of the fan — and a very modern, unsentimental fan at that. As Mr. Simmons sees it, his job is not to get into the heads of the players, but into the heads of his readers.

Tyler Cowen says, "Bill James and Bill Simmons are two of the greatest living social scientists. Seriously."

Bottom Line: Even if you're not a hard core sports fan there are still good general lessons to be taken from the sports world and excellent writers, such as Bill Simmons, who can deliver them to us.

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If you want to experience the fascinating and under-researched phenomenon of goosebumps caused by an emotional reaction and not cold weather, watch this clip of ESPN highlights from the past 100 years. One word: goosebumps.

The Very Best Are Obsessed

On his book tour in San Francisco, the noted crime novelist James Ellroy said:

I'm interested in doing very few things. I don't have a cell phone. Don't have a computer. Don't have a TV set. Don't go to movies. Don't read. I ignore the world so I might live obsessively.

This seems to be the case among many mega-successful people. They are obsessed with their talent. They can do little else, even if they've already hit it big. You see it a lot in writers like Ellroy. The very best entrepreneurs seem to be this way, as well. Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal, can't get off the saddle, even after making lots of money. He's now famously a workaholic at Slide.

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Here's how James Ellroy began a recent public appearance:

Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I'm James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I'm the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin' family, if the name of your family is the Manson Family.

The Ethos of Casualness

1.

America was a start-up created by a dozen or so entrepreneurial people who were rebelling against an aristocratic, overbearing empire. They were scrappy, quick on their feet, smart, hard working as hell, and (mostly) open-minded to whoever could help their improbable cause. Kind of like Silicon Valley start-ups. Except for America's founders the stakes were higher and urgency greater.

When George Washington became the first president of the United States, he rejected regal titles like "His Majesty," taken from the British tradition. Instead he made sure "the titles and trappings were suitably republican and never emulated European royal courts." He said he was to be called "Mr. President."

I believe this relaxation of formalities is a component of Americanism. I'll call it an ethos of casualness. Europe's different. EU passports, for example, list your degrees (Dr., PhD, etc). Or when introducing someone's biography at a European business conference you start with his titles and degrees. I remember the senior journalist Martin Wolf being introduced at the St. Gallen Symposium as first a graduate of LSE, followed by his professional accomplishments. In a start-up environment, by contrast, you don't have time to flatter the status sensibilities of everyone in the room.

To be sure, although America has let go of the Victorian era more than Europe on the whole, there are exceptions. "I don't understand you Americans: you wear jeans to the opera but insist on wearing clothes at the beach." I.e., Europeans are more casual about nudity.

2.

I like casualness. It maximizes commonality instead of difference. When everyone's name appears the same way on a passport, what they have in common -- a name and citizenship -- is the focus. If jeans and t-shirt are the attire guidelines, everyone can comply; if Italian suits are the standard, not as much. In this way casualness emphasizes similarity by focusing on a common denominator.

3.

My upbringing stressed casualness and affected the way I think.

First, I grew up in the most casual part of America. There's only one restaurant on the entire west coast which requires men to wear coats. New York City, by contrast, has 13 such restaurants. Clothes are just one part of this, but they stand for a lot: in California you might well see Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs wearing jeans at a nice restaurant, as I have, but you would never see Henry Kravis doing the same in New York. California's billionaires blend in.

Second, at my high school we addressed all of the teachers, including the head of school, by their first name. Several teachers had advanced degrees -- we still addressed them orally and in writing by their first name. Head of School, janitor, Chair of Science department, freshman student, security guard: Mike, Jason, Nancy, Jim, Kevin. There also was no dress code. I wore sweat pants to school many days and sometimes my teachers did the same.

Third, I had little interaction with the institutions that usually prize formality. People with religious upbringings get steeped in hierarchies, traditions, protocols, history. Not me. I also had little interaction with high culture (cuisine, fashion, or the arts).

The ethos of casualness came from my country, city, school, family and it's had an impact on how I think. It could explain why I'm skeptical of certain formalities. When someone dresses fancily, I sooner suspect he is trying to signal wealth than that he actually likes the clothes. I harbor related skepticism of people who talk about how much they love sushi or fine art.

As I've gotten older I have begun to selectively emphasize formality (and thus difference) in certain dimensions, such as use of language. But these are the selective overlays on a casual base.

Bottom Line: The ethos of casualness is a component of Americanism. Casualness maximizes similarities over differences. I am a product of this culture -- I prefer casualness and I harbor skepticism of certain formalities.

(thanks to Steve Dodson, Chris Yeh, and Dave Jilk for helping brainstorm this post)

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Last year I wrote about how weak a hold institutional categories have on my identity, and excerpted widely from an excellent essay titled Identity is That Which is Given.

Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit

Steven Pressfield shares his #1 lesson for anybody in the working world:

Nobody wants to read your shit.

He explains:

The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your product/work of art/business, no matter how worthy or how much you love it.

What’s your answer to that?

1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.

2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.

3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

In school anything you write or do will be read and graded by a teacher paid to do so. In the real world nobody wants to read your shit, and you have to earn their attention every single day.

Last year in a post titled You Have to Make People Give a Shit, I extolled blogging as a way to learn this value.

One way blogging makes you a better writer is it forces you to work hard for your readers' attention. On the web, it takes less than a second to close the page or click a new link. Your readers are busy and distracted.

This means you must engage the reader out of the gate and take nothing for granted. If you start sucking in the second paragraph, you'll likely lose the reader's attention. They click to a new page.

It's brutal. It makes you better.

Contrasts in How Google Suggests Searches

When you type a query into Google it will suggest the most popular completions to the given prefix.

There are some remarkable contrasts, Slate found, between "dumb" searches and "smart" ones. People who start their search "how 2" are more likely to search "how 2 get pregnant" or "how 2 grow weed." People who start their search "how one might" are more likely to search "how one might discover a new piece of music" or "how one might account for the rise of andrew jackson in 1828."

The most fascinating contrast is between "is it wrong to..." vs. "is it ethical to." One change in word generates very different suggestions.

"Is it wrong to..." generated the following suggestions:

Whereas "Is it ethical to" generated the following:

 

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Someone once told me that there is nowhere we are more honest than the search box. We don't lie to Google. Period. We type in what we're thinking -- good, bad, and ugly. There's probably no piece of information that would better show what's on someone's mind than their stream of searches.

Cultural Attitudes Toward Language (and Learning Spanish)

James Fallows, on the French/Japanese vs. American/Chinese attitude toward purity of language and foreigners' trying to speak their local tongue:

in France and Japan, the deep-down assumption is that the language is pure and difficult, that foreigners can't really learn it, and that one's attitude toward their attempts is either French hauteur or the elaborately over-polite and therefore inevitably patronizing Japanese response to even a word or two in their language. "Nihongo jouzu! Your Japanese is so good!"  ... Japanese people (to generalize) often seem self-conscious about potential errors in English. Of course, French speakers of English are marvelously non-self-conscious, even jauntily willful, about retaining their French accents, especially the trademark "z" sound for "th." " Zees ees what I mean..." (Yes, I am aware that the fricative th phoneme is the most difficult sound in English for non-native speakers, our counterpart to r's in French.)

The American attitude towards English is: everyone should get with the program, there are a million variants and accents of the language, all that really matters is that you can somehow get your meaning across. Because there are so many versions of Chinese in use within China, my impression is that the everyday attitude of Chinese people toward language is similar: You're expected to try to learn it, no one will spend that much time mocking your mistakes, mainly they are trying to figure out what you are trying to say. Probably both the U.S. and Chinese attitudes reflect the outlook of big, continental nations that encompass lots of internal diversity -- and in America's case, absorb huge numbers of immigrants.

Excellent point. Spanish is closer to English and Chinese in this respect, I think. Getting the meaning across matters most to the Latin American folk I've spent time with. Spanglish has nothing to do with purity and everything to do with utility.

I am trying, by the way, to elevate my Spanish speaking and writing skills from "intermediate" to "advanced." Here are some thoughts on how I'm going to do this:

1. Vocabulary first. If you don't know words, you can't communicate. If you can't communicate even basic ideas, you get frustrated. I'm emphasizing vocabulary. Grammar will come.

2. Spaced repetition. Per Piotr Wozniak's theories on memory -- the optimal time to review a word is the moment before you're about to forget it -- I'm using his free service SuperMemo.net to learn vocab.

3. Frequency of vocabulary over themes. I spent $30 on a frequency dictionary. It lists the 5,000 most frequently used Spanish words, in order, drawn from a 20 million word corpus of non-fiction and fiction writing and oral transcripts. The 5,000 most frequent words account for 95% of the written/oral material I am likely to encounter. I think it's a shame that virtually all Spanish vocabulary in U.S. schools is taught thematically (food, travel, etc) instead of by frequency.

4. Make mistakes, have no fear. Fear of embarrassment stops a lot of people from practicing a foreign language with natives, I think. I'm going to try to make as many mistakes as I can.

5. Immersion / live in a country. Chile is my target country. More on this, soon!

Here's a post on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism.

For those worried about the United States becoming a bilingual country, it's too late. The train has left the station. You cannot deny the demographic trends. Note that we will be bilingual in effect not in law. We are not destined to be Canada, in other words.

Given the competitive advantage they could bestow upon their child, I am surprised when I encounter wealthy American parents who are not paying their (probably El Salvadorean) cleaning lady to talk in Spanish in a structured way with their young children.

