Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics II

The second half of the book was not particularly exciting to me, but it was interesting in the sense of learning how a new academic discipline came into existence. Debate about behavioral economics within the economics profession began at a meeting at the University of Chicago, a hotbed of rationalist economists, in 1985. Thaler and a few others started to organize seminars and recruit new researchers, and by the 1990's behavioral economics had become a recognized field. Early topics focused on finance, where research indicated that the efficient market hypothesis, which had been academic dogma for several decades, was incorrect. Later, Thaler's research moved to irrational behavior in NFL draft selections, game shows and other areas. Finally, there was an intersection between behavioral economics and behavioral law when Thaler teamed up with Cass Sunstein, the law professor, and wrote the book Nudge, which was published in 2008 and became a bestseller. The thesis of Nudge is that behavioral research can be used to produce better public policies and improve individual behavior in ways that are beneficial to the public at large.

Perhaps what interests me the most about the book is the late admission by economists that human behavior is not rational. I had always held the economics profession in low regard, and that was one of the reasons. Another reason was that, while I was an undergraduate student in the late 1960's and early 1970's, the default major for unimaginative upper-middle-class males seemed to be economics, while my friends tended to major in philosophy and the arts, and I considered them more intelligent and less conformist. Then, while I was in graduate business school in the 1980's, the two economics classes that I took made no sense to me, because the rational agent basis for economics was still accepted without question and no allowance was made for the considerations later addressed by behavioral economists. Even though the M.B.A. program that I was in was highly rated, I thought that the faculty lacked real intellectual talent. As I became involved in my own investments, it became apparent to me, based on observation of the stock market, that financial markets could not possibly be efficient. To this day the efficient market hypothesis is still widely accepted by economists, and it provides part of the conceptual basis for index funds. Sabine Hossenfelder, the theoretical physicist whose book I discussed a year ago, confirmed my opinion of economists when she said that economics is a fallback field for physicists, because the math is easier and the pay is higher.

Although I am not a great fan of Richard Thaler, I thought that he acquitted himself very well in the final chapter. Given the dogmatic nature of his field, it took some doing to introduce behavioral concepts, and this may never have happened without Thaler, Kahneman and Tversky. In the end, unlike most economists, Thaler is a strong advocate of empirical research in economics and hopes to extend behavioral research into macroeconomics. When you review the circumstances that produced the Great Recession, it is easy to see how the misguided triumphalism of well-known economists such as Alan Greenspan facilitated a major economic disaster only eleven years ago. Nevertheless, behavioral economics is nowhere near providing a comprehensive economic program. Perhaps my main criticism of Thaler is that, while he is modest and self-deprecating and has helped expand his field, he still pays homage and fealty to the status quo in his advocacy of "libertarian paternalism," which, though it encourages rational behavior, seems implicitly to preserve elements of a hierarchy which places so-called rational agents, i.e., economists, at the top of the pecking order. Libertarian paternalism incorporates distinctly American pro-capitalist elements and presumes that a meritocracy of superior individuals, who would by definition become wealthy, would work to help less-capable people by designing systems to make them behave more rationally.

In this vein, I was surprised that the book made no mention of Thomas Piketty, who is a macroeconomist whose work is also based on empirical data. Although at times Thaler shows some socialistic affinities, he usually tows the line as a loyal capitalist. Capitalism, in my view, is an ideological fantasy that is on its way out. Socialism is another ideology with its own set of problems and a history of failure, but I think that some version of it will become inevitable as technology renders human labor obsolete. I don't know whether Piketty or other economists will collectively come up with a system that works well for future generations, but at the moment the wealth tax proposed by Piketty seems like a sensible approach. In the real world, a system such as libertarian paternalism is more likely to produce a plutocracy than a well-balanced democracy. At the moment, populist movements throughout the world seem to be fueled in part by public resentment of "elites" such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In the case of Obama, racism no doubt plays a role, but it is noteworthy that Obama is a friend of Cass Sunstein and seems to like the idea of libertarian paternalism. One might argue that those who adopt libertarian paternalism are engaging in a current form of politically correct social climbing and in reality may not have much to offer the public. Obama's political career, in my view, was mostly a failure.

To sum up, Thaler's introduction of behavioral research to economics was positive in the sense that it added not only an emphasis on empirical evidence but also an element of altruism, both of which had been in short supply in economics. However, Thaler seems timid in his advocacy of altruism, which was and still is anathema to the thinking of many economists, particularly in the Chicago school. The fact remains that, in their profession, economists are often obfuscators and apologists for wealthy and unscrupulous benefactors. Some of them even subscribe to the idiotic ideas of Ayn Rand. There is an implicit elitism and selfishness among economists who believe that they are part of the select few who make rational choices and deserve to be rewarded accordingly.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics I

I'm halfway through this book by Richard Thaler, which was published in 2015. Thaler is an economist and one of the founders of the field of behavioral economics. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017. Economics is not an especially interesting topic for me, and I generally prefer macroeconomics, such as that found in Thomas Piketty's Capital, to more circumscribed areas such as this. I am making an exception for Thaler in order to understand behavioral economics better. The book is partly autobiographical, and it describes the development of his career starting in 1970 up to the present. That adds a dimension in that you can see many of the pitfalls of academic life, which relates to my interest in the sociology of academia.

Early in his career, Thaler noticed that the actual decision-making processes used by people are often not rational in the sense that economists understand the term. There are different schools of economic thought, but the predominant one in the twentieth century entailed the idea that humans are rational agents who collectively make rational choices with respect to maximizing utility. This means that people usually make optimal choices regarding whatever it is that they value, and economists have traditionally focused on their financial decisions. From an economic standpoint, it is mathematically convenient to assume that people are rational, because that allow economists to predict collective human behavior with relatively straightforward mathematical tools.

The early behavioral economists conducted simple experiments like the ones described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow, demonstrating unequivocally that human decisions are often not rational in a quantitative sense. Thaler collaborated with Kahneman, Amos Tversky and others, and behavioral economics arose as a bridge between the academic disciplines of economics and psychology. In Thaler's language, Kahneman's "fast" or "System 1" thinking very roughly corresponds with Thaler's "Human," and Kahneman's "slow" or "System 2" thinking very roughly corresponds with Thaler's "Econ." Humans are fuzzy thinkers and Econs are ultra-rational. There are many examples of people arriving at answers that are mathematically or logically incorrect. Thaler differs somewhat from Kahneman in his search for what might be called extenuating circumstances or non-numerical values that affect how actual decisions are made. One example involves the way that Uber's pricing algorithm can alienate consumers. Uber increases fares automatically when the number of passengers in a particular area goes up and there is an insufficient number of drivers available. It is possible for fares to become ten times the normal rate. This formula can backfire when customers believe that they were treated unfairly and when anti-gouging laws provoke lawsuits. In the past, economists favored the Econ types for all of their models, because that type makes purely rational decisions based on maximizing value, which in most cases means money. Thaler in particular helped demonstrate that factors having nothing to do with maximization go into the decisions that most people make. In other respects, Thaler's discussion covers some familiar concepts such as confirmation bias and the endowment effect, the latter indicating that people value things that are currently in their possession more highly than they ought to rationally.

Reading about Thaler's career, you get a sense of how one might fail in academia. In his early years, he was conflicted between making enough money to support his family and pursuing his area of interest in research, which, at the time, was barely on the fringes of economics and was frowned upon by most economists. If he hadn't met Kahneman and Tversky and a few others and participated in research with them, behavioral economics may have remained an undeveloped field. As it turned out, it took off and has produced several Nobels. In this book, Thaler seems like a very ordinary sort of person with plebeian interests, and one can readily imagine him finishing off his career teaching traditional economics in a humdrum economics department somewhere. It is even possible that he would never have obtained tenure and may have switched to a different career.

Though my enthusiasm for the book is limited, I am holding out for the later chapters that cover the uses of behavioral economics for social benefit. Since I have visitors arriving soon, it will take me a while to finish, but I will eventually make another post.

Diary

The fragrance of autumn is in the air, and some of the leaves are beginning to fall. At this time of year the grass is full and green, and in the morning it glistens with heavy dew. Again it is impossible for me to imagine voluntarily living somewhere that lacks four distinct seasons.

Finally it looks as if Donald Trump is being brought to justice. Incredibly, he was too imbecilic to change his behavior when he only recently came close to impeachment by encouraging foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election and then obstructing its investigation. In those instances, a number of fortuitous elements converged for him, and he improbably both won the election and avoided censure. This time, in a move that can only be considered incredibly stupid under the circumstances, he exposed himself by directly soliciting a foreign power to provide information on the activities of Joe Biden and his son and immediately attempted to cover up the event. This was a major blunder in several respects: the phone call was soon reported, as was the effort to hide it, and, in any case, there was little chance of revealing improprieties by Joe Biden or his son, since those were most likely fabrications to begin with. One might add that targeting Biden may itself have inherently been a mistake, since there is a good chance that Biden will not win the Democratic nomination regardless.

