This is as close to a "Rules for Life" book as we'll get from Tyler Cowen, and if you've listened to his podcast or followed his blog what's inside won't surprise you — but it will make you think. Which is good: surprise is overrated anyway, and things that depend on it don't do well on re-reading/watching/listening. I'll be coming back to this one.
Cowen argues that growth is good even when it doesn't benefit everyone all the time. There are things that can grow that you can't measure (like happiness, life satisfaction, health, culture, feeling of superiority [I may be misremembering some of these]), so don't focus on wealth only but instead on Wealth Plus. Also, distant future is just as important as the near future, so don't sacrifice long-term prospects for short-term gains. Speaking of future, we can't predict it, so even though tiny decisions can influence it in an oversized manner we should stop fretting over those and focus on the big picture: which is to chose policies that provide the greater sustained benefit sooner. Finally, common sense morality can usually steer you in the right direction, but if it feels like it's not, remember everything else in the book and you should be all set.
That's all well and good, except that I kept imagining someone from Serbia — currently a second-world European kakistocracy — living by the standards of this book. Hilarity ensued: for things would be included in Wealth Plus that Cowen hadn't foreseen (the ability to redraw borders, to name one), and common sense morality would include good doses of nepotism, chauvinism, and the desire to cheat the state (yes, yes, I know, #notallserbs).
So the first thing that's keeping this book from being great is that it can't be universally applied — it was written by an American for his fellow Americans who have lost their way — and doesn't explore, or even mention, the implications of his vague concepts of Wealth Plus and common sense morality being different around the world.
The second is that shortly after admitting that economists don't have crystal balls (the twelve-year-old me would have loved to put parentheses around "crystal"), he goes on to compare hypothetical policies based on their projected rates of growth well into the future. It may be my lack of an economic background speaking, but how can those two go together?
But do read the book. After my first pass I can say it's good, if not great. For me as a doctor the idea of delaying gratification for long-term gains felt familiar. The oncologist in me would add that inflicting harm for a known long-term benefit is also reasonable and depending on the alternatives even preferred. Of course, it took centuries of wading in the dark before medicine got to the point where it could with any certainty predict the outcome of its interventions. Are social sciences there yet?
Written by Tyler Cowen, 2018
I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. The title is seductive for those of us who work with people’s very unengineered fleshy bits: would it help if we added some engineering tools to our mental toolbox? Well, maybe it would, but this book couldn’t help me find them, being more of an essay on why I should think like an engineer rather than an instruction manual on how.
Apparently, you need a lot anecdotes anecdotes to explain the Why; stories zip by so fast they gave me whiplash. There are too many narratives and not enough thoughts: instead of just buttressing the main point or two, the anecdotes take center stage, sprinkled with outlines of different ideas that never become central.
For a book about engineering, I expected better construction.
Written by Guru Madhavan, 2016
An oncologist(?), a psychologist, and a surgeon give master classes on unprofessional behavior while treating JGL and his unfortunately named tumor. Even though only one of the three was meant to look bad in the movie, they each break a fundamental rule of the doctor-patient relationship: don’t be a douchebag, don’t sleep with the patient, don’t tell them everything will be fine when you have no clue. Cut out the profanities, and you’d have a semester’s worth of medical ethics discussions.
Cut out the profanities, though, and you’ll miss half the movie. Seth Rogen — a dirty old man trapped inside Fozzy the Bear — does what he’s been doing ever since Judd Apatow found him, heart of gold included. Fortunately, 50/50 has better timing than anything to come out from the Apatow cringe factory, and even has a point.
Medical miscellanea: was the diagnosing physician a medical oncologist, neurologist, neurosurgeon, or an orthopedic surgeon? Likely not the first, else he wouldn’t give neoadjuvant cytarabine for a sarcoma, and probably not the latter two since another, overoptimistic MD does the actual surgery. Can a psychologist perform interviews for what she admits will be her PhD thesis without getting informed consent? How can a surgeon say with any certainty that “everything will be fine” minutes after performing what she admitted to be a difficult operation for a tumor with a relapse rate north of 50%. You know, the 50% that gave the movie its name.
Still, thumbs up.
Directed by Jonathan Levine, 2011
The book is almost forty years old but it could have been written yesterday. It is short, smart, punchy, and very, very meta. It also makes me want to learn Italian, though I understand William Weaver is a good translator.
Written by Italo Calvino, 1981
Jane Jacobs loved Greenwich Village so much that she wrote a book about why that was and why more neighborhoods weren’t like it. She looked at other similar areas in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc. as well some failed ones, and gave a few guidelines on what was needed for safe, lively, and desirable city streets.
It has enough whimsical observations of city life to keep things interesting for its too-many—over 400—pages. E.g. on a city park’s homeless population:
Almost imperceptibly, like the hand of a clock, the raggle-taggle reception creeps around the circular pool at the center of the square. And indeed, it is the hand of a clock, for it is following the sun, staying in the warmth.
