For the Win, Cory Doctorow

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Chris Hibbert

Cory Doctorow's For the Win is very much of the moment, covering an Internet-driven global uprising. In Doctorow's case, though it's a union organizing outbreak among Internet workers (gold farmers, mechanical turks, etc.). Not surprisingly, real-world union busting tactics are used to fight back. Doctorow, as usual, has a firm grasp on the zeitgeist, and has written another story just a few months into his own future. Published last year, it must have been written even earlier. The introduction on his webbed version of the story (linked above) talks up the relevance to the recent financial crisis.

There are a couple of fascinating ideas on display in the book: the parallels to current events in the Middle East of course, the discussions of on-line role-playing games and their various denizens, and the story itself and the characters and events that drive it.

The action centers around the Far East: mostly China and Viet Nam, though Cambodia, Indonesia, and India show up, too. Several groups of gold farmers are the focal characters. They're each controlled and abused by a relatively wealthy investor, who underwrites their access to the net, and resells the gold and treasures they earn on-line. In exchange, they're paid enough to keep them alive, and they get to play games all day. Rather than mindlessly wandering the games or doing the obvious quests, their modus operandi is to play the games and look for exploitable weaknesses—monsters that are easy to kill relative to the treasure they give, places that are unusually likely to spawn a good treasure, or actual bugs in the implementation that let players turn straw into gold with less than the usual effort. Since what they do is fun and exciting, and a lot like playing games, there are always plenty more players available, so individuals don't have a lot of leverage with their employers. In this kind of circumstance, it's not surprising that the situation occasionally turns more explicitly abusive, and that's the context that leads some of the characters to approach union organizers. Once they're gotten in contact, the support goes both ways: the on-line workers provide communication and publicity to traditional union workers, and the organizers provide manpower and experience in dealing with violent tactics.

The book was nominated for the Prometheus Award, but it's hard to identify explicitly libertarian aspects of the story. Most of the conflict is between (abusive) owners and workers, with governments not getting very involved. I found the context intriguing, and Doctorow tells a great story, but the closest I can get to a libertarian angle is to try to describe it as a struggle against authority—but it's only a struggle against power, which isn't quite the same thing.

For the Win is a fun read. Doctorow excels at depicting action crossing back and forth between virtual worlds and the real world, and at giving a feel for a future that's only a little advanced over our own. There's a fair amount of violence in this story, even though Doctorow presents it as a young adult novel. In the anti-union violence there's a fair amount of head-bashing, though eventually it's countered with ghandian non-violence. Definitely worth the read.

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande

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Chris Hibbert

Atul Gawande has been writing on medical practice, provocatively and informatively, for the New Yorker for several years. His comments on price differences and what drives disparities between different areas garnered a lot of attention, but that area hasn't been his main focus. His recent book, The Checklist Manifesto, is closer to the main line of his writings. In this short book, Gawande presents his argument that medicine as currently practiced is far from a rigorous, science-driven field. He shows how aviation and construction are at least as complex and time-constrained as medicine, and that both have benefited from the use of checklists to help practitioners get the details right when performing complex operations.

Individual errors and mistakes of coordination are far more common in medicine than in other modern highly-technical fields. If medicine followed the standards of professional practice common in other areas, there would be a dramatic improvement in our overall health. Gawande discusses how checklists are constructed and used in aviation, another field where routine work is occasionally suddenly interrupted by situation requiring split second decision making at a rapid pace in a distracting environment with enormous consequences. Safety experts in aviation have learned how to put together checklists that can be found quickly, and that enable professionals to correctly address situations that arise in one flight in a million.