Finally, I have read research that shows very young children can pick up a language faster than an adult. But, I have seen no evidence showing an 11 year-old can learn a language faster than a 60 year-old. This seems to be one of the most dangerous myths circulating about language learning. We are damn good at coming up with excuses or rationalizations!

Goal: More At-Bats Per Unit of Time and Money

From Gary Hamel's CliffNotes version of how to "outrun change":

Yet to outpace change, every organization is going to have to master the art of rapid prototyping. Here the goal is to maximize the ratio of learning over investment -- to find the sweet spot of demand for a new product, or perfect a nascent business more rapidly and inexpensively than your competitors. Listen to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, on this point: “Our goal is to have more at bats per unit of time and money than anyone else.” Your goal should be the same.

Exactly. Here's my long article on the importance of side projects to innovation. Institutionalized side project time is fundamentally about increasing the number of at-bats on the R&D front.

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Bob Sutton blogs about the one definitive paper on which employee selection methods are best at predicting job performance. Top three: work sample tests, general mental ability (IQ, etc), and structured interviews.

Religion for Atheists: A Secular Church

Alain de Botton, in an article titled Religion for Atheists, endorses the idea of a secular church:

In this new secular religion, there would be feast days, wedding ceremonies, revered figures (secularised saints) and even atheistic churches and temples. The new religion would rely on art and philosophy, but put them to overtly didactic ends: it would use the panoply of techniques known to traditional religions (buildings, great books, seminaries) to try to make us good according to the sanest and most advanced understanding of the word.

...there are certain needs in us that can never be satisfied by art, family, work or the state alone. In the light of this, it seems evident that what we now need is not a choice between atheism and religion, but a new secular religion: a religion for atheists.

He goes to write:

A secular religion would hence begin by putting man into context and would do so through works of art, landscape gardening and architecture. Imagine a network of secular churches, vast high spaces in which to escape from the hubbub of modern society and in which to focus on all that is beyond us. It isn’t surprising that secular people continue to be interested in cathedrals. Their archi­tecture performs the very clever and eternally useful function of relativising those who walk inside them. We begin to feel small ­inside a cathedral and recognise the debt that sanity owes to such a feeling.

In addition, a secular religion would use all the tools of art in ­order to create an effective kind of propaganda in the name of kindness and virtue. Rather than seeing art as a tool that can shock and surprise us (the two great emotions ­promoted by most contemp­orary works), a secular religion would return to an earlier view that art should improve us. It should be a form of propaganda for a better, nobler life.

Here's my earlier post The Secular Church and my post about Sunday School for Atheists.

Some of the features of the secular church that Chris and I will co-found includes:

• Chris Yeh as featured choir boy
• No sexual abuse of the children from priests
• Adequate leg room in the pews
• Gatorade instead of wine and Clif bars instead of stale crackers served during communion

Note our church will not be a proactively anti-God institution. It will instead appeal to my fellow pro-religion non-believers.

How to Dodge a Difficult Question

Econ blogger Steve Waldman, who recently participated in a meeting with Treasury Department officials, takes note of the technique employed by officials to dodge difficult questions:

In response to a several difficult questions, one official enthused that what the interlocutor had brought up was an important concern, something he really cared about, but then quickly went on to assert that, in his judgment, it was unlikely to be the pivotal or most challenging problem. I thought this a very effective trick to sweep an issue aside, a kind of jujitsu by which the official would render very sharp comments harmless by moving with rather than fighting against the questioner. After this move, the only possible disagreement is a judgment call about which of many problems is most pressing, and whose judgment would be better than that of a senior official immersed daily in the practicalities of policy?

Clever. Agree that it's an important question, but not the most important question. Then turn to the more important question. Perhaps even present the "more important" question back to the audience for their oh-so-valued feedback.

He then goes on to note how the Treasury officials employed the oldest trick in the book: flattery.

Twice Treasury officials commented on how uncommon a group we were, how we asked particularly pointed questions or were unusually bright. To borrow a cliché, I'll bet they say that to all the groups. One official made use of an expletive early in his discussion, which had the effect of making us feel like insiders, like this was not the sort of canned, guarded conversation one might see on CNN. The same official was quick to address us by first name when responding to questions. That wasn't hard, since our names were in front of us, written on placards in large letters. But it was still effective. Being addressed so familiarly makes you feel important, like you are someone powerful people deem worth their while to know. Obviously, the reality distortion field wears off when you leave, once you think it over. But these guys are pretty good at what they do.

Flattery, false bonding, etc: Even if you know it's happening, it doesn't mean it's not effective.

Budgeting Time to Think

During the campaign Michelle Obama was worried that Barack's schedule allowed him "no time to think."

