On Complications

I recently finished reading Complications – A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science – by Atul Gawande.

Below are key excerpts from this book that I found particularly insightful:

The thing that still startles me is how fundamentally human an endeavor it is. Usually, when we think about medicine and its remarkable abilities, what comes to mind is the science and all it has given us to fight sickness and misery: the tests, the machines, the drugs, the procedures. And without question, these are at the center of virtually everything medicine achieves. But we rarely see how it all actually works. You have a cough that won’t go away—and then? It’s not science you call upon but a doctor. A doctor with good days and bad days. A doctor with a weird laugh and a bad haircut. A doctor with three other patients to see and, inevitably, gaps in what he knows and skills he’s still trying to learn.

I am a surgical resident, very nearly at the end of my eight years of training in general surgery, and this book arises from the intensity of that experience…But more than anything, this book comes from what I have encountered and witnessed in the day-to-day caring of people…The book’s title, Complications, comes not just from the unexpected turns that can result in medicine but also, and more fundamentally, from my concern with the larger uncertainties and dilemmas that underlie what we do. This is the medicine that one cannot find explained in textbooks but that has puzzled me, sometimes troubled me, sometimes amazed me, as I’ve joined the profession’s ranks.

There is a saying about surgeons, meant as a reproof: “Sometimes wrong; never in doubt.” But this seemed to me their strength. Every day, surgeons are faced with uncertainties. Information is inadequate; the science is ambiguous; one’s knowledge and abilities are never perfect. Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off—or even alive.

In surgery, as in anything else, skill and confidence are learned through experience – haltingly and humiliatingly. Like the tennis player and the oboist and the guy who fixes hard drives, we need practice to get good at what we do. There is one difference in medicine, though: it is people we practice upon.

This is the uncomfortable truth about teaching. By traditional ethics and public insistence (not to mention court rulings), a patient’s right to the best care possible must trump the objective of training novices. We want perfection without practice.Yet everyone is harmed if no one is trained for the future. So learning is hidden, behind drapes and anesthesia and the elisions of language. Nor does the dilemma apply just to residents, physicians in training.

With repetition, a lot of mental functioning becomes automatic and effortless, as when you drive a car to work. Novel situations, however, usually require conscious thought and “workaround” solutions, which are slower to develop, more difficult to execute, and more prone to error. A surgeon for whom most situations have automatic solutions has a significant advantage.

The British psychologist James Reason argues, in his book Human Error, that our propensity for certain types of error is the price we pay for the brain’s remarkable ability to think and act intuitively—to sift quickly through the sensory information that constantly bombards us without wasting time trying to work through every situation anew. Thus systems that rely on human perfection present what Reason calls “latent errors”-errors waiting to happen.

This sort of burnout is surprisingly common. Doctors are supposed to be tougher, steadier, better able to handle pressure than most. (Don’t the rigors of medical training weed out the weak ones?) But the evidence suggests otherwise. Studies s show, for example, that alcoholism is no less common among doctors than among other people. Doctors are more likely to become addicted to prescription narcotics and tranquilizers, presumably because we have such easy access to them.

In the end, it is sometimes not science but what people tell us that is the most convincing proof we have.

In recent years, we in medicine have discovered how discouragingly often we turn out to do wrong by patients. For one thing, where the knowledge of what the right thing to do exists, we still too frequently fail to do it. Plain old mistakes of execution are not uncommon, and we have only begun to recognize the systemic frailties. technological faults, and human inadequacies that cause them, let alone how to reduce them. Furthermore, important knowledge simply not made its way far enough into practice.

In the absence of algorithms and evidence about what to do, you learn in medicine to make decisions by feel. You count on experience and judgment. And it is hard not to be troubled by this.

It is because intuition sometimes succeeds that we don’t know what to do with it. Such successes are not quite the result of logical thinking. But they are not the result of mere luck, either.

A highly recommended read in the areas of medicine and decision making.

On Writing

I recently finished reading On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft – by Stephen King.

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found to be particularly insightful:

Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your  job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

I am approaching the heart of this of this book with two theses, both simple. The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, gram mar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.

Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work.

Do you do it for the money, honey? The answer is no. Don’t now and never did. Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it. I have done some work as favors for friends—logrolling is the slang term for it— but at the very worst, you’d have to call that a crude kind of barter. I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side—I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.

On a closing note:

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the | end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book— perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it— is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

A highly recommended read in the areas of writing and storytelling.

On It Starts With Food

I recently finished reading It Starts with Food – Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life In Unexpected Way by Dallas Hartwig and Melissa Hartwig. This book was recommended to me by my fitness instructor.

Below are key excerpts from this book, that I found particularly insightful:

The food you eat either makes you more healthy or less healthy. Those are your options.

The food that we eat should: 1) Promote a healthy psychological response. 2) Promote a healthy hormonal response. 3) Support a healthy gut. 4) Support immune function and minimize inflammation.

In nature, pleasure and reward signals led us to vital nutrition.

*The food choices you make should promote a healthy psychological response. *Sweet, fatty, and salty tastes send pleasure and reward signals to the brain. In nature, these signals were designed to lead us to valuable nutrition and survival. *Today, these flavor sensations are unnaturally concentrated in food, which is simultaneously stripped of valuable nutrition. *This creates food-with-no-brakes- supernormally stimulating, carbohydrates-dense, nutrient-poor foods with all the pleasure and reward signals to keep us overeating, but none of the satiety signals to tell us to stop. *These foods rewire pleasure, reward, and emotion pathways in the brain, promoting hard-to-resist cravings and automatic consumption. Stress and inadequate sleep only reinforce these patterns. *Reconnecting delicious, rewarding food with the nutrition and satiety that nature intended is the key to changing these habits.

*The food choices you make should promote a healthy hormonal response in the body. *Chronic “overcarbsumption” of food-with-no-brakes leads to reliance on sugar for fuel, an accumulation of body fat, triglyceride buildup in the liver, and an excess of glucose and triglycerides in the bloodstream. *Excess glucose and triglycerides in the blood stream promote leptin resistance in the brain. *Leptin resistance means your brain doesn’t hear the leptin message and thinks you’re still too lean. This promotes further overconsumption and the down-regulation of your metabolism (in part via your thyroid). *Leptin resistance promotes insulin resistance, in which cells are no longer sensitive to insulin’s message to store. Forcing nutrients into cells creates damage and inflammation and leads to chronically elevated blood sugar and insulin levels. *Chronically elevated blood sugar and insulin levels are contributing factors to type 2 diabetes and a number of other lifestyle-related diseases and conditions. *Glucagon can help you stabilize blood sugar and use fat for fuel, but only when insulin levels aren’t elevated. *Cortisol is a stress hormone. Periods of fasting or excessive caloric restriction, along with lack of adequate sleep or too much stress, may contribute to chronically elevated cortisol levels. *Chronically elevated cortisol levels increase blood sugar, which may contribute to insulin resistance and promotes weight gain in the abdominal region, a component of metabolic syndrome.

