bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with economics

For the politics/current events book club, we decided to read Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conways’ The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. It tells the very interesting story of the decades-long propaganda campaign that is market fundamentalism, which somehow made it “common sense” in America that any government action (except killing brown people) is tyrannical and too Big, while companies can never be too Big and the invisible hand of the free market can solve all our problems as long as we give it completely free rein to do whatever it wants and do not anger it by attempting to put any checks on the behavior of Big Business (which does not exist), lest it smite us, this is definitely science and not religion.

You might think that if I said I had trouble getting into this book it would be because the content about far-right libertarian bullshit was too upsetting to focus on for long periods of time. This would be incorrect! I had a hard time getting into this book initially for a few reasons, but honestly, once I got past then and well into the far-right libertarian bullshit, I got much more engaged.

The first stumbling block for me was just that this book is 500 fucking pages long, and I have way too much assigned reading this year. This is entirely my own fault, as I am doing my yearly longread, Whale Weekly, the Monday history class, one Vorkosigan Saga book each month, and the Year of Erics, in addition to whatever book we pick each month for this book club. As a result I have discovered the limits of my tolerance for assigned reading projects and am starting to get resentful that I have no fucking time to just browse my own bookshelves and make impulsive decisions about what to read next. This is not actually a problem with the book itself. For the past eight years of this book club I have usually been the one getting excited about reading big 500-page-plus chonkers about upsetting things; it is unusual that I have put myself in a spot where the idea of reading anything for this book club that’s more than 200 pages long has me glaring balefully at my TBR shelves that I cannot squeeze in the time for.

The second stumbling block is that this book is very carefully aimed at a specific audience, which is moderate American liberals who may or may not consider themselves progressive but are at least open to the idea that “progressive” is a normal and legitimate political position for an American to hold, but anything further left that than would self-evidently be Too Far. So a lot of the book, especially right in the beginning, is devoted to covering its flank from right criticism by assuring the reader repeatedly that they’re not socialists, none of what they’re advocating is socialism, the right wing made them up, the socialists probably aren’t real and can’t hurt you. A fair amount of this is factually correct in that there is indeed a lot of room between far-right anarcho-capitalism and total central planning, and that for at least the last 30 years nearly the entirety of human politics has existed in that vast middle ground. But the constant assurances of Not Being Socialist and the obvious veneration for finding Reasonable Middle Grounds is just really fucking annoying as a reader who actually is a socialist.

Anyway, once we get past all the fucking framing, the content is very interesting. The book is very long because there is quite a lot of information there, some of which I was sort of familiar with, and some of which was not. I found the most interesting stuff to be the development of basically the right-wing version of “vulgar Marxism,” where American goons took the at least somewhat nuanced writings of folks like Hayek and Adam Smith and wrote “condensed” or “study” versions that conveniently left out all the bits where these writers acknowledged that market failure were ever real or that there was ever a role for government in doing anything about it. The chapter about Rose Wilder Lane and her hand in editing the Little House on the Prairie books–plus her own writing, which was much less successful because it was mostly just psychotically hard-right polemic–was also fascinating as someone who read the Little House on the Prairie books and reasonably enjoyed them but never got super into them the way I got into, say, American Girl or Dear America.

Anyway, this book could probably have gotten down to 400 pages if it was just the content and not all the framing and argumentation so much, and I personally would have enjoyed it better that way, but that is also not how books are structured, especially not ones where you are specifically attempting to advance an argument for political purposes and not just dump info on people. I would have preferred the infodump because I am slightly out of range of the audience for this book, but there are probably more people within the intended audience for this book than there are people like me, so fair play to the authors, I guess, but this is my review and I get to complain about the bits I didn’t like. Socialism is a scare word used in deeply dishonest ways by the right wing but it is also a real political project and people should be more normal about actual socialists existing and even being correct about stuff, thanks so much.

My yearlong read for 2022 was Capital: Volume 1 by the inestimable Karl Marx, because I figured that after five years of doing socialism it was high time I actually read it. I’d read some of the earliest chapters way back in the day when I first got involved, but was only able to make two or three book group meetings before I basically gave up going. This I think prepared me a little bit for the first few chapters on this read, since they are the densest and most difficult to follow, so it was nice to have this be the second attempt.

From a modern perspective, the experience of actually reading the book is very uneven. Some parts of it are perfectly easy to read, describing the conditions in various industries and the history of attempts to improve them. Others are harder to read because they involve more abstract theoretical stuff about value that takes some concentration to get one’s head around. And other parts of it are just tough to read because they are responses to other writings by various political economists and journalists and commentators whose opinions nobody still cares about. Marx spends plenty of time rebutting the ideas of people who are still considered influential, like Adam Smith and Richard Malthus, but apparently there were also a lot of two-bit chatterers participating in The Discourse in the 1860s and Marx was determined to rebut every last one of them.

That said, it was a very valuable and often entertaining read. Some of the incredible length is because Marx does try to repeat stuff until you get it, which I found helpful for remembering what everything means. I am still not sure I could give you an accurate off-the-cuff definition of “valorization of capital” but there are a lot of other little bits of Marxist discourse that make more sense now that I’ve seen them fitted into one big framework. I do feel sort of like I should go back and read it all again until more of it sticks (1,200 pages of content is a lot to remember) but more seriously I think if I do read it again, I should probably read it alongside one of those companion/explainer works.

The other thing I’m tempted to do is jump right into Volume 2 for next year’s read, but I think I will give myself a break and try to tackle one of the books that’s been sitting on my TBR shelf for years instead. Maybe I’ll read Volume 2 for 2024.

Back when we read Silvia Federici's Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women for the political book club, we also determined that for October, it being the spooky month, we were going to read Caliban and the Witch. And then we did!

Caliban and the Witch is not real long, but it is real dense. Not necessarily linguistically dense, although it is an academic work so it tends to do stuff like use "misogynous" instead of "misogynistic," which probably has some theoretical distinction that I'm not really aware of, but which does tend to mark the book as Doin A Srs Bsns in a way that I'm not always super fond of. But it's not hard to read. It's just hard to read fast, because there is a lot of very chewy material that really needs some time to be absorbed.

Once it's absorbed, though, it's the kind of stuff that reorients your entire understanding of the relationship between gender and capitalism. There's a whole bunch of stuff in the book that I sort of knew, whether from hearing other people discuss Caliban and the Witch or because Federici has been very influential over the past few decades, but having it all laid out instead of filtered in secondhand in bits and pieces makes a real difference.

We had a pretty meaty, packed discussion, and I feel like I already said most of what I have to say about it and now my brain is too tired to write all my thoughts out again. Or possibly I feel like I am too dumb to risk committing analysis about Federici to writing? No, I'm pretty sure that if I'd read this on my own and sat down to write a review in a timely manner, I'd have rambled out like a dozen pages.

Anyway, my favorite line in the whole book was when she pointed out that magic has been sort of "allowed" to return now that the project of imposing capitalist work-discipline on the populace has been so thoroughly completed, and mentioned that "even the most devoted consumer of astral charts will automatically consult the watch before going to work." I have little interest in astrology but as a tarot dork I must reluctantly admit that I will never skip work due to a bad Golden Thread draw (it would be awesome if I could, though, since Golden Thread is the world's crankiest and most negative tarot program). And the word "consumer" in there also hints towards a whole other discussion about the commodification of the witch figure and commodified resistance generally, which I think is especially pertinent in our current age of "witchcraft as self-care" combined with the coopting of self-care by the wellness industry. It is also pertinent to me personally as someone who lives within going-broke distance of Salem and is a huge sucker for its whole general Goth Disneyland tourist-trappy New Age scene (seriously, don't ask me how much money I spent in Salem this fall). There are also a lot of implications here for how we write magic in fiction, trying to make it fit modern ideas about what makes "sense" and is logically consistent, and how that doesn't tend to look much like precapitalist magic "traditions" at all.

The second half of the book focuses more on the "Caliban" part of "Caliban and the witch," tying the land enclosures and other early capitalist happenings in Europe to the colonization of the New World and the genocidally massive labor needs of that project. There's some real fascinating stuff in there about the ways in which European settlers engineered the imposition of their (awful) ideas about family, gender, childhood, etc. onto indigenous peoples as part and parcel of breaking their solidarity and their resistance to colonial rule.

I really can't recommend this book highly enough if you're interested in feminism and capitalism and witchy shit, not because it is perfect (it's not; there's some goofy historical "details" in there of questionable sourcing), but because it provides some important grounding for understanding a lot of modern socialist feminist thought and it will influence how you think about subjects of accumulation, reproductive labor, scientific progress, work-discipline, and a host of other issues.

For the last politics book club, we read David Graeber's influential book of economic history Debt: The First 5,000 Years. This book is 400 pages long plus notes, and I must admit that I did not finish it by the day of the book club, so I unfortunately had to skip it. I did, however, finish reading the book eventually, because it was really good.

By now, the very basics of Debt don't seem as groundbreaking as they did 10 years ago, because of how influential the book has been. The "Debt came before money" thesis was also presented in Varoufakis' Talking to my Daughter About the Economy, which we read last year.

This book sometimes seems to go all over the place, doing Cool Anthropological Anecdotes of the sort that Body Ritual Among the Nacirema makes fun of, but they are indeed cool, and they certainly do support the basic point that the neat progression of the history of money presented in most mainstream economics textbooks is a just-so story that doesn't even seem to take place anywhere in particular. I enjoyed them, even if they did wander a bit away from the actual central analytical theses about how debt and money function *now* and what that means.

