Whither Economics?

Looking for a path through the darkness, I read 2 Wikipedia articles: "History of economic thought" and "Schools of economic thought". The former was a lot more informative than the latter. I think I know most of the players now.

I think that next I will read "Value and Capital", by J.R. Hicks, 1939. It is subtitled "An Inquiry Into Some Fundamental Principles of Economic Theory". He formulated the IS-LM model (Inventment/Savings - Liquidity Preference/Money Supply), which seems to still be highly regarded, particularly by Krugman.

There were some good online posts with people actually starting to talk about an economy of plenty. On Twitter, the tag is #postscarcityutopia, which is a better, since "economy" implies scarcity, and I'm interested in what happens when things really aren't scarce. Here's one titled "Why Not Utopia?" from the New York Times. Here's the venerable Robert Reich talking about it an abstract sense in a post titled "The “iEverything” and the Redistributional Imperative".

There's also a few people - Martin Ford (‏@MFordFuture) has a book "Rise of the Robots" coming out in May - who are being somewhat alarmist about increased automation, like this article, titled "Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job". I try to inject a more positive outlook and #postscarcityutopia thinking into these discussions.

I had mentioned before a story by Bruce Sterling (@bruces) that showed an interesting post-scarcity future. I asked him by Twitter what it was, and he was kind enough to answer. The story was "The Beautiful and The Sublime". It was published in 1986 and set in 2070. Hard to believe that was almost 30 years ago. I reread it, the message still rings true. I really think we should be there decades before 2070. It is available in the "The Year's Best Science Fiction 4th Annual Collection" and in the Sterling short story collection "Crystal Express". I had a copy of the latter in the basement bookshelves, yay!

The Bone Clocks

"The Bone Clocks" is the latest novel by David Mitchell. It is a very enjoyable read. Mitchell, who is English, I think is one of those authors who transcends the sci-fi genre. He seems like a Real Author - but, given that I read almost no fiction but science fiction, because there are more new ideas in a decent sci-fi novel than in anything mainstream, that doesn't mean that much to me. But he's not one of those mainstream authors who think they are going to be daring and write sci-fi and write it pretty crapulously.

The story spans 60 years, and is told in 6 segments by 6 different narrators. The main story is one of immortals who achieve their immortality by eating the soul of a psychic every quarter, opposed by a group of what are basically bodhisattvas, who after death regain their consciousness in a new body, normally near death such that its old inhabitant has vacated it. Plus the bodhisattva types have bodhisattva-like magical powers, yay!

[I always told my kids, if you do decide you want to be religious, go for Mahayana Buddhism and bodhisattva status. Bodhisattvas can fly, walk through fire, walk through walls, deflect arrows, be in multiple places at the same time, etc, - and choose your reincarnations! What's not to like?]

But this main story is left in the background for probably 2/3 of the book, while we follow different narratives in each of the segments. One character spans all 6 segments, but in some she plays a very minor role.

Meanwhile, the side stories are all engaging. Mitchell has a nice touch with meta-fu - like one of the narrators who is an author who swore never to write a book with an author as a protagonist, only to have his comeback novel have an author as a protagonist. (I so saw this author as being played in a movie by Bill Nighy, although he was 10-20 years younger than Nighy.) Another side character is a war correspondent, who very poignantly relates how the US invasion destroyed Iraq and the texture of the lives of its inhabitants.

Halfway through this book I rewatched "Cloud Atlas", based on one of Mitchell's earlier novels. It also has 6 main threads, loosely interconnected, with overtones of reincarnation. I had been meaning to do the rewatch - it is a complex movie - and I enjoyed it more the 2nd time, when I knew I needed to make more of an effort to keep the threads straight. Surprisingly - she generally doesn't do rewatches - my wife rewatched it with me and she enjoyed it too.

I'm tempted to read "Cloud Atlas" but it will probably be much later - too much else on the stack. I may try some of Mitchell's other novels tho. "The Bone Clocks" was definitely a worthwhile read.

Addendum: I went to mark this as read in my eBook reader and noticed I had put it in the fantasy shelf rather than sci-fi. A little of both, I guess.

Pump Six and Other Stories

I had already declared Paolo Bacigalupi, together with Cory Doctorow, to be The Bards of the Revolution. "Pump Six and Other Stories" establishes Paolo as the Bard of Coming Environmental Disaster as well. Many of the stories deal with some form of future environmental disaster.

He is best known for his memes of bioengineered plagues which force the use of proprietary crops in a post-oil world controlled by Monsanto and their IP police("The Calorie Man", "Yellow Card Man"). Now we also get:

• Life in a completely dried-up, drought-stricken SW US ("The Tamarisk Hunter").
  
• A future where toxins in the environment have made the population morons or worse ("Pump Six").
  
• Or where toxins in the environment have severely disrupted human reproduction ("Small Offerings"). The fact that reproductive systems and young organisms are the most susceptible to environmental degradation and stress is one of the most chilling of the many chilling conclusions of "This Changes Everything".
  
• Or, creepiest of all, where the world is a completely toxic sludge dump with its ecosystems mostly gone, but we have, through genetic engineering and nanotechnology, adapted ourselves to thrive in this environment ("The People of Sand and Slag").
  

We also have a couple of other flavors of dystopia:

• A horrible cautionary tale of where runaway inequality could take us ("The Fluted Girl").
  
• A world of mostly immortals with a few people who still want to breed ilicitly ("Pop Squad").
  

The other 2 stories in the collection, "Pocketful of Dharma" and "The Pasho" are a bit further afield in their subject matter.

This is a great collection, a very quick read. A few of the stories, tho, really kind of hit my "this is disgusting" button - but rightfully so. I wonder sometimes what it will take to wake the sleeping (or online) millennial giant, maybe "this is disgusting" is a dash of what we need.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

"The General Theory" is generally considered to be the magnum opus of John Maynard Keynes. It was published in 1936, 410 pages, 111k words, during The Great Depression. Keynes's thinking dominated economics until the 1980's, particularly in rebuilding the world after World War II. From Wikipedia:

Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, overturning the older ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. Keynes instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. According to Keynesian economics, state intervention was necessary to moderate "boom and bust" cycles of economic activity. He advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Following the outbreak of World War II, Keynes's ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies.

The book was a hard read for me, particularly the first 1/3, in which he laid a lot of the groundwork for the rest of the book and defined a lot of his terms. I'm guessing that he was "classically educated" - he uses several latin terms that are useful but not part of the current vernacular. It was harder to read than Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" written 160 years earlier.

I don't think I can really do this book justice without more study of economics and another read. So I'll just jump around some and include my favorite quotes. I'll also focus on Keynes's championing of social justice, while keeping an appreciation of individualism and personal liberty.

Keynes main task here is to address the problem that was gripping the world in the 1930's: how do we put all the unemployed workers back to work and achieve "full employment". The dominant school of economics at the time was neo-classical, which held that free markets would do the job, but that obviously wasn't working out. Classical economics included Say's Law, which says that you don't have to worry about demand; demand will always rise to meet supply.

Here's a nice slap-down of Recardian economics, which were the basis of classical economics. His description reminds me very much of the values espoused by conservative economists and politicians today.

That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority.

Ricardo was also the father of monetarism, "the theory that excess currency leads to inflation" (Wikipedia). This theory is still popular with conservative economists, like those that predicted hyperinflation after the Fed tripled the money supply in response to The Great Recession of 2008, and who still refuse to admit that they were completely wrong in their predictions.

Classical economics placed great emphasis on thriftiness and saving. Keynes saw this in the context of a bigger picture.

The prevalence of the idea that saving and investment, taken in their straightforward sense, can differ from one another, is to be explained, I think, by an optical illusion due to regarding an individual depositor's relation to his bank as being a one-sided transaction, instead of seeing it as the two-sided transaction which it actually is.

This is obvious to anyone who has worked with (double-entry) accounting. All transactions are two-sided, always.

Keynes looks at the factors that create demand, in particular "the propensity to consume". Chapter 8 is on "objective factors" and Chapter 9 is on "subjective factors" which affect the propensity to consume. The subjective factors for saving vs consuming read like an oddly mixed list of virtues and vices.

These eight motives might be called the motives of Precaution, Foresight, Calculation, Improvement, Independence, Enterprise, Pride and Avarice; and we could also draw up a corresponding list of motives to consumption such as Enjoyment, Shortsightedness, Generosity, Miscalculation, Ostentation and Extravagance.

Chapter 10 is titled "The Marginal Propensity To Consume And The Multiplier". It introduces one of Keynes's most important concepts: the multiplier, related to the velocity of money.

the greater the marginal propensity to consume, the greater the multiplier, and hence the greater the disturbance to employment corresponding to a given change in investment.

Keynes sounds as frustrated with conservative economists and politicians who oppose government stimulus Just Because as Paul Krugman does now.

Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.

...

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

...

Just as wars have been the only form of large-scale loan expenditure which statesmen have thought justifiable, so gold-mining is the only pretext for digging holes in the ground which has recommended itself to bankers as sound finance; and each of these activities has played its part in progress - failing something better.

...

Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for the precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York. Thus we are so sensible, have schooled ourselves to so close a semblance of prudent financiers, taking careful thought before we add to the 'financial' burdens of posterity by building them houses to live in, that we have no such easy escape from the sufferings of unemployment.

Classical economists explain The Great Depression as having been caused by an excessive money supply leading to speculative investments which created the bubble that triggered The Great Depression when it popped. Keynes's formulation of the business cycle was different.

the succession of boom and slump can be described and analysed in terms of the fluctuations of the marginal efficiency of capital relatively to the rate of interest.