Chronically high levels of insulin are harmful, so managing insulin levels is critical for long-term health.

*The food you eat should foster a healthy gut and digestive system. *Maintaining a healthy gut barrier is critically important to your health. *Certain foods can unbalance your healthy gut bacteria and/or promote intestinal permeability, compromising gut integrity. *Compromised gut integrity and bacterial imbalance lead to digestive distress and can promote chronic disease, hypersensitivities, and autoimmune conditions in the body. *Most of your immune system is located in your gut, which means our third and fourth Good Food standards are very closely linked.

*The food you eat should promote a balanced immune system and minimize chronic systemic inflammation. *Chronic systemic inflammation is full-body (systemic), long-term (chronic) up-regulation of your immune system activity. *Your immune system has two major functions – defense against threats and low-level repair and maintenance. *Certain foods sneak past your gut’s defense system and create immune chaos. *If certain factors, like your food choices, are overloading your immune system, it’s going to be less effective at doing its main jobs, and something is going to be left undone or done poorly. *Chronic systemic inflammation is a central risk factor for a number of lifestyle-related diseases and conditions and is at the heart of metabolic syndrome. *Silent inflammation isn’t so silent if you know what to listen for. *Managing the inflammatory status of your body profoundly impacts your quality of life.

Eating whole, unprocessed foods with a rich complement of fat and other nutrients is not unhealthy. Overeating refined carbohydrates is.

A highly recommended read in the areas of health and nutrition.

On A Short History Of Nearly Everything

I recently finished reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. As best summarized by the author: “This is a book about how it happened – in particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also some of what happened in between and since. That’s a great deal to cover, of course, which is why the book is called A Short History of Nearly Everything, even though it isn’t really. It couldn’t be. But with luck by the time we finish it will feel as if it is.”

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

Just as there is no place where you can find the edge of the universe. so there is no place where you can stand at the center and say: This is where it all began. This is the centermost point of it all.” We are all at the center of it all. Actually, we don’t know that for sure; we can’t prove it mathematically. Scientists just assume that we can’t really be the center of the universe-think what that would imply but that the phenomenon must be the same for all observers in all places. Still, we don’t actually know.

So, by the late eighteenth century scientists knew very precisely the shape and dimensions of the Earth and its distance from the Sun and planets; and now Cavendish, without even leaving home, had given them its weight So you might think that determining the age of the Earth would be relatively straightforward. After all, the necessary materials were literally at their feet But no. Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

Smith’s revelation regarding strata heightened the moral awkwardness concerning extinctions. To begin with, it confirmed that God had wined out creatures not occasionally but repeatedly This made Him seem not so much careless as peculiarly hostile. It also made it inconveniently necessary to explain how some species were wiped out while others continued unimpeded into succeeding eons. Clearly there was more to extinctions than could be accounted for by a single Noachian deluge, as the Biblical flood was known. Cuvier resolved the matter to his own satisfaction by suggesting that Genesis applied only to the most recent inundation. God, it appeared, hadn’t wished to distract or alarm Moses with news of earlier, irrelevant extinctions.

Thanks to the devoted and unwittingly high-risk work of the first atomic scientists, by the early years of the twentieth century it was becoming clear that Earth was unquestionably venerable, though another half century of science would have to be done before anyone could confidently say quite how venerable. Science, meanwhile, was about to get a new age of its own-the atomic one.

Above all, there was the problem that quantum physics introduced a level of untidiness that hadn’t previously existed. Suddenly you needed two sets of laws to explain the behavior of the universe-quantum theory for the world of the very small and relativity for the larger universe beyond. The gravity of relativity theory was brilliant at explaining why planets orbited suns or why galaxies tended to cluster, but turned out to have no influence at all at the particle level. To explain what kept atoms together. other forces were needed, and in the 1930s two were discovered: the strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force. The strong force binds atoms together; it’s what allows protons to bed down together in the nucleus. The weak force engages in more miscellaneous tasks, mostly to do with controlling the rates of certain sorts of radioactive decay.

The theory is that empty space isn’t so empty at ail-that there are particles of matter and antimatter popping into existence and popping out again and that these are pushing the universe outward at an accelerating rate. Improbably enough, the one thing that resolves all this is Einstein’s cosmological constant-the little piece of math he dropped into the general theory of relativity to stop the universe’s presumed expansion, and called “the biggest blunder of my life.” It now appears that he may have gotten things right after all.

I have brought you a long way to make a small point: a big part of the reason that Earth seems so miraculously accommodating is that we evolved to suit its conditions. What we marvel at is not that it is suitable to life but that it is suitable to our life-and hardly surprising, really. It may be that many of the things that make it so splendid to us-well-proportioned Sun, doting Moon, sociable carbon, more magma than you can shake a stick at, and all the rest-seem splendid simply because they are what we were born count on. No one can altogether say.

Extinction is always bad news for the victims, of course, but it appears to be a good thing for a dynamic planet The alternative to extinction i; stagnation,” says Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History, “and stagnation is seldom a good thing in any realm.” (I should perhaps note that we are speaking here of extinction as a natural, long-term process. Extinction brought about by human carelessness is another matter altogether.)

So why do we know as little as we do? There are nearly as many reasons as there are animals left to count but here are a few of the principal causes: Most living things are small and easily overlooked. We don’t look in the right places. There aren’t enough specialists. The world is a really big place.

Together, without realizing it Darwin and Mendel laid the groundwork for all of life sciences in the twentieth century. Darwin saw that all living things are connected, that ultimately they “trace their ancestry to a single, common source,” while Mendel’s work provided the mechanism to explain how that could happen. The two men could easily have helped each other. Mendel owned a German edition of the Origin of Species, which he is known to have read, so he must have realized the applicability of his work to Darwin’s, yet he appears to have made no effort to get in touch. And Darwin for his part is known to have studied Focke’s influential paper with its repeated references to Mendel’s work, but didn’t connect them to his own studies.