The safety record in aviation world-wide is amazingly good. I've long ascribed that difference between aviation and medicine to the fact that accidents in aviation are scrutinized thoroughly, and every mistake drives new corrective processes that quickly make it less likely that the same thing will happen again anywhere in the world. Every airframe manufacturer ensures that all of its vehicles are quickly updated with the most up-to-date procedures. In medicine, individual hospitals sometimes conduct reviews, but any knowledge gained is used sporadically and locally. There is also no standard for how to conduct these inquiries, so some investigations are derailed by politics, infighting, or a desire to deflect blame (which is exacerbated by medical malpractice risks.) The inquiries conducted in aviation have been designed to find correctable causes, and not to place blame. Focusing on the checklists that result from these inquiries would be a big improvement on what we have in medicine now. It's even plausible that a coordinated process for producing checklists would drive an improvement in the checklists based on measured effectiveness.

The book is very readable. The main story is about how Gawande led a task force for WHO testing out some simple checklists for a few common surgical procedures with high rates of routine errors. The results were spectacular, leading to a 36 percent reduction in complications and 47 percent drop in deaths from a variety of hospitals in rich and poor communities all over the world. Getting doctors and hospitals to actually adopt this simple improvement is a far harder task than getting a pilot program demonstrating its effectiveness. The side trips Gawande makes into aviation and construction to show how checklists work there and how they're constructed are engaging.

Going Inside, John McCrone

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Chris Hibbert

John McCrone's Going Inside provides a lot of insightful observations about how the brain works, but fails to tie them together into a cohesive picture. McCrone focuses on recent findings from new brain scanning technologies, and is particularly fascinated by timing studies that give details on how long it takes us to process incoming information, the specific times at which decisions are made, and how our subjective experience of when choices happen comport with the underlying brain circuitry. In particular, the studies show that it takes a half second to react to new information, even when we're expecting it, but our subjective experience is that the decision is made instantaneously at the end of that period. The experiments that show this are ingenious: by cutting off or distracting the process at various points, we can compare the reported subjective feel about the decision state that was reached with the brain scanner's details of how far into the process the brain actually got. All this works experimentally, because repeated sessions show that there's a lot of consistency in the information processing, so the scientists can pinpoint when the incoming information started being processed, and how long it would have taken to reach a choice.

The problem with the presentation is that McCrone doesn't provide an overview of the whole picture until the closing chapter, so as a reader, I had no framework onto which to attach all the facts as he presented them so as to build up a cohesive picture. I was left with the feeling that he'd presented good evidence that seemed to bear on the issue he was investigating, but I didn't know how it fit as I encountered it, so each tidbit vanished as I encountered the next one. I'm not sure things would be much improved on a re-reading. With a familiarity with the whole story, I could figure out how most of the pieces buttress the argument, but I'd have to make up my own argument structure for why his is the best explanation for the workings of the entire system.

McCrone also flubs up on the evolutionary explanation. At various points, he attempts to show why evolution would have produced just the structures and relationships that he has revealed, but his descriptions are unconvincing--he sometimes speaks as if evolutionary pressures are pushing toward a known result, rather than explaining why some abilities would have been selectively favored and why random mutations could have produced the effects. I think the correctly formed arguments could have been constructed, but McCrone's failed attempts were distracting.

One of McCrone's goals is to show how quickly brain scanning technologies advanced over the last few decades. The best tools for peering into the deepest details of timing and interaction in the brain have only recently been developed, so the insights that are most crucial to the book's argument aren't presented until a third of the way into the book, when he has set the historical context. Benjamin Libet did a series of experiments on patients (who were getting brain surgery already) that showed that direct electrical stimulation of the brain wasn't noticed unless it continued for a full half-second. If the stimulation was cut off earlier the patient wouldn't notice anything; if it continued for longer, the subject would report that they had been aware of it from the beginning. Later experiments showed that a second stimulus could mask the first one, as much as a third of a second later. This is pretty convincing evidence that processing inputs takes us up to half a second, and our experience of the present is cobbled together after the fact. Explaining "Libet's half-second" and figuring out what it implies about consciousness occupies the bulk of the book.