The "Marginal Efficiency of Capital" seems to be Keynes's secret sauce in explaining the business cycle. Wikipedia defines it as "that rate of discount which would equate the price of a fixed capital asset with its present discounted value of expected income". I find this statement in Wikipedia much more comprehensible: "The MEC needs to be higher than the rate of interest for investment to take place." So it determines, will I do better with my money invested in a business (or the stock market) than with it collecting interest in a bank.

Exploring this concept, Keynes talks about "long-term expectation" and "state of confidence". He sees the same problems we have now with financial speculation versus investment that creates value rather than just harvesting it, and proposes as a solution - the Robin Hood tax!

The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism - which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object.

...

The introduction of a substantial government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available, with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation over enterprise in the United States.

Keynes talks about interest rates in terms of liquidity preference.

the rate of interest is the reward for parting with liquidity for a specified period.

He also notes how this is contrary to monetarism.

For whilst an increase in the quantity of money may be expected, cet. par., to reduce the rate of interest, this will not happen if the liquidity-preferences of the public are increasing more than the quantity of money; and whilst a decline in the rate of interest may be expected, cet. par., to increase the volume of investment, this will not happen if the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital is falling more rapidly than the rate of interest; and whilst an increase in the volume of investment may be expected, cet. par., to increase employment, this may not happen if the propensity to consume is falling off.

Note, "cet. par." is short for "ceteris paribus", which is latin for "other things being equal". Being able to look this up instantly is one of those eBook features that has me pretty much deserting print.

Ha ha, talking about the convoluted formulations of "The Classical Theory Of The Rate of Interest" (Chapter 14), he uses this quotation from Ibsen's "The Wild Duck":

'The wild duck has dived down to the bottom - as deep as she can get - and bitten fast hold of the weed and tangle and all the rubbish that is down there, and it would need an extraordinarily clever dog to dive after and fish her up again.'

Chapter 15 is "The Psychological And Business Incentives To Liquidity". I was in general encouraged with how much Keynes talks about psychology, of which I had not seen that much in my economic readings.

But at a level above the rate which corresponds to full employment, the long-term market-rate of interest will depend, not only on the current policy of the monetary authority, but also on market expectations concerning its future policy.

He also describes very succinctly our current situation at the zero lower bound, and says what Krugman says now re the opportunities this offers the government. This is amazing given that up to that time interest rates had never approached the zero lower bound.

There is the possibility, for the reasons discussed above, that, after the rate of interest has fallen to a certain level, liquidity-preference may become virtually absolute in the sense that almost everyone prefers cash to holding a debt which yields so low a rate of interest. In this event the monetary authority would have lost effective control over the rate of interest. But whilst this limiting case might become practically important in future, I know of no example of it hitherto. Indeed, owing to the unwillingness of most monetary authorities to deal boldly in debts of long term, there has not been much opportunity for a test. Moreover, if such a situation were to arise, it would mean that the public authority itself could borrow through the banking system on an unlimited scale at a nominal rate of interest.

Chapter 16 is titled "Sundry Ovservations On The Nature Of Capital". Keynes talks about capitalism as something that we can maybe eventually get rid of, as he does in his wonderful "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". According to the 2014 Credit Suisse World Wealth Report, the total wealth of the world is currently $263T, with $91T in North America. So why aren't we living in a post-scarcity utopia?

On such assumptions I should guess that a properly run community equipped with modern technical resources, of which the population is not increasing rapidly, ought to be able to bring down the marginal efficiency of capital in equilibrium approximately to zero within a single generation; so that we should attain the conditions of a quasi-stationary community where change and progress would result only from changes in technique, taste, population and institutions, with the products of capital selling at a price proportioned to the labour, etc., embodied in them on just the same principles as govern the prices of consumption-goods into which capital-charges enter in an insignificant degree.

If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism.

The book was written when most countries were still on the gold standard. Such an odd concept, surely highlighted by the fact that it requires a physical activity - gold mining - to create more money. Chapter 17, "The Essential Properties of Interest and Money" talks about why we have money:

But it is an essential difference between money and all (or most) other assets that in the case of money its liquidity-premium much exceeds its carrying cost, whereas in the case of other assets their carrying cost much exceeds their liquidity-premium.

...

The second differentia of money is that it has an elasticity of substitution equal, or nearly equal, to zero which means that as the exchange value of money rises there is no tendency to substitute some other factor for it;

...

Thus, not only is it impossible to turn more labour on to producing money when its labour-price rises, but money is a bottomless sink for purchasing power, when the demand for it increases, since there is no value for it at which demand is diverted - as in the case of other rent-factors - so as to slop over into a demand for other things.

In Chapter 19, "Changes In Money Wages", Keynes argues against the classical truism that the best way to lower unemployment is to lower wages.

Perhaps it will help to rebut the crude conclusion that a reduction in money-wages will increase employment 'because it reduces the cost of production', if we follow up the course of events on the hypothesis most favourable to this view, namely that at the outset entrepreneurs expect the reduction in money-wages to have this effect. It is indeed not unlikely that the individual entrepreneur, seeing his own costs reduced, will overlook at the outset the repercussions on the demand for his product and will act on the assumption that he will be able to sell at a profit a larger output than before. If, then, entrepreneurs generally act on this expectation, will they in fact succeed in increasing their profits? Only if the community's marginal propensity to consume is equal to unity, so that there is no gap between the increment of income and the increment of consumption; or if there is an increase in investment, corresponding to the gap between the increment of income and the increment of consumption, which will only occur if the schedule of marginal efficiencies of capital has increased relatively to the rate of interest. Thus the proceeds realised from the increased output will disappoint the entrepreneurs and employment will fall back again to its previous figure, unless the marginal propensity to consume is equal to unity or the reduction in money-wages has had the effect of increasing the schedule of marginal efficiencies of capital relatively to the rate of interest and hence the amount of investment. For if entrepreneurs offer employment on a scale which, if they could sell their output at the expected price, would provide the public with incomes out of which they would save more than the amount of current investment, entrepreneurs are bound to make a loss equal to the difference; and this will be the case absolutely irrespective of the level of money-wages. At the best, the date of their disappointment can only be delayed for the interval during which their own investment in increased working capital is filling the gap.

In other words, as we have seen in The Great Recession, you can't sell stuff if nobody has enough money to buy it. You can have demand side recessions.

There is, therefore, no ground for the belief that a flexible wage policy is capable of maintaining a state of continuous full employment;- any more than for the belief that an open-market monetary policy is capable, unaided, of achieving this result. The economic system cannot be made self-adjusting along these lines.

Keynes also references "social justice" twice as a goal worth targeting.

In Chapter 21, "The Theory of Prices", Keynes again demomlishes the monetarist contention that inflation follows the money supply.

But when they pass ... to the theory of money and prices, we hear no more of these homely but intelligible concepts [supply and demand] and move into a world where prices are governed by the quantity of money, by its income-velocity, by the velocity of circulation relatively to the volume of transactions, by hoarding, by forced saving, by inflation and deflation et hoc genus omne; and little or no attempt is made to relate these vaguer phrases to our former notions of the elasticities of supply and demand. If we reflect on what we are being taught and try to rationalise it, in the simpler discussions it seems that the elasticity of supply must have become zero and demand proportional to the quantity of money; whilst in the more sophisticated we are lost in a haze where nothing is clear and everything is possible. We have all of us become used to finding ourselves sometimes on the one side of the moon and sometimes on the other, without knowing what route or journey connects them, related, apparently, after the fashion of our waking and our dreaming lives.

Chapter 22 is titled "Notes On The Trade Cycle". Again, we see the importance that Keynes puts on psychology, particularly what is now known as "consumer confidence", and get back to his secret sauce, MEC.

The trade cycle is best regarded, I think, as being occasioned by a cyclical change in the marginal efficiency of capital, though complicated and often aggravated by associated changes in the other significant short-period variables of the economic system.

...

It is the return of confidence, to speak in ordinary language, which is so insusceptible to control in an economy of individualistic capitalism.

...

Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.

This seems to be Keynes strongest statement on the requirement for outside regulation of markets:

When once the recovery has been started, the manner in which it feeds on itself and cumulates is obvious. But during the downward phase, when both fixed capital and stocks of materials are for the time being redundant and working-capital is being reduced, the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital may fall so low that it can scarcely be corrected, so as to secure a satisfactory rate of new investment, by any practicable reduction in the rate of interest. Thus with markets organised and influenced as they are at present, the market estimation of the marginal efficiency of capital may suffer such enormously wide fluctuations that it cannot be sufficiently offset by corresponding fluctuations in the rate of interest. Moreover, the corresponding movements in the stock-market may, as we have seen above, depress the propensity to consume just wlaen it is most needed. In conditions of laissez-faire the avoidance of wide fluctuations in employment may, therefore, prove impossible without a far-reaching change in the psychology of investment markets such as there is no reason to expect. I conclude that the duty of ordering the current volume of investment cannot safely be left in private hands.

He again places emphasis on making sure that there is adequate demand.

We reach a condition where there is a shortage of houses, but where nevertheless no one can afford to live in the houses that there are.

Keynes again dangles the carrot of a post-scarcity "economy" (I put "economy" in quotes because the word itself implies scarcity). Where are the modern economists formulating how to juggle the numbers - because that is all we have to do - to get us to a post-scarcity world?

I am myself impressed by the great social advantages of increasing the stock of capital until it ceases to be scarce.

Chapter 23 is titled "Notes On Mercantilism, The Usury Laws, Stamped Money And Theories of Under-Consumption". Keynes seems to be pretty much of a free trade guy, opposed to mercantilism.

Usury laws, which limit the allowable rate of interest, were around as late as the 1970s. When we bought our 1st house in 1975, the rate was topped by the Kentucky law of that time. Keynes feels that this is not unreasonable.