The stuff that is more immediately politically relevant is... well, it's very, very politically relevant. Even if you don't agree with all of Graeber's politics, this is the stuff that makes the book a must-read, just as a way of looking at debt and economics completely differently from how it's usually discussed in mainstream economics. He ties debt and debt moralizing into not just neocolonialism, which a lot of leftist writers have been pointing out for a while now (and they are ALL CORRECT), but also national debt and monetary policy and the military-industrial complex and a bunch of other stuff. I cannot really do the insights here justice at the moment, since I have been absolutely slammed both at work and in activism and have gone so pudding-brained that I just told someone I live in a different neighborhood than I actually do, so intelligent commentary on Graeber's cycles of history is a bit beyond me right now.

I will admit that the first thing that caught my eye about Talking to My Daughter About the Economy was the title. It reminded me of being in the car on the way to school, back when I went to school up in Mountain Lakes, and listening to my dad explain concepts like business cycles, the structure of student loan repayment plans, why credit cards aren't money, and, of course, surety bonds. There were simplified lessons on Keynesian macroeconomic theories, heavily seasoned with Grateful Dead lyrics, because that's how my dad talks. So the Meandering Fatherly Lecture is a medium of learning about economics that I am very comfortable with--much more comfortable than trying to chew through actual academic economics texts--and so I was quite curious about what other teenage girls' Lessons On Economics From Dad sounded like, especially when the dad is a Marxist. (My dad is a fairly mainstream New Dealer/social democrat sort. I also got some bonus Dad Lectures from various Chamber of Commerce Republican dads on occasion, since the North Jersey suburb I grew up in was heavily populated by banking professionals. But if there were any Marxist dads around, they didn't feel nearly as free to lecture on economics around other people's kids as the Republicans did.)

Yanis Varoufakis, short-lived finance minister for the Syriza government in Greece, is one of a fairly limited number of dads out there whose dadly ramblings to their children about The Economy are actually worth reproducing for the general public. This is not only because a limited number of dads have ever served as national finance ministers in times of great crisis; most of those guys probably aren't worth listening to about economics either, if the state of the world financial system is anything to go by. But the list of dads who are left-wing finance ministers with Ph.D.s in economics and specializations in game theory--in my limited experience, a field with an unfortunate penchant for attracting hordes of libertarian fanboys, although perhaps it's different at the actually-studying-at-Ph.D.-level end--who can also still write in a concise and accessible style is very, very short.

Which brings us to Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: Or, How Capitalism Works--And How It Fails, just published in English this summer after having been published in its original Greek five years ago, and nearly every other major language in the interim. Why English held out so long--why it was so important for English speakers not to learn about the economy from a left-wing perspective that a reasonably bright preteen could understand--is surely a great mystery.

Despite the subtitle, Varoufakis doesn't tend to use terms like "capitalism" or "socialism" in this book. He doesn't use a lot of the traditional left-wing vocabulary, and he only uses mainstream economic vocabulary in order to explain what it means, and then goes back to talking about it in whatever way makes the most sense to him. The book also covers a bit more than just capitalism; the earliest chapters talk about the origins of the economy--any economy--and the inventions of debt, currency (yes, in that order), writing, the state, and markets. Then he explains how Europe went from a feudal economy with markets to an actual market economy, and the contradictions and absurdities that arise from having an entire society organized around markets. From here we get into a lot of the current hot topics, such as why capitalism makes automation bad when it ought to be good, the role of trust (and distrust) in markets, public debt, why market crashes are inevitable, how the labor markets and the money markets differ from the goods and services markets, how central banks work, why banking amplifies market destabilization, and the role of state violence in creating the conditions for the creation and accumulation of private wealth. All of these concepts are laid out in clear, accessible language, and explained with the help of numerous pop culture references, leading to subheads like "The Matrix and Karl Marx," which sounds like it ought to be dumb but is actually a perfectly reasonable point about how the mechanization of labor tends to generate a crisis before the machines fully "take over." Varoufakis seems to like Greek myth, Gothic classics, and modern sci-fi, so the references he uses manage to be even more familiar to me than my own dad's Grateful Dead lyrics. The one time he does use the word "socialism" it is to sneak in a quote by my longtime fave Oscar Wilde. This stuff is extremely my jam.

Even though I actually understood everything on the first go-round (which cannot be said for everything I read about banking), I do think this would be worth reviewing periodically, just to make sure that I, too, can explain public debt in a way that anybody can understand. This is essentially Varoufakis' goal, which he states right from the beginning: Not to popularize economics the way we usually understand it, where we learn to follow along with what the experts are doing, but to make economics reachable for regular people, because it is entirely too important to leave to the economists, most of whom think they're a lot more scientific than they really are just because they came up with some mathy-looking charts and models and stuff.

There is also a really excellent section on the perils of trying to make banking and money and general financial stuff suck less by trying to make it not political, which he argues is impossible, and trying to do so only makes it more undemocratic and unaccountable. The most excellent part of this excellent section is its takedown of bitcoin, a thing I have to constantly deal with people being very bullish about at my day job. My employer is paid in bitcoin on some of our accounts, which means I get cranky every time the value of bitcoin goes up 500% overnight and there's still not enough money to give me a raise, but I digress.

As is becoming sort of traditional for left-leaning books that try to cover a wide range of subjects, one of the very last sections of the book situates all the rest of it in its largest possible context, which is that we're killing off the entire planet. Chapter 8, titled "Stupid viruses?" talks a little about the unsustainable expansionist logic of capitalism but mostly talks about the two major approaches to fighting climate change--privatization and decommodification--and explains why market-based "solutions" to fighting climate change, like creating pollution "markets," however tightly regulated, are basically futile, and that it's very convenient that the proponents of these solutions would just have to own the whole world in order to "save" it under these plans.

Varoufakis' prescription for the staggering inequality and technocratic stupidity currently threatening to melt the world is, simply, "democratize everything," including democratization of the monetary and banking systems, democratizing the European Union, and generally refusing to leave economics to the experts. Of course, this is a lot easier said than done, otherwise we probably would have done it already, but it's still important to say since a lot of folks really do seem to be quite dedicated to going in the other direction. And, as Varoufakis reminds us, Star Trek teaches us that resistance is never futile.

Current Mood: awake

Sometimes, one has to admit defeat. For example, despite my intention to read every book ever written, I am definitely not going to ever actually read Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I'm possibly never going to finish reading the Capital that was about the nineteenth century either, and that one's mostly written in prose rather than in math.

Instead, on Adam's suggestion, the politics book club decided we could probably survive reading Piketty's The Economics of Inequality, which at a little over a hundred pages is a more plausible goal for laypeople. It's still a little on the dense side if you're not an economist--Piketty is an academic, not a financial reporter like Michael Lewis or Matt Taibbi--but it's manageable, and there are even some comments that could pass for humor in it.

Piketty seems to be writing from a leftist perspective as Americans understand it, in that he takes goals of social justice to be valid goals and appears to be generally anti-immiserating-the-working-classes-for-fun-and-profit, but the focus of the book is really less of a how-to or polemic and more an attempt to examine the empirical data, such as it can be determined, about how inequality functions. He talks a bit about the differences between political timescales and historical timescales, in addition to examining a number of factors that influence inequality both along the capital/labor split and within wage scales. A lay reader who hates charts (like me) may get a bit lost when looking at the charts, but will still learn important concepts, the different kinds of distribution (efficient vs. pure, direct vs. fiscal transfer). He briefly covers some of the successes and failures of different kinds of redistributive efforts over the past century or so, although this portion of the book, near the end, is very brief indeed. The country Piketty writes about the most is France, which made me very aware of how US-centric my own understanding of How Nonfiction Works is--everything is about the US unless it's about the UK, right? The countries Piketty talks about most after France are the US and the UK and something still felt fundamentally weird to me, like "France, that's pretty random!" even though Piketty is French and I know this.

I didn't take notes while reading (because I never take notes on anything) but I think it might be worth it to give the book at least another skim before book club (even though I never reread anything anymore either), if only because I have to come up with questions. Anyway, it's not as salacious as reading about the Koch brothers' Nazi babysitter, but it's probably more important if you're interested in workable leftist policy.

Covering gambling news on the day-to-day, I sometimes feel like the industry doesn't change nearly fast enough. It's been almost seven years since Black Friday, and only three U.S. states — Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware — offer regulated online poker. (Soon to be four, thanks to Pennsylvania, but not soon enough.) Some states, like California, seem to bang their head against the same wall every year and get nowhere. And of course, we're all biting our nails waiting to see what the Supreme Court decides about PASPA, and when they'll get around to deciding if legalized sports betting could actually become reality in the U.S.

But, despite all of the above, it's actually quite a rapidly changing industry. It's worth it, every now and again, to look back at how we got where we are and appreciate just how much batty stuff has happened over the course of gambling's establishment as a legitimate entertainment industry.

Enter David Clary's Gangsters to Governors: The New Bosses of Gambling in America, which was published in October from Rutgers University Press. Clocking in at about 250 pages (plus a lot of notes), this new history of American gambling focuses first on how gaming fell under the control of crime syndicates, and then on how the state drove those elements out, turning control of the industry over to "clean" private corporations, Indian nations and the states themselves. Clary also provides a nuanced, even-handed analysis of the pros and cons of states' use of gaming revenues to balance their budgets.

***

I posted a book review over at the day job.

I'd been wanting to have the politics book group read Jane Mayer's Dark Money since I first started the group, and we finally had a big enough gap between meetings that it made sense to read it, since it's almost 500 pages long. A lot of folks opted out of reading it. Some of the people that are reading it have been unable to finish it due to the sheer unrelenting awfulness of its subject matter. In short, the reaction to this book works pretty well as a microcosm for how we ended up in the sort of shit we're in, because it turns out that most normal human brains are actually incapable of dealing with how bad things can be, leaving not enough people to deal with them.