Libet did other studies later in which subjects were asked to notice the position of a rotating second hand at the moment they made a decision to lift a hand or take a similar action. With these and other similar experiments by other researchers it became clear that there isn't a precise moment at which decisions are made. The state of the brain changes somewhat continuously over a period from a half second to a full second, and subjects report somewhat arbitrary times as "the moment" of decision.

I would have to re-read the whole book (I've re-skimmed about the first half) in order to provide a detailed synopsis of it. I did feel like McCrone brought quite a few fascinating and important insights to light that would clarify an understanding of brain mechanisms, but the organization makes it hard to put them together on first reading. Maybe someone else will (or has) pull the material together in a better order, and that will be a more worthwhile book.

Wired for War, P. W. Singer

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Chris Hibbert

P. W. Singer's Wired for War covers all the ways robots are being prepared for and used in military missions. There's a lot of valuable detail here on what's happening, and what's coming. Singer is a little out of his depth when it comes to the societal implications, though. The robots covered here are used for surveillance, rescue, and actual fighting missions on land, at sea, and in the air. Few of the land-based robots are news, though the pervasiveness and popularity with the troops haven't been widely reported as far as I know. The variety of aerial and marine uses was somewhat of a surprise to me. There has been more progress on small-scale fliers and long-duration flights than I had previously known. The underwater and surface autonomous craft haven't seen as much active use as the others, but rapid development has been happening in these areas in parallel with the better known land and air variety.

The material on consequences for society was much thinner; Singer has thought of several plausible areas where the implications might be interesting, but he was stretching to find things to worry about. The main substantive issue he addressed was whether the operators of remotely-operated robots would be less careful about who they attack because of their distance, and whether autonomous systems are an immoral or inappropriate tool, since there would be no human in the loop. I didn't see any substantive contribution to the issue from Singer: he raised the issue, drew in the outlines of the discussion, and moved on. After that, he talked about issues such as: If the robots are operated by armchair warriors who never approach the theater of operations, how does that affect the military esprit de corps?, should the operators be considered combatants if opposing forces want to target the operators in order to reduce military effectiveness?

Another issue he brought up without any depth is the charge that operators who grew up playing video games are already inured to committing violence on-screen, and so would have a hard time thinking of their targets as actual people. This has been a perennial problem with human soldiers. The military does its best to train soldiers to follow orders and let the officers decide what the strategy and rules of engagement should be. The main limit on the military's tactics is public opinion--the same restraints have to be used with robotic soldiers and their operators. With robots it's likely that we'll have better records of who did what. Additionally, the victims in the modern day will have better tools for recording and publicizing any atrocities that happen, so even if there's a greater ability, and we might expect less hesitation from the soldiers, the same mechanisms are available to restrain their instincts, and better abilities to track and hold them responsible. It only looks like the problem is growing in an unchecked fashion if you don't look at how things used to work holistically. That seems to be common in Wired for War.

I recommend reading the book if you'd like to know more about the impact of robotics on the military, but take what Singer says about the consequences with a grain of salt.

Cambio Bay, Kate Wilhelm

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Chris Hibbert

Kate Wilhelm's Cambio Bay is light fantasy, combining a character study style with an old house that seems to insulate itself and its inhabitants from outside influences and the ravages of time. Cambio Bay is an isolated community on the Santa Barbara coastline of central California, which has somehow escaped the notice of the map makers.

A woman (Iris) and her unspeaking daughter (Bonnie) are on the run because Iris' flaky boyfriend has run afoul of a drug kingpin for whom he did odd jobs. A storm and earthquake shut down the highway and divert Iris and a few other travelers to Cambio Bay and Luisa'a Guest House. Carolyn is a real estate agent with a background in design who quickly realizes that the house's layout doesn't make any sense. She can't be sure that the rooms aren't always in the same places, but she is positive that rooms on opposite sides of the hallway can't both face the beach. She tries several times to sketch out the parts of the floor plan that she has become familiar with (an exercise she commonly performs while touring houses before showing them in her business), and when she can't make consistent picture, she decides the place is too creepy and leaves. Of course the evolving story and the other guests' troubles find ways to lure her back.