I mean the doctrine that the rate of interest is not self-adjusting at a level best suited to the social advantage but constantly tends to rise too high, so that a wise government is concerned to curb it by statute and custom and even by invoking the sanctions of the moral law.

Keynes also introduces us to some economic figures of the past, including "the strange, unduly neglected prophet Silvio Gesell (1862-1930)".

He cites the comparative stability of the rate of interest throughout the ages as evidence that it cannot depend on purely physical characters, inasmuch as the variation of the latter from one epoch to another must have been incalculably greater than the observed changes in the rate of interest;

Others mentioned in this chapter:

• Irving Fisher;
  
• Bernard Mandeville;
  
• Major Douglas;
  
• and from earlier chapters, I think his favorite whipping boy, Professor Pigou.
  

Chapter 24 is titled "Concluding Notes On The Social Philosophy Towards Which The General Theory Might Lead". His 1st target is unemployment, his second target is: inequality!

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

...

I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth, but not for such large disparities as exist to-day.

Ha, ha, here's a different read on why capitalism is not all bad. Unfortunately, we are now seeing his last point being made. The rich are not satisfied with just being uber-wealthy, they also want to run things.

dangerous human proclivities can be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement. It is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens; and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.

Again he dangles a post-capitalist, post-scarcity world before us:

it would mean the euthanasia of the rentier, and, consequently, the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the scarcity-value of capital.

...

I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work.

But Keynes was not a socialist. Despite being the father of government fiscal policy as a tool to solve economic problems, he saw the government intervention necessary as limited, and touted individualism.

apart from the necessity of central controls to bring about an adjustment between the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest, there is no more reason to socialise economic life than there was before.

...

But, above all, individualism, if it can be purged of its defects and its abuses, is the best safeguard of personal liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice. It is also the best safeguard of the variety of life, which emerges precisely from this extended field of personal choice, and the loss of which is the greatest of all the losses of the homogeneous or totalitarian state. For this variety preserves the traditions which embody the most secure and successful choices of former generations; it colours the present with the diversification of its fancy; and, being the handmaid of experiment as well as of tradition and of fancy, it is the most powerful instrument to better the future.

Keynes was such an optimist, I really identify with that. He believed in the power of the idea. He was a hope and change kind of guy. Here is the close of the book (and this review):

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

The Doubt Factory

I kind of got in the groove reading "General Theory" - read 8 chapters and was thinking about forging ahead and reading the final 6. But then, needed a break. I went back to the unread books in the Kobo app on my iPad - currently down to 19 books! I decided on "The Doubt Factory" by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is a YA novel - and I know this for sure because the central character is a teenage high school girl, and part of the plot is her getting a boyfriend.

She starts out being pretty annoying, a smart but spoiled 1%er child in a private academy. But the subject matter quickly becomes very topical and important. Her father is 1 of the 2 principals of "The Doubt Factory" - a PR firm that specializes in "product defense". They are the masters of sowing doubt via paid experts and other techniques to keep harmful products on the market for as long as possible to squeeze out just a little more profit - "delay = $$$". The father's firm is very happy to work in the shadows, but it is targeted for exposure by a lovable group of young misfits all of whom have lost family to products that The Doubt Factory helped keep on the market.

I read this in 1 day, so it is definitely a page turner. Lots of action and explosions, should make a great movie. Paolo is performing a really valuable service in exposing young adults to this topic. He and Cory Doctorow are both Bards of the Revolution. And unlike "Hunger Games" or "Divergent", both of which have vague future dystopias, their works are based on aspects of our modern world that are for the most part spot on.

In a nice piece of synchronicity, Greenpeace has just this weekend outed a major academic climate denier for having taken payment from the fossil fuel industry for "scholarly" articles denying anthropogenic climate change. Nice!

Fluency

For my "General Theory" break, I read "Fluency", by Jennifer Foehner Wells. Ms. Wells has a charming persona on Twitter (@jenthulhu), and the book had several tweeted recommendations, so I thought I'd try something new.

I think this was her 1st book, and, well, she is not that good of a writer (hopefully yet). The prose comes across as stilted. I'm not sure what the particulars are - maybe just extra words that don't belong? The plot has a lot of reworked elements - not unusual, but none really stood out as original. It ended somewhat abruptly - I was like, "what?", after I realized I'd read the last page. There were a few questions that I would have preferred not to have to wonder about until the next installment (it is book 1 of a trilogy) that were left unanswered.

It was a pretty good page turner tho. The generally likable strong female lead seemed to have very inexplicably mixed reactions at times. All in all, a comic book without pictures - remember, I like comic books. So I will probably read the others when they come out.

Hmmm, I originally linked to the all ages edition. I guess that has the sex taken out. A new capability with eBooks, apparently? I wonder if that is going to become widely used?

The Joint Is Jumpin'

I decided to go on and plow through Keynes "General Theory". It is rough going - harder to read than Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" written 150 years earlier. So I'm reading it 5 chapters at a time, with a break in between.

For my first break, I decided to read the latest Jumper book by Steven Gould, "Exo". This is the 4th book in the series. I started it and realized quickly I had not read the previous book. So I downloaded "Impulse" and then binge read the 2 of them in about 3 days.

The 1st book "Jumper" came out in 1992. A teenage boy saves his life by jumping (teleporting). He becomes a superhero, but is pursued by government agencies and/or an evil billionaire. There was a not-so-good movie made of this starring the ever-so-wooden Christian Hayden. They added very unnecessary plot modifications: multiple jumpers who have been pursued for millennia by a cult who ritually murders them because they are too powerful to leave alone.

The 2nd book, "Reflex" came out in 2004. The boy is older now and his jumping ability rubs off on his girlfriend who later becomes his wife. More trying to be do-gooders while evading the powers that be.

The 3rd and 4th books both follow their 16-17 year old daughter, who also learns to jump to save her life. In "Impulse" she is mostly helping out the downtrodden in her new high school (she had been home-schooled). "Exo" gets a little more cosmic in its scope, and we have bad guys back. Some interesting side effects of teleportation are put to good use.

These are all very enjoyable reads, total page turners. And no question that these are YA novels. There was 1 line about putting makeup on in "Impulse". I couldn't find it, but searching the eBook for "makeup" found 14 matches. So definitely a lot of teenage angst. Hmmm, the Wikipedia page for Steven Gould says he is 4 years younger than me. So, a pretty old guy, he must be using his daughters for source material.

The Death of Economics

I finally started Keynes's "General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money". I got bogged down in the 2nd chapter, "The Postulates of the Classical Economics". I was having trouble getting what "marginal disutility of employment" meant, and, wading through Keynes's writing style.

So, I decided to give it a rest for a while. I read "Microeconomics Made Simple" by Austin Frakt & Mike Piper. It is subtitled "Basic Microeconomic Principles Explained in 100 Pages or Less". The "100 Pages or Less" series I'm guessing is like the "for dummies" books. It is available in Kindle format for free at the link above. OK, some basic concepts refreshed, but ...

I thought about going back to the PDF I downloaded from the MIT Open Courseware site: the alternate (i.e., not $200) textbook to 14.01, Principles of Economics, at MIT. It is also titled "Principles of Economics", by Libby Rittenberg and Timothy Tregarthen. I had read 1 chapter of it and decided to take the historical approach instead. Going back to this book, it's an 1100 page PDF - with no table of contents! What is up with that, very hard to work with.

BTW, here is the listing of all Economics courses at MIT.

I guess I'll keep slogging with the Keynes. Overall, my attempt to study Economics has been discouraging. So many of the assumptions underlying its basic principles seem way too simplistic. The notion that consumers (and producers) are "rational agents" is an example. Having lived through the Dotcom bubbles v1 and v2 and the housing bubble of the 2000s, it is completely evident to me that herd mentality greatly outweighed any kind of rationality during all of those periods. And I have yet to hear any mention of Marketing - the great driver of our consumer society - in anything I have read about economics. Maybe Behavioral Economics addresses this - hopefully I'll get to that soon.

Additionally, Economics is so politicized. I guess that you can always find a few scientists willing to drink some tasty koolaid in exchange for hefty research grants - climate crisis deniers for example - but in Economics it seems like it is half the field. Maybe this is evidence that Economics is indeed not a science: only 4% of scientists identify as Republican, while maybe 1/2 of economists seem to identify strongly with the Republican mindset.

The Solip:System Peripheral Echopraxis

I am being good and actually reading Economics now. But before I got back to it, I had a couple of novels that were burning a hole in my iPad, so I went on and read them.

1st a piece of bookkeeping. A couple of months ago, I read "Solip:System (Hardwired)" by Walter Jon Williams. This is set in the universe of "Hardwired", which was a great favorite when it came out in 1986. It is a short read, only $2.99 on Kobo, and fun cyberpunk. The story revolves around the notion of weaponizing the post-singularity tech that allows the up/downloading of consciousness.

The 1st of the 2 novels I just read was "Echopraxis", by Peter Watts. This is a loose sequel to his "Blindsight", which I thought was one of the best sci-fi novels I'd read in quite a while, blogged about here. The Jurassic Park'ed vampires and augmented humans are joined by zombie soldiers and group-mind idiot savants with redesigned brains. Mainline humanity gets a few more props in this book, rather than being relegated to the dustbin of history as we were at the end of "Blindsight". The main character is called a "roach" by the other characters, but it's a compliment:

roach isn't an insult. We're the ones still standing after the mammals built their nukes, we're the ones with the stripped-down OS's so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We're the god-damned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.

The novel is a great read, very insightful into the nature of consciousness, although Watts claims that he had exhausted his thinking on that subject in "Blindsight". The book also has 140 references to cognitive and brain science research at the end. Man, you could probably spend a week easy following up on those.