Climate is the product of so many variables-rising and falling carbon dioxide levels, the shifts of continents, solar activity, the stately wobbles of the Milankovitch cycles-that it is as difficult to comprehend the events of the past as it is to predict those of the future. Much is simply beyond us.

But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive and when not we have no idea-really none at ail-about how many things have died off permanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process. In 1979, in the book The Sinking Art the author Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing about two extinctions a week on the planet By the early 1990s he had raised the figure to some six hundred per week. (That’s extinctions have put the figure even higher-to well over a thousand a week. A United Nations report of 1995, on the other hand, put the total number of known extinctions in the last four hundred years at slightly under 500 for animals and slightly over 650 for plants-while allowing that this was “almost certainly an underestimate,” particularly with regard to tropical species. A few interpreters think most extinction figures are grossly inflated. The fact is, we don’t know. Don’t have any idea. We don’t know when we started doing many of the things we’ve done. We don’t know what we are doing right now or how our present actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do it on, and only one species of being capable of making a considered difference. Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: “One planet one experiment.” If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by “we” I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp. We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modem human beings-that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities-have existed for only about 0-0001 percent of Earth’s history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune. We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.

A highly recommended read!

On Predictably Irrational

I recently finished reading Predictably Irrational – The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions – by Dan Ariely. As the author best states it, this book is about: ” My goal, by the end of this book, is to help you fundamentally rethink what makes you and the people around you tick. I hope to lead you there by presenting a wide range of scientific experiments, findings, and anecdotes that are in many cases quite amusing. Once you see how systematic certain mistakes are—how we repeat them again and again—I think you will begin to learn how to avoid some of them.” He further expands: “My further observation is that we are not only irrational, but predictably irrational—that our irrationality happens the same way, again and again. Whether we are acting as consumers, businesspeople, or policy makers, understanding how we are predictably irrational provides a starting point for improving our decision-making and changing the way we live for the better.”

Below are key excerpts from this book that I found particularly insightful:

Relativity is (relatively) easy to understand. But there’s one aspect of relativity that consistently trips us up. It’s this: we not only tend to compare things with one another but also tend to focus on comparing things that are easily comparable—and avoid comparing things that cannot be compared easily.

When we keep social and market norms on their separate paths, life hums along pretty well…When social and market norms collide, trouble sets in.

The answer, I believe, is not to re-create society as Burning Man, but to remember that social norms can play a far greater role in society than we have been giving them credit for. If we contemplate how market norms have gradually taken over our lives in the past few decades—with their emphasis on higher salaries, more income, and more spending— we may recognize that a return to some of the old social norms might not be so bad after all. In fact, it might bring quite a bit of the old civility back to our lives.

We have problems with self-control. related to immediate and delayed gratification—^no doubt there. But each of the problems we face has potential self-control mechanisms, as well. If we can’t save from our paycheck, we can take advantage of our employer’s automatic deduction option; if we don’t have the will to exercise regularly alone, we can make an appointment to exercise in the company of our friends. These are the tools that we can commit to in advance, and they may help us be the kind of people we want to be.

Our propensity to overvalue what we own is a basic human bias, and it reflects a more general tendency to fall in love with, and be overly optimistic about, anything that has to do with ourselves…I don’t think we can become more accurate and objective in the way we think about our children and houses, but maybe we can realize that we have such biases and listen more carefully to the advice and feedback we get from others.

As it turns out, positive expectations allow us to enjoy things more and improve our perception of the world around us. The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it night be all we’ll get.

This is my take. We care about honesty and we want to be honest. The problem is that our internal honesty monitor is active only when we contemplate big transgressions, like grabbing an entire box of pens from the conference hall. For the little transgressions, like taking a single pen or two pens, we don’t even consider how these actions would reflect on our honesty and so our superego stays asleep. Without the superego’s help, monitoring, and managing of our honesty, the only defense we have against this kind of transgression is a rational cost-benefit analysis. But who is going to consciously weigh the benefits of taking a towel from a hotel room versus the cost of being caught? Who is going to consider the costs and benefits of adding a few receipts to a tax statement? As we saw in the experiment at Harvard, the cost-benefit analysis, and the probability of getting caught in particular, does not seem to have much influence on dishonesty.

In many ways, the standard economic and Shakespearean views are more optimistic about human nature, since they assume that our capacity for reasoning is limitless. By the same token the behavioral economics view, which acknowledges human deficiencies, is more depressing, because it demonstrates the many ways in which we fall short of our ideals. Indeed, it can be rather depressing to realize that we all continually make irrational decisions in our personal, professional, and social lives. But there is a silver lining: the fact that we make mistakes also means that there are ways to improve our decisions—and therefore that there are opportunities for “free lunches.”

In closing:

Visual illusions are also illustrative here. Just as we can’t help being fooled by visual illusions, we fall for the “decision illusions” our minds show us. The point is that our visual and decision environments are filtered to us courtesy of our eyes. our ears, our senses of smell and touch, and the master of it all, our brain. By the time we comprehend and digest information, it is not necessarily a true reflection of reality. Instead, it is our representation of reality, and this is the input we base our decisions on. In essence we are limited to the tools nature has given us, and the natural way in which we make decisions is limited by the quality and accuracy of these tools. A second main lesson is that although irrationality is commonplace, it does not necessarily mean that we are helpless. Once we understand when and where we may make erroneous decisions, we can try to be more vigilant, force ourselves to think differently about these decisions, or use technology to overcome our inherent shortcomings. This is also where businesses and policy makers could revise their thinking and consider how to design their policies and products so as to provide free lunches.

A must read in the area of decision making.

 

On Guns, Germs, And Steel

I recently finished reading the Pulitzer winner Guns, Germs, And Steel – The Fates of Human Societies – by Jared Diamond. As the author best summarizes:

Thus, we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern and my book’s subject. While this book is thus ultimately about history and prehistory, its subject is not of just academic interest but also of overwhelming practical and political importance. The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas today…It seems logical to suppose that history’s pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves. Of course, we’re taught that it’s not polite to say so in public. We read of technical studies claiming to demonstrate inborn differences, and we also read rebuttals claiming that those studies suffer from technical flaws. We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place. We’re told that this too is to be attributed not to any biological shortcomings but to social disadvantages and limited opportunities…I harbor no illusions that these chapters have succeeded in explaining the histories of all the continents for the past 13,000 years. Obviously, that would be impossible to accomplish in a single book even if we did understand all the answers, which we don’t. At best, this book identifies several constellations of environmental factors that I believe provide a large part of the answer to Yali’s question. Recognition of those factors emphasizes the unexplained residue, whose understanding will be a task for the future.