In the end, the house turns out to be a force for good, and the good and innocent visitors find ways to outsmart the bad guys. As the story unfolds, we get to know the visitors quite well, and see what drives them. Bonnie's lack of speech is never explained, nor why the drug kingpin is obsessed with capturing her. The house's mystery is traced back to some local Native American legends.

Overall, a pretty fun read, but not very deep. Kate Wilhelm knows how to present interact characters in an interesting story, even when the conflicts remain on a very small scale.

The Price of Everything: Russ Roberts

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Chris Hibbert

Russ Roberts' The Price of Everything is an engaging story written by an economics professor in an attempt to show how prices help us direct our efforts so they will provide the most benefit to others we will never meet. In the story Ruth Lieber, a strikingly insightful Stanford professor leads Ramon Fernandez, a charismatic student athlete, to an appreciation for the unseen consequences of prices after he leads a protest of a local big box store for raising prices after an earthquake.

Ruth sometimes explains, but more often hints so Ramon will investigate for himself, how higher prices or the expectation of a higher return cause suppliers, inventors and others to provide more useful goods and services so they're available when people want them.

The prose is vivid and the characters are interesting. Most of the story is reasonably believable, though there are enough hints at the purpose of the exposition that no one should be surprised at the occasional speech. Roberts does a good job of keeping that to a minimum, but he does have some points to make. Ramon isn't initially interested in economics, but he's smart enough to look into the details when Ruth points out inconsistencies between how he expects people to act and the ways they actually do. Ruth (and Russ) rely on common experiences so Ruth's objections will strike home to readers who are reasonably honest about how events actually turn out, even if their prejudices align more with Ramon's.

I think this would be a reasonable book to give to someone who wants a gentle introduction to the economic way of thinking. It can be read as an interesting story, or for the insights it provides.

That Hideous Strength: C. S. Lewis

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Chris Hibbert

C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength has been a perennial nominee for the Libertarian Futurists Society's Hall of Fame award. Seeking to give it a fair shot, I waited to read it until after reading the first two works in the series: Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandria. Neither of those books impressed me, and this book doesn't significantly rely on the connection to them. Unfortunately, this book didn't impress me either. I think part of it is the style of the writing, which seems vague, foggy, and long-winded to me. I also didn't care much for the characters, didn't find the plot interesting, and had trouble seeing what the conflict was about.

Lewis sets up two clear factions, clearly struggling over something, but we appear to only watching the activities of people who are a few steps removed from those who are aware of the strategy and aims of each side. Instead of watching maneuvering about the great struggle that is going on, we watch the minor characters as they maneuver through office politics, attempting to ensure that they have a seat at the table, while those characters remain ignorant about what the goals of those at the table are whom they wish to join.

Eventually, we see more of the high level action, but the sides are painted so starkly--the bad guys are depraved, manipulating, torturers, while the good guys refrain from acting--that it's hard to imagine how Lewis will turn the struggle into a fair fight. In the end, it was hard to see that it was a fair fight; the bad guys laid waste to the countryside in an attempt to take control over everything, while the good guys recruited a top wizard who eventually makes the bad guys stop.

I couldn't see it as a struggle of ideas, because I couldn't tell what the ideas might have been. One side was full of people who were scrambling for power, and most of their efforts seemed to be the minor squabbles of factional politics. The other side acted in a more genteel fashion, and didn't seem aware that their opponents were preparing a rapacious campaign. In the end, the only part of the struggle that mattered was over who would recruit the master wizard, and this didn't seem to be about who he agreed with as much as who could bridge the language gap with him effectively or who could isolate him better. So the good guys won, but the territory was spoiled in the process, and neither we nor the characters learned much in the process.