I also just picked up a short work by Watts "The Colonel", providing backstory on one of the characters of "Echopraxis". Only $0.99, I guess that the eBook format makes it easy for authors to release these short add-ons, as opposed to releasing a full novel or short story collection.

The 2nd of the 2 novels I just read was "The Peripheral" by William Gibson. I have a fair amount of Gibson in paperback or hardcover, so I got this in hardcover. I am increasingly finding it hard to read non-eBooks. The fonts are usually smaller than I'd like. Plus I'm spoiled with being able to highlight a word and get its definition or google it. I love books, but ...

"The Peripheral" is quite a bit more sci-fi than Gibson's recent near-future Blue Ant trilogy: "Pattern Recognition", "Spook Country" and "Zero History". These are almost if not completely mainstream.

His latest has some nice, workable time travel, alternate universes foo. The "current" thread is set in a near future dystopia which is basically "Winter's Bone" + 20 years. (Man, hope they get Jennifer Lawrence to play the lead in the film version of this.) The pacing of the book is great. There are only 2 narrative threads in a 500 page book, and the chapters are mostly from 2-6 pages - I think the longest chapter is 8 pages. Gibson's prose is as terse and catchy as ever, and he does such a great job of having the story line continuously accelerate up to the rousing conclusion - just like "Neuromancer" 30 years ago.

"The Peripheral" is definitely some of Gibson's best work IMO. Joe Bob sez, check it out.

I Swear, I'm Done With Short Stories For A While

Well, I had another free collection of short stories, and figured, what the hell? The collection was "Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014". You can download in Kindle, Nook, or Apple (my choice) format here.

The 24 stories, which are in alphabetical order by author, start strong and finish somewhat weak.

The 2nd story, "The End of the End of Everything", by Dale Bailey, was yet again an "end-of-the-world" story more like "7th Seal" than "Mad Max".

"Brisk Money" by Adam Christopher featured a hard-boiled 1950s detective who was a magtape-based robot - what, IBMpunk? Kind of an odd story.

"The Litany of Earth" by Ruthanna Emrys was a very readable Lovecraftian story - the ancient ones are very background figures, cast in a somewhat favorable light.

"A Kiss With Teeth" by Max Gladstone has pretty much the same plot as "The Incredibles", but with the dad being a vampire rather than a superhero.

"Reborn" by Ken Liu reminded me of one of Octavia Butler's series. Aliens with no long term memory conquer earth but then want acceptance and love.

"Anyway: Angie" by Daniel Jose Older had a good noir feel to it. The protagonist is a bodyguard for prostitutes who start getting picked off by monsters.

"Unlocked: An Oral History of Hayden's Syndrome" by John Scalzi was some good companion reading to Scalzi's novel "Locked In", which I blogged about here.

"Among the Thorns" by Veronica Schanoes and "A Cup of Salt Tears" by Isabel Yap both have a nice fairy tale feel to them. The former has a medieval setting, the latter a Japanese setting.

The story that actually made the greatest impression on me was "In the Sight of Akresa" by Ray Wood - but the impression was negative. In a medieval setting, the Baron's spoiled daughter has a love affair with a recaptured slave whose tongue had been torn out, and, in feuding with her equally spoiled brother, winds up with her fiance crippled, for which the slave is blamed and executed. Ugh. No characters of redeeming value, totally ignoble behavior, but written as tho we are supposed to identify with the spoiled daughter?!?!? I don't think it was tongue-in-cheek at all, just epic fail.

Even More Short Stories

I definitely seem to have been in a short-story-reading mood lately. Hopefully this doesn't denote a long term loss of attention span. Concentration was always one of my superpowers. Well, I guess we'll see.

I 1st read the collection of short stories and poems "Through the Drowsy Dark", by Rachel Swirsky. I had mentioned how varied and interesting her stories in the 150 story Tor collection were. These 10 quite varied stories do not disappoint. There are 9 poems alternating with the stories. I read the poems out loud. Poetry seems to work much better for me that way. I particularly liked the poem "The Dream Vacation" - a recipe in the form of a poem.

Notable stories were "Heartstrung", which features a crazy but effective metaphor of the female condition; "Defiled Imagination", which features some in-your-face female sexuality, which I feel is laudable; and "The Debt of the Innocent", which takes a frank look at the implications of healthcare as a commodity to be purchased rather than as a human right.

I had to buy this book from Amazon in Kindle format, and slightly annoying was the book's not having a usable (linked) table of contents.

This book was book 27 of a series called "Conversation Pieces" of books with feminist themes. Yay feminism!

Then, long overdue, I read "The Year's Best Science Fiction 31st Annual Edition", edited by Gardner Dozois. This has been an annual ritual for me for, I guess, 31 years. Always good stories, and a good place to spot new sources of edginess. The story quality is, of course, very good, but no new authors to report.

A couple of stories dealt with life after death: the 1st story, "The Discovered Country", by Ian R. MacLeod, and the last story, "Quicken", by Damien Broderick. The latter is one of those epic-in-scope stories that keeps one-upping itself. There were many other stories dealing with other flavors of post-human existence.

Also notable was "Earth I" by Stephen Baxter. This features religious vs scientific theories of how life spread across the galaxies. Both theories are wrong, and the overall tone of the stories is somewhat heartless. I have liked Baxter's novels that I have read, particularly his Destiny's Children novels (Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, and Resplendent), which have the great concept of an offshoot of humanity that starts using the social insect model of breeding. I will have to check out more of his many novels - I have also read the Manifold series of his.

Also noteworthy were "Rock of Ages", by Jay Lake, a nice conspiracy theory action story; "One", by Nancy Kress, a good superhero tale; "The Other Gun", by Neal Asher, which had a nice comic-bookish space opera feel; and "Technarion" by Sean McMullen, which was steampunk, but with electricity instead of steam - electropunk?

Lots and Lots of Short Stories

Well, I finished the Tor eBook of 150 short stories which I talked about starting here. I used this as filler when I was babysitting Uncle Bruce - still going on after 9 months. It's getting really old. Hopefully turning my mind down to a 3YO level a couple of days a week for this long won't have a lasting effect. Meanwhile, he's really blossomed in that time: mall walking up to 3 miles, trolling for hugs and kisses the whole time; and spending the night with us in Lexington 6 times so far, including trips to Patchen Pub for the blues jam.

For the money (free), this was a very nice collection of stories. Ha ha, that's a cheap shot, it was a nice collection regardless of the price. I should have blogged the most noteworthy stories as I went, but, we'll just have to go from memory. Stories of note:

• "A Clean Sweep With All The Trimmings" by James Alan Gardner, written in the style of Damon Runyon, was nicely odd and a lot of fun.
  
• The Steven Gould story set in the "Jumper" universe, "Shade" was very enjoyable. I have his latest novel in this universe "Exo" in my iPad, but there's 20 other books to read there as well, so I'm not sure when I'll get to it.
  
• I'm going to pan the stories by Peter Orullian. I just read the 1st one, "Sacrifice of the First Sheason", and the writing was so stilted that I did not read the other two of his stories that followed. That was the only time I did this.
  
• The 2 stories by Jay Lake (now deceased) are very good.
  
• I always like Robert Reed's short stories, and his 3 in this book do not disappoint. All of them kind of make you think.
  
• I always think I should like Rudy Rucker's stuff, I'm afraid I just don't think he's a very good writer. All 3 of his stories in this volume are kind of stupid.
  
• The John Scalzi story set in the "Old Man's War" universe is pretty good. I think it is one of the ones that wound up in "The Human Division". The other 2 are kind of dumb - I think Scalzi has trouble at times keeping his snark under control.
  
• The 3 Charles Stross stories I had already read. I don't think Charlie could write a bad story if he tried.
  
• The 6 Michael Swanwick stories are all good.
  
• I particularly enjoyed all 4 stories by Rachel Swirsky. All very well written, all with real emotional content, all on very different themes in very different settings. I think I'll go right now and see what else she's written. Ok, I'm back. Too bad, no novels yet. One collection of short stories and poetry from 2010, "Through the Drowsy Dark". Kobo didn't have it so I had to just purchase the Kindle version.
  
• The 7 Harry Turtledove stories are all enjoyable.
  

I also read another collection, "Hieroglyph", subtitled "Stories and Visions for a Better Future". This collection appeared to be largely the brainchild of Neal Stephenson. The idea was, let's get away from cranking out Yet Another Dystopian Future, and instead write stories about bright, shiny new futures.

The stories are all pretty good, and it was indeed nice to get some positive views. I remain an optimist about our future, although it is hard sometimes. I'll comment on a few of the stories - SPOILER ALERT for the Karl Schroeder story.

• "Atmosphaera Incognita", by Neal Stephenson, gets the stories off to a strong start. It's about building a 20km tall tower.
  
• "Girl in Wave : Wave in Girl", by Kathleen Ann Goonan is particularly inspiring. It's about using brain nanos, developed to help autistics, to improve everyone's intelligence. That is a thought I've had many times: that if we're going to make it, we're going to have to get smarter. I see our smartphones as a step in the right direction. And I've said many times that, as soon as I can get my smartphone as a chip in my head, I'm going for it.
  
• "The Man Who Sold the Moon", by Cory Doctorow I found very touching, particularly in describing a death. He pulls in a lot of his Burning Man experience - I doubt I'll ever make it.
  
• "Degrees of Freedom", by Karl Schroeder I really liked. Millennials use big data and social media to basically replace the government. I've really been wondering if this is how that generation would go, given that they don't seem to vote. I really hope that works out. I don't know if it does - the old lizards still own all the raw materials. But maybe Blockadia lets them sidestep that.
  
• "The Man Who Sold the Stars", by Gregory Benford, seemed like I had read it before. Some of that good old school libertarian-fu, but still enjoyable.
  
