Tuesday, June 21, 2011

OK, so I had to make it 25 books

In the order in which they were published:
  1. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History
  2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
  3. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
  4. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
  5. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
  6. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological
  7. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
  8. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  9. Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
  10. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
  11. Christopher Lasch, Culture of Narcissism
  12. Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs
  13. Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
  14. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History
  15. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
  16. Paul Fussell, Class
  17. Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces
  18. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions
  19. Mike Davis, City of Quartz
  20. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
  21. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
  22. James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine
  23. James Scott, Seeing Like a State
  24. John Robb, Brave New War
  25. Misha Glenny, McMafia
And, if I really had to boil it down to the ten that probably most influence my thinking today (not necessarily the same as the ones who made the biggest impression on me when I read the book), it would probably be Nietzsche, Polanyi, Canguilhem, Kuhn, Bell, Davis, Jameson, Ferguson, Scott, and Robb.

Favorite nonfiction books

Since everyone seems to be doing it, here's my dozen favorite nonfiction books (in no particular order), defined as books that changed the way I looked at the world in some fundamental way:
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
  • James Scott, Seeing Like a State
  • Donna Haraway, Primate Visions
  • George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
  • Paul Fussell, Class
  • Misha Glenny, McMafia
  • Mike Davis, City of Quartz
  • Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
  • Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs
  • Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
  • Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
  • Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces
What strikes me most about this list is that I read almost every one of these books in the 1990s. Does that mean I don't read enough any more, or simply that it's hard for a book to shake me from my preceptions?

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Five stages of global warming denialism

I think there are five successive variants of climate change denialism. I'll try to assign names to people who subscribe to these at some point later, but for now I'd like to just note these:
  1. Those who deny that the climate is changing at all.
  2. Those who admit that the climate is changing, but who say it has nothing to do with human GHG emissions (e.g. it is "natural variation").
  3. Those who admit that the climate is changing, and that this is a result of human GHG emissions, but who say that for the most part it won't have malign effects on humans.
  4. Those who admit that the climate is changing, and that this is a result of human GHG emissions, and that it will have malign effects on humans, but who say that there's nothing we can do about it.
  5. Those who admit that the climate is changing, and that this is a result of human GHG emissions, and that it will have malign effects on humans, and that we could do something about it, but who think that this "something" is a lower priority than other things we could be doing to improve the human condition.
I guess if I were to provide a basic summary of what I think of each of these positions it would be, respectively: delusional, anti-scientific, historically blind, defeatist, and a sign of poor priorities.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

A constitutional amendment that would save $2B a year

From the Economist:
The constitution calls for an “actual enumeration” of the population. That may make newfangled census methods vulnerable to challenges from the courts. A Supreme Court ruling already limits the use of statistical sampling, which adjusts survey data to include more accurately minorities, who are generally undercounted by older methods. In December the Government Accountability Office noted that the census’s cost has on average doubled each decade since 1970. Without “fundamental reforms”, the next one could cost $30 billion. [Emphasis added.]
How about this for a simple, massively cost-saving Constitutional Amendment:
The decennial census shall be conducted using modern statistical methods.