Though the immediate problem is that Trump doesn't know or care what his responsibilities are as president, about forty percent of American voters either can't see that or don't understand the ramifications. The division between Trump supporters and non-supporters is often portrayed as a rural-urban divide, with rural people believing Trump's rhetoric about getting them jobs and supporting their biases. However, recent polling indicates that educational attainment may have more to do with it. Vermont might be a good example, because, despite being one of the most rural states, the population is relatively well-educated. Trump is unpopular here even among Republicans. The small number of Trump supporters in this state probably live in isolated pockets and have below-average schooling. I think that low educational attainment may be the primary cause of Trump's ascent. Generally, well-educated voters, including those who are Republicans, can identify Trump's particular pathology: he often doesn't know what he's talking about and routinely uses obfuscation and lies to distract from the fact that he has little interest in anything other than self-aggrandizement. To the extent that he has any policies, they are exclusively directed at maintaining and expanding the Trump status quo, or, more specifically, his brand. As commentators are increasingly saying, history is not going to be kind to him or his associates.

I recently found a book that may well be worth reading, and it's on its way in the mail. The author is Richard Thaler, the economist, who has an interest in how behavioral economics can be used to shape public policy. This is still a relatively new field, and I am hoping that at some point it will converge with biology and address some of the points that I've been making on this blog, though, as I've said, economics is usually only used as a tool for capitalism.

Diary

I started to read a biography of Édouard Manet but gave up. My main reason was that I didn't like the writing style of the author, who seems to be American. In most respects it was a well-researched book, but I thought that it dawdled on irrelevant details and was primarily directed at an American audience. I have noticed over the last few years that American academics and journalists seem to be trained to produce slightly dumbed-down, over-simplified writing, not only with the aim of reaching wide audiences, but because that is the standard for all groups of American readers regardless of their educational backgrounds. It is unfortunate in this case, because, although in many respects Manet's life was that of a boring bourgeoisie, he somehow managed to occupy a pivotal position in the transition from pristine neoclassical paintings to what is now thought of as modern art. Though in a purely aesthetic sense his paintings don't always measure up to the paintings of the Impressionists, who were slightly younger, or the Post-Impressionists, he was the first to paint unflattering depictions of urban life while evoking classical themes: both his painting style and his subject matter were an affront to his contemporaries. However, it seems to me that Manet was less an artistic visionary than a representative of the ubiquitous social changes that occurred in Paris in the late nineteenth century. Those changes favored realism, as in the case of Courbet and Manet, and the visual appreciation of life as it is, as in the case of the Impressionists. I don't actually like Manet's paintings that much, and while he does seem to occupy a pivotal role in the history of art, I now see him more as a mere participant in the broader cultural evolution of his time.

I'm not sure how well the biographies of artists are going to work out for me as reading material. After reading Robert Hughes, most of the authors are likely to be disappointments. I also have a book on Gauguin, but, because it's long, I may save that for winter.

I've more or less resumed my routines, such as yard work, house painting and tree trimming. I haven't done any stargazing in months and may have missed a few good nights in August. September has been unusually cool so far. William has been catching lots of mice lately, so the local mouse population doesn't seem to be adversely affected by climate change. At night he brings them through the cat door onto the porch, and in the morning I usually find a dead mouse, a partially eaten mouse or a live mouse that is hiding in a crack to escape from William. It's a pain in the neck to catch the live mice, which I let out. Most of them are small, and it is easiest to catch them when they climb the screen. I use the same juice glass with a piece of cardboard that I use to catch insects. Last night I locked the cat door so that William had to stay outside and couldn't enter the porch. I also put his bowl of water outside so that he would have plenty to drink. In the morning, the bowl had a dead mouse floating in it. As you can see, dealing with the mice isn't a very pleasant process. Fortunately, after several years of assiduous mouse-blocking, we haven't had any in the house since 2017.

I guess I'll continue to look for new reading materials. In particular, I would like to read about research like Robert Plomin's and David Reich's. I am finding biological topics far more interesting than physics problems. For this reason I'm skipping Sean Carroll's latest book, which discusses quantum mechanics and its unintelligibility. Even though I am a novice as far as the sciences are concerned, I often find science writing preferable to journalism, fiction and other kinds of nonfiction. Because behavioral economics seems to be a potentially interesting break from traditional economics, I am hoping that at some point it will diverge from capitalist propaganda and be put to use in different areas such as social policy and governance. At present, most of the purveyors of economics stupidly perpetuate the myth that human progress depends on the profit motive and the innovations of entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, as far as I know, little or no research has been done to debunk that outlook – it would make for good reading if it existed. At the moment, climate change seems to be reducing public approval of unchecked economic growth, but the wealthy still remain in firm control of the dialogue, at least in the U.S.

Diary

At this point I seem to have fully recovered from the Lyme disease, if that's what it was, and I've been catching up on various tasks that had been neglected for a few weeks. I've also been curious about some of the medical aspects of my illness. Though unlikely, it is possible that I did not have Lyme disease on this occasion, because one can have it with no symptoms; I was diagnosed with it from antibodies, but it is theoretically possible that the antibodies came from a previous exposure. Thus, it is possible that the illness was produced by a different, unidentified bacterial infection which also can be cured with doxycycline hyclate. There is so much that is unknown in medicine that it is easy for me to be skeptical about diagnoses. Strangely, I got some unexpected benefits from this illness: I lost ten pounds, my eye pressure fell to its lowest level ever, reducing my chances of glaucoma, and a slight ache that I've had in my intestines for the last forty years seems to have disappeared. The fact is that doctors have no idea what the full ramifications are of the antibiotics that they prescribe. This is particularly true at the microbial level, because we have trillions of microbes in our bodies, many of which are poorly understood.

I am at a loss for something to read and have ordered a couple of biographies of artists. I was unable to find any current nonfiction that appeals to me, and I am embarking on a different biographical sub-genre from what I've read previously. When you come right down to it, the lives of most thinkers, writers and intellectuals tend to be a bit dull, since they lead controlled lives and usually don't take real risks. The exceptions occur when external circumstances force them to make changes that they may not have made otherwise, as was the case with Czeslaw Milosz. Artists, on the other hand, often lead conspicuously unstable lives, which are sometimes fueled by psychiatric illnesses. Thus, they are more likely to be bohemians than college professors. Their downside is that their messages may be indecipherable or incoherent from an intellectual standpoint. For example, what was really going on in van Gogh's head? Does anyone know? Nevertheless, for anyone who is attuned to the visual arts, paintings can be deeply satisfying in an entirely different way. I am increasingly disillusioned with academization, because it sucks the freshness out of everything and lays the groundwork for mindless dogma in one form or another. As I've grown older, I've found that the wisdom I once attributed to college professors was illusory, and that unmediated thoughts have a greater potential to produce useful insights and meaning. Intellectuals tend to follow one rut or another, and they encourage you to join them in their rut. Colleges and universities have given rise to the myth that some sort of omniscience can be reached through continuous research and learning, but I now think that, because of our well-documented cognitive limitations, the baton should soon be passed to AI, if that becomes a possibility. In the long run, we may be better suited to the arts than to the sciences, because we can perceive and appreciate the arts without attempting to stretch ourselves beyond our innate capacities.

I must confess to having become, somewhat reluctantly, a political junkie. This isn't because I actually like politics, but because the current state of national politics in the U.S. seems to have triggered a fight or flight reaction in me. The manner in which government is now being conducted in Washington, D.C. feels like a visceral threat which cannot be ignored. In essence, a criminal is in charge of the executive branch of government and his accomplices control the Senate. It would have been difficult to imagine this scenario occurring a few years ago, even with the sort of incompetent politicians that we've grown used to. What is maddening to me is the length of time that it is taking to straighten out this mess. What should have taken weeks or months to accomplish is taking years. Since I have no deep allegiance to the U.S., if conditions deteriorated significantly from where we are now, I would be prepared to move back to the U.K. – I've just renewed my passport. However, that possibility seems remote, and it is really only a matter of waiting for Trump's long-overdue departure.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

I've had this book by David Wallace-Wells sitting around for quite some time and read it in spurts. It is well-researched and packed with well-documented facts, but I found that in places there was too much information in relation to what I thought was a slightly disjointed central narrative, and I mostly speed-read it. There are four main sections, and I ended up deciding that only the second section, "Elements of Chaos," was worth reading. That includes twelve chapters covering different aspects of climate change: "Heat Death," "Hunger," "Drowning," "Wildfire," "Disasters No Longer Natural," "Freshwater Drain," "Dying Oceans," "Unbreathable Air," "Plagues of Warming," "Economic Collapse," "Climate Conflict" and "Systems." Consensus is that science can only very roughly predict how much the planet will warm by 2100, and beyond that would be speculative. The U.N. estimates that there will be a warming of 4.5 degrees by 2100 if nothing is done, and the worst-case scenario is 8 degrees. Human intervention may reduce the warming to less than 4.5 degrees. Where I think Wallace-Wells does an excellent job is in conveying the complexity of global warming, which makes it almost incomprehensible to us and perhaps explains why the public has been so slow to catch on. Any of the various elements of global warming could have multiplier effects, making the planet less habitable when combined with other elements. For example, the thawing of permafrost not only releases methane, one of the strongest greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere, but may also release ancient bacteria for which we have no immunity. Such bacteria might be distributed globally at an accelerated rate due to the increase in storm activity. Similarly, stressed populations attempting to escape from drought-stricken regions, wars and storm-destroyed habitats, in addition to PTSD, may be handicapped by high temperatures and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, both of which reduce human cognitive function.

The main point of the book is that extremely dire outcomes for mankind are quite possible in the next eighty years, especially if the problem isn't addressed now. That isn't a very long time at all: my grandson will probably still be alive. I think that Wallace-Wells is somewhat more effective than others at making this point in the way that he piles up fact after fact and creates a sense of immediate danger. Other environmental writers often have circumscribed narratives and limit themselves to, say, a few species extinctions, which in themselves are matters of some concern but have far less impact on the reader. It is more important for readers to know that, within a few decades, anywhere from a few million to a few billion people may die due to climate change, and the complete collapse of civilization is certainly a possibility.