Below are excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

In short, plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses, and (in some areas) the animal-based means of transporting those surpluses. were a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies. Hence the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earliest in Eurasia and later, or not at all, on other continents. The military uses of horses and camels, and the killing power of animal-derived germs, complete the list of major links between food production and conquest that we shall be exploring.

There is no doubt that Europeans developed a big advantage in weaponry, technology, and political organization over most of the non-European peoples that they conquered. But that advantage alone doesn’t fully explain how initially so few European immigrants came to supplant so much of the native population of the Americas and some other parts of the world. That might not have happened without Europe’s sinister gift to other continents—the germs evolving from Eurasians’ long intimacy with domestic animals.

Knowledge brings power. Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant lands and more remote times. Of course, some peoples (notably the Incas) managed to administer empires without writing, and “civilized” peoples don’t always defeat “barbarians,” as Roman armies facing the Huns learned. But the European conquests of the Americas, Siberia, and Australia illustrate the typical recent outcome. Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest. The commands of the monarchs and merchants who organized colonizing fleets were conveyed in writing. The fleets set their courses by maps and written sailing directions prepared by previous expeditions. Written accounts of earlier expeditions motivated later ones, by describing the wealth and fertile lands awaiting the conquerors. The accounts taught subsequent explorers what conditions to expect, and helped them prepare themselves. The resulting empires were administered with the aid of writing. While all those types of information were also transmitted by other means in preliterate societies. writing made the transmission easier, more detailed, more accurate, and more persuasive.

When a widely useful invention does crop up in one society, it then tends to spread in either of two ways. One way is that other societies see or learn of the invention, are receptive to it, and adopt it. The second is that societies lacking the invention find themselves at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the inventing society, and they become overwhelmed and replaced if the disadvantage is sufficiently great.

Considerations of conflict resolution, decision-making, economics, and space thus converge in requiring large societies to be centralized. But centralization of power inevitably opens the door—for those who hold the power, are privy to information, make the decisions, and redistribute the goods—to exploit the resulting opportunities to reward themselves and their relatives. To anyone familiar with any modern grouping of people, that’s obvious. As early societies developed, those acquiring centralized power gradually established themselves as an elite, perhaps originating as one of several formerly equal-ranked village clans that became “more equal” than the others.

Why were the trajectories of all key developments shifted to later dates in the Americas than in Eurasia? Four groups of reasons suggest themselves: the later start, more limited suite of wild animals and plants available for domestication, greater barriers to diffusion, and possibly smaller or more isolated areas of dense human populations in the Americas than in Eurasia.

These comparisons suggest that geographic connectedness has exerted both positive and negative effects on the evolution of technology. As a result, in the very long run, technology may have developed most rapidly in regions with moderate connectedness, neither too high nor too low. Technology’s course over the last 1,000 years in China, Europe, and possibly the Indian subcontinent exemplifies those net effects of high, moderate. and low connectedness, respectively.

There are many obvious reasons for these effects of history, such as that long experience of state societies and agriculture implies experienced administrators, experience with market economies, and so on. Statistically, part of that ultimate effect of history proves to be mediated by the familiar proximate causes of good institutions. But there is still a large effect of history remaining after one controls for the usual measures of good institutions. Hence there must be other mediating proximate mechanisms as well. Thus a key problem will be to understand the detailed chain of causation from a long history of state societies and agriculture to modern economic growth, in order to help developing countries advance up that chain more quickly.

A must read for anyone looking to better understand the past, present and future of human civilization.

 

On Washington

I recently finished reading the masterpiece, Washington – A Life, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, by acclaimed author Ron Chernow. As Ron states in the introduction: “The goal of the present biography is to create a fresh portrait of Washington that will make him real, credible, and charismatic in the same way that he was perceived by his contemporaries. By gleaning anecdotes and quotes from myriad sources, especially from hundreds of eyewitness accounts, I have tried to make him vivid and immediate, rather than the lifeless waxwork he has become for many Americans, and thereby elucidate the secrets of his uncanny ability to lead a nation.”

Below are selected excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

Gouverneur Morris agreed that Washington had “the tumultuous passions which accompany greatness and frequently tarnish its luster. With them was his first contest, and his first victory was over himself…Yet those who have seen him strongly moved will bear witness that his wrath was terrible. They have seen, boiling in his bosom, passion almost too mighty for man.

What strikes one most about the twenty-year-old George Washington was that his sudden remarkable standing in the world was the result not so much of a slow. agonizing progress as of a series of rapid, abrupt leaps that thrust him into the topmost echelons of Virginia society. The deaths of those he loved most dearly had. ironically, brightened his prospects the most. Quite contrary to his own wishes, the untimely deaths of his father and his half-brother had endowed him with extraordinary advantages in the form of land, slaves, and social status. Every misfortune only pushed him further along his desired path. Most providential of all for him was that Lawrence Washington had expired on the eve of the French and Indian War, a conflict in which George’s newfound status as district adjutant would place him squarely at the forefront of a thunderous global confrontation.

Beneath the hard rind, Washington was far more sensitive than he appeared. and this heartfelt message from his men “affected him exceedingly,” he admitted. He had a fine sense of occasion, displayed in this early response to his men. Already adept at tearful farewells, he exhibited the succinct eloquence that came to define his speaking style. He began by calling the officers’ approval of his conduct “an honor that will constitute the greatest happiness of my fife and afford in my latest hours the most pleasing reflections.” Unable to avoid a youthful dig at Dinwiddle and Forbes, he hinted at the “uncommon difficulties” under which he had labored. But it was the palpable affection he summoned up for his men that made the statement noteworthy. Washington thanked his officers “with uncommon sincerity and true affection for the honor you have done me, for if I have acquired any reputation, it is from you I derive it. I thank you also for the love and regard you have all along shown me. It is in this I am rewarded. It is herein I glory.”