This is a constant theme within the book as well, but we'll get to that in a bit.

Anyway. The book's full title is Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, and it is mostly about the Koch Brothers, but it is also about all their cartoon villain billionaire friends and the pieceashit grifter minions they dole out wingnut welfare to.

The first thing we learn about the Kochs is that they are deeply screwed-up people. Their nanny was a Nazi and their father was a John Birch Society conspiracy theorist who got rich building oil refineries for Stalin and Hitler. It is a mark of how much I already hate the Kochs even by page 34 that this information managed to lower my opinion of Stalin. In addition to being the second-most-genocidal leader of the 20th century, he gave Fred fuckin' Koch his first half-million dollars in the middle of the Great Depression. I hope Trotsky is torturing you with an ice pick forevermore in the afterlife, asshole. Fred Koch then built an oil refinery in Hamburg that the Nazis used to fuel their war machine, and he built some oil refineries in the U.S. that the government used to fuel the U.S. Air Force planes to bomb the Hamburg refinery, because being a war profiteering fossil fuel baron that sells to both sides is just the sort of person you need to be to wind up with kids like Charles and David Koch.

The Koch family's history of political organizing is an enlightening tour through the history of mid-twentieth-century racism, conspiracy theories, and culty ancap scams. The Kochs thought Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist. (Is this because he built the interstate system? Which was actually the least Communist thing ever, because cars are consumerist and individualistic and lefties love mass transit, and also because it was for the purpose of easier movement of military trucks and tanks?) (Wait, some Communists love tanks. Thanks for the highways, Comrade Ike!) Charles Koch eventually decided the John Birch Society's conspiracy theories were a bit gauche and instead started taking "classes" at anarchocapitalist theorist Robert LeFevre's "Freedom School." He started recruiting all his friends whether they liked it or not, and successfully indoctrinated his younger brother David. David was actually only one of three other brothers; the other two Koch brothers are not quite as terrible, although still terrible. One of them seems almost not-terrible, like, useless but also mostly harmless, being mostly into restoring historic houses and art collecting and that sort of thing, so obviously the other brothers basically disowned him, accusing him of being gay (this is an accusation when you're a right-wing "libertarian") and cutting him out of the family business.

This is because the family business is being awful. Like, officially it's a fossil fuel refining business, which is pretty awful to start with, but they really do seem to be on an ongoing quest to top their humble beginnings of refining oil for genocidal dictators. The company repeatedly fell afoul of labor, workplace safety, and environmental regulations, fueling the brothers' belief that they are being unfairly persecuted by a socialist nanny state infringing upon their rights as superior humans to hemorrhage poisons into the air and blow up teenagers like Danielle Smalley and Jason Stone with leaking, corroded gas pipelines. They've also bought up a bunch of other companies that make ubiquitous cheap crap so that it's almost possible for an American citizen to not patronize them, and eventually they got into our lovely bloated financial services industry, probably since that's where all the money in the entire economy that they weren't personally sitting on already went.

After introducing us to the Kochs and their terrifying family history, Mayer dedicates a bunch of chapters to other important right-wing libertarian assbags who have used they money to buy politicians, fellowships, fake "grassroots" groups that put out agitprop, private detectives to harass their political opponents, and other shady shit. These cretins include Richard Mellon Scaife, the dude behind the Arkansas Project and the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that everyone laughed at Hillary Clinton for saying exists (Hillary Clinton's right-wing-conspiracy-identifying skills are pretty much inversely proportional to how helpful identifying them is, which is frustrating); John M. Olin, who spearheaded funding conservative research at otherwise respectable institutions to try to stop them from doing scary liberal things like care about black students and whose shady-ass foundation did shady-ass things like function as a bank for the CIA for almost a decade; and Lynde and Harry Bradley, whose Bradley Foundation continued to fund "research" by pseudointellectual cronies like Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a noxious bit of warmed-over eugenics theory, who is most recently back in the headlines for getting overenthusiastically protested by a bunch of students who are tired of rich assholes deliberately funding racists showing up at their homes to tell them they're genetically inferior (the headlines mostly focus on how illiberal and Bad For Academic Freedom it is for the students to object, not for outside rich assholes to be able to seed colleges with intellectually bankrupt pseudoscience). Later in the book we also meet such delightful humans as Art Pope, they guy who spearheaded North Carolina's transformation into a gerrymandered-to-death clusterfuck (we'd already read a bit about North Carolina's issues with being a gerrymandered clusterfuck in Give Us the Ballot and in the Moral Mondays chapter of Necessary Trouble), and Betsy DeVos, now lamentably our Secretary of Education because we're living in the worst timeline.

It's difficult to get across without reading the book just to what extent all of the billionaires who fund the Kochtopus come off as not only dreadful political actors, but also as grossly nasty and un-self-aware people. While they are mostly driven by pure greed and clearly view all non-billionaires as lesser lifeforms akin to some type of moderately useful bugs, it turns out that many of these libertarian Ubermenschen are also pretty racist. They also are very invested in the idea that they are Private Citizens and therefore there is nothing shady about them secretly spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fake a political movement and completely thwart American democracy (the one thing the Kochs have failed to do thus far is make anyone actually like their political agenda). They get extremely butthurt whenever journalists dare do things like follow the No. 1 rule of journalism and start to follow the money. Then the Kochs hire private detectives to dig through their trash, a thing they also do to lawyers when, say, their employees' families sue them for wrongful deaths and stuff.

Where are the Democrats in all of this? Well, the Kochs may have dedicated themselves to only taking over the Republican party and thought that Obama was a radical Kenyan Muslim socialist (I wish) (#Ellison2020), but the rules the business class have gotten rewritten for their own benefit over the decades have certainly put the loyal opposition in a position of being dependent upon the goodwill of their perennially butthurt donor class, who just don't understand why the little people are mad at them just because the gambled the world economy away? It wasn't our fault, man, and we won't do it again, we don't need any adult supervision, stop being mean. An ongoing theme over the course of several decades is that the Democrats are never quite prepared for what's coming next and every new batch of fresh-faced young Democrats who come in thinking they're going to fix things ends up being shocked and just how much opposition they run into. Which, like, I can see how it's frustrating, but it's not surprising; this is why "Is our Democrats learning?" has been a joke on the netroots for like fifteen years now. But more than the candidates themselves, the good info here is about the donors and the strategists, so that the reader knows that, for example, while Neera Tanden is currently on some of the crankier economically progressive folks' shit list, she was in support of more progressive policies than smug garbage fire advisors like David Plouffe, who was more concerned with appearing centrist than with actual good policy and referred to more liberal people in the party as "bedwetters" whenever they had the goddamn sense to be worried that not enacting desperately needed Keynesian policies might negatively affect the party's electoral fortunes (turns out the bedwetters were right and the Democrats continue to be the Mozarts of losing). But as gratifying as it may be to read that, for example, Hillary Clinton was so upset by the "sequester" budget that she had to leave the room when it was unveiled, the fact remains that the Democrats on the whole have gotten caught napping way too many times in a row and have been woefully ineffective as a loyal opposition. We read about this in more depth in Give Us the Ballot; it pops up again here because initiatives like Citizens United, REDMAP, and the suit where the Supreme Court vacated the Voting Rights Act were all funded by various tentacles of the Kochtopus.

Perhaps the Democratic Party candidates and behind-the-scenes folks had the same problem that my reading group did: In addition to just only being able to take so much, they tend toward a liberal worldview that's rooted in the idea that people are fundamentally good and capable of rational thought. As a result, the horrors of actual reality don't integrate easily into their minds. Perhaps it's time for the Dems to invest in some crankier people, not even necessarily as a move further left policy-wise, but just so they can stop hope-and-faith-in-the-American-people-ing their way out of being able to even see what they're up against. Maybe the election of Trump, which took pieces of human garbage like Betsy Devos out of the shadows and into the spotlight, will finally help it sink in that the Republican party has, in fact, been fully taken over by a cancerous tentacly parasite that cannot be reasoned with, has no sense of the greater good, and will not stop until it has destroyed all of society so Charles Koch (or possibly his ghost, propped up by money) can sit upon the ashes and proclaim himself God-emperor of Kochland, at least until climate change kills us all.

...Oh, man, I didn't even get to talk about the climate change stuff. You all know that rich fossil fuel barons have Astroturfed the entire climate change denial movement, right? This is a thing that everyone knows is a fact and is not really up for interpretation or debate, it's just what happened? Good. Because that's what happened. And so far we've let it.

God help us all.

The April 3 issue of The New Yorker was the "Health, Medicine & The Body" issue, and it features a number of really strong pieces of medtech-related reporting in varying degrees of not-for-the-squeamish. But for me, the most upsetting article in the whole issue was Tad Friend's excellently creepy "The God Pill: Silicon Valley's quest for eternal life," a look into the field of longevity/immortality research.

While much of what Friend reports on in the article is a little weird on its face—there are some, uh, colorful characters involved in this line of work—what I found to be the most disturbing aspect of the 10-page longread was what wasn't discussed: The inequalities in health care access and health care outcomes in America.

The article opens at a longevity symposium held in some dude's house, and there are three types of people in attendance: Scientists, movie stars, and venture capitalists. The scientists are obviously there because those are the people who do the science, and this is a scientific topic. The movie stars... I could probably write a whole post about Hollywood culture and why these people want to be young and lovely forever, but I'll spare you that rant for now.