You hear the expression a lot. But how many people actually budget thinking time on their calendar? You don't often see:

9:45 - 10:00 AM: Meet John Doe
10:05 - 10:20 AM: Conference call with team
10:20 - 11:00 AM: Meeting with client
11:00 - 11:20 AM: Think
11:20 - 12 noon: Meet with direct reports

Even if you had "thinking time" on your calendar, what would you do during that time? Sit in a chair, stare straight ahead, and ponder the world?

Because for some that would feel unacceptably unproductive, people usually do the kind of thinking Michelle was referring to -- synthesis, reflection, processing events and data -- while actively engaged in something else, albeit something that's not too taxing.

Driving is the most popular activity of this sort. Driving requires some level of attention, but you have plenty of cycles to think about other stuff, especially if you're driving a familiar route. "When Joan Didion moved from California to New York, Didion realized that she had done much of her thinking and mental writing during the long drives endogenous to the Californian lifestyle," Steve Dodson notes. I'm the same. I can't tell you how many emails and plans and conclusions I've come to while driving on the 101 or 280 freeways.

Reading is another activity that can be specifically scheduled and invites the kind of reflection and catch-up thinking that we need. It's for this reason I've long been puzzled by those "book summary" services where you buy a two page cheat sheet to a book. After all, it's not just the ideas in a book that matter; it's the time you allocate to reading.

Bottom Line: "Thinking time" usually takes place indirectly during activities such as driving or reading. We should schedule those activities accordingly.

Working Out With Nothing but a Floor

When you're on-the-go, finding a gym can be hard and going for a run outside is always fraught with the risk of getting lost.

So I now pack two good exercise tools in my suitcase that allow me to do a workout anywhere, anytime:

1. Jump rope - A jump rope is light, compact, and use-able anywhere. Because you stay in one place, you can simply take one step outside your hotel building and get after it.

2. Ripcords - I discovered these when their CEO, a blog reader, emailed and offered to send me a box. They're awesome. You can do many types of exercises with resistance bands.

Another blog reader, Adam Gilbert who's CEO of MyBodyTutor.com, emailed me a workout plan that requires nothing but a floor:

1. Jumping jacks - Do 4 sets of 50

2. Body Weight Squats - Do 3 sets of 20 (shoulder width)
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqj1qjIA6E0 - Great video to watch for form)

3. Wall Sit - 2 sets of 1:30 each
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDjKeOCgisw - Good video to watch for form)

4. Calf Raises  - 4 sets of 25 each

5. Push ups (shoulder width) - 3 sets of 20 each (Go slow and steady.)

6. Push ups (close grip) - 3 sets of 20 each (Go slow and steady. Again, own the exercise!)

7. Lying Torso Raise - 3 Sets of 15 each

Directions: Lie face down on the floor and place your hands loosely behind your head. Slowly raise your upper body until your chest is a few inches off the floor. You should feel your lower back muscles contracting as you rise up. Hold the top position for two-seconds then slowly return to the starting position and repeat.

8. Crunch - 3 sets of 15 each
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKg_cdwq9l4 - Good video on how to do them. Most importantly crunch your chin up towards the ceiling. Look up! And hold!)

9. Bicycles - 3 sets of 30 each (Every time you touch a knee it counts as one)
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPKXFarXbys - Very good video with great form!)

10. Plank (Hold for 2 minutes or as long as you can. 2 minutes is the goal though.)
(Perfect form - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ar2iRusnnc)

Your Customers Lie to You

A McDonald's executive, participating in the always-fascinating IamA series on Reddit, writes:

Our customers want mediocre food cheap. Every time we release a higher priced but higher quality product, the people who said they would pay for it... never do.

You say you want more fruits, salads, organic, all natural, etc. well then start buying that stuff and stop buying double cheeseburgers. Our best selling stuff is always whatever we can make taste good, at rock bottom prices.

We've actually learned not to listen to our customers when it comes to a lot of things. Health nuts won't come into McDonald's to eat even when we give them what they want.

As entrepreneurs we cannot blindly listen to our customers. They lie to us. Here's my old post titled Listening to Customers is Harder Than it Seems.

Given that customers lie, sometimes we have to extract information indirectly. Instead of asking customers how much they would pay for a hypothetical product, ask them how much they're currently paying for however it is they're solving the problem that you are trying to solve.

Other times, it can work to ask a direct question but discount the words that come out of their mouth and pay attention to body language. It would be fun to come up with a list of questions that elicit non-useful verbal answers but useful body language answers. In the past I've proposed, "Do you have self-confidence?" Steve Jobs asks employees, "Why are you here?"

Finally, actions speak louder than words. Just as your calendar never lies -- how you spend your time says more about your priorities than your stated priorities -- what customers actually buy and do is more instructive than what they say they'll do.