• "Entanglement", by Vandana Singh, is a very hopeful story, with technology connecting and strengthening people all over the world who are fighting the good fight.
  
• "Covenant", by Elizabeth Bear, has a repaired serial killer as it's protagonist. Hard to have a story about a serial killer without it being at least a little creepy, and this story is that.
  
• "The Day It All Ended", by Charlie Jane Anders. I think I've liked other of her stuff. This story is kind of a heartbreaker tho. You wish it were true, but you know, it's probably not.
  

One thing that is a little scary in this collection is that a number of the stories assume that we have had to try geoengineering to fight global warming. But, still, very hopeful, very enjoyable, I recommend it highly.

One Nation

A few months ago I started following and being followed by a guy named Marshall (@ernie_bbuilderx) on Twitter. He's a conservative. He builds boats, and I mentioned to him how my great-uncle (paternal grandmother's brother) Everett Arthur built wooden sailboats by hand in Gulfport, MS, 50-60 years ago. We had a few tweet discussions that stayed civil. A couple of times when I trolled some of his retweets, other conservatives were not so civil. The conversations degenerated into name-calling (on their part) - so now I am officially a hypocrite and, proudly, a libtard.

I still follow Marshall, in the hope of drilling a tiny hole between the conservative Fox News echo chamber and the liberal MSNBC echo chamber. I read this book at his behest; he agreed to read my review, which follows. Note, I have never read a book like this before, i.e., a book written by someone wanting to run for president.

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"One Nation" is the title of the 7th and latest book by Ben Carson, M.D., published in May, 2014. It is subtitled "What We Can All Do to Save America's Future". Dr. Carson is a retired black neurosurgeon who was raised by a single mother in inner city Detroit and Boston. Per Wikipedia, "He is credited with being the first surgeon to successfully separate conjoined twins joined at the head." Hah, he is 3 months younger than I am - 1951 birthdays rule!

He came into the political spotlight when he delivered the keynote address at the National Prayer Breakfast (for the second time, the only person besides Billy Graham to do so) in 2013. The address, which is reprinted in the book's preface, came under fire - by Fox News pundits?!?!? - for being overly politicized and critical of President Obama, who was seated 10 feet away. But this made him a darling to conservatives.

His next big burst of publicity came from comments he made about gay marriage. From Wikipedia:

Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn’t matter what they are. They don't get to change the definition.

The gays didn't particularly appreciate being lumped in with pedophiles and practitioners of bestiality.

Dr. Carson in his wife founded the Carson Scholars Fund in 1994, which gives scholarships and trophies for academic achievement in grades 4-11, attempting to give academic achievement the same type of recognition that is given to athletic achievement. The fund has given out 5700 awards - a very laudable enterprise, IMO.

He had not been a member of any political party, but then, again per Wikipedia, "on the day of the 2014 midterms he joined the Republican Party as "truly a pragmatic move" because of the possibility of a presidential run in 2016."

The book is a quick and easy read - it is 256 pages in hardback, I read it in around 4 hours. It has a preface, 17 chapters in 3 parts of 6, 6, and 4 short chapters (chapter 1 comes before part 1), and an epilogue. The 3 parts are "Causes of Disunity and Decline", "Solutions", and "Who We Are".

Each chapter begins with a biblical quote from Proverbs - he reads from Proverbs every day, and the authorship of Proverbs is attributed to the biblical figure Solomon, which is his middle name. Chapters 2-16 each end with 4 "Action Steps" - exercises for the reader. (I didn't do the exercises, altho some of them were things I had already done.)

The book is peppered with anecdotes from his years of medical practice and growing up in the inner city.

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So, where did I agree with Dr. Carson? I am 100% on board with his emphasis on education and reading. His mother made him and his brother turn off the TV and read. When our kids were growing up we had a hard-and-fast rule: "No TV after supper on a school night". And I tell all new parents, read with your kids, get them to love reading, and they will excel in their school work.

Reviewing the book to write this, Dr. Carson really doesn't have much of a plan to improve education, other than saying that the current state of our citizens' education is not good and emphasizing that it is mostly up to the individual, guided by their parents, to educate themself. Odd. He also did not comment on how in recent years our children have become a $M cost center for testing companies.

Chapter 2 of the book is titled "Political Correctness", which Dr. Carson attacks. I have a tag in this blog "politically incorrect", so I would have to confess that on occasion I am guilty of straying outside politically correct boundaries. But I think you should not allow a dislike for the, what, restrictiveness and maybe hypocrisy, of political correctness to make you think you have a license to be insensitive, particularly to groups who have been oppressed, maligned or otherwise downtrodden for centuries or millennia. Here's Dr. Carson:

They forbid the use of the word slavery by conservatives, the mention of Nazism by conservatives, or the mention of homosexuality in anything other than a positive context, to name a few of their rules.

...

I had my own run-in with the PCP when I said that I thought Obamacare was the worst thing in our country since slavery.

Conservatives compare many things to slavery, and I have never heard one of them that is actually even vaguely comparable, to any somewhat rational person, to the horror that was and is slavery - a horror whose legacy we are still living with in this country. And using "Nazism" - it is a truism on the Internet that once you start comparing things or people to Hitler or Nazis, whatever argument you were in is over. You've lost the argument, you're just trying to inflame your opponent. So, if we are trying to hold rational discourse, why do you want to stick your finger in the other person's eye?

I think Dr. Carson still stings a little bit from the flack he got over his gay remarks quoted above and this slavery comparison.

Note, I just used the word "sensitivity". Dr. Carson calls out "hypersensitivy" as stifling dialogue - but who draws the line between the two? Dr. Carson I think agrees with this well-known liberal, atheist homosexual:

I personally believe the more polite thing to do is to err on the side of not hurting someone else's feelings - particularly someone who comes from a group that has suffered oppression - unless they are being unreasonable and indeed "hypersensitive", in which case, you're probably better off keeping your mouth shut.

In this chapter Dr. Carson also introduces us to Saul Alinsky, whose book Rules for Radicals he says is the bible of the "political correctness police". I had never heard of either, I guess I will have to check them out.

I agree with Dr. Carson on most of Chapter 11, "Becoming Informed". This is a good reminder:

As a neuroscientist I can tell you unequivocally that it is impossible to overload the human brain with information.

In chapter 12, "Wisdom and Knowledge", we get into Dr. Carson's "Vision for a Wiser Health Care System".

I believe everyone should have a health savings account (HSA) and an electronic medical record (EMR) at the time of birth

The EMR is a great idea. Europe has had these for years. Everytime I get my annual physical, I have to fill out the same medical history form - what bad tech, in this day and age! Where is my smartcard with a chip to keep my whole medical history? In the US, tho, this kind of thing tends to be opposed by fundamentalist christians who equate such systems with "the mark of the beast" from the book of Apocalypse. Sigh :-(

The rest of Dr. Carson's system involves getting rid of health insurance companies, and instead having consumers interact directly with health care providers. I like getting rid of health insurance companies, the rest not so much, as we'll discuss below. But, there is next to no chance of his plan moving forward. Obamacare was originally a conservative program, which forestalled a single-payer system by keeping the insurance companies in place. The health insurance industry is one of the most powerful lobbies in DC. Everyone knew that a single payer system would have no chance of being passed, and could create too much chaos taking all the currently insured off their current plans. So Obamacare, designed by conservatives, was the compromise. So, again, the chances are really slim for Dr. Carson's system, even if it were desirable.

He also would like tort reform, which is a reasonable idea, within limits. But, the lawyers are as powerful a lobby in DC as the doctors and insurance companies are - not to mention that a large majority of legislators are lawyers. Ah, doctors vs lawyers, what's not to like?

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I disagree with Dr. Carson far more than I agree, so I'm afraid this next section will be a good bit longer than the previous one. I will try to hold down the snark here, but, I've been a smart-ass my whole life, and I am indeed an old dog.

Overall, as a non-believer, I take issue with using religion as a basis for public policy making. For example, on taxation:

And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the Universe: God. And He’s given us a system. It’s called tithe.

But worse than this overall approach is the standard right-wing, conservative view of the US as being in decline. For example, as soon as he was told about the prayer breakfast address

I ... immediately begin praying for the necessary wisdom and words to gently address the spiritual, financial, and moral decline of America

Or from Chapter 1:

The secular progressive movement completely denies any moral backsliding and feels that we have made substantial progress as a nation with respect to great moral issues like abortion, gay marriage, and helping the poor, but in reality we are losing our moral compass and are caught up in elitism and bigotry.

So I guess he has not read Stephen Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature", which contains numerous statistics showing that all forms of crime have greatly decreased in recent decades.

And he hasn't heard of the Flynn Effect, which notes that IQ scores have been going up for as long as they have been measured. [snark] Or, he has heard of it but chooses to use that favorite conservative practice of ignoring any science that doesn't agree with their ideology.

And he probably doesn't think that plummeting teenage pregnancy and abortion rates, particularly in states like Colorado with free contraception, are a good thing, since maybe some of these young women are having (gasp) recreational sex.[/snark]

Whenever conservatives say "moral decline", it's usually about sex. The out-of-control individual and corporate greed that has become business-as-usual since Reaganomics and the 80s is OK tho. It's not at all a sign of "moral decline" - it's just the healthy free market at work! Dr. Carson has no comment on this.

"Spiritual decline" usually means that conservatives don't like young people rejecting their mega-churches with their "gospel of prosperity" and their patriarchal christianity. Many of the young people I know are very spiritual, but it is more about connecting with and saving our planet, rather than waiting for the rapture or pie-in-the-sky dished out in the afterlife by the big sky father.