My main complaint about the book is that Wallace-Wells seems to come from a more literary than scientific background, and he doesn't seem comfortable limiting himself to merely describing the most probable outcomes with each incremental degree of increase in global temperature. Although he doesn't follow the familiar formalities of journalism by plodding along with the scientists as they conduct their research, he throws in dozens of peripheral references to popular nonfiction from the last twenty-or-so years and drags in literary quotations that do not, in my opinion, add anything to the text. These references are not explored in enough detail to be of much value and end up seeming like name-dropping. From my point of view, he is a young and talented writer who goes overboard on occasion in attempting to persuade the reader that he is a man of letters who knows all about, not only Enrico Fermi and James Hansen, but also Robinson Jeffers and Lord Byron. I found this sort of thing a little grating, because it didn't really add anything to my understanding and seemed more like a misguided effort by a neophyte to impress – someone other than me.

Diary

It looks as if I've almost completely recovered from the Lyme disease. I don't want to get into the habit of boring readers with accounts of my afflictions, but I'll at least fill you in with a few details on this one. This was as sick as I've ever been, and the worst symptom was extreme fatigue. One morning I got up and took a brief shower, and after that I had so little energy left that I had to go back to bed immediately – with barely enough energy to dry myself first. Walking upstairs became a strain. This seemed like a preview of what it might be like to be ninety years old and too feeble to take care of oneself. It is possible that the antibiotic I took, doxycycline hyclate, had side effects that worsened my symptoms, but in any case it does seem to have killed the Lyme disease bacteria.

While I was sick, my mental faculties must have declined a little, and I didn't read anything demanding. Instead I pored over the news and played computer bridge to kill time. Of course, the more news I read, the more it became apparent to me how shallow it is. Even in the best American newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, there were usually a couple of lead articles reporting news that could be found almost anywhere, followed by mountains of filler, such as insipid op-ed pieces and various lifestyle articles. The Wall Street Journal, in slight contrast, offered more articles on expensive real estate, since their readers tend to be materialistic, money-crazed Republicans who lust after trophy houses. I did learn that the Post generally has better opinion pieces than the Times. At this point I am almost ready to barf the moment I see names such as David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugman. As I've noted, it is simply impossible for them to churn out useful articles week after week, and I can't see why anyone would bother to read them regularly. Underlying this is the inescapable commercial nature of journalism: people don't really want thoughtful news and are only willing to pay for it if they receive large dollops of upbeat entertainment in return.

Another phenomenon that struck me during my incapacity was the sheer extent to which misinformation and hucksterism clog up the internet. Google searches have always seemed problematic to me, and now, specifically in the realm of medical information, I have found that they can be spectacularly misleading. When one enters a medical term, hundreds or thousands of web pages pop up, and nearly all of them contain misinformation, making it a significant challenge to find anything reliable. Google provides no method for sorting through it. The only unequivocally good site I found for Lyme disease was the CDC, which, as a government agency, has no profit motive. Some of the non-government sites, such as the Mayo Clinic, are generally reliable, but they don't have the resources or incentives to provide the most up-to-date information and tend to show more basic information. Misinformation is one of the great challenges that we face today, and it is supported by the decline in government services and the growth in spurious business entities. The internet is often portrayed as a fountain of knowledge when the reality is that it has become a vehicle for draining money from or propagandizing millions of unsuspecting victims.

One recent turn of events that I have been enjoying is the change of tone in the news media regarding Donald Trump. Though it was apparent to many that he was unfit for the office well before he was elected, the press puzzlingly treated him with respect until very recently. It appears that, after nearly three years of incompetence, dishonesty and criminality, the news media have finally built up the confidence to criticize him openly. Surprisingly, that even extends to Fox News, which until now seemed like the voice of the Trump administration. Finally, it is looking more certain that things are not going to end well for Donald Trump, and nothing could make me happier than to see him disappear entirely from the news.

During my infirmity, I neglected the vegetable garden. Fortunately, it was a rainy August, and it didn't make any difference. The two crops for which I'm responsible, tomatoes and carrots, are doing exceedingly well this year compared to the last few years, which were much drier.

I have started to read a nonfiction bestseller and will comment on it soon. I must note, though, that I increasingly find the task of locating worthwhile books extremely daunting. I do occasionally come across unfamiliar fiction writers whom I end up liking for one reason or another, such as László Krasznahorkai, Simone de Beauvoir, Katherine Mansfield, and Patrick Chamoiseau, but when I delve further into their writings I usually conclude that the quality of their writing from book to book is uneven. In any case, fiction now seems to me a frivolous form of writing that I feel no obligation to read. In contrast, I have found some of the nonfiction books that I've read over the last few years to be informative and interesting, and, despite the fact that new ones come out regularly, the better ones come out only in a trickle. This tends to leave me with nothing to read except extremely lengthy biographies of people who mean nothing to you, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau or William Morris, when I need something to occupy me during the long winter months indoors. If you would like to take the Paul challenge, I would consider reading something that you think is exceptionally good. Most likely I would have significant criticisms, though I never know when I might like something with which I am unfamiliar.

Stupidity

As I've mentioned before, the time lag between the announcement of new scientific findings and their assimilation by the public is often astoundingly long. In the extreme case, you have the works of Charles Darwin. His main ideas have been confirmed repeatedly, and they have been widely accepted by educated people for over a century. Yet, here in the U.S., about a third of the population still supports Creationism, depending on how the questions are asked. Creationism is dying out here, but it may end up taking a total of two hundred years, despite the mountains of evidence against it. As I've also mentioned previously, there seems to be a time lag between the announcements of the recent findings of Daniel Kahneman, Steven Sloman, Philip Fernbach and Robert Sapolsky and their acceptance within the public sphere. They don't even seem to be percolating within the intellectual community at the moment. Tangentially, the works of Robert Plomin and David Reich, which provide insights into the genetic nature of human aptitudes and their unequal distribution within the overall population, seem buried in the media, perhaps because they conflict with some of the central tenets of political correctness. The picture that has emerged from recent research is that people don't think clearly most of the time or know as much as they think they do. There is nothing that can be done about it because this is how their brains work.

A related topic that isn't exactly a discrete field is groupthink within academic disciplines. The phenomenon demonstrates that even groups of people don't necessarily think clearly. Groupthink has been studied for many years in business settings, but it occurs everywhere, including in academia. Thomas Piketty touches on this in Capital, and may have been the first to criticize the overemphasis on mathematical models in economics. Sabine Hossenfelder has a similar message in Lost in Math, which accuses physicists of wasting time on untestable mathematical models when the real problem may be a lack of new data. From an institutional point of view, mathematically-oriented physics researchers offer the major benefit of not having to purchase expensive research equipment. This strategy may work in the short-term, but more fundamentally it may be a misallocation of resources. Then there is the closed culture of MFA programs and their stranglehold on what counts as literary writing. I have seen some criticism of that system, but it remains intact. My point here is that even highly-educated groups make collective cognitive errors – these are the most likely to escape scrutiny, yet Piketty and Hossenfelder have had the courage to call out the leaders of their fields.

The basic insight one gets from surveying the research is that no groups are immune to a variety of cognitive failures, thus, whatever principles a group claims to uphold, and no matter how competent they may seem to outsiders, behind the scenes, the prejudices and cognitive limitations of individuals are what actually drive practices and policies. In economics and physics, the accumulation of new data became secondary to mathematical modeling. In MFA programs, departments became vulnerable to the preferences of their faculties: the criteria for good literary writing can easily be distorted by the faculty. As I've said ad nauseum, the result has been that MFA writing is now at best forgettable, to put it politely. Nevertheless, MFA writers do well as a cult through their strategic use of self-congratulatory propaganda. It is customary to compare individuals to assess their competence, but comparable variation can be found between groups, and it is a mistake to think that the best-credentialed groups are the most competent.

Of course, these problems in academia are not really that important in the greater scheme of things. I remain astounded by the resilience of Donald Trump as a public figure. In a recent review of a biography of P.T. Barnum, Elizabeth Kolbert writes:

Barnum became one of the most celebrated men in America not despite his bigotry and duplicity, his flimflamming and self-dealing, but because of them. He didn't so much fool the public as indulge it....he turned P.T. Barnum into yet another relentlessly promoted exhibit—the Greatest Showman on Earth. Americans, he knew, were drawn to such humbug. Why they are still being drawn to it is a puzzle that, now more than ever, demands our attention.

The problems of the Trump presidency are as obvious as one could hope. My only criticism of Kolbert's innuendo is that the information needed to answer her question is already available: people are stupid. It seems as if the last hurdle before order can be brought to civilization is the recognition that, although we're smarter than chimpanzees, we're often quite stupid. The research I've alluded to unequivocally supports this position. The stupidity applies to all level of society, though people who are perceived to be successful usually get a free pass. It may be that, at an instinctive level, Trump supporters recognize a fellow ignoramus who has been successful and can dominate and humiliate smarter people if he likes. Trump supporters get a perverse satisfaction from seeing him thumb his nose at the establishment, which they feel has neglected them and reduced their social rank. Trump is uplifting for them because he normalizes inarticulateness and ignorance. Actually, this is a very old problem, one that thinkers have pondered for hundreds of years. Jean-Jacques Rousseau recognized that most people are unqualified to vote. He preferred a more patrician model in which only a few educated people without private ambitions or agendas would be permitted to vote. The Founding Fathers attempted to put in safeguards to prevent mob rule, but the gradual elimination of restrictions on voting and the expansion of the electorate have rendered it more difficult than ever to screen out incompetent politicians from public elections.