Book Review: Truman by David McCullough

David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry Truman is one of the best books I've read in 2009. At over 1,000 pages, it is a complete examination of Harry Truman's life and presidency, including blow-by-blow accounts of the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, the pivotal meetings with Churchill and Stalin at the finish of WWII, the Marshall Plan, the decision to send troops into the Korean War, his improbable re-election in 1948, and the crafting of America's anti-communist foreign policy.

McCullough is a masterful biographer. His characters become larger than life, he describes historical scenes with gripping detail, and he interweaves just the right amount of subjective analysis with objective facts and events. The result is that you not only get a sense of Harry Truman the man, but you also learn an enormous amount about the period of history in which he led.

Biographies of presidents are portraits of leadership. They are instructive. From Truman I learned about how far decency, straight talk, cheerfulness, and grittiness can take you.

Ambitious by nature, he was never torn by ambition, never tried to appear as something he was not. He stood for common sense, common decency. He spoke the common tongue. As much as any president since Lincoln, he brought to the highest office the language and values of the common American people. He held to the old guidelines: work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear.

It is said that George W. Bush read about Truman and his presidency while in office. I now understand why. Both had massive foreign policy decisions thrust upon them early in office; both were war-time presidents; both showed enormous resolve in making difficult decisions in face of criticism; both left office with very low approval ratings. Of course there are differences. On domestic policy, they had little in common. Truman was a common man of Missouri; Bush was born to the silver spoon. And while history has vindicated Truman, I don't think the same will happen to Bush 43.

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Assorted Excerpts:

• To Hopkins, he advised using either diplomatic language with Stalin or a baseball bat, whichever would work.
• As American as anything about this thoroughly American new President was his fundamental faith that most problems came down to misunderstandings between people, and that even the most complicated problems really weren't as complicated as they were made out to be, once everybody got to know one another.
• He is a most charming and a very clever person -- meaning clever in the English not the Kentucky sense.
• Dewey, it was cracked, was the only man who could strut sitting down.
• There was something in the American character that responded to a fighter, said the Washington Post on its editorial page. "The American people admire a man with courage even though they don't always agree with him."
• He ranked NATO with the Marshall Plan, as one of the proudest achievements of his presidency,
• For the first time in history, a world organization had voted to use armed force to stop armed force.
• In seventeen days of savage fighting, American and ROK forces had fallen back seventy miles. It was, in many respects, one of the darkest chapters in American military history.
• that the greatest part of a President's responsibilities was making decisions. A President had to decide. That's his job.
• His insistence that the war in Korea be kept in bounds, kept from becoming a nuclear nightmare, would figure more and more clearly as time passed as one of his outstanding achievements.
• But Mamma could also observe that "Being too good is apt to be uninteresting" a line they all loved.
• Here, he thought, was the eighth natural wonder of the world, a politician who didn't take himself too seriously, a friendly, likable, warmhearted fellow with a lot of common sense hidden under an overpowering inferiority complex.
• "You give a good leader very little and he will succeed," he said, looking at the chairman; "you give a mediocrity a great deal and he will fail."
• And clearly he delighted in talking about himself. He was his own favorite subject, yet nearly always with a sense of proportion and a sense of humor.

The Best Time to Have Sex (and Do Other Things)

Best time to have surgery: Morning (4x less likely to have complications in the morning than between 3-4PM)

Best time to get a human being on the phone when calling a company's customer service line: As early as possible (lowest call volume)

Best day of the week to eat dinner out: Tuesday (freshest food, no crowds)

Best day to fly: Saturday (fewer flights means fewer delays, shorter lines, less stress)

Best time to fly: Noon (varies but pilots say airport rush hours coincide with workday rush hours)

Best time to exercise: 6-8PM (body temp highest, peak time for strength and flexibility)

Best time to have sex: 10PM-1AM (skin sensitivity is highest in late evening)

The nuggets are from Mark Di Vincenzo's Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon: A Guide to the Best Time to Buy This, Do That and Go There which I expect the fun-facts-at-cocktail-parties crowd is buying by the bucketload. The pointer is from Barking Up the Wrong Tree, via Andy McKenzie.

Note that the worst time to do anything is immediately after lunch.

How to Kill It: Passion and Patience

Gary Vaynerchuk delivered a highly entertaining 15 minute "keynote" at last year's Web 2.0 conference which is ostensibly about "how to build a personal brand" but is really about passion, hustle, grit, not making excuses, and wanting to win. His authenticity is what comes through most of all. He's all over the place, but it works. Embed:

(thanks to Rob Montz for sending)

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I'm teaching a free one hour class on entrepreneurship tomorrow (Wednesday) on Edufire. Only 15 spots left.