"Financial decline" I totally have to take issue with. The US controls 40% of the wealth and income in the world, and that has not been declining. Our middle class has been hurt badly, with union membership down by a factor of almost 3 as manufacturing jobs have been shipped to China by our patriotic corporations, but overall, we are still by far the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. Note, shipping those jobs to China did help raise 10s of millions of Chinese out of poverty.

The US dollar is also the world's de facto currency, and challenges to that status have fizzled in recent years, particularly with the difficulties in the Eurozone keeping the future of the Euro uncertain.

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Chapter 3, "Elitism", I found somewhat hard to understand. Elites are trying to oppress the rest of us?

In order for elitism to flourish, there has to be another class of people who are willing to acknowledge the superiority of the chosen ones. Elites cultivate this obeisance by providing goodies to the less fortunate ones. In our society today, those goodies consist of multiple kinds of entitlement programs. As the dependency on these programs grows, the position of the elite class is solidified because they will always be seen as the providers who need to be protected from any threats of power redistribution.

...

the liberal policies of the elite class have done little to improve the lot of those who depend so much on them.

??? So are you only "elite" if you are in favor of "liberal policies" ???

I also wonder that Dr. Carson does not consider physicians in the highest-paying specialities to be an elite. The average neurosurgeon in the US makes $346,791/year, with the top neurosurgeons making over $700,000/year.

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Chapter 4 is titled "Ignorance and Forgetfulness". It really has a lot not to like.

Dr. Carson starts by engaging in one of the conservative practices that I find most annoying: channelling the founding fathers.

Our founders were deathly afraid that our government would do the same thing that virtually all other governments had done previously: expand continually, developing a voracious appetite for the resources of the people.

I have never heard a quote from one of the founding fathers in this vein, and Dr. Carson does not supply one. I did find this quote tho:

Ha ha, I'll leave this one here, as a lesson in, "don't trust the Internet", but our crackerjack fact-checkers here at "Portrait of the Dumbass" have determined that it is likely that Madison never said this. It's OK, TJ makes the point quite well enough.

I see a big, democratic, federal government as the only thing that can save us from the corporations and banks and their owners, the oligarchs. Dr. Carson has nothing to say about this clear and present danger which the founding fathers were indeed concerned about - except to disrespect the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was largely responsibly for pushing this critical issue into the public dialogue:

the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was replicated in many parts of the country, shows how easily physically destructive actions that compromise the rights and property of others can be incited in those who have been educated this way and also have an entitlement mentality.

Dr. Carson points out that "The Constitution ... arranged for the federal government to remain small, allowing state governments to be responsible for most of the legislation." Those days are over. The states don't have a chance - most of them are smaller than the biggest corporations, and even the richest individuals. Look at how the Koch Brothers pretty much bought the Wisconsin state government. Now their organizations are even moving down to the local level of city councils and school boards.

Dr. Carson very much beats the jingoist USA drum. I'm guessing he hasn't read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States"

By emphasizing these things and other wrongdoings, revisionists attempt to paint the United States as an opportunistic, uncaring, and savage nation in dire need of change.

Since the release of the CIA torture report, with Republicans flocking to Darth Cheney's "torture is OK" banner, it's looking more and more like allowing torture is going go be a plank in the next Republican platform. I wonder how Dr. Carson, who took the Hippocratic Oath, is going to feel about that?

He also mentions several times how important it is that the USA remain the world's "pinnacle power".

Furthermore, it is important that we maintain our pinnacle status, because if we lose it, we will be replaced by another world power that is unlikely to be nearly as benign.

I personally think we will all be much better off when every nation in the world is a "pinnacle power". Then maybe we can end the current war-without-end-for-profit. Plus cut our military spending, which almost equals that of the rest of the world put together. We have 11 aircraft carriers, Italy has 2, and no other country has more than 1. I know, I'm a dreamer.

In the section "Forgetting Out Christian Heritage", Dr. Carson gets even more scarily religious:

They can justify anything based on their ideology because in their opinion, there is no higher authority other than themselves to overrule them. They have a visceral reaction to the mention of God’s word, because it tears at the fabric of their justification system.

Ugh, rule by holy book. Yeah, that's really going to work out well. Look how well it's working for Islamic countries with Sharia Law.

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Chapter 5 is titled "Bigotry". It has long sections about racism, religious bigotry (the longest section, which of course includes reference to the "War on Christmas"), sexism, ageism - and then 2 short paragraphs on homophobia. The 2nd of these paragraphs has a nice "right wing dog whistle" in it:

the mantle of hatred has been taken up by the other side, which feels that hateful speech and actions toward anyone who doesn’t embrace the gay agenda is justified.

So, what is "the gay agenda"? I'm guessing if I watched Fox News I would know, but, I really don't have a clue. I'm going to guess that "the gay agenda" is that they want the same rights as everyone else. So how is that "the gay agenda"? Isn't that "the human agenda"?

---

Chapter 6 is titled "No Winners In Political Fighting". Why is congress so dysfunctional?

polarizing influences — such as unions that want what they want, gay rights groups, isolationists, and others who cannot or will not consider the opinions of others — have become stronger in recent years, robbing from the pool of moderate legislators and increasing the numbers of extreme legislators.

Seriously? Seriously? Unions have become stronger in recent years? Following Reagan's opening salvo on August 5, 1981, when he fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, and aided by "right-to-work" laws in, of course, southern states, union membership has plummeted from 32% of the workforce in 1950 to under 12% now. And as the unions have declined, so has the middle class.

And of course he does not mention the fact that the Tea Party is by far the leading source of "extreme legislators" that I can remember in my lifetime.

Next we get some swipes at the Affordable Care Act - ACA or Obamacare.

A program that was supposed to reduce costs and allow people to keep their insurance if they wanted to, is raising costs and making it impractical for people to keep their previous insurance. It is also rapidly expanding the number of part-time workers in our country because the law does not require employers to provide health care insurance for part-time workers.

Quoting Hudson from "Aliens", "Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events", but the ACA seems to be doing very well: lowering costs, increasing the number insured, adding more insurers offering more plans in the 2nd year, and freeing many workers who were "insurance slaves" to their employers to start their own companies.

Another Fox News "scandal of the day":

the IRS targeted Tea Party organizations for intense scrutiny and unfair treatment.

Investigations found out that liberal groups and Occupy Wall Street were targeted as well, but, of course, you'll never hear that on Fox News.

I am going to put forward my theory of the cause of current congressional gridlock: that the libertarian Koch Brothers and other groups who want a federal government "small enough to drown in a bathtub", in a brilliant and utterly cynical move, created the Tea Party, fueled by the shock felt by (perhaps subconsciously, to give them the benefit of a doubt) racist whites, particularly in the south, at the election of our first black president.

And the Republican leadership, even as Obama was being sworn in, met and vowed to do all they could to make him a failure, welfare of the country be damned. This congress, led by the Tea Party, sees getting nothing done as a feature, not a bug.

---

Chapter 7 it titled "Enslaving Out Children - Don't Sell The Future". It's about the deficit. We get the standard "China will pull the rug from under us" thinking:

If the rest of the world, and especially China, loses confidence in America’s ability to handle its fiscal responsibilities and calls for repayment of the money we owe them, an unimaginable economic crisis would likely ensue.

Currently 34% of our debt is held by foreign countries, with China holding the largest piece at 7%. I don't think they have grounds to foreclose on us. If the Wall Street banks are "too big to fail", the US government is 10x so. More on economics later.

---

We're now into Part 2, "Solutions". Chapter 8 is titled "Pushing Back". It starts with Dr. Carson recounting a story of standing up to a bully as a kid. There are a couple of other stories on this same theme in the book. I personally have a "standing up to a bully" story from my childhood. I wonder how many (non-bully) males do?

So who are the modern bullies in our society? Per Dr. Carson they are:

• the PC police, elites, historical revisionists, bigots, dividers, and spenders mentioned in the previous sections;
  
• the media;
  
• politicians;
  
• academia;
  
• businesses who ban their employees from saying "Merry Christmas".
  

This is not the list I would have made up. I would list as bullies:

• the financial industry, which is constantly trying to find ways to separate us from our money, and which currently is leading both the Republicans and the Democrats around by their noses;
  
• the military-industrial complex, say, for example, Lockheed Martin, which was rewarded for its $7M in lobbying with an additional $240M for 2 of its F-35 fighters, which ‘can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run’ and which the Pentagon didn't want, in the recent CROmnibus budget;
  
• the fossil fuel industry, which continues to receive $B in subsidies to produce products which are destroying the planet;
  
• the NRA and its masters, the firearms companies, who have produced a public health menace, unknown in every other advanced country, with their opposition to even the most reasonable restrictions on firearms;
  
• fundamentalist christians and their allies, who insist on trying to cram their outmoded, patriarchal beliefs down the throats of the rest of us, particularly women.
  

I think the bullies in my list are far more powerful, better funded, and more in control of things than the bullies in Dr. Carson's list. But, government, Nazi Germany, Hitler, argle blargle ... and hold on to your guns!

Throughout history many societies have failed to push back and have allowed an overly aggressive government to expand and dominate their lives. Nazi Germany is a perfect example of such a society. One can only wonder what would’ve happened if people had not tolerated the foolishness of Adolf Hitler’s appeal to the baser instincts of greed and envy and his institution of an official weapons confiscation program.

A section titled "Know Your Enemy" starts with this:

A final word on bullies: It is very important to know who your “enemies” are. They are not your average fellow Americans.

Man, does this not remind you of McCarthy? Or of every [inflammatory text]fascist of the last century?[/inflammatory text] "You're not a real American!!!". There's another one like this later.