Live Free or Die: John Ringo

0.3

Chris Hibbert

John Ringo's Live Free or Die is quite a fun read in the genre of space entrepreneurship. The protagonist, Tyler Vernon, is practically a superman of business, who can create innovative new deals out of thin air with anyone who is amenable to trading. In this case, his objective is to save us all from the Horvath invaders who have set up a warship orbiting the earth and are extracting heavy "protection fees" from all humanity. Other space faring societies are willing to trade, but not in military goods, so Vernon has to figure out what non-military goods he can bend to his purposes without triggering the proscriptions.

For a writer who seems to have a reasonable insight into how business people set up deals so they benefit all parties, it's surprising that Ringo leaves the story as a one-man show. Vernon gains an immense amount of wealth early in the story by figuring out what earth-produced good will be of value to the friendly aliens, and then locking up supplies before anyone else knows that it will be valuable. But the approach he uses to make his discovery should be able to be repeated several times, so it's a surprise that Vernon is the only entrepreneur in contact with the aliens. But in the story, that works out fine, because Vernon is a tireless workaholic who really wants to ensure that we find a way to get the Horvath out of our hair.

There's not much more depth to the story than that, but there are enough twists and turns in the plot that I don't want to describe the story in any more detail. Live Free or Die is a nominee for the Prometheus award, and I'd guess that it will make it as a finalist as well. I'm hoping for something with more depth, but I haven't seen it yet, though it's still early.

Fantastic Voyage: Ray Kurzweil & Terry Grossman

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Chris Hibbert

Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman's Fantastic Voyage is a guide to (as the subtitle says) how to "Live Long enough to Live Forever." The premise is that medical science and technology are on an accelerating growth path like that of digital technologies in general, though it may be a shallower exponential.

In my view, longer lifespans are definitely coming, and it seems likely that we'll be able to extend maximum spans beyond the 120 years or so that are currently possible. In addition, we're coming to an understanding of the causes of aging sufficient to be able to repair or reverse some of the damage. We don't yet know how to apply what we know, but the time isn't far off if current trends continue. The question is how long would you have to live and how healthy will you have to be in order to make use of the technology when it becomes available.

The saddest outcome would be to live to see introduction of technologies for rejuvenation, but be too frail for them to be of much use. This book is Kurzweil and Grossman's summary of what they believe you should do if you agree with them that surviving healthy is of paramount importance now that these technologies appear to be on the near horizon and drawing quickly closer.

Much of their advice is standard current health care wisdom: maintain a good weight, don't eat too much, don't smoke, get a variety of exercise, and so on. They put their advice in perspective a couple of times, pointing out that following the rest of their advice won't matter much if you don't have these basics right.

Given Kurzweil's background, it's not surprising that the book includes an explanation of how the exponential trends and what we can see of the development of the technology provide convincing evidence that we can look forward to enhanced longevity, and some reasonable bounds on how soon and how good.

A lot of the presentation is colored by Kurzweil's family history and past battles with weight control and the concomitant consequences of metabolic syndrome: diabetes and heart disease. When the authors are recommending supplements, it's a chore to distinguish between recommendations that apply to everyone and those that are focused on the majority of Americans who are susceptible to the same problems. Its possible, but you have to concentrate and take careful notes. Some of the discussion of what each supplement is good for is presented separately from the recommendations of what nearly everyone should take, and you have to cross-correlate the two to see what matters if you aren't troubled by this common syndrome.

In the end the recommendations that seem most likely to change my behavior are a few of the nutritional suggestions: eat more soy & tofu, and a further slight movement toward more fruit and vegetable and less meat. I will probably also add more supplements to my regimen. The hard part of evaluating their suggestions is deciding how much time to spend evaluating the suggestions and the science behind them. They recommend supplements for mitochondrial health and to reduce cellular cross-linking. I've read Aubrey de Grey's work on senescence and the role of these factors, and believe his arguments that these are fundamental in aging. The harder question is how anyone is measuring the direct effects in the body, and what evidence there is for actual consequences in the body beyond the theoretical. I may be reduced to accepting that quite a few very sophisticated scientists who are interested in longevity are saying the same things. I attended the recent conference on Personalized Life Extension. The organizer, Chris Peterson of the Foresight Institute, and several of the researchers are very well regarded, and they all seemed to be saying the same things about the same supplements.

