Seth’s blog

Edward Jay Epstein, a wonderful journalist, has just published The Hollywood Economist. I asked the publisher for a free copy. About two-thirds I’d already seen, mostly in Slate. The back cover says “Freakonomics meets Hollywood saga” but I’d say “Spy meets The New Yorker” — not that many people would understand “Spy”. It has a Spy-ish “here’s how things really are” aspect but with fewer embarrassing stories. And it has a New-Yorker-ish broad and deep view. (Epstein has often written for The New Yorker.) Like both Spy and The New Yorker it is very well-written. Although I’ve visited his website many times, I didn’t know about The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend (three books combined) nor Who Owns the Corporation: Management vs. Shareholders (69 pages). He’s currently writing a book about the 9-11 commission. From his profile: “I taught political science at MIT and UCLA for three years but then decided that researching and writing books was a far more educational enterprise.”

In an excellent talk last week about North Korea — linked to his book The Cleanest Race — Brian Myers, a professor in South Korea, said that people don’t fear dying, they fear dying without significance. Without their life having meant something. Life in North Korea is far more attractive than Americans realize, he said. The border between North Korea and China is easy to cross, and about half of the North Koreans who go to China later return, in spite of North Korea’s poverty. How does the North Korean government do such a good job under such difficult circumstances? Partly by playing up external threats (U.S. troops in South Korea), the obvious way politicians win support, but also by telling the North Korean people they are special. Maybe it plays this card because it has to — they can’t afford a police state — but there is no denying how well it works. In contrast, Myers said, the South Korean government offers its citizens no more than consumerism. That doesn’t work well, and South Korea, in spite of high per capita income, has high rates of depression and suicide.

I think the attractiveness of North Korean life has a lot to do with why Penn State students like Penn State so much. This American Life did a show about Penn State a few months ago. Life at the nation’s top party school said the description. Sounds boring, I thought, so I waited to listen to it until I’d run out of stuff to listen to. It turned out to be one of their best shows ever. Mostly it’s about the large amount of drinking — this is why they did the show — but at the very end is a short segment about how much Penn State students love their school. Not much detail but I was convinced. The attractive school cheer (”We Are Penn State”) comes up in conversation! A few people reading this won’t know that Penn State has an extremely successful football team. A large fraction of the students attend its games. After graduation, a lot of them continue to attend the games.

Here is a powerful and neglected force in human life. The bland technical term is group identity.  As the South Korea comparison indicates, governments don’t routinely use it to govern. As Penn State exceptionalism indicates, colleges don’t routinely use it either. Faculty routinely disparage football. Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education was written by a professor — of course. The Penn State chancellor seemed mystified that his students were so proud and supportive of their school. (They’re just that way, he seemed to say.) A lot of my self-experimentation has been about discovering what we need to be healthy, such as morning faces. I can’t self-experiment about this but I would if I could. It’s yet another thing that people must have routinely gotten in Stone-Age life but don’t get any more — unless you happen to be a rabid sports fan or an alumnus of a college with a sufficiently successful football team. Or live in North Korea.

• how Andrew Gelman chooses book titles
• how to buy a car
• horizontal evolution was very important
• The rise of Chinese universities. The world’s top 100 universities. In 2004, Berkeley was #2 on this list. It is now #39.
• The IPCC under siege

Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell, Tim Beneke, and Stephen Marsh.

A few years ago, Gawande wrote two articles in The New Yorker about medical innovation: The Score (about Apgar scores) and The Checklist. Since then, he has done actual research promoting the use of checklists and this book (which I got free from the publisher) is mostly the story of his contribution, with sidebars about the origin of checklists in aviation and their use in building construction. The word checklist suggests that it is all about making sure certain things get done but Gawande takes pains to say that is only half of it. The other half is helping people who don’t know each other work together — by having them introduce themselves and by making sure everyone is heard.

Use of checklists, judging by the results, is a big advance and for that reason alone this would be a solid book — the story of one person’s part in an important innovation. I am sorry he didn’t tell parts of the story that reflect badly on others — such as the Office of Human Research Protections decision that Johns Hopkins research must be stopped immediately because introducing checklists and tracking their effectiveness was dangerous. (Doctors might be embarassed by the results!) I wouldn’t expect a Harvard Med School prof to get nauseous with rage, the way Richard Harris, an earlier New Yorker writer, appropriately did in A Sacred Trust (how the AMA tried to block Medicare), but every story needs a villain. And there are plenty of villains in American medicine.

The book’s website, including Steve Levitt’s review.

I liked David Owen’s new book, Green Metropolis (free copy from publisher), as much as I thought I would. A large fraction of the environmental movement is criticized for missing the point that big cities like New York are the greenest communities in America. To make a community green you need two things: high density and great public transportation. They go together: high density makes great public transportation possible. In large chunks of New York, unlike most big American cities, it’s easy to not have a car.

The book has plenty of villains. Bill McKibben wrote one of the first books about global warming, wrote a book about cutting back on consumerism, wrote a book about having only one child (to save the earth from overpopulation), wrote a book called Hope, Human and Wild about environmentalism — yet Bill McKibben lives in a small town in upstate New York, which requires him to use a lot of energy — for heating and travel — that he wouldn’t have to use if he lived in New York City. (McKibben is my example, not Owen’s.) A great many environmentalists, Owen says, have causes or goals that have little to do with reducing energy use. They tend to see themselves as preserving the past rather than shaping the future — an excellent point. That’s something Jane Jacobs might have said and if the book has a hero, it’s her. “Jacobs’s focus was on the vibrancy of city life but the same urban qualities she identified as enhancing human interaction also greatly reduce energy consumption and waste,” Owen writes.

Owen sees himself almost as deluded as the average environmentalist. He and his family moved from Manhattan to rural New England when their daughter was one year old. How she will love the country, thought Owen. She didn’t. Walking through the country bored her far more than walking through the city. “And it [a country walk] usually has the same effect on me, although I hate to admit it,” he writes.

Why did my self-experimentation discover a lot? Because a lot remained to be discovered. The discoveries I made weren’t made by the experts who should have made them (e.g., sleep experts)  because they were too busy doing research whose main goal was to impress other people. Rather than do science that worked, they did science that looked good. It’s the same with environmentalists. Rather than do projects that work (save energy), they do projects that feel good. “Sitting indoors playing video games is easier on the environment than any number of (formerly) popular outdoor recreational activities, including most of the ones that the most committed environmentalists tend to favor for themselves,” says Owen, neatly summing up the problem.