Kolbert, like many journalists, recognizes that Trump appeals to the worst instincts of the public. Fortunately, he can never be a popular president, and only about forty percent of voters will continue to support him. The underlying problem, which Kolbert and most journalists avoid discussing at all costs, is that at some point the public must be implicated as part of the problem. The fact that such suggestions would be labeled as elitist doesn't subtract from their truth. Thus, Kolbert, a science writer, whom one would assume is familiar with the research I've cited, is not exactly taking a heroic stance. This brings me back to my criticism of Michiko Kakutani, who, I said, was constrained by the requirements of her publisher, a corporation. There is an implicit "never bite the hand that feeds you" rule in journalism. From a journalistic standpoint, the conflict between free speech and corporate interests is almost always resolved in favor of corporations. There is no marketplace of ideas when so many of them are repressed from the start. Criticism of the public, even when it is deserved, rarely makes it into the media. When it does occur, it is usually only part of Donald Trump's ugly, worn-out business and political strategy.

If one were serious about preventing a recurrence of the Trump phenomenon, one would have to look at changing the democratic process. Trump was elected with the twenty-first century equivalent of the nineteenth-century practice of handing out free beer at rallies. Democracy, though it is preferable to autocracy in most cases, is not a good system for promoting competent political leaders. We are stuck with the worst president in American history only because a minority of the population was willing to set aside reason for a few feel-good moments. It is an unsubstantiated myth that "the voice of the people" will always correct political errors. Moreover, the freedom of individuals, as understood by most Americans, is not a sustainable idea. The U.S. is like a casino in which everyone feels entitled to a piece of the action. The American acceptance of capitalism is so deeply ingrained that alternatives are unthinkingly seen as heretical.

Much as I try to avoid it, I always circle back to the same conclusion: that the best hope lies in removing the public from a decision-making role in many if not most instances. The important problems facing Americans (and the world) are so complex that they may be beyond the comprehension of even the most experienced politicians. If anything, a mechanism is needed to prevent the public from guaranteeing a dysfunctional government in the future. In my view, the competent elite of the future will be AI, and it is already apparent that this needs looking into. I would be surprised if people in the distant future were not amazed that we were able to survive this long stretch of political turmoil with nothing more to help us than our chaotic little animal brains.

Diary

We were hit by the heatwave that affected much of the country, and the temperature got up to ninety-two here. It's quite cool again, which makes it easier to think of spending time outside. For the hottest days I set up a TV and reclining chairs in the basement, where it never goes above seventy-two degrees. The ceiling is low, but the arrangement is comfortable, if a bit dusty. Though I always have a hard time finding things to watch, the Netflix series on Ted Bundy wasn't bad, and we've started a BBC series with Mary Beard on ancient Rome. As for my reading, I've been lackadaisically working through an old book of articles by Anatole Broyard; it is interesting in places, though not sufficiently substantive to warrant comment. I have a different book on hand but decided that I may skip it. There is a popular book on global warming on its way here which I'll most likely read.

I had to send one of my stargazing devices to Australia for repair, and now it's on its return trip. One of the most satisfying aspects of stargazing is the fact that much of the equipment is made by very small companies, and when you need something you communicate directly with the owners. If I have a problem with my Dobsonian telescope, I email Rob Teeter, who made it himself in New Jersey, and get an immediate reply. This time I spoke to Serge Antonov, the owner of Astro Devices, in Australia. When I drove down to pick up the Dobsonian telescope in Massachusetts in 2014, by coincidence I met Al Nagler, the owner of Tele Vue, which makes the eyepieces I use. In 2017 I directly contacted Charlie Starks, the owner of Markless Astronomics, which makes instrument stalks for Dobsonian telescopes. Since this is a cottage industry, it offers a different and more satisfying experience than buying from large, anonymous suppliers. There is a trade-like, medieval aura surrounding the hobby.

I'm getting a little concerned that the blog no longer generates much of a reaction. Although Teresa Gill, who dropped out in late 2015, didn't always provide comments that I considered ideal, she was thoughtful and interesting enough to liven things up a little. Without her, the blog seems more closed off than ever. Still, I prefer limited comments, because I'm sure that a large increase in them would create too much of a distraction. When I look at comments on other sites, I invariably decide that it would be better not to have to deal with anything like that. Since the readership here is so small, I am sometimes tempted to write more autobiographically and more personally about people I know, but that might offend or upset some, so I have consistently decided against it. I'm beginning to think that an honest, thoughtful memoir written for posthumous publication would make for the best reading, but I'm not ready to commit to that myself. Some of my posts have been very personal – more personal than what I've seen elsewhere – but that's about as far as I want to go at present.

In any case, this blog probably won't fizzle out soon. I've noticed that most blogs do come to a halt rapidly: that could be an interesting subject in itself. I would guess that many blogs die out because their authors soon discover that they're not becoming rich or famous. Before long they realize that they are putting time and effort into something that will never pay off. In my case, none of that is relevant, and the only things that are likely to stop me are boredom with the process or mental incapacity – which could take a few years. Sometimes I am tempted to write fewer reviews and more opinion pieces, but I prefer to continually infuse the blog with new information, because that creates an atmosphere in which the blog can't easily be written off as the rants of some old crank. Anyway, I do get occasional views from anonymous readers, and I wouldn't mind it if some of them communicated their reactions or preferences to me from time to time.

Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

When I read book reviews in The New York Times many years ago, I was often impressed by those written by Anatole Broyard. He didn't publish many books during his life, but I recently came across this unfinished memoir, which was published three years after he died in 1990. It includes vignettes of people he knew in 1946 and 1947 in Greenwich Village, during the period in which it became a haven for literary and artistic people following World War II. Besides the vignettes, there is discussion of the formation of Broyard's adult identity, the quality of the interactions he had, particularly with women, and an anecdotal glimpse of American cultural history.

While I was growing up in the suburbs, the Village still had a reputation as a hip place, though by then the Beat movement was mostly dead and folk music was more popular than jazz. Bob Dylan made a name for himself there in the early 1960's, and, as far as I know, the Village has been gentrified since then, with high property values. I haven't been there since 2003, when I visited Tony Judt in his office at NYU on Washington Square. As Broyard tells it, the area was poor after the war, and the dwellings consisted of walk-up tenements with DC electricity, which required humming AC adapters to run modern appliances. Though Broyard's discussion isn't particularly sociological, he describes the unusual circumstances created by the end of the Great Depression and the end of the war. With the GI Bill, millions of people simultaneously had opportunities to direct their lives in ways that hadn't been possible previously. Many of them ended up becoming doctors, lawyers, engineers or accountants, but people in the arts crowd tended to descend on the Village. Anïs Nin lived there, and much of the book concerns Broyard's relationship with Nin's protégé, Sheri Martinelli (under the pseudonym "Donatti"). W.H. Auden was in the neighborhood, as were Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas and many others. As I recall, Denise Levertov moved there in 1948, but she never liked the grunge.

I ought to provide a sample of Broyard's writing, which I think is very good, as good as that of any American writer:

One night in the San Remo Bar Delmore Schwartz invited me to sit in a booth with him. He was with Dwight Macdonald and Clem Greenberg. I was flattered. I knew Delmore because he had accepted for Partisan Review a piece I'd called "Portrait of a Hipster."

They were talking about the primitive: Picasso, D.H. Lawrence, and Hemingway; bullfighting and boxing. I was a bit uneasy, because my piece was about jazz and the attitudes surrounding it, and I didn't want to be typecast as an aficionado of the primitive. I wanted to be a literary man, like them. I felt too primitive myself to be talking about the primitive.

Yet I couldn't help showing off a little. I had noticed in taking strolls with Delmore that he was surprised and even impressed by what I thought were ordinary observations. He seemed to see American life only in the abstract, as a Platonic essence. Sometimes he saw it as vaudeville, but he always saw it through something else. He imposed a form, intellectual or esthetic, on it, as if he couldn't bear to look at it directly.

Like many other New York writers and intellectuals of his generation, Delmore seemed to have read himself right out of American culture. He was a citizen only of literature. His Greenwich Village was part Dostoyevski's Saint Petersburg and part Kafka's Amerika. 

I admired his high abstraction, his ability to think in noninclusive generalizations, but I pitied him too. I thought his was as much a lost generation as Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's—in fact, more lost. While the writers of the twenties had lost only their illusions, Delmore, the typical New York intellectual of the forties, seemed to have lost the world itself. It was as if these men had been blinded by reading. Their heads were so filled with books, fictional characters, and symbols that there was no room for the raw data of actuality. They couldn't see the small, only the large. They still thought of ordinary people as the proletariat, or the masses. 

I wanted to be an intellectual, too, to see life from a great height, yet I didn't want to give up my sense of connection, my intimacy with things. When I read a book, I always kept one eye on the world, like someone watching a clock.