The venture capitalists are where it gets weird.

According to how capitalism works, it shouldn't be weird, because longevity advancement is an interesting research/technology problem, and it is the job of venture capitalists to provide capital for interesting ventures. So if you just think of the venture capitalists as sources of funding for the project, it's cool that they're there: It indicates that the project might get funded, and improving longevity is probably a better use of capital than developing a $400 machine that squeezes bags of juice or reinventing the bus.

This, however, is a simplistic view of venture capitalists. It ignores who they are as people: mainly, really, really rich ones.

Here is a fun fact about rich people that does not appear in Friend's article but had also been making the news that week: Rich people in the U.S. already live an average of 15 years longer than poor people. The research, published in the most recent edition of The Lancet, concluded that this was due to our inefficient, expensive for-profit health care system, and the researchers suggested that we adopt a single-payer system like a real country.

If venture-capital-funded researchers develop a way to increase longevity or induce immortality, it's likely to be a pretty expensive medical treatment, because currently all medical treatment is expensive but new stuff is the most expensive. It would possibly not even be covered by insurance, because insurance companies never cover anything if they can find a way out of it, which means it could end up being available only to people who are already wealthy enough to pay for it out of pocket.

So then the gap between the richest 1% and everyone else would expand to a lot more than 15 years, with billionaires living forever and everyone else being subjected to normal human frailty and dying of stupid things like humans have always done. The extra lifespan would allow people wealthy enough to buy eternal life even more time to work on consolidating their fortunes and other forms of power, leading to a society ruled by a small cadre of immortal oligarchs with decades or centuries of experience in squeezing every last resource from an oppressed underclass of normal humans.

This is the premise for a bunch of shitty vampire apocalypse stories.

Bill Maris, founder of Google Ventures, is interviewed in the article and gives us the closest thing to a recognition of access and distribution issues that we get, which is this quote: "This is not about Silicon Valley billionaires living forever off the blood of young people. It's about a 'Star Trek' future where no one dies of preventable diseases, where life is fair."

Neither Maris nor Friend further discuss how to get to a Star Trek future where no one dies of preventable diseases. Instead, the article goes into a discussion of the state of the field of parabiosis, an area of research in which Silicon Valley billionaires attempt to retard aging by injecting themselves with the blood of young people.

One of the most well-known wannabe vampire oligarchs is libertarian douchebro Peter Thiel, who got rich writing code for moving money around and now thinks he's the smartest dude ever. Thiel is apparently worried that one lifetime won't be enough time to cause sufficient damage to democracy, the free press, and society in general.

The Master vampire from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Master vampire from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Peter Thiel, basically

This brings us to my other big issue with venture capitalists: Not only do they already siphon enough years off the lifespans of the poor, but they are frequently either greedy arrogant humans, just plain fuckin' weird, or some combination thereof.

This is actually discussed at great length in the article, making it a fascinating character study as well as an interesting scientific piece. Right at the beginning, when the venture capitalists are introduced, they're not introduced as being there to consider funding: The first line we read about them is "The venture capitalists were keeping slim to maintain their imposing vitality," because venture capitalists see themselves as Randian Captains of Industry and Masters of the Universe and all that insufferable nonsense instead of as humans who have a lot of money. So apparently they feel a need to look like the Ubermenschen they think they are. (You'd think being rich as Croesus would liberate you from giving a shit what people think about your looks, but this is apparently not the case in ~~Uncanny~~ Silicon Valley.)

It's pretty clear that most of the folks profiled here, Maris' protest to the contrary notwithstanding, are interested in this eternal life thing because they personally want to live forever. Sergey Brin of Google is apparently determined to prove wrong a book about anti-aging research that says he's going to die (although in fairness, it must be weird to have a book single you out personally for something so universal). Other fun quotes from the piece include, from an unnamed scientist, "This is as self-serving as the Medici building a Renaissance chapel in Italy, but with a little extra Silicon Valley narcissism thrown in. It’s based on the frustration of many successful rich people that life is too short: ‘We have all this money, but we only get to live a normal life span,’" and from one Dr. Rando (who is named, it's just that his name is Rando), "I’ve had a lot of meetings with young billionaires in Silicon Valley, and they all, to varying degrees, want to know when the secrets are coming out, both so they can get in on the next big thing and so they can personally take advantage of them."

Two other main themes keep popping up in the characterization of these vampire capitalist types. One is that they are dooftastic, mediocre nerdboys. Many of them are probably pretty smart in whatever type of smart let them become rich, but since I am smart in ways that are the opposite of things that let you become rich—such as, for example, literary criticism of spec fic—the one thing I get to be really smug about when reading this is just how simplistic their sci-fi inspirations are. The vague hand-waving about a Star Trek future has already been mentioned, and I'd probably want to leave it up to the many lefties who are better versed in Star Trek specifically than I am to explain how we're never going to get to a Trek-like economy, let alone develop fully automated luxury gay space communism, if we leave stuff up to Peter Thiel. (Another article in this issue does discuss fully automated luxury diagnostics; it doesn't talk much about health insurance either, but it doesn't seem like such a big omission there.) However, there's also a lady who has commissioned a "mindclone" robot of her wife, despite the fact that we don't have the technology to do that yet; a guy who had a 3-D scan of his brain done and a model of it made, despite the fact that we're nowhere near close to bridging the gap in understanding between the physical structure of the brain and our actual consciousness so who knows if that scan will even be good when we do understand what we're looking for; and a dude who goes on for a bit about turning people into Marvel superheroes. Maris also gives a quote about genies that serves mostly to illustrate that he's never read a single goddamn story about genies, ever, in his goddamn life:

“Imagine you found a lamp on the beach, and a genie came out and granted you a wish,” Maris said. “If you were clever, your first wish would be for unlimited wishes.” As Doerr nodded, Maris continued, “Let’s say you’re going to live, at most, another thirty years.” Doerr had just turned sixty. “If each day is a wish, that’s only between one and ten thousand wishes. I don’t know about you, but I want to add more—I want to add wishes faster than they’re taken away.”

The other thing that keeps popping up, which could theoretically be considered a subset of them being dooftastic mediocre nerds, is an utter and all-encompassing inability to grasp the concept of something not being a computer. They just cannot do it. It's most plainly stated in this anecdote right at the beginning of the article:

Joon Yun, a doctor who runs a health-care hedge fund, announced that he and his wife had given the first two million dollars toward funding the challenge. “I have the idea that aging is plastic, that it’s encoded,” he said. “If something is encoded, you can crack the code.” To growing applause, he went on, “If you can crack the code, you can hack the code!”

And from there it just keeps going. Friend reports that most of the "immortalists" come from tech backgrounds, and that most of them view aging as "entropy demolishing a machine." The CEO of one startup profiled chirpily offers that "Biotech is something a lot of V.C.s don't understand" as part of her explanation for why she's optimistic about raising her next round of venture financing.

Some of the people interviewed here do seem willing to put their copious amounts of money where their mouths are, in a literal sense, by popping a lot of experimental pills, as well as injecting themselves with stuff. I'm not really sure if I should be giving them credit for committing to their beliefs or just appalled at the self-experimentation.

I do know that I am not comfortable with any of these folks becoming my new vampire overlords.

One of the big issues with wealth inequality is the way it snowballs. Wealth is both a reward for playing the game right and a tool that helps you play the game better and acquire more wealth. The rich, despite not needing as much government help because have their own money, already collect $130,000 more in lifetime government benefits than poor people due to the gap in lifespan. If immortality becomes available, but inequalities in health care access remain, it's clear that only the rich will get to be immortal, and it'll only trickle down to the rest of us as much as they think is convenient to allow. I suspect that the resource-hoarding advantage the already-wealthy early adopters will have will ensure that that's not very far.

Current Mood: contemplative

After the election, I decided to start a book club.

The first meeting is in January, well before inauguration. For our first book, we picked Sarah Jaffe's Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.

Necessary Trouble covers a bunch of the different protest/activist movements that have arisen in the U.S. since the financial crisis hit in 2008: Starting with the Tea Party, it moves on chapter by chapter to cover Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Our Homes, the Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, Moral Mondays, and a number of climate actions. The section on climate actions, mostly the anti-fracking movement, are kept for the end of the book so that it ends on a maximally apocalyptic note: These are the people fighting government's attempts to literally burn the earth and poison people to make a buck.

Jaffe contextualizes each movement in terms of the events and policies that led up to it being born, often giving recap that go far back into the history of capitalism and of the United States. She ties that in with the stories of activists within each movement, providing in-depth interviews about how and why they got involved and what the movement means to them.

A couple key themes continually emerge. One is that many of these crises have been a long time coming and will not be easily solved. Another is a theme among the activists that so many of them found themselves ashamed of being in the sorts of situations that instigated these movements--of losing their jobs or retirement savings in the financial crash, of being foreclosed on, of holding student debt. Americans really, really want to be hard-working and self-sufficient, and this is part of what's allowed things to get as bad as they have: People will tell themselves that they should individually work harder to overcome whatever's being thrown at them instead of insisting upon being treated fairly, which we tend to believe sounds like petulant whining--that if someone's treating you unfairly, you should be awesome enough to make them treat you fairly, instead of complaining that they're not. The result of this is that the powers that be have been able to tilt the playing field ENORMOUSLY in their own favor before folks who see themselves as average hardworking Americans are willing to admit that they haven't been able to overcome the enormous structural disadvantages they've been put at and maybe you fuckers should just stop stacking the deck. Americans are highly prone to believing that there is still shame in losing even if the other guy was cheating, because you should have been awesome enough to stop the other guy from cheating you.