---

Chapter 9 is titled "Respectful Disagreement". He lists several of the issues that divide us today. The first is Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice. He doesn't say which he is, but he does make these statements, and I don't think it is too much of a stretch to see these as the basis for a ban on abortions after 10 weeks:

Recent scientific observations have led observers to conclude that a fetus can experience pain as early as ten weeks of gestation. This means that most abortion procedures produce extreme discomfort for the fetus before it dies

...

I suspect that over the course of time, the age line for abortions will continue to shift depending on political winds and further scientific information regarding fetal existence.

A quick discussion with The Google does not immediately turn up any support for the "10 week fetal pain" theory, but I did not look hard.

Other issues in the chapter are welfare; doctors versus patients; the rich versus the poor. On this last topic, Dr. Carson seems to think that a poll tax is a reasonable thing:

serious problems arise when a person who pays nothing has the right to vote and determine what other people are paying.

And he is not the most compassionate of 1%ers:

Not only is this kind of taxation both divisive and unsustainable, it is especially offensive to individuals like me who have worked extremely hard throughout life to achieve success and who give away enormous amounts of money to benefit others.

---

Chapter 10 is titled "The Art of Compromise". Ha ha, I think Dr. Carson needs to work on his compromise skills some.

I firmly believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. However, I see no reason why any two consenting adults, regardless of their sexual orientation, cannot be joined together in a legally binding civil relationship that provides hospital visitation rights, property rights, and so on without tampering with the definition of marriage. This would give the gay population what they want, while leaving the traditional definition of marriage intact. This is what compromise is about.

Actually, I'm guessing that what the gay population wants is to be married, like other (heterosexual) couples, so those damn playground bullies can't taunt their kids with "your moms aren't married". Here's my compromise: we define marriage as "a legally binding relationship between two (or more if you're a polygamous mormon) consenting human adults (oops, there went the Utah polygamists)". That makes the gay population happy; it excludes NAMBLA and the animal lovers and, for now, the Japanese guy who married his video game girlfriend.

Meanwhile, we'll let Dr. Carson call what he and his wife have "a traditional marriage". Now that's compromise!

Dr. Carson frames his discussion of the national debt in "we're good, you're bad" terms:

The Democrats, led by the president, appear to be relatively unconcerned about the debt and are happy to continue spending, borrowing, and expanding entitlements. The Republicans, on the other hand,

...

One side is concerned about preserving entitlements and the other is concerned about preserving our nation’s future.

It's so interesting to me that Republicans weren't worried about the national debt at all when, for the first time in our nation's history, we started not 1 but 2 wars without raising taxes to pay for them. Instead, we got the exact opposite with the Bush tax cuts! But once the black guy got saddled with that debt, it's a crisis. The national debt is indeed a problem, but I think it is easily solvable if everyone starts paying their fair share - more later.

Dr. Carson makes reference to the informal conspiracy in which Republican business organizations engaged in their desperation to do whatever it took to discredit our 1st black president, the country be damned:

Big businesses have trillions of dollars sitting on the sidelines waiting for a friendlier business environment before investing.

But businesses got tired of that strategy and most have started investing again - wanting to discredit Obama is all well and good, but we're talking profits here. Plus, Obama has not been at all anti-business.

Ha ha, Dr. Carson makes the standard conservative argument that demonstrates abysmal ignorance of economics:

As far as the growing debt is concerned, it should be treated the same way that personal debt is treated by thinking and pragmatic families.

No, no, no! Countries with their own currencies can print money, which families cannot do. And sometimes it the right thing to do. When the Fed tripled the money supply in 2008, conservatives howled about hyperinflation. When the Fed started quantitative easing later in 2008, 12 conservative economists signed a letter predicting runaway inflation. The inflation never occurred, but the conservative economists refuse to admit they were wrong. "We said there might be inflation." [snark]Man, wouldn't it be nice for a conservative just once to admit they were wrong? About anything?[/snark]

With Japan in deflation for 20 years, Europe heading towards deflation (Sweden is there), and interest rates at the zero lower bound, what we need is government stimulus programs, particularly to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. Note that, annoyingly, in the graph below the bottom of the Y-axis is not 0, it is 225.

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The government can right now borrow money at close to 0% interest, and the fiscal multiplier effect lets that money circulate through the economy multiple times.

We then get back to taxes, which should, of course, be based on the model of tithes from the bible.

As soon as you depart from a proportional taxation system, you introduce ideological bias, making arguments endless.

...

Even with the loopholes, the top 10 percent of the populace in terms of income pay 70 percent of the income taxes while earning 46 percent of the taxable income, which means they are indeed paying more than their fair share.

I'm not sure where where he got those last figures. Nothing in the book references any hard data. But, I think I can get behind his idea that everyone should pay the same tax rate. According to Piketty (my review/summary here), the bottom 50% by income pay about 50% of their income in taxes - not just federal and state income taxes, but also sales, excise, property and other taxes. This is a good target tax rate. It is about what it takes the European countries to maintain a birth-to-grave social net with universal health care and free college for all who are qualified. The next 40% pay 40-45% of their income in taxes. The top 10% pay 30-35% of their income in taxes. And the very top, the 1% and even more so the top 0.01%, pay 10-15% - think Mitt Romney. So, let's tax carried interest, capital gains, and dividends at a rate above wages instead of well below, and then use the progressive income tax rate to make up any difference left and get everyone's total rate up to 50%. I think that will work wonders for the deficit!

Note, I've been studying economics (slowly) for a couple of years now. And a lot of it, particularly when you are in a liquidity trap as we have been since 2008, is very counterintuitive. So beware of "common-sense" economics.

---

Chapter 11, "Becoming Informed", I said I mostly agreed with up above. But then you get this:

By not focusing on the “fast and furious” scandal, the Benghazi debacle, the IRS scandal, the government surveillance revelations, and so on, the hope is that the public will simply forget about these horrendous shortcomings and move on.

Ah, so many nice Fox News "scandals of the week".

• "Fast and furious" was stupid but has been dealt with - and it doesn't begin to compare to something like the Iran-Contra scandal under Reagan.
  
• We just had, what, the 8th congressional investigation of Benghazi, led by Republicans, find no wrong doing. [snark] But, they've got ANOTHER ONE going now, I'm sure it will get to the truth! [/snark] I wonder if that would be the case if congress investigated the 13 attacks and 60 deaths that occurred under George W. Bush.
  
• The IRS scandal we've already noted did not solely target conservatives.
  
• I don't think anybody is going to let the government surveillance issue go away anytime soon.
  
• "and so on" I'm guessing includes other Fox "scandals" like securing the release of Bowe Bergdahl, capturing the guy behind the Benghazi attack, the president wearing a tan suit, "and so on", ad nauseam.
  

---

Chapter 12 is titled "Wisdom and Knowledge". We talked a little bit about Dr. Carson's "Vision for a Wiser Health Care System" above. Now for the bad news on his system.

If I was told of this system without knowing who designed it and was asked, "Who designed this system?", I would answer, "A doctor". The insurance companies go away, and we are left with a free market.

most people would become interested in saving by shopping for the most cost-effective high-quality health care plans available.

...

most of the relationships would be doctor-patient relationships, the doctors certainly would not order things without regard to price, and patients would not permit excessive depletion of their HSA’s by careless expenditure. With everybody becoming cost conscious, price transparency would be of paramount importance and fair competition would cause prices to be consistent and reasonable.

I personally have no interest in "shopping for the most cost-effective high-quality health care". I want to go the primary care provider of my choice. For acute care, I want to go to the closest doc-in-a-box. In an emergency, I want to go to the closest emergency room. For a serious operation, I want to shop around and pick the doctor with the best record of results.

The insurance companies do currently serve one useful purpose: they bargain with providers, using the clout of the numbers they represent, to get lower prices. A free market might do that better - and Adam Smith would surely approve - if it weren't for the American Medical Association (AMA).

For decades, the AMA has held the number of new medical schools opening to a trickle, to maintain the artificially high salaries of physicians in the US. On average, US physicians make around twice what physicians make in the rest of the developed world. So there is not a free market. There is a market in which the supply of services is tightly constrained to keep prices high.

Here in KY, 10 years ago there was a shortage of pharmacists. Hospitals and retailers had to compete for the scarce pharmacists with increased salaries and benefits, including repayment of student loans. Then, in 2008, a 2nd pharmacy school opened. With the shortage curtailed, pharmacist salaries have stabilized greatly.

So I find Dr. Carson's system to be self-serving. He is retired, but I think that the desire to hold on to their supply-side stranglehold is engrained in lots of US physicians, particularly those in the highest paying specialities like neurosurgery.

Another really bad side effect of the AMA's monopoly is that they let pseudo-medicine like chiropractic, homeopathy, etc. go unchallenged so that they can say "look, we're not a monopoly".

The other part of his plan is the lifetime health spending account (HSA) that every citizen gets at birth.

The HSA could be populated with funds supplied by an employer, the owner, relatives, friends, and governmental sources

...

It is natural to ask what happens if a man needs an operation and does not have enough money in his HSA to cover the cost? The system would be designed in such a way that allows members of his immediate family to shift money from their HSA accounts to his without any penalties. In essence, this would make each family unit its own private health insurance company with no unnecessary middleman increasing costs. I would also make it possible for people to pass the money in their HSAs to family members at the time of their death.

...

A portion of the money in the account could be used to purchase bridge or catastrophic insurance,

...

It could also be made possible for any adult to donate up to a certain predetermined amount of money from their account to any other person’s account for charitable reasons. This becomes an easy way for churches and other organizations to provide charity care at their discretion. It also would encourage those people with massive amounts of money in their accounts to think charitably toward others.

So, families can share, and you can do kickstarter for an operation. Rich people can help out if they like. But I don't see how this keeps medical bills from bankrupting a family - there doesn't seem to be any of the risk pool that you have with insurance. But he does mention purchasing "catastrophic insurance" - so are there still health insurance companies, or not? Or does the (evil) federal government become the insurer of last resort?