Impressions and Lessons from Cyprus

I spent the last two weeks in North and South Cyprus. It is a beautiful country! I had the opportunity to meet many businesspeople, government officials, journalists, and students. Here's what I learned:

1. A Divided Country. The first thing to say about Cyprus, both because it's the reality and because the locals talk about it constantly, is the political situation. It is a divided country: Turkish Cypriots in the north, Greek Cypriots in the south. A U.N.-controlled "green line" divides the two sides. Like any disputed territory, each side has a different interpretation of history. This I.H.T. op/ed from last week does a good job at briefly describing the two historical narratives.

2. Will There Be Re-Unification? In 2004 citizens of both sides voted on a referendum on the Annan Plan which would have re-unified the country. The north (Turkish) voted yes and the south (Greek) voted no. Why did the Greek Cypriots vote against? Wikipedia offers several reasons. My impression is that there was in general a distrust that the north would fulfill its obligations in the plan and specifically that Turkish troops would ever leave. But the bottom line was economic self-interest: Why absorb a poorer per-capita neighbor? Why would you want your tax dollars to prop up a people who speak a different language and whose history on the island you resent?

Cyprus joined the EU in 2004. This creates even less incentive for the Greek-Cypriots. Had re-unification been a condition of EU membership, the island would have found a way, I think. Cyprus got into the EU as a divided country because Greece threatened to veto the Baltic countries' membership unless Cyprus gained admission. An obvious weakness of the EU is every member country wields veto power over new applicants.

3. Victimhood Narratives. I was impressed with the businesspeople and students I met in North Cyprus. There is so much to say in praise of their resilience. But I worry about one thing: self-pity, no matter how justified, is an unproductive endeavor. And the victimhood narrative seems to run deep in the North Cyprus psyche.

If you see yourself as a victim, by definition there must be a victimizer. For many Turkish-Cypriots, it is the Greek-Cypriots and the international community which recognizes the South. Victims also usually have saviors or protectors. This is Turkey. Thus emerges an easy formula for both excusing and explaining the past (the victimizer) and excusing and blaming failures of the future (the would-be savior). Missing from the equation is a sense of personal responsibility for the present and a spirit of self-determination to create a better future.

4. Leviathan and Santa Claus. ~ 50% of the people in North Cyprus work for the government. The government then, is both Santa Claus and Satan. When good things happen, thank the government. When bad things happen, blame the government. Individuals depend too much on the government. The government in turn depends on Turkey. We need a stronger and more active private sector. We need more entrepreneurs.

5. "We" vs. "I." Victimhood narratives and a bloated state chip away at individuality. If I were facilitating conversations in North Cyprus, I would prohibit anyone, on the topic of politics and national improvement, from starting a sentence with "We." Sweeping diagnoses of society at large fix nothing and distract attention from the one thing an individual can control: his or her own actions and beliefs. In the language of the collective we can forget that a "society" is comprised of individuals, and "society" only changes when each individual first changes himself. "We" proclamations in politics make for stirring rhetoric, but can stymie individual change. The unity sought by collectivist language, absent a foundation of independent individual minds, is rather brittle. Think Gandhi: Be the change you want to see in the world.

6. Should a Congressman Represent America or His District? It is in the U.S. national interest for Cyprus to be a unified country, not because of Cyprus per se (although a more stable country and larger economy benefits all countries, in the non-zero sum game of economic growth), but because a unified Cyprus is helpful for Turkey's admission to the E.U., and the U.S. wants Turkey in the E.U. Turkey is, after all, a majority Muslim country of 74 million with a secular, democratic government that stands at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.

Congresspeople don't necessarily hear this story, though. There are about three million Greek-Americans in the U.S. and they comprise a formidable lobby. They oppose unification and regard the Turkish presence in Cyprus as an illegal occupation. This muddies U.S. foreign policy and raises a question about democracy: Should a congressman put the desires and needs of the country ahead of the desires and needs of his particular district? If they conflict, should the national interest trump those of the district whose voters elected you?

7. The Physical and Psychological. It's easier to be a small island, economically speaking, in a globalized world: air travel is easy and cheap, and technology sends bits and bytes over the air regardless of whether it's land or sea below. But I still believe psychological boundaries erect when freedom of movement on your own two feet is limited. The American west worked so well an an idea because it lay physically far away. When the frontier opened, it was possible to get in your car in the east and drive for hours and hours into desert and red clay and canyons and forest. The west lured easterners who wanted to re-invent themselves. The new physical geography sparked new identities and modes of thinking. A small island cannot offer this as easily.