The book is very hopeful--hopeful that Americans are willing to learn and to organize and to come together in solidarity to get into "good trouble" and demand change. But it also warns of the temptations of the dark side of populism, the scapegoating, tribalist kind illustrated by Trump, who had not yet been, to our eternal shame and possibly to the end of our democracy, barely elected on a technicality with some help via cheating. (And yeah, in true American fashion, I'm pretty ashamed that the Clinton campaign couldn't still beat him even with the cheating, because he's the worst con man ever.) The hopefulness is alternately infectious--Americans have been organizing and fighting; we'll be able to do it more--and depressing. Frankly, the emotional whiplash is a little hard to take.

I learned a lot, though, even as someone who tried to follow these movements relatively closely on social media when they first happened. (For example, I didn't know that Lehman Brothers had gotten its start selling security bonds on slaves--honestly, and this is probably stupid of me, I hadn't realized you could create any sort of financial instruments with slaves as collateral, even though now that I think about it that's precisely what the "chattel" designation means. And I hadn't realized how much of what some of these banks got up to in the mortgage crisis was actually fraud--as in, already illegal--rather than just goddamn stupid.) And the book is so well-written that even though its subject matter is so heavy, it'll make you want to get out into the streets and crash your Congresscritter's next town hall. (My Congressman doesn't have a Town Hall scheduled so I called his office and asked him to have one. Le sigh.)

Highly recommended reading for the resistance. I can't wait to discuss it at book club.

Book: Life's a Gamble by Mike Sexton

Review is here.

I kind of didn't want to read Disrupted.

I heard a lot about it because it takes place right around here, so it was getting a lot of press in the regional news; some of the reviews were also getting sent around a certain part of my social circle; namely, the part I developed when I worked at a hip and dysfunctional marketing tech startup in Boston. It was not HubSpot, but many of the things I was seeing in the reviews being sent to me sounded quite familiar.

I was partly curious to read it, but also sort of figured that since I'd already lived through a brief and disastrous tenure at a chic marketing startup, I figured that actually reading the book would mostly just give me unpleasant flashbacks and impede my attempts to let go of the whole thing. I am already pretty bad at letting go of grudges, so I figured I shouldn't actively sabotage myself.

Enter my mom, who, having had two children lose jobs at super trendy Boston-area startups in the space of about a year, ordered the book and read it, apparently to see if these places really are that unnavigably volatile or if her children are just stupid. Then she told me I had to read it. At this point, curiosity got the better of me and I started reading it, although I refused to actually borrow it and have it in my possession; it stayed at her place and I read it there.

My feelings on this book are mixed. Basically every shitty thing Lyons writes about HubSpot rings true to me, either from my own reading about the way the economy has gotten disastrously fucked, especially for young people; from my own lived experience working at a similar company; from stories I've heard from other people who work at similar companies (including other reports of people having a shitty time working at HubSpot; apparently they're TERRIBLE to their female web devs); and, in the latter half of the book, from dealing with and witnessing the behavior of gaslighting assholes whose main tactic is to stun you into compliance with WTF-ery so off-script from normal human behavior that you just can't figure out how to react to them.

So when it comes to strictly factual, reporter-y things, Lyons is stellar. He does a fabulous job of laying out how these "new economy" companies spin themselves as being Great Places to Work with tactics that sound good but actually screw people over — like "unlimited vacation time," which is code for "you don't bank PTO so when we let you go we don't have to pay you any banked PTO" (thank God the place I worked didn't do that one, at least), or giving people lower wages in exchange for stock options that vest in five years, when the tenure for most workers — especially lower-level ones, who are most likely to think that "stock options" sounds impressive and grown-up, and who probably don't realize that their salaries are being lowered to supposedly account for this because most industries have depressed entry-level wages ridiculously already — is half that or less, meaning that most workers will simply not receive this part of their supposed compensation. Shit's enough to make you vote for Bernie Sanders.

Unfortunately, Lyons seems to have a severe cognitive disconnect between the stuff he reports on and his ability to understand exactly the same things when they are going on in his immediate vicinity — or, heaven forbid, to him — and there are times when it really hurts his reporting. Much review ink has been spilled pointing out that Lyons is clearly kind of an asshole, and it is true that he is playing the Cranky Old Man Journalist role to the hilt — an archetype I personally find to be in a weird halfway territory between relatable and insufferable — but my issue with his general cranky asshattery is not really that it is unlikeable, but that it prevents him from being able to get more than surface-level observations about the general weirdness and shenanigans going on around him. In short, he styles himself as an anthropologist, but he's definitely the sort of anthropologist that is why anthropology as a discipline has so many issues and so much incomplete information. What he doesn't manage to do is go undercover, which I think would have provided a lot more insight and depth into how anyone but Dan Lyons actually feels about any of the shit that goes on in these companies.

More specifically:
—Lyons points out the lack of diversity and the labor exploitation at these companies, but mostly just seems to use these stats as a club against companies to reinforce that they suck. He doesn't demonstrate any sympathy for the people hurt by practices like insta-firing or sexual harassment, or even interview them. This is a sharp contrast to the beginning of the book where he loses his own job and spends about two chapters illustrating at great length how destabilizing and scary it is, even though he gets notice and severance and all that stuff, and tries to negotiate for things like "just" staying through the end of the year (several months away at the time). While he's happy to point out that it's mean for HubSpot to fire people on a "go to lunch and don't come back" basis, he doesn't acknowledge — even in passing — that, judging from his reaction to being given notice and severance, if this had happened to him he would probably have had an actual heart attack.
—He notices that turnover is high and people get disappeared fast and mysteriously, also notices that everyone around him is RELENTLESSLY CHEERFUL and ALL-IN all of the time, and concludes that all millennials are dumb and easily hoodwinked. Dude: Everyone whose facade of less than 100% committed Kool-Aid drinking cracked even for a moment got let go before you were able to see it. DUH.
—He doesn't really establish relationships with his colleagues, so if any of them are secretly stressed to death and miserable under their cheerful marketer faces, there's no reason to believe they'd confide in him about it. In fact, as an older celebrity hire for whom a new position was specifically created and who seemed to be wandering around a lot of the time not actually doing much, I think if I, a twentysomething young lady who hates self-important business buffoonery with a passion that makes her teeth hurt, were working there during that time, Dan Lyons would be the absolute LAST person I'd let my Obedient Capitalist Robot face slide in front of, especially considering he doesn't seem to have the social intelligence to keep his opinions to himself in a dangerous situation and put on an Obedient Capitalist Robot face of his own, meaning if he didn't rat me out deliberately I'd worry he'd do it just without thinking anything of it. And I say this as someone whose Obedient Capitalist Robot face isn't even very good to start with.
—Specifically, at one point he asks his younger colleagues if they wouldn't rather make more money than be paid in candy, and is baffled when they're all like "I like candy!" Like having some Baby Boomer with a nebulously defined job trying to goad you into complaining about your pay IN THE WORKPLACE doesn't have IT'S A TRAP written all over it in aggressively orange letters with a gif of Admiral Ackbar on it. Millennials know what Baby Boomers think of us when we indicate in any way that we would like to be compensated for our labor. If Lyons is unaware, he should go read some of the stuff put out by the legacy media companies that can't afford to employ him anymore because millennials aren't subscribing to them, and see if he can't figure out why we're not.
—He believes that everyone besides him who worked at HubSpot liked it because they have great Glassdoor reviews. I know at least one hip martech company in Boston that has specifically asked employees to leave positive ratings/reviews on Glassdoor to cancel out negative ones. If Lyons had been at all plugged into the Secretly Miserable Stressed-Out Debt-Ridden Underpaid Millennial Underground Gossip Network at HubSpot, he may have heard something similar. Learning to tap into and navigate the gossip network at my old place of employment was the single most valuable skill I learned there, although I learned it too late. Lyons, it seemed, never learned to use gossip at all. He seems unaware that he could be missing anything. Not a good investigative journalist trait, dude. Be more suspicious!
—HE'S SURPRISED HE GOT IN TROUBLE FOR A COMMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA THE GODDAMN SECOND TIME HE GOT IN TROUBLE FOR A COMMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA. And after he'd seen other people also get into giant unprofessional fights over comments on social media. Learn from your experiences! And yet he continues to be incredulous, instead of appreciating that he's the only nonexecutive in the company who would be allowed to hang around long enough to do that twice.
—Basically he complains about how ageist HubSpot is, which is entirely true, but completely fails to acknowledge the other ways in which he still really does have old white guy privilege, because he keeps getting breaks other people don't get. Like being able to negotiate a leave of absence (lol) and actually being able to get anything out of his stock options. I know this stuff is probably invisible to him because it's supposed to be a standard part of how jobs work, but it's not anymore.
—OK, so basically all my complaints boil down to one thing: I think he blows off the younger generation of workers as stupid and hoodwinked too easily and glosses over the ways the 99.9999% of us who aren't startup founders are getting screwed, because his desire to tell an entertaining fish out of water story about how full of wacky people HubSpot is is stronger than his empathy for a generation that's been comprehensively fucked over economically, and certainly a hell of a lot stronger than his curiosity. Most of the people I know who have been struggling through workplaces like this are not dumb. I know people who have been made "executives" at content farms who are 100% aware the moment they get the job that a) they are not ready for this, b) the company is using the prevalence of internships and contract work in the "gig economy" to make themselves look good for giving people salaries at all even when they're abysmally low, c) calling someone an "executive" or "manager" is a shitty way to make them work an additional 20 hours a week with no overtime pay like they're a fuckin' lawyer or something, and d) we'll be called lazy and entitled and told to work harder and make better decisions if we point out that we can't live in the rapidly gentrifying cities where the jobs are and pay the student loan bills racked up from getting the degrees the jobs require on the wages the jobs are paying. WE DON'T LIKE WORKING FOR SHIT WAGES AND WE'RE NOT DOING IT DELIBERATELY TO UNDERCUT BABY BOOMERS. WE DON'T HAVE A FUCKING CHOICE. There's too many of us, too many of us are college-educated, we have mortgage-size debts to pay off even if we don't have houses and families, and so much former entry-level work has been downgraded to usually-unpaid "internships" that we can't afford to not take any job we can find that pays us in actual money at all — even if we're only being paid partly in money and the rest is in stocks we'll never cash out, or salt and beer like we're in the fucking first-century Roman Army. Oh, and if we ever turned down a job just because it was laughably underpaid, five million pseudoCalvinist Baby Boomers with pensions 'n' shit would immediately materialize to lecture us on how awfully full of ourselves and lazy we are and that we should be grateful we could get a job at all and not think we're too good for it. Hey, wait, no — we don't even have to turn down the laughably underpaid jobs for that to happen! But basically, if Baby Boomers are worried that their jobs are being threatened because companies can hire 22-year-olds for a third of the salary they'd have to pay real adults, they may also wish to STFU about how enormously entitled 22-year-olds are that they think they deserve a whole third of a salary. Please see how these two things are related and stop calling us dumb.