One thing that hasn’t aroused dispute is the exemplary nature of Washington’s religious tolerance. He shuddered at the notion of exploiting religion for partisan purposes or showing favoritism for certain denominations. As president, when writing to Jewish, Baptist, Presbyterian, and other congregations—he officially saluted twenty-two major religious groups—he issued eloquent statements on rel i tolerance. He was so devoid of spiritual bias that his tolerance even embraced atheism.

For all the many virtues he had shown in his life, nothing quite foreshadowed the wisdom, courage, fortitude, and resolution that George Washington had just exhibited. Adversity had brought his best traits to the surface and even ennobled him. Sensing it, Abigail Adams told her friend Mercy Otis Warren, “I am apt to think that our later misfortunes have called out the hidden excellencies of our commander-in-chief.” She quoted a line from the English poet Edward Young: “‘Affliction is the good man’s shining time.'” One consistent thread from his earlier life had prefigured these events: Washington’s tenacity of purpose, his singular ability to stalk a goal with all the resources at his disposal.

Instead of elevating himself above his men, Washington portrayed himself as their friend and peer. Having softened them up with personal history, he delivered an impassioned appeal to their deep-seated patriotism.

The man who had pulled off the exemplary feat of humbling the most powerful military on earth had not been corrupted by fame. Though quietly elated and relieved, he was neither intoxicated by power nor puffed up with a sense of his own genius.

As Benjamin Franklin told an English friend after the war, “An American planter was chosen by us to command our troops and continued during the whole war. This man sent home to you, one after another, five of your best generals, baffled, their heads bare of laurels, disgraced even in the opinion of their employers.”

Historians often quote a September 1786 letter from Washington to John Francis Mercer as signaling a major forward stride in his thinking on slavery: “I never mean (unless some particular circumstance should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by the legislature by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.” But this noble statement then took a harsh turn. Washington mentioned being hard pressed by two debts—to retire one of which, “if there is no other resource, I must sell land or Negroes to discharge.” In other words. in a pinch, Washington would trade slaves to settle debts. Clearly, the abolition of slavery would have exacted too steep an economic price for Washington to contemplate serious action.

Washington was a perceptive man who, behind his polite facade, was unmatched at taking the measure of people. People did not always realize how observant he was.

The gist of many of Washington’s remarks was that French actions toward America had been motivated by self-interest, not ideological solidarity, and flouted American neutrality in seeking to enlist the United States in the war against England. The imbroglio with Monroe signaled the demise of yet another Washington friendship with a prominent Virginian, a list that now encompassed George Mason, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Edmund Randolph.

The presidential legacy he left behind in Philadelphia was a towering one. As Gordon Wood has observed, “The presidency is the powerful office it is in large part because of Washington’s initial behavior.” Washington had forged the executive branch of the federal government, appointed outstanding department heads, and set a benchmark for fairness, efficiency, and integrity that future administrations would aspire to match.

Washington never achieved the national unity he desired and, by the end, presided over a deeply riven country…But whatever his or clamp down on his shrill opponents in the press who had hounded him mercilessly. To his everlasting credit, he showed that the American political system could manage tensions without abridging civil liberties. His most flagrant failings remained those of the country as a whole—the inability to deal forthrightly with the injustice of slavery or to figure out an equitable solution in the ongoing clashes with Native Americans.

Washington died in a manner that befit his life: with grace, dignity, self-possession, and a manifest regard for others. He never yielded to shrieks, hysteria. or unseemly complaints.

George Washington possessed the gift of inspired simplicity, a clarity and purity of vision that never failed him. Whatever petty partisan disputes swirled around him, he kept his eyes fixed on the transcendent goals that motivated his quest. As sensitive to criticism as any other man, he never allowed personal attacks or threats to distract him, following an inner compass that charted the way ahead. For a quarter century, he had stuck to an undeviating path that led straight to the creation of an independent republic, the enactment of the Constitution, and the formation of the federal government. History records few examples of a leader who so earnestly wanted to do the right thing, not just for himself but for his country. Avoiding moral shortcuts, he consistently upheld such high ethical standards that he seemed larger than any other figure on the political scene. Again and again the American people had entrusted him with power, secure in the knowledge that he would exercise it fairly and ably and surrender it when his term of office was up. He had shown that the president and commander-in-chief of a republic could possess a grandeur surpassing that of all the crowned heads of Europe. He brought maturity, sobriety, judgment, and integrity to a political experiment that could easily have grown giddy with its own vaunted success, and he avoided the backbiting, envy, and intrigue that detracted from the achievements of other founders. He had indeed been the indispensable man of the American Revolution.

A must read book about a key historical figure, not only for the US but for the world at large.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman

I recently finished reading “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” – Adventures of a Curious Character by the late and famed Physicist Richard P. Feynman – Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. I first came across Richard through a series of lectures in which he was explaining what Science is. He immediately captivated me in his ability to clearly and simply articulate even the most complex of subjects.

Albert R. Hibbs, a senior member of the scientific staff at Caltech sums up this book perfectly in his introduction to it:

I hope these won’t be the only memoirs of Richard Feynman. Certainly the reminiscences here give a true picture of much of his character—his almost compulsive need to solve puzzles, his provocative mischievousness, his indignant impatience with pretension and hypocrisy, and his talent for one-upping anybody who tries to one-up him! This book is great reading: outrageous, shocking, still warm and very human. For all that, it only skirts the keystone of his life: science. We see it here and there. as background material in one sketch or another, but never as the focus of his existence, which generations of his students and colleagues know it to be. Perhaps nothing else is possible. There may be no way to construct such a series of delightful stories about himself and his work: the challenge and frustration, the excitement that caps insight, the deep pleasure of scientific understanding that has been the wellspring of happiness in his life.

On Feynman’s drive to solve puzzles:

That’s a puzzle drive. It’s what accounts for my wanting to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school, during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldn’t stop until I figured the damn thing out—it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the same problem, and I’d do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a super-genius.

On the importance of common language:

I thought my symbols were just as good, if not better, than the regular symbols—it doesn’t make any difference what symbols you use—but I discovered later that it does make a difference. Once when I was explaining something to another kid in high school, without thinking I started to make these symbols, and he said, “What the hell are those?” I realized then that if I’m going said, ‘ I realized then that if I’m going to talk to anybody else, I’ll have to use the standard symbols, so I eventually gave up my own symbols.