The authors provide a reasonable amount of justification for all of their advice, and the technical details to convince a moderate skeptic that they know what the biological pathways are and which ones need to be reinforced. I found the presentation reasonably convincing, though it requires further research and correlation with other sophisticated researchers in order for me to have sufficient confidence to take action.

Understanding Institutional Diversity: Elinor Ostrom

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Chris Hibbert

Elinor Ostrom's Understanding Institutional Diversity presents some of the work that led to her Nobel prize last year. Ostrom has developed new frameworks for analyzing the way people organize to manage shared use of common resources. She seems particularly interested in the interaction between spontaneous orders (whether or not relying on markets) and government systems at different scales. The core of the analysis is a robust grammar for describing how an institution is organized and enforces the rules it intends to impose on participants. The grammar lays out 5 elements to be described in relatively standardized language, which results in descriptions that make it possible to compare disparate institutions. Systematically cataloging their relevant features makes it easier to compare institutions to find out what common features lead to their relative levels of success.

Few of the institutions Ostrom studies are government mandated; most have been around longer than the local government. This means the mechanism they use to enforce adherence to traditions, and adjudicate disputes must rely on something other than the rule of law and police power for its effectiveness. Ostrom shows that there are a variety of approaches, and there's a systematic relationship between membership forms and workable enforcement mechanisms.

The grammar Ostrom presents has five elements: the attributes that qualify someone as a participant in the system; whether actions are permitted, required, or forbidden (may, must, must not); the covered actions; the conditions under which the rules apply; and the consequences of not following the rule. These components can be used to describe rules, norms and shared strategies. Rules have all 5 components, norms specify all but the consequences, and shared strategies are statements that only contain the first three components. When using this framework, you have to be aware that most rules can be rephrased between prohibitions and compulsions without changing their sense. When comparing two institutions, a little care is usually enough to penetrate this surface distinction. For example "Actor X is forbidden to take action Y" could be written as "X must perform a non-Y action" or "X does not have the option of doing Y".

Writing descriptions of a variety of institutions using this consistent format has allowed researchers to catalog the kinds of attributes that are used by long surviving non-governmental institutions and contrast those with the kinds of attributes that governments often rely on. The successful private institutions tend to depend on attributes that reinforce a sense of community and mutual obligation (residence in a locality, paying dues or working in a local organization) rather than ones that are easier to administer in a consistent way and have a surface appearance of fairness (paying for a license, passing a test).

The book is organized in three parts. Part I provides background of the context in which Ostrom writes, and introduces vocabulary and some canonical problems. Much of this content is pulled from earlier papers and doesn't flow seamlessly. Other parts are reviews of now well-known examples and experiments and can be skipped or skimmed if the material seems repetitious. Part II explains the grammar's framework, gives some justification, and shows how it has been applied (by Ostrom and others). This is the meat of the book and rewards careful attention. I thought the presentation was clear and the contents quite valuable. In Part III, Ostrom talks about the implications of the theory and the approach for designing and repairing real world institutions.

This was the first place I got a feel for her own attitudes, and I was pleasantly surprised. Since most of her work has been in the context of common pool resources, and she studies communal or voluntary solutions, I expected her to argue that emergent systems somehow "naturally" resolve the issues. Instead she argues that markets have a crucial role, and that it's important that there be multiple institutions at various aggregation levels so rules and meta-rules can be handled through institutions with different incentives and varying feedback systems.