Or, comparing a safe-but-dirty city street to a desired but decidedly unsafe park:
The sidewalks were dirty, they were too narrow for the demands put upon them, and they needed shade from the sun. But here was no scene of arson, mayhem or the flourishing of dangerous weapons. In the playground where the night-time murder had occurred, things were apparently back to normal too. Three small boys were setting fire under a wooden bench. Another was having his head beaten against the concrete. The custodian was absorbed in solemnly and slowly hauling down the American flag).
It’s all quite lovely. But ultimately, it is an exercise in confirmation bias that misses as many essential points as it reveals. What was arguably the most devastating influence on American cities — Robert Moses — is but a misguided elderly official who, and kudos to him, knows his way around public funds. City planners like big, disruptive projects because of their bad (deductive!) reasoning, not because they give politicians photogenic ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
If you want to know why American cities are the way they are, better read The Power Broker.
Written by Jane Jacobs, 1961
Extraordinary set pieces strung together by the thinnest of plots, based on an absurd, sitcom-worthy failure to communicate. A particular subplot should have been spun off as a buddy cop movie.
The Ray-Luke-Kylo triangle should have been a bigger part of the movie, but then many of the new characters, the ones that aren’t white and/or men, would have nothing to do. Such are the problems of building on an old and popular franchise: you can’t both stay true to the roots and change with the times.
It has cute animals and looks good in 3D though, so Dora (5.4) approves.
Directed by Rian Johnson, 2017
Serbia’s public broadcaster, RTS (that’s PTC in cyrillic) has a good chunk of its archive spread across multiple YouTube channels, and it is magnificent (this one in particular).
Observe the 1960s-1990s televised plays and TV dramas. I still have vivid memories of watching one particular product the first time it aired, about a Serbian family keeping in touch with their ex-pat relatives in Germany via VHS tapes. Replace camcorders with smart phones and speed up the timeline to account for the internet, and it could have been shot today. Technology changes, people don’t.
My favorite childhood TV show hasn’t aged well at all; then again has anything from the ‘90s? If you consider most of it was made during a civil war and in a time of hyperinflation it is actually quite good. What was 90210’s excuse? Better kids’ shows have been made in Serbia both before and after.
Best for last: the celebration of hard core nerddom that is Serbia’s longest-running quiz show, important enough to have its own channel. It starts with anagrams and math problems, makes a detour to Mastermind, then finishes off with three different ways to test for trivia. Jokes about the autism spectrum would be writing themselves if this were an American show, but it’s not, and (before I left, at least) Serbian viewers still had some admiration for the participants. It is all very serious and competitive, and has been on the air every weekday for the last 24 years. (A political side-note: this does not mean Serbia is free from anti-intellectualism, quite the opposite in fact. Some combination of militant anti-intellectuals, gas-lighters, and proponents of economic/financial scientism has been in positions of power since the early 90s. There are no lessons here, just observations).
The world in general, and the US in particular, is spending too much on goal-directed, targeted biomedical research while undervaluing both applied and theoretical physics. Picture Leonardo da Vinci drawing helicopters: that’s the modern-day cancer researcher. The universal cure for cancer — and there should be one, if humanity survives long enough to create it — will not come from an NIH grant. If grants are involved at all, it will be something initially funded by the National Science Foundation. The current system of funding (government, non-profit, biotech, you name it) is broken, and if you account for the opportunity cost it is a complete disaster. Each of these statements deserves at least a paragraph, but I am saving my carpal tunnels for a manuscript, an LOI, and a couple of protocols (oh, the irony).
In the meantime, a few things physician-scientists should do for the overall good:
How beneficial any of this would be for one’s career is a different question altogether, but let’s not get into incentives because RSI. I am also very open to opposing opinions, since my being wrong would make my life easier.
For better or worse, the American system of government is strong. Those who say otherwise have a financial interest in people thinking the opposite.
Culturally, US has more similarities with Iran than with Saudi Arabia, even if you count religion and religiosity as part of culture. The Christian right is working hard to make them even more similar.
Though still quite hard, it’s easier for a high-skilled immigrant to come to America than to any other country in the world. Comparison is even more favorable for low-skilled and unskilled immigrants. For all of them, quality of life, acceptance, and protection they get are better than anywhere else.
The randomness of the Green Card lottery process is a feature not a bug.
Reading the non-fiction sections of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and whatever their conservative equivalents are, is good for generating fake insight but ultimately pointless. The Economist is useful for a tiny segment of the population but lets be real: if you’re reading this you are not it.
The only useful section in the daily newspapers is Local. Maybe Sports, if you are into that sort of thing, but professional and college sports are a scam so stick with the amateur leagues.
TSA agents and airline personnel are nice people but some passengers check out their brains at the curb and make everyone’s lives less pleasant.
Apple hardware products are underpriced for what you get but do you actually need what they offer? This doesn’t include the AirPods, which are the best thing Apple has made in the last 20 years and still underpriced; though they unfortunately resemble in both name and appearance a mind control method from Doctor Who S2 and paired with a smart phone are not far from it.
The world doesn’t need another IPA. America needs more tripels.
This is all coming from a non-immigrant resident alien with no expertise in politics, international law, transportation, or technology. I do know beer though.