Surprisingly to me, to the extent that there is a main theme to the book, it is Broyard's inability to connect with women, no matter how hard he tried. His writing about Sheri is nonjudgmental, yet her behavior seems bizarre to me, and though I couldn't tolerate someone like her now, Broyard expresses very well the angst that he experienced when he tried to develop a close relationship with her. In the end he broke up with her after she had made a suicide attempt without offering an explanation and after she had had him arrested for taking one of his own possessions from her apartment. As a reader, I was reminded of  Andy Warhol's "Superstars" and got the sense that people like Sheri may have prefigured the movement toward empty celebrity in the arts. Broyard doesn't try to outline Sheri's psychodynamics, but I found it difficult to see her as anything other than mentally ill in a significant sense. Though Broyard mentions in passing that he saw a psychiatrist because it was fashionable, mental illness never comes up as a specific topic in the book, but, in the postscript by Alexandra Broyard, his wife at the time of his death, it becomes evident that he found stability later, after he had moved away from Greenwich Village, raised a family and developed a career. My interpretation is that Broyard was very much a down-to-earth person who was thrown off when he placed himself in the milieu of artistic people with unstable personalities. As the first member of his family to take an interest in the arts or graduate from college, he had placed himself in an environment that took more adjustment than he realized was necessary.

There is a lot of discussion in the book about sex; it is done tastefully and usually is related to Broyard's difficulty connecting with women. This is striking to read now, when women are more often seen as the victims of insensitive, self-centered men. In this case, you can clearly see that, compared to Broyard, Sheri and some of the other women he knew were the ones who were emotionally unavailable and perhaps manipulative. Broyard also remarks how different it was before the sexual revolution and books like Portnoy's Complaint. Relationships between men and women were strained compared to later days, and that was an enduring problem for Broyard in this memoir

The style of writing in the book is elegant and literary, but not so literary as to fit Broyard's description of Delmore Schwartz's style. Though I usually prefer more analytical works, this one makes up for it by capturing Broyard's mental state at the time so well that it is absorbing enough in itself. I think this book would appeal more to men than to women, but those women who are interested in broadening their horizons in understanding men surely could benefit from it. My current position is that the gulf between men and women is unbridgeable, but that education and awareness can still improve relations between the sexes. I may read more of Broyard and comment on that later.

Diary

With no good reading materials on hand, a guest in the house, technical telescope issues to solve, tomato plants to attend to and a few hot days, circumstances haven't been conducive to writing new posts. The visitor has left, the temperature has cooled and I have a book on order, so eventually I'll resume my regular posts.

I had been thinking about writing a long post that would sum up the nonfiction that I've been reading over the last few years, with the title "The Disunity of Knowledge," which would connect my ideas more clearly than I have done so far. However, I get the sense that my very small group of readers isn't really interested in that kind of thing, so I'm going to skip it for the time being. Nevertheless, I feel an impetus to write something of the sort, because it is alarming to me how much new knowledge has accumulated in recent years, and that the implications of this knowledge are hardly discussed publicly; public awareness remains several decades behind the present in terms of the comprehension of potentially critical situations that have already begun or may arise within the next few years. For example, if you follow American politics, many of the "issues" are framed as if it were the 1990's, not 2019. Of particular interest to me are the economic effects of AI and the alteration of human cognition by digital media. Then, of course, there are well-documented events such as anthropogenic climate change; this is getting some attention now, but when you consider how disastrous the effects are already proving to be, the reaction in the U.S. makes it look as if the year is about 2010. One of the most striking aspects of the current period is the ineffectiveness of democratic processes, which has resulted in the routine election of incompetent politicians who make inappropriate policy decisions. As the complexity of the world has increased, the popular vote has become more vulnerable to manipulation by special interests, and at the moment special interests seem to be gaining the upper hand. If the goals of special interests were in alignment with the best interests of the public, I wouldn't care, but in most cases special interests are indifferent to the common good. Some of the ill effects of special interests occur as secondary results of seemingly innocuous activities, when, for example, businesses seek to increase their profits without violating any laws. To a certain extent, we got stuck with Donald Trump because he was a free source of reality TV for the news media. If the news media wasn't governed by the profit motive and instead followed responsible principles of journalism, Trump might have been exposed long ago and may never have been elected president. The media is in dereliction of duty to the extent that the encouragement of critical thinking has been marginalized by profit-seeking. Although in the past there was a sense that journalism and free speech could serve as counterbalances to private enterprise and criminality, truth seems recently to have taken a back seat to profit throughout all levels of American society, and a collective reality seems no longer to exist. The environment that we inhabit increasingly exceeds our ability to comprehend it, and there isn't anyone out there offering good advice.

The Monologue/The Woman Destroyed

These are the other two short stories by Simone de Beauvoir in the volume I'm reading. "The Monologue" is not to my taste, because it is written in the stream of consciousness style, which I generally don't like. It describes the point of view of a woman named Murielle, whose life hasn't been going well at all. Her daughter from her first marriage, Sylvie, apparently has died, and she is separated from her second husband, who has custody of their son, Francis. She is living alone in a noisy apartment and ruminating over her life and the people who have wronged her. I found it a little confusing to follow and couldn't see the point of the awkward presentation.

I suppose that this was an experimental attempt by de Beauvoir to emulate other writers, such as William Faulkner, whom I also dislike. For me, stream of consciousness was a literary fad that ran its course without adding much to literature as an art. The only writer whom I've found to have any real facility at it was Katherine Mansfield. It requires a psychological insight beyond the level that most writers possess and otherwise reads like a gimmick. I also oppose stream of consciousness on a philosophical basis, because what occurs in someone's head, mine at least, is mostly nonverbal and can't be simulated accurately with words, sentence fragments or sentences. For me, putting things into words is a process separate from the raw mental activities occurring in my conscious brain at any given moment, and I don't think that portraying those mental activities in a verbal format represents them accurately. Mansfield succeeded better than others only because she had an uncanny ability to divine the inner experiences of others.

Although I like certain aspects of de Beauvoir's writing, I don't think that she had the right attributes to be a great writer. While intellectually aware, she lacked the depth of George Eliot, whose knowledge had originated more organically over many decades through observation, thought and reading rather than through the more artificial protocols of universities and intellectuals. Furthermore, de Beauvoir's prose reads more like essays than creative writing. She had none of Kafka's creative imagination and did not produce sentences as elegant as those of Proust, though she probably surpassed both of them intellectually.

"The Woman Destroyed," the final story and the title of the collection, is a long series of diary entries by Monique, a fortyish upper-middle-class Parisian housewife with two grown daughters and a husband, Maurice, who is a medical researcher. Maurice has been seeing Noëllie, an ambitious young lawyer, and the entire story concerns the effect that this has on Monique. Maurice won't give up Noëllie and doesn't want to give up Monique either. Monique, for her part, wants Maurice to dump Noëllie, but she makes no progress, and by the end of the story he is getting a separate apartment for himself. Most of the discussion concerns what Monique did or didn't do right, speculation on Noëllie's character and support from friends, her children and a psychiatrist. By the end of the story, Monique has lost a lot of weight, is depressed and is heavily medicated.

The writing device of "The Woman Destroyed" is not as psychologically oppressive to me as that of "The Monologue," because it includes dialogue quoted from various people and therefore is not a completely closed monologue. However, Monique's obsessions don't interest me much, and no advice that I would consider practical emerges until the very end, when Monique visits her younger daughter, Lucienne, in New York City:

"You saw our life together," I said. "And indeed you were very critical as far as I was concerned. Don't be afraid of hurting me. Try to explain why your father has stopped loving me."

She smiled rather pityingly. "But, Mama, after fifteen years of marriage it is perfectly natural to stop loving one's wife. It's the other thing that would be astonishing!" 

"There are people who love each other all their lives." 

"They pretend to." 

In the end, Monique remains fixated on Maurice, with no hope on the horizon.

This story seemed realistic to me, because there are many women like Monique who encounter this situation. The only difference I see is that affairs are more likely to be taken in stride in France than in the U.S. In this instance, Maurice had already had several affairs unbeknownst to Monique, and Monique herself had had one affair. Unfortunately, neither Monique nor Maurice seemed interesting to me, and I had to wait for Lucienne to speak up to find a character who appealed to me.

Of the three stories, I would say that "The Woman Destroyed" is the best. Nevertheless, I even found that boring. The impression I have from this book and The Mandarins is that de Beauvoir liked to write about the travails that women face. She seems sympathetic, yet doesn't really offer solutions for aggrieved women. I don't currently plan to delve further into the biographies and autobiographies of de Beauvoir, but the sense I have is that she typically took a stoic position on the hurtful behavior of the men she knew. Here, in The Mandarins and in her memoirs, men behave badly and women get upset, but de Beauvoir is reluctant to criticize them, or, for that matter, provide any discernible lessons. She is good when it comes to accepting facts, but, as far as I can tell, she does nothing to prescribe responsible behavior. In "The Woman Destroyed," the question of whether Maurice's actions and his inability to justify them are acceptable remains open. The Monique-Maurice relationship resembles the Paula-Henri relationship in The Mandarins, and in both cases the men just do what they want to do while the women crack up. There may be no intended message, but de Beauvoir clearly sympathizes with the men. She seems to enjoy deconstructing the bourgeois follies of the women she knew.

The Age of Discretion

I've just read this short story by Simone de Beauvoir. It features a sixtyish couple, André and his wife, their son, Phillipe, Phillipe's wife, Iréne, and André's mother, Manette. The story is a narration by André's wife concerning events at the time of Phillipe's announcement that he has decided to change careers. André is a scientist, still conducting research, and the narrator is a writer. Phillipe suddenly shocks his parents when he informs them that he is not going to pursue an academic career and instead has accepted a high-paying job at the Ministry of Culture, which he obtained with help from Iréne's father.