Obviously, there are only so many things you can cover in one book, and Lyons' focus here was on how colorfully strange HubSpot is and on the shortsighted, jargon-riddled fuckery of the startup bubble, rather than the younger generation's lack of economic opportunity. But if someone's getting overpaid, someone else is getting underpaid — and I think the underpaid deserve a little more real compassion than just being used as a rhetorical device against the overpaid. Also, full confession: Baby Boomers whining about millennials like we fucked ourselves over is something that got on my last goddamn nerve several years ago; I am well out of nerves and even the slightest hint of it will turn me into a giant angry class warfare rage monster.

For a calmer and more rational takedown than mine of the irresponsible, victim-blaming ways the media covers the idiosyncrasies of millennial lifestyles and economic habits, please see Sarah Kendzior's excellent piece on Quartz this week: http://qz.com/720456/the-myth-of-millennial-entitlement-was-created-to-hide-their-parents-mistakes/

I got less angry near the end when the story refocused away from "observing" the rest of the company and making assumptions about them and onto the process of Lyons getting what in the business world I guess is called "managed out," in this case, the process by which it happened is, in the mental health, sociology and social justice worlds, called "gaslighting." Trotsky's calculatedly incomprehensible behavior is probably unfamiliar to anyone who has so far escaped being in the line of fire of similar emotional abuse, but from my weird addiction to reading advice columns, I don't think it's as uncommon as we'd all hope it would be. Some people just regularly operate in extreme bad faith. This part of the book also reawakened my sympathy for Lyons because nobody, nobody deserves to be deliberately blocked from getting shit done at work, especially not by the people whose job it is to enable you to get shit done. This is the opposite of the point of work and it is truly, truly baffling to deal with, especially in places that talk a big talk about rewarding people who TAKE INITIATIVE and DO THEIR OWN THING but if they personally don't like you they will permanently back-burner any idea you try to run past your superiors and dress you the fuck DOWN for subordination if you try to do anything without running it past your superiors. People and places that operate solely on vague buzzwords do it because they don't want you to have anything to fight for yourself with. It's all too common, but its still inexcusable, and Lyons documents it all clearly, thoroughly, and with the same sense of disbelief/naivete that irritated me so much during the rest of the book, except here it comes off more as a type of innocence that it's sad to see destroyed.

Honestly, the scariest, most effective, and most dramatic part of the whole book is the afterword, which covers the scandal surrounding the firing of two HubSpot executives for what, as far as anyone's been able to figure out, appear to be attempts to procure a copy of the manuscript for Disrupted via hacking and possibly extortion. This is the kind of stuff that really illustrates why the self-important cowboy culture of startups — the deliberately ill-defined rules, the cults of personality, the might-makes-right (or more often, money-makes-right) sense of entitlement, the unshakable belief that if you can get away with something, it must be a moral good for you to get away with it — aren't just irritating quirks of individual douchebros with too much money, they are problems. They allow morally bankrupt people with delusions of technosainthood to seriously fuck with the rest of us honest dumbasses who got suckered into trying to work for a living.

In short: Eat the rich.

Anyway, things end fairly well for Lyons, as he goes on to be a writer for Silicon Valley, which is better than being jerked around in a culty martech startup in New England, and if the people at HubSpot legitimately don't understand that then maybe they are even weirder than the people in other culty martech startups. Things ended OK for me, too, in case you were wondering; I got a job at a newsroom in an industry that might have the least social utility of any sector of journalism ever, but I am OK with that, since I am also allowed to make jokes and they are even letting me occasionally do journalism-ing instead of just editing (I'm still probably getting paid like a third of what Lyons was making as a journalist, though, so we can't put that one entirely on startups). Lyons is right that journalism is much much better for people with cranky senses of humor, even though I know he would probably think I am dumb because I am an overly excitable young lady with a cranky sense of humor instead of an important middle-aged guy with A Family To Support.

Anyway, I know this is (a) a long political rant and (b) about the farthest thing away from an objective book review as you can get, but I did only read the book because someone wanted to hear about it specifically through the filter of my personal experiences with a similar type of company, so that's what you're all getting (congratulations if anyone who's not my mom actually read it this far; I owe you a drink or something) (Mom, I probably owe you a drink too).

Should you read this book? This is going to depend a lot on your personal experiences. If you've worked at one of these places and have any political opinions in the directions that work should produce something useful, or companies should treat employees like humans, then maybe not; it's bad for your blood pressure. If you think that genius is directly correlated to net worth, don't bother — this book is going to challenge your assumptions, but let's face it; you're not going to want to hear it and you're going to write Lyons off as a douchebag who's just sour that he's not quite a big enough douchebag to pull off bilking other people out of millions. (Also, get back in the sea.) If you're a person who has been sheltered within traditional office environments and you are curious about how all this hip open-office-plans-and-ping-pong-tables stuff you've been hearing about works in practice (spoiler: it doesn't), then you should DEFINITELY read it. If you're a manager dealing with low employee morale and are considering trying to fix it by adding branded taps and a foosball table instead of taking another look at your training or performance evaluation processes and making sure they're not made out of holes, also read this book.

Current Mood: angry
Current Music: "Do You Hear the People Sing?" Les Mis

As the most recent dictator of the newly installed rotating dictatorship for my writing group's book club, I decreed that the next book we'd be reading after Sorcerer to the Crown would be Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which was just published this fall and which I had heard enthusiastic, if vague, good things about. It promised a lot of political intrigue--which it delivered, in spades.

The premise of the story is that young Baru Cormorant lives in a nice little tropical island society that is taken over by a foreign power called the Imperial Republic, colloquially known as the Masquerade, because its agents wear masks when acting in official capacities. The Masquerade seems to be based largely on the early modern European empires that conquered most of the globe from the 1500s through 1900s, but keyed up to be even more sinister, with four centuries of stuff happening within a generation or two and every element of chaos that marked real-world colonialism reworked as a deliberate and calculated act of empire. The Masquerade is powerful not so much for its military might--although it has that, relying most heavily on its Navy--but also because of its more insidious weapons: bureaucracy, cultural annihilation, plague, trade, paper money, racism, sexism, repressive mores of sexual purity, and eugenics. Also citrus juice and salt.

In case you are not getting the picture yet, this book is about colonialism. And not just regular levels of about colonialism, either; this book is SUPER ABOUT COLONIALISM. It is about, like, all the colonialism that has ever happened and how and why.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that it is also largely about money.

It used to be something of a given that fantasy books were terrible about money. Everything cost One Gold Piece when you remembered that people are supposed to pay for stuff occasionally; where that piece came from was rarely explained much; characters were generally either Poor or they were Noble (and therefore rich) and this difference was illustrated largely through lifestyle. Lately, this has been changing. Huge chunks of the A Song of Ice and Fire books feature discussion of debts and budgets; Tamora Pierce's Beka Cooper books deal much more with everyday realities of living paycheck to paycheck than her earlier books did; The Hunger Games deals explicitly, if not in super mathy detail, with Panem's mercantilist economic system and how it keeps the Districts poor and the Capitol rich. I want to say that ever since the global economic crash, finance has featured more heavily in all sorts of genre fiction as being a thing that is Big and Dramatic and Dangerous and Will Fuck You Up. It is also just possible that I am reading better, more thoughtfully written books now that I am older than I was in 2008 and have less tolerance for stories where Stew just pops up out of thin air.

Either way, The Traitor Baru Cormorant is pretty much the fantasy book the most about money that I've ever read. Baru, after years of diligent studying in the new Masquerade schools that are definitely not based on the U.S. and Canada's boarding schools for Native American children at all, is made the Imperial Accountant to another of the Masquerade's colonies, a clump of squabbling duchies known collectively as Aurdwynn. Being Imperial Accountant is a very important post because money is very important. Being Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn is tough because Aurdwynn has a tendency toward rebellion, and Baru needs to put down the latest brewing rebellion--using the power of the purse--to prove that she is worthy of going to Falcrest (the home country of the Masquerade) so that she can learn everything about power and accumulate it for herself, a thing she wants to do because she wants to be able to liberate her homeland from the Masquerade. Baru is deeply committed to the idea that the best way to destroy the master's house is from the inside with the master's tools; unsurprisingly, the Aurdwynn rebels disagree, and whether or not it's possible to do so is one of the driving questions in the book.