8. Good Food, Good Weather, Good People. There's so much pleasantness on the island. A stroll down Lidra street in Nicosia feels like the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, except more hip. The October weather I experienced was extraordinary. It's too hot in the summer, but fall and winter delight. The local food is delicious, if Mediterranean / middle eastern cuisine is your thing. For spicy girliemen like myself, the mildness of the cuisine meant I faced none of the "will this food burn my mouth?" anxiety that I faced in China in August. Don't forget baklava for dessert. Cypriot people are hospitable, friendly, interested.

9. Tourist Suggestions. 50% of tourists to Cyprus are Brits. It's a hot spot in Europe. I've never been to Turkey or Greece, but I've heard more enchanting stories about Turkey than Greece; so, if you wanted to stick to a single currency and language, a terrific itinerary would be a two week trip to Turkey and Northern Cyprus. In Cyprus, spend most of your time lounging around the harbor in Kyrenia and sitting on the stunning beaches. Devote a day or two to Nicosia, the last divided capital in the world, and soak up the history and observe the U.N. peacekeepers. Eat kebabs, drink Turkish yogurt, and if ancient history is your thing, marvel at relics of a 9,000 year old place.

10. Students Thinking Differently. I had the opportunity to address over 1,000 people on the island, and I have been touched by some of the emails and relationships I have struck up. It is inspiring to see people there thinking big things.

(The views above are mine, expressed as a private citizen, and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. government.)

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On-the-ground lessons and impressions from:

• China: 2009, 2006
• Colombia
• Mexico
• Argentina
• Chile and Uruguay
• Ukraine
• Ecuador
• Czech Republic
• Hong Kong
• Switzerland (1) and (2)
• Western Europe and Asia
• Russia

My travel blog has over 250 on-the-ground dispatches from 25 countries.

Creativity: Loving, Knowing, Doing

‘…the most useful definition of creativity is the following: people are artistically creative when they love what they are doing, know what they are doing, and actively engage in art-making. The three elements of creativity are thus loving, knowing and doing; or heart, mind and hands; or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it, great faith, great question, and great courage.’

Loving, knowing, doing. The secret behind becoming excellent at anything is loving one thing deep and hard enough to do it for a very long time. To continue to learn and know it.

That's Eric Maisel via Justine Musk, in her epic post on why you have to read like a maniac to develop a writer's intuition. Later she says:

Don’t just read because it will make you a better writer – although it will. Read because you love to read, you love stories of all shapes and sizes, you love the flow and rhythms and innovations of language, you love to learn stuff about people, you love to learn stuff about the world, you love to form relationships with individuals who don’t exist. Read because you love to write. Read because you love fiction and nonfiction and their pirate chests of treasures.

I can't imagine being interested in writing and not subscribing to Justine's blog.

Obtaining Honest Feedback

Earlier this year I was lucky to participate in a group dinner with five accomplished, interesting people.

One guy at the table you've probably heard of -- let's call him Unaware Big Man -- began dominating the dinner conversation. He kept bringing the conversation back to his own experiences. He made great points -- he is an exceptionally smart person -- so at first we all went along with him playing professor. But soon enough people wanted to hear from others.

Unaware Big Man didn't get this. He did not possess, for example, the social awareness to notice the body language of someone "getting in line" to speak next. Halfway through the dinner, an older gentleman semi-forcefully interrupted Unaware Big Man: "I want to hear what John has to say," pointing to John across the table. Unaware Big Man had no idea he was being asked to simmer it down; he let John speak for 30 seconds and then jumped in with a friendly rebuttal.

I was astonished to witness someone so successful be so oblivious to the social dynamics of the dinner.

Here's the kicker: everyone knew what was going on but none of us gave him feedback afterwards. None of us knew him well enough to say, "Hey man, you really talked a lot at dinner -- let's hear what other people have to say next time." That might seem like easy feedback to give, but not when it's to a high status person. I have no vested interest in his personal growth, but I do have an interest in him not thinking ill of me. It's possible he takes the feedback the wrong way, or takes personal offense. The potential upside vs. potential downside calculation doesn't compel me to deliver honest feedback.

Here's the second kicker, a more general point: I'm sure all of us at one point or another have been the Unaware Big Man or Woman. Undoubtedly there have been times when one or more other people I've interacted with, in their heads, thought: "Gosh, Ben is annoying right now." And yet, they don't give me the feedback. The feedback loop breaks down.

Obtaining honest feedback is hard. Some CEOs tell me it's the hardest part of their job. Without feedback you can't improve. But as you acquire more power and status, people sugarcoat and are reticent to volunteer constructive criticism.

Four thoughts on this topic jump to mind:

1. For feedback on specifics -- such as your participation at a dinner or a piece of writing -- I think you have to proactively ask for it. It still might not come, honestly anyways, but if you don't ask it almost definitely will not come. The rub, of course, is that you don't know what you don't know. It didn't cross Unaware Big Man's mind to ask me for my feedback on his dinner participation. I suppose the solution is to solicit feedback even when you think you did a good job and to do so without seeming needy or insecure.