The narrator goes off the deep end and has unpleasant spats with Phillipe in which she says that she never wants to see him again. She also becomes alienated from André when his reaction isn't as forceful as hers, and she ruminates over what is left for her in life. Initially she seems depressed and sees nothing more than an unsatisfactory relationship with André, old age and death. Her reaction to Phillipe's decision seems extreme to André, and also to me. In her mind, an intellectual career is unquestionably superior to an ordinary well-paid job. André recognizes that Phillipe may not have been cut out for an academic career, whereas his mother sees Phillipe's choice as a moral flaw.

After André leaves for a few days to visit his mother in the country, and the narrator later joins him, they manage to reconcile, and the narrator agrees that she should take a more conciliatory approach with Phillipe. Much of the discussion concerns the differences between youth and old age. André thinks that most scientists are finished by his age, but that his ongoing research is useful nevertheless. The narrator has just published a new book that is receiving a tepid reception, and she worries about her own decline.

At first glance, the narrator's high-mindedness seems puzzling, especially if you're used to living among philistine Americans. Besides that, she is more controlling than most of the mothers I've known. In fact, she exhibits a rather extreme insensitivity regarding which outcome would best suit her son. I can make a little sense of all this by looking at the ways in which French upper-middle-class culture differs from American upper-middle-class culture. The rules are somewhat different for educated French people, who are more likely to be sensitive to social issues than educated Americans, on average. There is also the element in which de Beauvoir may be imposing her idea of existentialism on the narrative. That implies some vague moral imperative that she derived from the writings of Sartre, which, unfortunately, I interpret as nonsense. 

This reminds me very much of The Mandarins, in which de Beauvoir invented Nadine as the imagined daughter she never had. In that context, Anne and Robert were much younger, but Nadine, their daughter, also seemed like an artifice placed there for some specific conceptual message. Because this is only a short story, Phillipe really doesn't get the chance to develop as a credible character, yet I can still see de Beauvoir's mind at work attempting to demonstrate some theory that suits her preferences. In the end, I am left with the idea that I had previously: de Beauvoir is a good thinker and writer, but she was not able to break out from her conceptual history in the cause of creating a truly transformative kind of art. In literature, creative artists have an advantage over intellectuals in the sense that the feelings that one gets from good literature are more durable than ideas, which tend to have more wooden characteristics and eventually rot, as I think existentialism did. In my opinion, the general criticism that ideology diminishes the value of art is valid, because ideology works better in essays, where the intent of the author takes precedence over aesthetic factors. I must also note that de Beauvoir's presumption that the intellectual life is always better than others seems to have blinded her to the shortcomings evident in her milieu. In reading The Mandarins, I got the sense that she thought that their lives were self-evidently superior, and, based on my research, I would beg to differ. Even so, I believe that some aspects of value are to be found in this story. It presents serious elements that are of interest to thoughtful people as they age. In my case, I don't find de Beauvoir particularly enlightening, yet one does not often come across a writer with a brain in these matters. De Beauvoir remains a kind of salve for me, because there are few options available in a country that in so many ways is intellectually dead.

This book has two other stories, and, after I've read them, I'll decide whether or not to comment on them.

Diary

I'm having a disorienting spring and hope to settle into something that resembles a familiar routine soon. First, I became a chauffeur, making five round trips to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in connection with an elective surgery; the hospital is seventy miles each way and requires crossing the mountains. There was still snow on the ground on the first trip, and later one of the roads was washed out by rain. Then the cold weather prevented me from planting my tomatoes, and I've just planted them – a week late. At the moment it's quite green outside and is starting to look like summer. The lilacs are in bloom, and I'm enjoying the fragrance of the pink ones next to the rear deck.

I've also been doing more genealogical research, with bits of information arriving in spurts. The online databases keep growing, and every once in a while something new and interesting surfaces. I have long been intrigued by the history of craziness in my ex-wife's family. On her father's side, they were sturdy pioneers who settled in Indiana before it became a state. The first family member in Indiana had grown up in Pennsylvania and had been indentured, because his parents couldn't afford to raise him; when he came of age he was given a horse per the agreement and headed west. After living in Kentucky and Ohio, he bought land in what is now Randolph County, Indiana. On her mother's side, there was a dark, hidden mystery that was kept secret, and I finally found out what it was. I learned last year that her great-great-grandfather, Jacob Kelley, a civil war veteran, had committed suicide. Her great-grandmother, Jacob's daughter, Mary Gertrude Kelley, was married and living with her husband and children in Jacob's house a few years earlier. The problem seems to have been Mary and her husband, Fred Ellis. Mary had become pregnant before she was married, and she married Fred prior to giving birth. The first child was Blossom Ellis, my ex-wife's grandmother, whom I met in 1973; she died in 1974. Fred and Mary went on to have three more children. The family secret is that Fred was a criminal, and a stupid one at that. He was a burglar and highway robber who robbed a relative who recognized him. Fred became a notorious criminal who appeared regularly in the Palladium-Item, the local newspaper. He provided fodder for the paper with a failed jail escape. He ended up dying in prison in Ohio at the age of forty-five. The climax with Mary occurred earlier, when Fred got out of jail from one of his prison stints. When he arrived home, Mary herself was in jail for adultery. She had been living with Neal Temple and had been neglecting her children. A newspaper article describes how the police crept into their house at 1:00 AM and caught them. Mary was released after agreeing to change her sinful ways, but shortly thereafter Neal accosted Fred on the street and slashed him with a knife, and Neal soon disappeared with Mary. At that time, Blossom Ellis was living with an aunt. She subsequently had a normal upbringing, went to nursing school and married a farmer. However, Blossom's younger sister, Lulu, was put up for adoption and two younger brothers were sent to an orphanage. Mary was never heard from again, as far as I know, and in later years Blossom told her children that Fred's mother, Lydia, who visited occasionally, was her mother and their grandmother. I think the mental illness comes either from Mary or Fred, or both.

I also recently got some Armenian genealogical news that finally allowed me to accurately identify everyone in the group photo taken in Athens in 1930. I contacted an amateur genealogist who lives in Brookshire, Texas and found out that a person whom I had thought was one of my great-grandfathers was actually Dr. Paul Donigan, who lived in Brookshire and had married my great-grandfather's sister, Rebecca. My great-grandparents later traveled from Greece to Texas in 1920 to attend a wedding. At that time there was an Armenian community in Waller County, Texas, west of Houston, and Paul Donigan, whose original name was Donigian, had moved there after he finished medical school. I have no blood relatives in Waller County, since Paul Donigan and Rebecca had no children, but my uncle moved to Texas after World War II, and I have two cousins living in the state now. Paul Donigan's wife, Rebecca, sponsored my uncle when he came to the U.S. She was his great-aunt. Since 1900, my Armenian relatives have lived in Turkey, France, Greece, South Africa, the U.K. and the U.S. They are much harder to track than my other relatives due to the lack of documents.

I have a couple of books lined up to read and am even going to try some fiction again. I am making an exception for Simone de Beauvoir, who has flaws as a writer which I am willing to overlook because she retains for me the aura of an imaginary friend.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis IV

The chapter on America evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. and the challenges it faces. While presenting a perspective that is primarily historical, unlike most commentators, Diamond frequently writes from the point of view of a geographer. The U.S., he says, became a major power in the world primarily because of its geographic characteristics. It has the largest land area in the world with good agricultural soil. This is the result of glaciation over the last hundred thousand years that has enriched more soil here than it has in China, Russia, Europe or Canada. Furthermore, North America is physically protected by oceans on the east and west, a sparsely inhabited region to the north, and a narrowing of the continent to the south. From an economic standpoint, it has better natural ports on both coasts than those in most countries, and the river network is also more suitable for navigation than those on other continents. The political system has offered some advantages, partly because each state serves as a laboratory in which various laws can be tested and later copied at the national level. A continuous inflow of financially ambitious immigrants has also helped bring prosperity to the country. On the negative side, he argues that political polarization and a decline in compromise are the principal problems facing the country, though competition from China also poses a threat. There is a separate chapter discussing other internal problems associated with flaws in the voting system, inequality and insufficient investment in the future.

The last chapter before the epilogue discusses global problems such as nuclear weaponry, climate change and inequality. There are several scenarios in which the deployment of nuclear weapons could intentionally or unintentionally wreak havoc. Climate change is causing a reduction in biodiversity and is starting to disrupt food supplies, in addition to raising ocean levels enough to flood heavily-populated coastal regions. Inequality in conjunction with population growth and a decline in natural resources is making the situation even more dangerous: the planet would be unable to sustain the current world population at the standard of living in developed countries.

The epilogue reviews the 12 crisis factors brought up at the beginning of the book in the context of the examples discussed in later chapters and answers a couple of separate questions that people have asked him. At the very end, he sums up the reasons he had for writing the book and preemptively rebuts critics:

Pessimists may respond to these suggestions by protesting: "How absurdly obvious! We don't need Jared Diamond's book to tell us to practice honest self-appraisal, to look to other countries for models, to avoid retreating into victimhood, and so on!"  No, we do need a book, because it's undeniable that those "obvious" requirements have so often been ignored, and are still so often ignored today.... People whose ignoring of "obvious" requirements threatens their well-being today include my fellow several hundred million Americans.