The other driving questions in the book at any given time are 1 "Is the power of money more or less powerful than (insert whatever else the other person is using)" and 2 "What the hell side is everybody on," something that just gets more and more complex as the book goes on, all the way to the last page. By the end of the book it's not entirely clear what all the sides are, and I don't want to go into it any more than that, but there are so many layers of intrigue that I think I'd have to read the book again knowing what I know now to double-check if it all makes sense or if there are plot holes, since at the moment I've just been turned around too many times. It's a very intricate, literary sort of book; in this instance, I'm using "literary" to mean that basically all the characters are terrible, the main character included, and everyone is very serious all the time, and the role of the individual within nearly any social issue you care to name is explored (spoiler: the individual is always miserable). The only character who makes any jokes is Baru's secretary, Muire Lo, who is very understatedly following in the wonderful tradition of the dryly sarcastic butler type.

I think this'll make fun book group discussion fodder because of all the THINGS HAPPENING that I can't really go into here because spoilers. For the moment, though I have two last random thoughts:
1. I like that the Masquerade's sexist bullshit is a seamless mix of real-world sexist stereotypes and the opposite of real-world ones. The Masquerade is all like "Women are given to abstract thought, so they're less emotionally stable and also better at navigating and mathematics." Sounds at least as vaguely plausible as the shit we believe!
2. Scurvy features heavily in this book, which would be great and all grounded 'n' stuff except that I listened to the Sawbones episode about scurvy like a week ago and it's a terrifying creepy disease and every time the book mentions it my teeth and toes hurt. Aieeee. Drink your orange juice, kids.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Hamilton soundtrack

For various personal reasons (namely, changing jobs) I figured it was high time I read this book that my mom lent to me last year, Hannah Sigelson’s New Girl on the Job: Advice from the Trenches. Whether or not it will prove to be useful in my new jobs remains to be seen, but it certainly seems to be full of very good advice! It’s quite well-researched—the author interviewed a ton of highly successful career women and also a ton of young women who had recently entered the workforce. There’s a fairly heavy focus on white-collar corporate jobs—the kind of thing that requires a college degree—but since that is actually the kind of jobs I have I am not complaining.

The book is short and readable, although there are times when I think it gets a bit twee/buzzwordy in the way it discusses certain concepts (the book is less than 200 pages long but it has a seven-page glossary). It covers a good breadth of topics, from dealing with bad bosses to what “mentoring” actually means. Some of it seems pretty obvious—flirting at work isn’t good for getting taken seriously, that sort of thing—but other information is much less so, like how to avoid getting stuck with all the assistant/administrative tasks just because girls tend to be better at them. It also discusses stuff like perfectionism and, near the end of the book, takes a turn for the fairly explicitly feminist and discusses the dangers of inter-female sabotage, both as a concrete possible problem at work and as part of the larger picture of women in the working world and the social forces that shape our success or lack of it.

Overall I’d say it seems like a good recommendation for any other young women looking for or just starting work.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: noisy roommates

Looking back on my books from 2013, I realized I’d only read one book from the large pile of financial-catastrophe-related books I’d borrowed from Paul a while ago, and figured I’d need to start making better progress than that if I’m going to return them this decade. So I picked up a nice slim one, Charles R. Morris’ The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash.

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown chronicles the major developments in the finance industry and in government economic policy from about the 1970s until 2008, when the book was written. Towards the end, he makes a series of educated guesses about how the next several years could turn out. Five years later, most of what he says still seems pretty sensible, if a bit disheartening (we really should have done more by now).

There are two things I particularly appreciated about this book. One is that it is very good at concisely explaining how various financial instruments and markets work, which is extremely important for me in reading any book about banking or finance, because I have no head for dealing with any of the mathy stuff, and I sometimes forget things I learned from one finance book to the next. The other thing I really appreciated is the discussion of politics and finance as being cyclical, and the inevitability of having to continually adjust the way countries and markets are run (i.e., there is no one, lastingly perfect system). From what I can tell, the author comes off as being a moderate (an actual moderate, not a golden-mean type of false equivalence moderate) who is currently in the position of pushing left-wing views as a direct result of thirty years of free-market fundamentalism. He gives a brief overview of Arthur Schlesinger’s hypothesis of twenty-five to thirty-five year shifts in political consensus, and posits that we’re probably at the end of a conservative cycle. In terms of public political opinion, he seems to be spot-on—economic populism looks to be making a comeback. (Whether the government will actually do much about it is obviously another question.)

The earlier part of the book is largely concerned with government monetary policy in recent history, discussing inflation, stagflation, demographics, the oil price shocks of the early seventies, and Paul Volcker’s victory over inflation. (I really appreciate that the book, despite being very short, still touches on demographics; a lot of discussions of economics I’ve seen are surprisingly willing to completely leave out questions of “how many people are competing for these resources anyway” even though economics is literally the study of allocation of resources among people.)

From there it goes into the meatiest (and most intellectually challenging) part of the book, walking us through a number of historically and economically significant market failures, from the development of asset bubbles and the invention of new, complex financial instruments through the profit-seeking behaviors of various banks, funds, and investors, and how they ended up collapsing. The brief overviews of the 1994 residential mortgage crisis and the 1998 Long-Term Capital Management crisis are extremely helpful in understanding foundations of the subprime mortgage crisis, the catalyst for the 2008 crash. We learn about the derivative financial instruments created out of mortgages, and particularly the collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) that allowed large quantities of subprime mortgages to be turned into double- and triple-AAA rated securities, and how this rather suddenly caused banks to not only lose all their prior reluctance to extend mortgages to people deemed to be credit risks, but actively develop lending practices designed to get more people to sign on for subprime mortgages (some of these practices seem to be developed to ensure that the loans would never get paid back, and yet the ratings of the derivative instruments based on these loans were determined according to the usual assumptions of the numbers of people who default on their mortgages) (but finance people get paid more than us regular working Joes in other industries, because they’re so smart).

After walking us through the beginnings of the crash, Morris identifies other similarly shaky credit markets and why they are shaky (shady accounting practices, overly optimistic views of the real assets they are based on, overleveraging leading to extreme sensitivity to minor market shifts… there’s a whole load of unstable things going on in the world of high finance), and gives some estimates for what could be affected and how badly in the coming years. (I haven’t gone and fact-checked all of his predictions, but I Googled a few of them while I was reading and he seems to have been broadly correct on the ones I was curious about—there was a big spate of bank write-offs of consumer credit card debt, for instance.) (The fact that this book was rereleased a year or two later with some updates and under the title “The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown” seems to indicate that he underestimated some things, but I’d have to find a copy of the rerelease and look at the new information to see what it is.) He also points out a couple of areas where he says it is imperative we bring in some reasonable regulation, and discusses the issues with the current systems. Everything he mention has become a hot-button issue in the past few years: he talks about our expensive but embarrassingly inefficient healthcare system (including our abject failure to apply technology to healthcare administration in anything resembling a sensible way), the student loan debt load and the shady practices of loan servicers like Sallie Mae, and the need to reinstate some kind of reasonable federal oversight of banking, such as reinstating an updated version of the Glass-Steagall Act.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn some basics on the how and why of the financial crash, and I would particularly recommend that you read this book rather slowly (at least, if you’re not a finance person). At less than 200 pages, it doesn’t go into too much minor detail on any subject, but there’s still a lot of information packed into such a little book. While the writing style is blessedly conversational—and occasionally even mildly funny—finance is a world of acronyms, jargon, and slippery concepts based on other slippery concepts, and it’s easy to mix stuff up or forget what a structured investment vehicle is.

So, I just finished reading Funny Money, by Mark Singer, and I am embarrassed to admit that I did a thing I almost never do, which is I read half of it and then didn’t finish it for several months.

It wasn’t a bad book! It was, in fact, a pretty good book, but it appears it didn’t engage my attention quite enough to prevent me from being distracted by other things, because I am more easily distracted when I don’t entirely understand what I’m reading, and Funny Money is primarily about three things I do not understand at all: banking, oil drilling, and Oklahoma.

Funny Money tells the story of the rise and fall of the Penn Square Bank, a tiny shopping-mall bank in Oklahoma that briefly became a very big oil-and-gas loan broker, and then collapsed in a pile of bad loans and general mismanagement, and very nearly took the entire banking system with it. It is a story about a bunch of dudes doing that American thing we celebrate so much where they work themselves up from being unknown small-timers into being big tycoons through pluck and determination and hard work and dreaming big and wearing loud suits, except it’s sad because then it all implodes because actual financial systems and the geographical realities of oil drilling don’t care two figs for dreaming big and are based on facts that, if you don’t understand them, you will fuck things up.

Mark Singer tells this story well, explaining banking and oil drilling and Oklahoma to the lay reader on a need-to-know basis and pretty simply. He has a great facility for description, highlighting the awkward, plastic absurdity of America in the 80s, making the scenes vivid enough that sometimes it feels like you’re reading a novel.

Since it is not a novel, however, reality forces Mr. Singer to engage in some storytelling sins that are storytelling sins for a reason. For one, the names are often too similar, so I found it difficult to keep track of which oilman was which; they were all named Beep or Bill or Bud, and they were all pretty interesting characters (the way in real life you’d say “That guy’s, uh, quite a character”) but I got them all mixed up anyway. I should have made a chart or something. There is a similar problem with the names of all the different companies and banks, because… banks. Banks put their creativity into efforts besides naming themselves, it seems. Like how to cover up that they have no idea what they’re doing by doing a lot of it. The other main storytelling problem, for me, is that while the characters are all entertainingly wacky (in ways that scream that they should not be trusted with large amounts of money), there is nobody to root for; not a single person that I actually liked.