I would personally prefer a single payer system, with health care professionals compensated in a range that depends on their results, as hospitals are now under Obamacare. Medicare runs 2% overhead, as opposed to 20% for private health insurance companies - and they used to routinely exceed this before Obamacare capped their overhead at 20%. Vermont is supposed to be trying a Medicare-for-all plan soon. So we'll probably get a chance to see how that works before we get to see if Dr. Carson's plan would be at all workable.

More wisdom from Dr. Carson: rein in that pesky EPA! And this guy is a physician?!?!? When does a physician put "energy independence" above the health risk that pollution produces? Very disappointing.

The Environmental Protection Agency feels it has a duty to protect every aspect of the environment under all circumstances, and that priority has been placed above energy independence.

...

I thoroughly believe that we have a duty to protect our environment not only for ourselves but for the next generations. However, we also have a duty to develop our economic potential and free ourselves of unnecessary stress and dependency on volatile foreign sources of energy.

---

Chapter 13, "My Brother's Keeper", is the last chapter of this part. Basically he says, people need to do more to care for the handicapped and elderly in their homes, rather than in government subsidized institutions. And, if we have to sacrifice to do it, so be it.

During the time in America when these kinds of questions were not asked, people didn’t necessarily have to have multiple vehicles, flat screen televisions, multiple cell phones, iPads, and a host of other “necessities.” This begs the question: Is it more important to take care of your extended family or have the creature comforts pop culture demands?

Not entirely invalid. But, I'll follow Dr. Carson's example and share some personal experience. For the last 9 months I have been involved a few days a week in caring for a 56YO relative with Downs Syndrome - mental age 3YO - in his home. And it is the wrong way to do this. He is very social and needs much more community than we can provide at home. And as he ages, he will need more and more professional help, particularly as Downs Syndrome carries with it an increased probability of early onset Altzheimer's. Finally, informal caregiving takes a toll on the health of the informal caregiver. I seem to remember from a seminar I went to that full-time informal caregivers lose 1 month of life expectancy for every year spent in caregiving. You'd think a physician would know that.

Similarly, we need to care for the poor and needy without the big bad government. There are sections titled "The Problem of Government Dependency" and "Rolling Back Welfare". In the section titled "Compassion for the Poor" he says

Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts.

But he offers no real plans to implement this, other than through "churches and other charitable organizations" - because government assistance programs "create dependency and robs people of their God-given dignity". I really think that this is the last of poor and hungry peoples' worries.

I found this next quote offensive. I have never dealt with any government employee at any level who was not professional and courteous. I guess this is just more of the conservative canon.

Other types of organizations, especially government agencies, are frequently staffed by people who only see it as a job, know they have job security, and therefore treat people without respect or compassion.

I'll end the discussion of this chapter by noting the title of another of its sections: Socialism: A Deterrent to Charity. I would like live in a society where no one had to depend on charity to live. I know christians work at shelters, feed the homeless, etc, and that these activities help them feel better about themselves and their Escalades. But the bottom line is, if this system worked, we would not have 1/3 of our children in the US living in poverty. And I don't think Dr. Carson's exhortations to people to "just do more to help" are going to be very effective.

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Part 3 of the book, "Who We Are", does not contain much new content. Chapter 14, "Without a Vision", has another bullying anecdote, and some more constitution worship (there is actually a section titled "Revering the Constitution"). He also exhorts Republicans to "stand on principle" and not "cave in to pressure at the last minute." So much for that "compromise" thing. These do indeed appear to be important principles to Republican voters.

And we also get another nice exhortation to be on the alert for thoughtcrime:

We need people who ... are willing to point out who among their compatriots are deviating from the Constitution and why.

---

Chapter 15 is titled "Role Models". Talking about growing up in the inner city, Dr. Carson says that the main role models of economic success were drug dealers and factory foremen, but also, "one could occasionally see a well-dressed and polished physician driving off in a beautiful car." Not what most physicians I know normally give as their inspiration for becoming doctors.

He proposes as role models parents, teachers, and inventors - but, absolutely NOT Miley Cyrus. He had earlier given some props to Margaret Thatcher, I got a chuckle out of this one:

This is why people like Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and John F. Kennedy are widely admired.

How did Ronald Reagan, and for that matter JFK, wind up in that group?

---

Chapter 16 is titled "The Origin of Morality". Ugh. Let's include his setup of the discussion of morality in its entirety:

Who Says?

What is right? What is wrong? And who gets to determine the answers to these questions? For a nation to be truly united, most of its citizens must agree on the answers to these questions—or at least agree that there are answers to be found. For years, most Americans have turned to a belief in God and the Bible for answers. From the Creation story to the Ten Commandments to the Gospels to the Epistles, the Bible provided an explanation for the meaning of life and instructed us in moral principles. We held to a Judeo-Christian standard while respecting the beliefs of those who didn’t share them, and that standard saved us from confusion. Today, fewer people believe in the Bible, or even in absolute truth, and our rejection of an objective moral standard has thrown our society into disarray. If in fact we do really believe in God and His word, many of the moral “gray” issues of today become black and white.

So, yeah, let's order us some bible-based moral absolutism! Woo-hoo! [snark]Wow, I'm really curious, what does the bible say about abortion (inquiring minds want to know)?[/snark]

According to God’s word, life begins at conception rather than at the time of delivery or at some arbitrary point during gestation.

...

In the Book of Exodus, chapter 21, verses 22–24, it is made quite clear that God considers the life of the unborn to be just as valuable as the life of an adult. When you couple this belief with the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13), it is clear that abortion is rarely a moral option.

But he still hedges his bets and doesn't come right out and say he's for banning abortion. [snark]There's some moral integrity for you.[/snark]

Next we get, of course, Leviticus on homosexuality. Ha ha, I liked this one. Leviticus also forbids tatoos! (And eating pork. And eating shellfish. And cutting your forelocks. And ...)

Sodom and Gomorrah. Evolution. Dogs and cats sleeping together. Immorality is around us everywhere!!!

Finally, he discusses "under God" in the pledge of allegiance. At least he mentions that these words "were subquently added" - but he doesn't mention that they were added in 1954. Huh, the pledge was written in 1896 and only adopted officially in 1942. Who knew? Somebody must have been doing some serious channeling of the founding fathers, who were very sorry that they did not think of the pledge Back In The Day.

---

Chapter 17 is "Take Courage". Mostly rah rah stuff, but Dr. Carson wants to make sure he can hold on to his "beautiful car":

Why did all of these people toil so relentlessly for an idea? It is because they had a dream of ... a nation where people could choose how to disperse their own wealth after contributing a small, but reasonable amount of their resources to conduct the affairs of government.

"Small but reasonable"? I guess he's onboard with my 50% overall tax rate, yay! Piketty guesses you might have to go to a top tax rate of 80% to make things work. At least that's not as bad as that commie Eisenhower in the '50s, when the top tax rate was 94%.

---

That's concludes my review of what Dr. Carson talked about. What didn't he talk about? I've already mentioned his silence on the ongoing transformation of our democracy into a plutocracy / oligarchy / corporatocracy.

No mention of increasing the minimum wage, which was supposed to be a livable wage, other than to mention that he worked a number of low-paying jobs as he was growing up "all of which provided some knowledge and skill sets that were useful, no matter how low-skilled and low-paid they were". I agree with him on that. I worked doing yard work, bagging and cleaning produce at Kroger, as a welder and a shipfitter at JeffBoat, and delivering airline tickets in Boston before I got a high-paying job. I enjoyed and learned from all those jobs. But so what? This doesn't help the people, and there are an increasing number of them since the unions have been gutted, who will never get a decent paying job.

But more notably, I searched the ebook for "climate change" or "global warming". Zero hits, no mention whatsoever of the climate crisis, the greatest challenge to human civilization in its entire history, a challenge which we are grievously failing to address adequately. [snark]I guess "saving America's future" doesn't include keeping our costal cities from being underwater.[/snark]

---

So, what did I learn from this book? There was no hard data and no verifiable references, so not much in the way of facts. Instead there are Fox News talking points and "scandals of the day", right wing dog whistles, real-life anecdotes, references to scripture, and unsupported opinions presented as fact. But again, as I said above, this is the 1st book of this type I have read, so maybe they are all written that way.

The main thing I learned is that the right wing echo chamber is as reality-challenged in print as it is in electronic media. "Reality has a well-known liberal bias".

My wife recently read Elizabeth Warren's book, and she liked it a lot. I may try that in a month or so and see if it as devoid of data and facts that can be verified by the references (not) provided as this book is. But, I definitely need a breather. I'll read some good escapist science fiction or fantasy, some factual science books, and some more economics text books. Maybe after that I'll try another book by a politician.

Is Dr. Carson presidential material? He kind of reminds me of our own Random Paul: rote parroting of Fox News talking points, but with their own weird stuff thrown in. For Random Paul (also a physician), his odd stuff comes from the Libertarian principles he learned at his pappy's knee. For Dr. Carson, his odd stuff seems to come from his background as a physician, and his religious belief. [joke]Quite frankly (pun), if either of them were to get elected president, I will probably move to France. (And good riddance to me, I know!)[/joke] Of the two, Dr. Carson is a little scarier to me I think. In addition to his theocratic leanings, his McCarthy-like and thoughtcrime statements reminded me of the government in "V for Vendetta" or "1984".

Well, Ernie, I read the book, and I did try to find things to agree with - and I did find a few. But overall, I'm sorry this book did not affect me as you had maybe hoped. If I read the Elizabeth Warren book and like it, maybe I'll recommend it to you, and you can go off on it. ;->