While as an individual reader I found the book a little tedious and overly cautious at times, it is obvious to me that this kind of book is necessary and beneficial. If the issues brought up by Diamond were widely discussed by the politicians in Washington, D.C., the national dialogue would be shockingly different from what we have now. I can only hope that some of the new Democratic candidates for the presidency read it. I have few substantive criticisms. I liked the fact that Diamond rebuked many of the wasteful, self-indulgent habits of Americans, such as driving SUVs that get poor gas mileage. He specifically debunked the myth of American exceptionalism, which is currently accepted as gospel by both political parties. However, in one instance, Diamond included widely-circulated information that seems dubious to me:

...pet cats that are allowed to wander in and out of their owners' houses have been measured to kill an average of more than 300 birds per year per cat....If the U.S. population of outdoor cats is estimated to be about 100 million, then cats can be calculated to kill at least 30 billion birds per year in the U.S....

As a long-time cat owner, I can tell you that pet cats that are let out do not on average kill 300 birds per year. I would estimate something closer to 10. William occasionally catches a bird, and I have noticed no reduction in the number of goldfinches that come to our feeder year-round. He usually catches juncos, which feed on the ground, and I haven't noticed a reduction in those either.

The main criticism I have of Diamond, which I alluded to earlier, is his assumption that humans are rational agents who are undoubtedly capable of collectively solving the crises that he discusses in the book by using tried-and-true democratic methods. That is certainly possible, and, in order to do so, books like this are necessary. In my view, as I've written in earlier posts, more radical approaches assuming intractable  human limitations are probably going to be necessary. Diamond correctly notes that China has an advantage over the U.S. with respect to its ability to make rapid decisions and implement them quickly. The Chinese have their share of problems, but they don't dawdle politically the way Americans do. The U.S., for example, is taking decades to deal with infrastructure repair, gun control and health care, and, under the Trump administration, the addressing of climate change has been put on hold. Many of the legislative delays in the U.S. are the result of intentional corporate obstruction. Gun laws haven't changed much because the N.R.A., a lobbying group for gun manufacturers, funds the campaigns of many politicians. Lobbyists for various industries have ample funds available to influence election results. There is probably no equivalent in China, and, even with a significant amount of corruption, China may be capable of operating a more efficient and effective government under an authoritarian regime. A point that I've made previously is that, in the long run, people are likely to prefer a functional authoritarian regime to a dysfunctional democratic regime like the one we have now in the U.S.

Looking to the future, I see a surviving model closer to the one currently in place in China than to the one mythologized in the U.S. As I've said, capitalism tends to subvert the best interests of the majority over time, in our case by undermining the democratic processes that Diamond seems to take for granted. As an old-fashioned academic, Diamond doesn't fully examine the corrosive effects of capitalism and seems to assume that mistakes can always be corrected within the capitalist framework with which he is familiar. One area of concern that goes unmentioned in this book is the long-term economic effect of automation. What's going to happen if there aren't any jobs and corporations control the government? At that point I don't think that Diamond's examples and recommendations are going to be particularly relevant.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis III

As I said, I'm not finding this to be the most exciting reading. After Indonesia there is a chapter on Germany, which focuses on the World Wars and the successful recovery after Germany's devastating defeat in World War II. Not much so far in the book has seemed quotable, but I liked this passage:

Differing geographical constraints have meant that bad leadership results in much more painful consequences for Germany than for geographically less constrained countries. For instance, while Germany's Emperor Wilhelm II and his chancellors and ministers were notorious for their blunders and unrealism, Germany has had no monopoly on poor leadership: the U.S. and Britain and other countries have had their share. But the seas protecting the U.S. and Britain meant that inept leaders doing stupid things didn't bring disasters to their countries, whereas the ineptness of Wilhelm and his chancellors did bring disaster on Germany in World War One.

A memorable aspect of Diamond's writings is his pointing to basic geographical facts to explain complex human outcomes, and this is a good example. However, as a geographer, he is probably overusing that methodology at the expense of other analytical tools. I am tiring of his persistent perspective in which humans are rational agents who can collectively solve their problems. Then, at the heart of his writing style is storytelling, which is effective for reaching mass audiences but less so for more critical readers.

Diamond also comments on the rigidity of thinking among Germans and points out that the elimination of Jews called for by Hitler was hardly questioned at all by the public. There is no rhyme or reason to German standards on child-rearing: until the end of World War II, corporal punishment of children was considered almost mandatory, and then, following the war, it suddenly became unthinkable. Groupthink seems to affect Germans more than it does other cultures.

After Germany there is a chapter on Australia that is reminiscent of a chapter on Australia in Collapse. While Collapse emphasizes environmental factors, which makes it seem more scientific, Upheaval emphasizes cultural and historical factors, which results in a more conventional narrative. Diamond describes how Australia's stubborn clinging to a British identity has hampered its evolution into a stable country. Australians suffered enormous losses in World War I in Europe in a conflict that didn't threaten them in the least, and when they needed help against the Japanese in World War II they were abandoned. Only now are Australians starting to recognize that it is in their best interest to become integrated with Asian countries, which are much closer than Europe. Implicit in Australia's past attitudes is racism towards aboriginal cultures and Asians, and, according to Diamond, this is beginning to change.

The last section of the book discusses the current world outlook. There is a chapter on Japan, which examines its strengths and weaknesses. The main strength is that it is a homogeneous culture that has developed a robust economy since World War II. The weaknesses include rigid traditions, opposition to immigration and a low fertility rate. These three are related. Because there is no inexpensive daycare, women take all of the responsibility for childcare and don't work as much as in other countries. Raising children is so difficult that many women choose not to have them. At the same time, traditional consultation to arrange a marriage is being replaced with Western models favoring romantic attraction, and the Japanese are ill-prepared for that. In a restaurant, a dating couple was observed sitting at a table looking down solemnly; on close inspection, they were texting each other – presumably because they were not psychologically equipped for face-to-face conversations. Although Diamond doesn't say so, this is probably also a problem occurring in other countries due to the spread of digital communication.

The next chapter is on the current situation in the U.S., which I'll probably have more to say about than the others. I should be able to finish up the book on my next post.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis II

This book is not as exotic as Collapse, which isn't necessarily a weakness, though reading it feels more like dutifully informing oneself on relatively recent world history. As a cautious academic, Diamond seems to be avoiding explicit political commentary in the manner of Robert Reich, the Berkeley professor, and is merely laying the groundwork for readers in order to draw parallels and highlight differences between events that have occurred in various modern countries. I am finding the book informative, and, though I would prefer a more conceptual approach, Diamond is providing ample information for readers to gain a sense of how national issues have developed and played out in the last century or so. The predictive value of what Diamond has to say, I think, is rather dubious, given that each national situation is unique in most respects, and that Diamond is not providing a template regarding human nature. It is a little exhausting to learn what has occurred in so many countries, but my sense is that Diamond's descriptions are reasonably accurate and therefore have value for understanding current geopolitical trends, if that is the sort of thing that interests you. I wouldn't place that at the top of the list of my interests, and I am plugging along mainly for general information.

There is a chapter on Japan, the contents of which I found vaguely familiar. Until 1853, Japan was still a medieval society, with shoguns and none of the modern technology that was then available in Europe. The Japanese were aware of what had occurred in China when British imperialism intruded there, so when Commodore Perry arrived in Edo representing the U.S. and made various demands, they began the radical process of national transformation which is now referred to as the Meiji period. They did an excellent job and copied various ideas that had been used in other countries, creating a startling change in little time. However, the Japanese leaders later became "hotheads" and engaged in a war with Russia and entered World War II. Nevertheless, Japan is currently in good shape economically and politically. Diamond rolls out his list of factors for each country undergoing an upheaval, and so far I'm not finding it very useful.

There is a chapter on Chile, a country with which I had little familiarity. It has a relatively homogeneous culture, since the natives interbred with Spaniards, and no other groups make up a significant segment of the population. However, the problems in Chile emerged primarily internally, with conflicting ideas about how to run the country. Salvador Allende, a communist sympathizer, socialist and Marxist, barely won the election in 1970, and was completely ineffectual as a leader. Following the nationalization playbook under Allende, the country soon fell into disarray, and the wealthy, along with international corporations and the U.S., soon sought his removal. In 1973 there was a brutal military coup, and Augusto Pinochet became the new leader. Law and order returned to Chile, and although Pinochet's regime engaged in the interrogation, torture and murder of thousands of Chileans, he was still somewhat popular. In this chapter, Diamond engages in psychological speculation about Allende and Pinochet and finds them both somewhat mysterious. My preferred way of approaching this subject is to identify the essential human weaknesses that cause undesirable consequences. Allende didn't understand that socialism can't easily replace capitalism, mainly because the active management of an economy is extremely difficult and no regime has been able to do it effectively for any length of time. As soon as there is an economic decline, people become worried and restless. The capitalist model works better not because it is intrinsically superior, but because markets have a tendency to self-correct, and even if some individuals become wealthier than others and there is corruption, the public on the whole are more likely to feel economically secure, and they will support capitalist leaders under the mistaken assumption that they are the ones who have a better understanding of economics. In the case of Chile, neither Allende nor Pinochet understood economics, and Pinochet masked his corruption by pretending to be pious; even if capitalism causes inequality, people are willing to overlook that when they come to associate it with order and prosperity as opposed to chaos.