All that said, this book is both entertaining and informative, and provides several useful examples of the limitations of positive thinking.

Hell, I am running out of things to say for reviews about finance books. At least I decide to branch out author-wise this time!

I read Too Big To Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, for once, is not Michael Lewis, so now I can officially say I have learned things about finance from sources other than Michael Lewis and my dad rambling about what assholes everybody in the business is.

This book is pretty much a blow-by-blow account of every thing everyone on Wall Street, at the Treasury, and at the Fed said and did around the time the crisis hit. The book covers roughly from the Bear Stearns bailout to the passing of TARP, and includes extremely detailed coverage of the failure of Lehman Brothers, which is remarkably suspenseful considering that we all know Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy at the end. It is also well told enough to have some pathos, without engaging in whiny apologetics about how banking executives are the REAL victims here, like some commentary I have seen. Everyone says "fuck" a lot, obviously. There is a set of picture spreads about halfway through the book, which is a thing I love to bits in historical nonfiction, but sadly, this book is not yet old enough for that to be either informative or entertaining--it's basically dozens of pictures of almost identical-looking middle-aged white guys in suits. I think there's one women and one Korean dude in their somewhere.

A thing that might be a downside of this book to other readers but which I did not mind so much, due to it being the third or fourth book on the financial crisis that I've read, is that it contains very little discussion of what any of these financial products are or how they work--really just the absolute bare bones needed to follow the story, usually one sentence or less. Most of the book is more of a human drama, full of people on the phone yelling at each other, running around trying to make all sorts of iffy deals with anyone who will make them, trying to avoid going bankrupt and having the entire financial system collapse. Treasury Secretary Paulson appears in a state of High Pissed-Offedness for 95% of the book, and throwing up for the rest of it. Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, spends most of the book basically in denial about how bad things really are for his firm. Warren Buffett shows up periodically when people beg him to make deals with them, looks at all the banks' crappy assets, and decides this shit is too wacky for him, he's going home, thanks. It is all very dramatic and power-grabby. It is even full of funny one-liners, sometimes! All it needs is a bunch of naked people and they could put it on HBO.

So, because I have enjoyed Michael Lewis' books on financial fuckery thus far, and because the interview he gave on the Daily Show in the fall was very entertaining, I picked up his newest book, Boomerang: Adventures in the New Third World. I found it well worth the nine dollars it cost on Kindle, even if it was a bit short; however, this is apparently because I do not subscribe to Vanity Fair (and I'm not even sure I know anyone who does).

This book is, mostly, a short, cute little travelogue. While Lewis retains his preternatural ability to discuss the complexities of high finance in ways that make sense to outsiders and are somehow entertaining, this book contains a somewhat lower ratio of financial nerdery to Adventures With Michael anecdotes than the other books of his that I'd read. This seems to be, in part, because the debt crises in Greece, Iceland, and Ireland--to name the countries covered in the first three chapters--were simpler fuck-ups than the subprime housing crisis, because most of the people involved were not finance people, so things didn't need to get that complex before they had no idea what they were doing: the Icelanders sold things back and forth to each other at continually inflated values; the Irish built tens of thousands more houses than they could ever hope to find people to live in; the Greeks fudged their numbers and avoided paying their taxes. The Germans, it seems, mostly just managed to have missed the memo that finance is full of lying scumbags, and bought a lot of really crappy bonds. And California is an ungovernable mess.

Ergo, as short as this book is, much of it is full of Michael Lewis' kind-of-adorable adventures getting smacked into by Icelanders (Icelandic men, specifically), discussing all the different German slang expressions that involve poop with his German interpreter/chauffeur, hanging out with Greek monks on an island where no women are allowed, and making cheerfully overgeneralized-to-the-point-of-being-kind-of-racist sociological observations on each country's National Character and why the state of its gender roles--either in its mainstream culture or as it manifests in the global boys' club of high finance--helped make it financially irresponsible. (His talk with Kristin Petursdottir, who founded Iceland's first woman-run bank which just so happened to be one of the few banks left standing after the crash, is particularly funny in a head-desky sort of way.)

After flying, driving, boating, and chicken-playing around Europe gawking at abandoned housing complexes, Lewis comes back to the U.S. to poke around some of its most spectacularly dysfunctional cities, most of which are in California.

I will note that one thing this book most emphatically is not, is a primer on what's wrong with the globalized financial system in general. It's basically a companion piece made of leftover slightly-off-topic material from The Big Short and his other Wall Street stuff, which discuss where all these ridiculous financial products were coming from, and even The Big Short was designed not to rehash the same angles as other well-known books that were just straightforwardly about how the housing bubble happened. (I have several of those in the TBR pile; I will read them eventually! I just... like reading funny stories about the people on the sidelines going "WTF WHAT ARE THESE ASSHOLES DOING" better.) So it occasionally comes off as a little soft on the American high finance assholes who crashed the global economy, but I think it's just supposed to be understood that we've already covered the American high finance assholes who crashed the global economy in the other books.

So, while I was reading The Big Short, which I had borrowed from my father, who is an insurance executive, I told Paul, who used to be a Merrill Lynch executive, about it, and Paul lent me a gigantic stack of books from his Big Business Behaving Badly shelf. So you may be seeing a number of reviews of finance/big business books from me in the near future.

This week, I read Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, also by Michael Lewis. This one is partly a memoir of Mr. Lewis' short stint at the investment bank Salomon Brothers for a few years in the eighties, and partly an investigation of everything that was ridiculous about Salomon Brothers over the course of a few decades, but mostly the eighties.

Salomon Brothers, in the eighties, was apparently so ridiculous that Michael Lewis not only got a job there, but did really well, despite not really understanding much of what he was doing. According to himself, Michael Lewis got his undergraduate degree in art history from Princeton, got a master's degree in economics because that was the only degree investment banks accepted even when the jobs didn't have anything to do with knowing economic theory, landed a job at Salomon Brothers after talking to some guy's wife at a benefit dinner, and spent most of his time at the firm trying to copy other successful people and not usually having any idea what he was doing until after he'd been doing it for several months. He was a bond salesman, and apparently, for a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the eighties, actual knowledge of the markets was helpful, but optional. Sitting close to someone else who understood the markets and whose lines you could parrot was good enough, or else you could sell what the traders told you to sell and end up with angry customers but much acclaim within the firm (apparently, customer service was low on the firm's priority list). Beyond a reasonable level of general intelligence, what Salomon Brothers really seemed to require from its employees was the ability to take a lot of abuse. If you took enough abuse, you would be allowed to start dishing it out.

Lewis' portrait of the sociology and politics of Salomon Brothers is somewhere between hilarious and depressing. On the depressing end, it was all hugely dysfunctional: the interdepartmental backstabbing eventually led the firm to be unable to compete with other firms because it was too busy competing with itself. It was also discriminatory, with female trainees being disproportionately assigned to departments with little prestige and subject to harassment, and Wall Street in general being so WASPy that Salomon Brothers was considered positively ethnic for being run by Italians and Jews. On the hilarious end was the hierarchy of respect: trainees, at the lowest level, were ignored; geeks, the lowest level of people doing work, were roundly abused; in the middle, you might get called by your real name and left alone for a bit; and if you were a success, one of the managers would convey upon you the title of Big Swinging Dick. He also gives a pretty spot-on description of Fuckspeak, which is the dialect used by guys in finance to show how in charge they are.

With the exception of John Gutfreund, Salomon's eminently weird CEO, many of the colorful characters in this book are known by outlandish pseudonyms, such as "the Human Piranha." There is also a character known only as "the opportunist," who tried to claim credit for a new warrant deal that the author and one of his colleagues designed. While the opportunist is not a particularly colorful character, his plotline is one of the most deliciously funny in the book, as he inspires our author to hatch an elaborate revenge plot. This plotline stuck out at me partly because it was hilarious but also partly because it really was one of the few parts of the book where Mr. Lewis was actually being an active sort of character; in much of the rest of the book he is basically observing and having weird shit happen to him, which I suppose is sort of the point.

The climax of the book, inasmuch as there is one, is the stock market crash of October 19, 1987. Shortly after this, it appears that Mr. Lewis decided to get out of finance and write snarky books about it instead, which I think was a good choice.

What I mostly got out of this book was: Man, I am glad I'm not a bond salesman; I would be balls awful at it. Apparently, it mostly involves cold-calling people and trying to talk them into buying things they don't want to buy, being stuffed in a noisy room with a hundred insufferable finance dudes on phones all day long, and being okay with people shouting at you and throwing phones at your head. I hate phones and do not have the constitution to handle any of those things. So I think I will stick to quietly reading about finance in my room and being poor.

Current Mood: tired

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bloodygranuaile

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Markets aren't magic because magic isn't real
In which I tackle the big one
Sycorax, Lucifer, Marx, and other important parents
The value of a human life?
Paternal lessons in economics: Lefty edition
Just what it says on the tin
Mobsters and CEOs and state legislators, oh my
The most important book you'll gouge your eyes out reading
Vampire capitalism: Health, wealth, and inequality
A brief history of Occupying things
A beach read for the poker crowd
Eat the rich vs. eating our young
Intrigue, espionage, and... fiat money?
Career advice for the advice-needing career woman
Let's just say it's a matter of... leverage
Of "Okiesmo" and an oil boom
I am running out of titles for posts about finance books
Adventure Time
Money money money, ain't it funny

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