On innovating in the real world:

I thought that was perfect, but the boss came by one day, and she wanted to answer the phone, and she couldn’t figure it out— too complicated. “What are all these papers doing? Why is the telephone on this side? Why don’t you . . . raaaaaaaa!” I tried to explain—it was my own aunt—that there was no reason not to do that, but you can’t say that to anybody who’s smart, who runs a hotel! I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world.

On the team assembled at Los Alamos:

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet. while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end. the decision is made as to which idea was the best—summing it all up—without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.

On being direct:

Then the son told me what happened. The last time he was there, Bohr said to his son, “Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? He’s the only guy who’s not afraid of me, and will say when I’ve got a crazy idea. So next time when we want to discuss ideas, we’re not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy and we’ll talk with him first.” I was always dumb in that way. I never knew who I was talking to. I was always worried about the nhvsics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition.

On the importance of validation:

Since then I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself. When people said the quark theory was pretty good, I got two Ph.D.s, Finn Ravndal and Mark Kislinger, to go through the whole works with me, just so I could check that the thing was really giving results that fit fairly well, and that it was a significantly good theory. I’ll never make that mistake again, reading the experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do. and that’s the end of you.

On simplicity and scientific integrity:

If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing—and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision. One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.

On a concluding note:

It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching—to  teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity. So I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

 

On The Price of Inequality

I just finished reading The Price of Inequality – How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future – by Joseph E. Stiglitz. This book was a selected reading at the Houston Non Fiction Book Club that I am part of.

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- “But fully addressing a problem of the magnitude, depth, and duration of inequality in the United States will take comprehensive actions, of a kind that will require bipartisan support. Traditionally persons in both parties have understood that a nation divided cannot stand—and the divisions today ire greater than they have been in generations, threatening basic values, including our conception of ourselves as a land of opportunity Will we once again pull back from the brink? This book is written in the hope that we can and that we will—if only we grasp what has been happening to our economy and our society.”

2- “As we talked, it was clear to me that while specific grievances varied from country to country and, in particular, that the political grievances in the Middle East were very different from those in the West, there were some shared themes. There was a common understanding that in many ways the economic and political system had failed and that both were fundamentally unfair.”

3- “Three themes resonated around the world: that markets weren’t working the way they were supposed to, for they were obviously neither efficient nor stable; that the political system hadn’t corrected the market failures; and that the economic and political systems are fundamentally unfair. While this book focuses on the excessive inequality that marks the United States and some other advanced industrial countries today it explains how the three themes are intimately interlinked: the inequality is cause and consequence of the failure of the political system, and it contributes to the instability of our economic system, which in turn contributes to increased inequality—a vicious downward spiral into which we have descended, and from which we can emerge only through concerted policies that I describe below.”

4- “This book is about why our economic system is failing for most Americans, why inequality is growing to the extent it is, and what the consequences are. The underlying thesis is that we are paying a high price for our inequality—an economic system that is less stable and less efficient, with less growth. and a democracy that has been put into peril. But even more is at stake: as our economic system is seen to fail for most citizens, and as our political system seems to be captured by moneyed interests, confidence in our democracy and in our market economy will erode along with our global influence. As the reality sinks in that we are no longer a country of opportunity and that even our long-vaunted rule of law and system of justice have been compromised, even our sense of national identity may be put into jeopardy.”

5- “Given a political system that is so sensitive to moneyed interests, growing economic inequality leads to a growing imbalance of political power, a vicious nexus between politics and economics. And the two together shape, and are shaped by societal forces—social mores and institutions—that help reinforce this growing inequality.”

6- “The journalist Jonathan Chait has drawn attention to two of the most telling statistics from the Economic Mobility Project and research from the Economic Policy Institute Poor kids who succeed academically are less likely to graduate from college than richer kids who do worse in school Even if they graduate from college, the children of the poor are still worse-off than low-achieving children of the rich, None of this comes as a surprise: education is one of the keys to success; at the top, the country gives its elite an education that is the best in the world. But the average American gets just an average education—and in mathematics, key to success in many areas of modern life, it’s subpar.”

7- “Our political system has increasingly been working in ways that increase the inequality of outcomes and reduce equality of opportunity This should not come as a surprise: we have a political system that gives inordinate power to those t the top, and they have used that power not only to limit the extent of redistribution but also to shape the rules of the game in their favor, and to extract from the public what can only be called large “gifts.” Economists have a name for these activities: they call them rent seeking, getting income not as a reward to creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort.”

8- “Three factors contributed to this increased monopolization of markets. First, there was a battle over ideas about the role that government should take in ensuring competition.Chicago school economists (like Milton Friedman and George Stigler) who believe in free and unfettered markets argued that markets are naturally competitive^^ and that seemingly anti-competitive practices really enhance efficiency A massive program to “educate” people, and especially judges, regarding these new doctrines of law and economics, partly sponsored by right-wing foundations like ^he Olin Foundation, was successful…A second factor giving rise to increased monopoly is related to changes in our economy. The creation of monopoly power was easier in some of the new growth industries. Many of these sectors were marked by what are called network externalities.”

9- “In many societies, those at the bottom consist disproportionately of groups that suffer, in one way or another, from discrimination. The extent of such discrimination is a matter of societal norms. We’ll see how changes in social norms—concerning, for instance, what is fair compensation—and in institutions, like unions, have helped shape America’s distribution of income and wealth. But these social norms and institutions, like markets, don’t exist in a vacuum: they too are shaped, in part, by the 1 percent.”

10- “I have emphasized that the problems concern globalization as it has been managed. Countries in Asia benefited enormously through export-led growth, and some (such as China) took measures to ensure that significant portions of that increased output went to the poor, some went to provide for public education, and much was reinvested in the economy to provide more jobs. In other countries, there have been big losers as well as winners—poor corn farmers in Mexico have seen their incomes decline as subsidized American corn drives down prices on world markets.”

11- “What is striking about the United States is that while the level of inequality generated by the market—a market shaped and distorted by politics and rent seeking—is higher than in other advanced industrial countries, it does less to temper this inequality through tax and expenditure programs. And as the market-generated inequality has increased, our government has done less and less.”

12- “Government today plays a double role in our current inequality: it is partly responsible for the inequality in before-tax distribution of income, and it has taken a diminished role in “correcting” this inequality through progressive tax and expenditure policies.”