She seems most averse to solutions imposed by central authorities, since they seldom know enough about local conditions to be able to design systems of reciprocity that will fit with the ways that people interact in different locales. In order for a common pool resource institution to succeed over the long term, the participants have to feel ownership of the resource and of the reward and punishment system so that they'll both follow and enforce the rules. If someone else is responsible for enforcement, then the people with the most knowledge of local activities won't be watching one another carefully, and they'll find ways to shirk when times get tough. If they're watching one another, they'll assume they're being watched, and will be much more likely to follow the rules.

I've read other books that talk about how people solve problems in the absence of law and government, but this is the first to present a framework for analyzing existing approaches. The framework doesn't give the answers, but Ostrom's work has allowed her to look at many different approaches that have been taken around the world, and to systematically compare them to see what works and what doesn't. Her conclusions should be studied widely.

What Intelligence Tests Miss, Keith Stanovich

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Keith Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss does a reasonable job of arguing that we have a couple of different things in mind when we talk about how "smart" a person is, and that some of the important aspects are very different from what IQ tests measure. His goal seems to be to convince us that the other parts are important and we would do better if we either found good ways to measure them (though there are caveats there) or reduce the societal importance of IQ tests and their ilk.

Most of the areas that Stanovich is interested in could loosely be called rationality skills. He starts out the book with the example of George Bush, whose apparent IQ (estimated from various of his tests results that are on the record) is about 120, but who is agreed to not have conventional smarts, or be a thorough, consistent, or deep thinker. The main point here is talking about how people are surprised, but shouldn't be, that IQ is separate from what we call smart. The book is mainly a riff on Kahneman and Tversky's work on human decision making, and all the kinds of rationality traps that we fall for.

Apparently, Stanovich's own research is in how the various layers of processing—the Autonomous mind, the Algorithmic mine, and the Reflective mind— interact and override one another in order to determine the kinds of processing we do. We spend most of our time in autonomous mode, with occasional incidents propelling us into slower Algorithmic thinking, and only rarely do we have a reason to actually think about what we're doing reflectively. Stanovich has a detailed model showing the interactions, and pointing to the Reflective mind as the director that gives the signal for when to invoke the Algorithmic level. His argument seems to be that people who don't "act smart" fail to engage their Reflective layer, and so end up on auto-pilot most of the time.

The rest of the book is mainly a rehash of the literature on rationality errors, and a plea for approaches like Thaler and Sunstein's Libertarian Paternalism, which are intended to provide support for people so they can get smarter results without having to reason more clearly.

In the end, I guess I'd say that there are some interesting ideas here, but not enough to make the book worthwhile.

No Justice, No Peace

Matt Welch's Editor's column in the June issue of Reason includes this paragraph on a budget fight in Montgomery County, Maryland:

The housing bubble, with its tax-generating wealth, was already bursting in 2007. Yet as recently as 2009, Montgomery County, Maryland, decided to make "phantom" cost-of-living increases to the pensions of government workers, linking contributions to salary increases that did not occur. This sweetheart deal, which added more than $7 million to the county's annual budget (according to The Washington Post), tasted rather bitter at a time when the county's revenue was falling short of projections by more than $24 million. Yet after one Montgomery County Council member proposed eliminating this sop to the public-sector unions, four of his colleagues joined a rally on the rooftop of the council's parking garage, leading a crowd of 400 government employees in chants of "We've had enough!" and "No justice, no peace."

I boggled at the audacity of re-using the "No justice, no peace" chant in a context like this. Normally, when the left uses this chant at a rally, it's in support of a group that isn't getting fair treatment on housing or employment rights. The unstated thinking behind the chant is that societies that don't protect people's rights will find that the underprivileged are more restive. But in the mouths of public safety workers threatening to strike because outrageous privileges might be taken away, it sounds more like a threat, which I would paraphrase as "If we don't get what we want, we'll make your life hell!"

A little digging assured me that Montgomery County did rescind the pension increases eventually. Some the county council members are running on their record for having imposed fiscal austerity measures, even though they were in place for the initial largesse as well.