2. It's harder to get feedback on more permanent personality traits or long-standing habits. My friends Maria and Colin have solicited this type of feedback via the Nohari and Johari exercises, but it's awfully hard to ask someone to assess your character in the abstract. If you're looking for this kind of what-do-you-think-of-me-as-a-person commentary, here's an idea from a friend. Tell someone: "I'm having a hard time dating. Why do you think people are not that into me?" This will prompt a range of "ideas" about what might be unattractive about any and every aspect of your being.

3. When I ask people whether they get honest feedback, sometimes they say, "Of course I do. I always give people honest feedback, and they know this is the case -- and so I have no problem receiving it in return." Not only does this not logically follow, but these types of bull-in-china-shop people are exactly the personalities which intimidate potential feedback-givers. My theory: If you give blunt feedback, you are actually less likely to get blunt feedback in return. The law of reciprocity does not apply here.

4. Should we value feedback less when it comes from people who don't know us than feedback that comes from people who do know us well? Intimacy to a person means you are more likely to be forthright but also more biased and invested in a relationship. Also, how much does anonymity increase honesty and is the tradeoff of not being able to contextualize feedback worth the honesty boost that comes from anonymity?

We Like to be Shocked Because It Means We're Innocent

The other day, sitting in a cafe here in Nicosia, Cyprus, I glanced at CNN International on the TV as the anchor ran through the headlines. Serious dispatches from Africa, from Europe, from Colombia, and then...from the leader of the free world...balloon boy!

Lee Siegel, on the incident that dominated the headlines, writes:

Along with the primal terror of a threatened child, there is something about the ordeal of innocence that strikes deep in the American soul. We are still shocked by everything, by sex scandals, by marital infidelity, by corruption, by violence, by public displays of anger—not an hour goes by when society is not rocked, briefly, by alarm, and then hysteria over Something That Happened Out There. We like to be shocked because we like to think of ourselves as innocent enough to be shocked. So in the spectacle of a child endangered and of all the country’s law-enforcement, and military, and technological resources used to try to save the child, we perhaps see our innocence put to the test, and our strengths and virtues fully on display in response.

It recalls Robin Hanson's interesting essay on Innocence vs. Insight. Why are we so taken with innocence, an apparently attractive form of ignorance?

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I have yet to find a series of insults and defenses more impressive or hilarious than those that Lee Siegel-in-disguise hurled against his detractors.

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Here's Robin Hanson on why people do not care about inequality of beauty (while we do care about inequalities related to genders or ethnicities). Should we compensate ugly people for their bad luck?

Here's Hanson, in response to David Letterman's forced admission that he slept with female producers on his show, in praise of blackmail.

What I've Been Reading

A politics kick:

1. The People's Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy by Joe Mathews

A stupendously researched account of the first years of Schwarzenegger's governorship of California. It is sufficiently detailed as to only probably interest those who follow California politics, but then again, isn't everyone intrigued by The Governator? After reading you feel sympathetic to Arnold's attempt to reform California and newly cynical about the prospect of anyone being able to effect meaningful change. The title of the book refers to Arnold's strategy of governing via ballot initiatives and circumventing the legislature. His success in office has depended on whether the people vote up or down his many ballot initiatives. Voters are influenced by the interest groups which run California. When the teachers' unions came out against his slate of initiatives a few years ago -- spending millions of dollars to flood the state with ads bashing Arnold and his proposed reforms, which included such insane ideas like lengthening the time it would take for teachers to gain tenure from 3 to 5 years -- his initiatives went down, along with his governorship.

2. Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt by David McCullough

A good look at TR's childhood and early influences. McCullough is masterful, as ever. Here's Edith Wharton on TR:

...he was so alive at all points, and so gifted with the rare faculty of living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passed...

Living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passes: not a bad goal.

3, 4. Dead Right (1992) and Comeback (2008) by David Frum. Frum is one of the wisest conservative commentators. I support his new project, Newmajority, which (unofficially) stands to rebuke the Sarah Palin wing of the Republican party -- and her talk radio side-kicks -- and instead promote a smarter renewal of a conservative movement. Dead Right is more serious and comprehensive and I recommend it to anyone interested in an insider's take on the conservative scene in the 80's and 90's. Comeback is positioned as a playbook for the Republican Party in the coming years but it struck me as rushed and not terribly persuasive. I am intrigued at Frum's evolving view on the role social issues should play in the Republican Platform. His shift is evident when you read his two books back to back. Myself, I am not at home in the Republican Party because of the social views they espouse and so I am always interested in how GOP commentators position their party on this front for the future, given changing demographics and related views on gay marriage and the like.