I'm a little over halfway through the book and just finished the chapter on Indonesia, a country that was unfamiliar to me. Indonesia did not exist as a country until 1945; before then it was the Dutch East Indies. The area was too large to be managed as a Dutch colony, and the Japanese had used it as a source of oil during World War II. Much like Allende in Chile, Indonesia's first leader, Sukarno, had anti-colonial, pro-communist leanings that didn't work well for the economy. Suharto took over in a military coup that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. He was capitalism-friendly and corrupt, like Pinochet, and the economy eventually stabilized. Over the years, unification has been facilitated by an invented language, Bahasa Indonesia, which makes communication easier in a country of islands stretching 3400 miles and comprising over 700 indigenous languages. For me, it is hard to think of Indonesia as a country, given its geographic and cultural characteristics, and so far Diamond hasn't commented on what I often think about national unity: it seems like a fiction, especially in a heterogeneous country like Indonesia. Diamond's working hypothesis, that nations are real entities that can, through rational means, reliably be directed toward ends that satisfy the needs of all their citizens, remains suspect to me, and I'll comment on that throughout the remainder of the book.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis I

I'm reading this latest book from Jared Diamond. As in Collapse, he includes several case studies, but this time the main topic is modern national crises rather than an assortment of local population crises from various eras. He also includes a personal crisis in order to provide a concrete example of how they manifest themselves in individuals and how individuals deal with them. Diamond is an affecting writer and a good storyteller, which makes him pleasant to read, though I don't consider him particularly scientific in the terms that I prefer. I haven't read his best-known book, Guns, Germs and Steel, which describes the development of modern civilization as an accident of geography and the spread of ideas through cultural means. Diamond is a traditional humanist academic and does not appear to subscribe to the deterministic theories of human nature that dominate on this blog. For example, as far as I know, he completely ignores the works of Robert Plomin and David Reich, which I think are important. Nor is there any hint that Diamond is aware of works on the cognitive limitations of humans, such as those of Daniel Kahneman and Robert Sapolsky. Diamond's writing style seems like a cross between the Bible and the case study method used at Harvard Business School. In every instance, events involve a group of people with specific characteristics and the problems that they are forced to confront. The analysis includes looking at the decision-making processes of each group and how their decisions worked or didn't work. In Diamond's framework, the inherent competence of the group making a decision has nothing to do with its genetic background. To be fair, genetics are not always relevant in such cases, but, if you look at humans over periods of thousands of years, I think that there is evidence that they do have an impact. This constitutes my chief criticism of Diamond's methodology, because, indirectly, he is denying the existence of natural selection insofar as it pertains to humans.

The personal crisis recounted by Diamond is the difficulty that he encountered in graduate school. Although he had been a whiz student as an undergraduate at Harvard, when he moved on to Cambridge in England to pursue a Ph.D. in physiology, he soon discovered that he was dismal at setting up lab experiments and almost dropped out. He became so demoralized that he considered quitting and getting a job translating at the U.N. in Switzerland. However, he consulted his father, who recommended that he try physiology for one more semester, and he managed to overcome his deficiencies and went on to complete his Ph.D. Diamond produces lists of factors related to outcomes of personal and national crises, and this sets the stage for the remainder of the book.

As far as I've read, he discusses Finland's war with the U.S.S.R. from 1939 to 1944. It is an excellent piece of historical work and goes into some detail about Finnish culture and the strategies that the Finns adopted. Finland is unique in character in matters related to language, ethnic uniformity and its close proximity to Russia. As Diamond describes it, the Finns took completely pragmatic positions and aligned either with Nazi Germany or the U.S.S.R. when necessary. They have an extremely strong sense of national identity and will do whatever it takes to succeed as a country. Thus, even though they were ruined economically by World War II, they stuck together, and now they have a vibrant economy and are in better shape than most other European countries, with a high standard of living. Although, as in Collapse, Diamond richly describes the circumstances, I am doubtful that he will arrive at useful conclusions, since each situation is different, and it isn't necessarily possible to extrapolate from one to another. For this reason, reading Diamond is like reading history, and I find it hard to see what he does as having scientific relevance, other than in the generic sense that if a group sticks together and acts rationally for the benefit of all its members, they will have a better chance of surviving collectively than they would otherwise. This is E.O. Wilson 101. Nevertheless, there are chapters on several other countries, including the U.S., which should make for interesting reading, and I'll comment on the remainder of the book as I make my way through it.

Diary

The book I was reading, Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography, by Lesley Milne, was a disappointment. It consists mainly of summaries of his works and includes little biographical information. There is a brief description of his early life, but very few details are offered from letters, spouses, friends, acquaintances or other sources. For example, you learn that he was married three times, and that his third wife served as a model for Margarita in The Master and Margarita, the latter of which I already knew, but there is no explanation of the circumstances of his marriages and divorces. As far as I know, he was childless. Besides the fact that there isn't much information about his personal life, I didn't feel that his works were analyzed proficiently. For me, this was a typical medium-grade academic book in which it seems as if the author has accumulated notes on a stack of index cards, sorted them by subtopic and then copied them out as chapters. This type of writing usually seems incoherent to me and makes me grateful that I'm not an academic and therefore don't have to read it as a professional duty. At this point, I still think that Bulgakov would make a good biographical subject, but I am concluding that there is probably no good biography of him currently available in English. It is possible that one exists in Russia or Ukraine, because Bulgakov once had a following in Russia and grew up in Kiev. However, he was not the kind of writer whom Vladimir Putin would appreciate, and his works may be suppressed in Russia now. There is also a chance that at this stage there is insufficient material available to produce a good biography of Bulgakov, though I still think that more information must exist, and that it did not appear in Milne's book partly because her focus wasn't sufficiently biographical. For my purposes, I'm giving up on Bulgakov biographies unless something new and promising pops up. From the biographies I've read of George Eliot, I noticed that the early ones were terrible, and good ones didn't begin to appear until she had been dead for more than a century.

I have little going on at the moment and am awaiting a new book and the full-throated arrival of spring, which is still dark, gloomy and wet. Of course, I can't easily avoid the Trump controversy, which is like a festering wound. Or it's like a gigantic tumor growing on the top of your head: the first doctor tells you that it looks normal, and that you should just cover it with a hat if it makes you feel uncomfortable; the second doctor tells you that it does look serious, but that if you attempt to remove it surgically it will only grow back larger. Trump will be gone eventually, but it's still hard to reconcile his continued presence with the idea of an orderly government. But, then, if medical doctors are often quacks, charlatans or crooks, why would politicians be any different?

I'll make another post whenever I think I have something worthwhile to say.

Diary

I read a few more of the essays in Extremes but have decided not to comment extensively on them. There is an excellent summary of the global warming phenomenon, "Extreme Weather," by Emily Shuckburgh, which reminds me that British academics often produce much more lucid prose than American academics – even when they are scientists. The irony is that climate change is a solvable problem, yet little is being done about it at the moment in the U.S., thanks largely to the current president. Assuming that humans survive climate change, which will cause millions of deaths and trillions of dollars in damage, our descendants are going to wonder who was minding the store during this era. There is also an informative essay, "Extreme Longevity," by Sarah Harper, and a concise presentation of major astronomical events, "Extremes of Power in the Universe," by Andrew C. Fabian, which makes me think that, in a way, we're lucky to have such brief lives, given the gigantic, powerful and destructive events that occur periodically in the universe. Yet we're still not completely safe, because it is possible that a large solar flare such as one that struck Earth in 1849 could wipe out our electric grids and decommission our satellites. A much rarer – but possible – superflare would do considerably more damage to the planet.

The viewing conditions for stargazing have been bad for months, but last night I looked at a few galaxies in my small telescope. I saw the supergiant elliptical galaxy M87. It's a long way off, and its light took 53 million years to reach the telescope. It would appear more clearly in my large telescope, but I could still make it out. The reason why I chose this galaxy was that it is the location of the first photographed black hole, which was featured in the news recently. At this time of year you can see a cluster of galaxies in Virgo, some of which form a line known as Markarian's Chain. If we get better weather soon I'll set up my large Dobsonian telescope before these galaxies have moved out of range.

For new reading materials, I've been racking my brains for something that I would like. I'm going to try a biography of Mikhail Bulgakov on the theory that his life was more interesting than most. He was born in Kiev in 1891 and lived through the early years of the Soviet Union as an author of novels, short stories and plays. Little of what he wrote was published during his life, and he was best known mainly for one play, which Stalin happened to like. I was first exposed to Bulgakov in a Soviet literature class that I took in college. I read The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog and wrote a paper on his most famous novel, The Master and Margarita. I don't think that I would be as amused by his writing now, but at the time I was fascinated by his satire and the breadth of his subject matter. In fact, after years of being force-fed literature in high school (Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, etc.) and various unsuccessful explorations of my own (John Barth and Hermann Hesse come to mind), Bulgakov was the first writer whom I found engaging at all. My selection of Bulgakov as a biographical subject is partly derived from the theory that challenging lives are more interesting than safe, bourgeois ones. On that basis, he had a few things in common with Czeslaw Milosz: he was born before the Russian Revolution and suffered from its consequences – though, unlike Milosz, who ended up with a cushy job in Berkeley and a Nobel Prize, Bulgakov stayed in the U.S.S.R. and died almost unknown at the age of 48. Like Milosz, Bulgakov believed that writers have a civic responsibility during troubled times. As I've suggested quite often, the fiction produced during placid periods tends to be insipid, and the commercialization of literary fiction has made matters even worse. Writers tend to become more serious when they face real hardships. The biography that I've chosen may or may not be worth reading – I'll let you know.