13- “The central thesis of this chapter and the preceding one is also that inequality is not just the result of the forces of nature, of abstract market forces. We might like the speed of light to be faster, but there is nothing we can do about it. But inequality is, to a very large extent, the result of government policies that shape and direct the forces of technology and markets and broader societal forces. There is in this a note of both hope and despair: hope because it means that this inequality is not inevitable, and that by changing policies we can achieve a more efficient and a more egalitarian society; despair because the political processes that shape these policies are so hard to change.”

14- “We have seen how inequality gives rise to instability, as a suit of both the deregulatory policies that are enacted and the policies that are typically adopted in response to the deficiencies in aggregate demand. Neither is a necessary consequence of inequality: if our democracy worked better, it might have resisted the political demand for deregulation and might lave responded to the weaknesses in aggregate demand in ways that enhanced sustainable growth rather than creating a bubble.”

15- “Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on getting ahead, but the statistics today, as we’ve seen, suggest otherwise: the chances that a poor or even a middle-class American will make it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. And as inequality itself creates a weaker economy, the chance can only grow slimmer.”

16- “Another vicious circle has been set in play: political rules of the game have not only directly benefited those at the top, ensuring that they have a disproportionate voice, but have also created a political process that indirectly gives them even more power. We have identified a whole series of forces contributing to the disillusionment with politics and distrust of the political system. The yawning divide in our society has made it difficult to reach compromise, contributing to our political gridlock.”

17- “As one of the world’s experts on globalization, the Harvard University professor Dani Rodrikhas pointed out, one cannot simultaneously have democracy, national self-determination, and full and unfettered globalization.”

18- “We are often told that this is the way it has to be, that globalization gives us no choice. This fatalism, v which serves those benefiting from the current system, obscures reality: the predicament is a choice. The governments of our democracies have chosen an economic framework f for globalization that has actually tied the hands of those democracies. The 1 percent was always worried that democracies would be tempted to enact “excessively” progressive taxation under the influence, say, of a populist leader. Now citizens are told they can’t do so, not if they want to partake of globalization. In short, globalization, as it’s been managed, is narrowing the choices facing our democracies, making it more difficult for them to undertake the tax and expenditure policies that are necessary if we are to create societies with more equality and more opportunity But tying the hands of our democracies is exactly what those at the top wanted: we can have a democracy with one person one vote, and still get outcomes that are more in accord with what we might expect in a system with one dollar one vote.”

19- “Of course, not every government effort is successful, or as successful as its advocates would have liked. Indeed, when the government undertakes research (or supports new private sector ventures), there should be some failures. A lack of failures means you are not taking enough risks. Success occurs when the returns from those projects that succeed are more than enough to offset the losses on those that fail And the evidence in the case of government research ventures is unambiguously and overwhelmingly that the returns from government investments in technology on average have been very, very high—^just think about the Internet, the Human Genome Project, jet airplanes, the browser, the telegraph, the increases in productivity in agriculture in the nineteenth century, that provided the basis for the United States’ moving from farming to manufacturing.”

20- “That there are successes and failures in both the public and the private sector is clear. And yet many on the right seem to think only the government can fail.”

21- “The powerful try to frame the discussion in a way that benefits their interests, realizing that, in a democracy they cannot imply impose their rule on others. In one way or another, they have to “co-opt” the rest of society to advance their agenda. Here again the wealthy have an advantage. Perceptions and beliefs are malleable. This chapter has shown that the wealthy have the instruments, resources, and incentives to shape beliefs in ways that serve their interests. They don’t always win—but it’s far from an even battle. We’ve seen how the powerful manipulate public perception by appeals to fairness and efficiency, while the real outcomes benefit only them.”

22- “We can take advantage of the extent to which different taxes and expenditures stimulate the economy, spending more on programs that have large multipliers (where each dollar of )ending generates more overall GDP) and less on programs that have small multipliers; raising taxes from sources with low multipliers while cutting taxes on those with high multipliers.”

23- “The lack of faith in democratic accountability on the part of those who argue for independent central banks should be deeply troubling. Where does one draw the line in turning over the central responsibilities of government to independent authorities. The same arguments about politicization could be applied to tax and budgetary policies. I suspect some in the financial market would be content to turn those responsibilities over to “technical experts.” But here’s the hidden agenda: the financial markets would not be content with just any set of technical experts. They prefer, as we have seen, “experts” who shared their views—views that support their interests and ideology. The Federal Reserve and its chairmen like to end that they are above politics. It is convenient not to be accountable, to be independent. hey see themselves as simply wise men and women, public servants, helping to steer the complex ship of the economy. But if there was any doubt of the political nature of the Fed and its chairmen, it should have been resolved by observing the seemingly shifting positions of the central bank over the past twenty years.”

24- “Inflation targeting was based on three questionable hypotheses. The first is that inflation is the supreme evil; the second is that maintaining low and stable inflation was necessary and almost sufficient for maintaining a high and stable real growth rate; the third is that all would benefit from low inflation.”

25- “While the advocates of these policies may claim that they the best policies for all, this is not the case. There is no  single, best policy. As I have stressed in this book, policies lave distributive effects, so there are trade-offs between the interests of bondholders and debtors, young and old, financial sectors and other sectors, and so on. I have also stressed, however, that there are alternative policies that would have led to better overall economic performance—especially so if we judge economic performance by what is happening to the well-being of most citizens. But if these alternatives are to be implemented, the institutional arrangements through which the decisions are made will have to change. We cannot have a monetary system that is run by people whose thinking is captured by the bankers and that is effectively run for the benefit of the those at the top.”

26- “The Economic Reform Agenda…Curbing the financial sector…Stronger and more effectively enforced competition laws…Improving corporate Governance-especially to limit the power of the CEOs to divert so much of corporate resources for their own benefit…End government giveaways—whether in the disposition of public assets or in procurement…End corporate welfare—including hidden subsidies…Legal reform—democratizing, access to justice, and diminishing the arms race…Create a more progressive income and corporate tax system—with fewer loopholes…Create a more effective and effectively enforced estate tax system to prevent the creation of a new oligarchy…Improving access to education…Helping ordinary Americans save…Health care for all…Strengthening other social protection programs…Tempering globalization: creating a more even playing field and ending the race to the bottom…A fiscal policy to maintain full employment—with equality…A monetary policy—and monetary institutions—to maintain full employment…Correcting trade imbalances…Active labor market policies and improved social protection…Supporting workers’ and citizens’ collective action…Affirmative action to eliminate the legacy of discrimination…A growth agenda, based on public investment.”

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

The Price of Inequality

On Quiet

I recently finished reading Quiet – The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. This book was referenced by one of my colleagues during a recent Toastmaster’s speech, which sparked my interest in reading it.

Below are key excerpts from the books that I found particularly insightful:

1- “It makes sense that so many introverts hide even from themselves. We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal—the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual—the kind who’s comfortable “putting himself out there.” Sure, we allow technologically gifted loners who launch companies in garages to have any personality they please, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so. Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.”

2- “What exactly do I mean when I say that Laura is an introvert? When I started writing this book, the first thing I wanted to find out was precisely how researchers define introversion and extroversion. I knew that in 1921 the influential psychologist Carl Jung had published a bombshell off a book, Psychological Types, popularizing the terms introvert and extrovert as the central building blocks of personality. Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the even themselves. Introverts recharge their batteries by being alone; extroverts need to recharge when they don’t socialize enough.”

3- “Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not. One reason that people confuse the two concepts is that they sometimes overlap (though psychologists debate to what it degree). Some psychologists map the two tendencies on vertical and horizontal axes, with the introvert-extrovert spectrum on the horizontal ax and the anxious-stable spectrum on the vertical. With this model, you end up with four quadrants of personality types: calm extroverts, anxious (or impulsive) extroverts, calm introverts, and anxious introverts.”

4- “If there is only one insight you take away from this book, though. I hope it’s a new found sense of entitlement to be yourself I can vouch personally for the life-transforming effects of this outlook.”

5- “At the onset of the Culture of Personality, we were urged to develop an extroverted personality for frankly selfish reasons—as a way off outshining the crowd in a newly anonymous and competitive society. But nowadays we tend to think that becoming more extroverted not only makes us more successful, but also makes us better people. We see salesmanship as a way of sharing one’s gifts with the world.”

6- “If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day. This would mean that an awful lot of bad ideas prevail while good ones get squashed. Yet studies in group dynamics suggest that this is exactly what happens. We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types—even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate.”

7- “”Among the most effective leaders I have encountered and worked with in half a century,” the management guru Peter Drucker has written, “some locked themselves into their office and others were ultra-gregarious. Some were quick and impulsive, while others studied the situation and took forever to come to a decision…. The one and only personality trait the effective ones I have encountered did have in common was something they did not have: they had little or no ‘charisma’ and little use either for the term or what it signifies.””

8- “It’s impossible to say. No one has ever run these studies, as far as I know—which is a shame. It’s understandable that the HBS model of leadership places such a high premium on confidence and quick decision-making. If assertive people tend to get their way, then it’s a useful skill for leaders whose work depends on influencing others. Decisiveness inspires confidence, while wavering (or even appearing to waver) can threaten morale. But one can take these truths too far; in some circumstances quiet, modest styles of leadership may be equally or more effective.”

9- “…I wonder whether students like the young safety officer would be better off if we appreciated that not everyone aspires to be a leader in the conventional sense of the word—that some people wish to fit harmoniously into the group, others to be independent of it. Often the most highly creative people are in the latter category.”

10- “A mountain of recent data on open-plan offices from many different industries corroborates the results of the games. Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. Open-plan workers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure and elevated stress levels and to get the flu; they argue more with their colleagues; they worry about coworkers eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their computer screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They’re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates; releases Cortisol, the body’s fight-or-flight “stress” hormone; and makes people socially distant, quick to anger, aggressive, and slow to help others.”

11- “Psychologists usually offer three explanations for the failure of group brainstorming. The first is social loafing: in a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work. The second is production blocking: only one person can talk or produce an idea at once, while the other group members are forced to sit passively. And the third is evaluation apprehension, meaning the fear of looking stupid in front of one’s peers.”

12- “The way forward, I’m suggesting, is not to stop collaborating face-to-face, but to refine the way we do it. For one thing, we should actively seek out symbiotic introvert-extrovert relationships, in which leadership and other tasks are divided according to people’s natural strengths and temperaments. The most effective teams are composed of a healthy mix of introverts and extroverts, studies show, and so are many leadership structures.”

13- “Psychologists often discuss the difference between “temperament” and “personality.” Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix. Some say that temperament is the foundation, and personality is the building. Kagan’s work helped link certain infant temperaments with adolescent personality styles like those of Tom and Ralph.”

14- “When combined with Kagan’s findings on high reactivity, this line of studies offers a very empowering lens through which to view your personality. Once you understand introversion and extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you can begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favorable to your own personality—neither overstimulating nor under-stimulating, neither boring nor anxiety-making. You can organize your life in terms of what personality psychologists rail “optimal levels of arousal” and what I call “sweet spots,” and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before.”

15- “Dom has observed that her extroverted clients are more likely to be highly reward-sensitive, while the introverts are more likely to pay attention to warning signals. They’re more successful at regulating their feelings of desire or excitement. They protect themselves better from the downside.”

16- “When I first met Mike Wei, the Stanford student who wished he was as uninhibited as his classmates, he said that there was no such thing quiet leader. “How can you let people know you have conviction if you’re quiet about it?” he asked. I reassured him that this wasn’t so, but Mike had so much quiet conviction about the inability of quiet people to convey conviction that deep down I’d wondered whether he had a point. But that was before I heard Professor Ni talk about Asian-style soft power, before I read Gandhi on satyagraha, before I contemplated Tiffany’s bright future as a journalist. Conviction is conviction, the kids from Cupertino taught me, at whatever decibel level it’s expressed.”

17- “But the most interesting part of Thorne’s experiment was how much the two types appreciated each other. Introverts talking to extroverts chose cheerier topics, reported making conversation more easily, and described conversing with extroverts as a “breath of fresh air.” In contrast, the extroverts felt that they could relax more with introvert partners and were freer to confide their problems. They didn’t feel pressure to be falsely upbeat. These are useful pieces of social information. Introverts and extroverts sometimes feel mutually put off, but Thorne’s research suggests how much each has to offer the other. Extroverts need to know that introverts—who often seem to disdain the superficial—may be only too happy to be tugged along to a more lighthearted place; and introverts. who sometimes feel as if their propensity for problem talk makes them a drag, should know that they make it safe for others to get serious.”

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

Quiet