Half Changed World

I've developed a standing pattern of reporting each year on which books I've read from the NY Times list of notable books.

This year, I've read:

• A Most Wanted Man
  
• Unaccustomed Earth (don't seem to have blogged about this one, but I liked it a lot)
• Predictably Irrational (having read even more books about behavioral economics, this one stands out as particularly good)
• Trillion Dollar Meltdown (an important book, but not the most readable one)

I started reading The Lazarus Project, but couldn't get into it and so have given up on it.  I'm also still in the middle of Nixonland.

This year, from the 2007 list I read The Abstinence Teacher and The Maytrees.

So many books, so little time.

I knew that December 1 is World AIDS Day, but I hadn't realized that it was first observed 20 years ago.  

I'm young enough, and my friends are young enough, that I didn't lose anyone close to me to AIDS. But in 1990, I had a summer job working for a doctor whose practice was mostly AIDS patients  She was an internist in the West Village in the '80s, and was one of the first to notice that a bunch of people were coming in with diseases that were supposed to be incredibly rare.  She was always running really late, and gradually most of the healthy people stopped coming to her practice, but if you were sick, she was a great doctor to have on your side.  She spent hours dealing with the paperwork needed to get people enrolled in clinical trials, because that was the only way to get the drugs that might possibly help them.  And she'd visit her patients in the hospital and sit with them and read the riot act to the staff who were afraid to touch them.  (Me?  I answered phones and filed charts and entered data.)

I don't know what I'd have thought if a time traveler from 2008 had come with a news report.  So wonderful that HIV is a manageable infection, something you can live with, not an automatic death sentence.  But I don't think I ever imagined that 20 years later, there still wouldn't be a cure.  And if you had told me that gay rights groups would be focused on marriage equality, with hardly a mention of HIV/AIDS, I simply wouldn't have believed it.

I'm somewhat surprised that there hasn't been more discussion of Mumbai on the blogs that I read.  I guess it's because once you've said "how awful," there's really not that much more to add to the conversation. But I found myself repeatedly borrowing my dad's computer this weekend in order to check whether there was any more news.

I'm not sure why this story got to me so much more than any other horrible attack.  I think the uncertainty of the situation, and the fact that it's still not clear who did it, or why, kept me looking for more information.  And while I've never been to Mumbai, I have been to India, and stayed in another hotel in the Taj chain.

In spite of the early reports that the attackers were targeting Americans and Brits, the overwhelming majority of the victims were Indian.  In some cases, the attackers just fired into crowds, but in other cases (e.g. the chefs at the Taj), they clearly could have le Indians go, and chose not to.  As far as I'm aware, they never made any specific demands.

We were in NYC for the holiday, and took the subway all over the place. And no, I didn't worry about the possible threat against the system, although there were cops everywhere, especially on Thursday morning.  I take the DC metro every day, and I just can't manage to stay worried all the time.

Today's book is A Most Wanted Man, by John LeCarre.  I'm not going to give away the ending, but I don't think it's possible to talk about the book without spoiling it a little bit, so if  that's going to make you crazy, stop reading now.

Like all of LeCarre's books, this is a spy novel, although only one of the main characters is a spy master in the sense of LeCarre's cold war novels.  A young man half-Russian, half-Chechen with a history of imprisonment in Russian and Turkish jails finds his way to Hamburg.  Is he a terrorist?  A humanitarian refuge?  Just an ordinary illegal immigrant?  The novel never shows his point of view, so the reader is as much at a loss as the people who move in his orbit — an idealistic young lawyer, a pragmatic spymaster, a middle aged banker who is not as jaded as he thinks he is.

The characters were interesting, but never quite fully developed.  (The banker is the most fleshed out, and I think is LeCarre's stand-in in the novel.)  What interests LeCarre is the situation, and the philosophical questions: is the leader of a charitable organization where 5 percent of the money is diverted to terrorists entirely bad, or 95 percent good?  Does it matter?  (See today's headlines.)  Does old-fashioned spycraft still have a role to play in world of electronic eavesdropping and bombs on public transportation?

The ending approaches what a teacher of mine used to call a "beer truck ending" — an ending that comes out of nowhere, without connection to what has come before.  But it's not a matter of laziness on LeCarre's part.  He's making a very specific point about the fact that we live in a world where people can get run over by beer trucks in spite of their best laid plans.

These images from Minnesota Public Radio make me grateful that I'm not an election judge.  There are some examples — on both sides where the campaigns are grabbing at straws.  But there are also some where it's really hard to tell what the voter had in mind.  And there's also the issue of having someone who can't decide whether they're voting for Al Franken or the Lizard People determine the control of the U.S. Senate.

I have to say, these ballots make the Georgia idea of having a runoff when neither candidate gets 50 percent seem more reasonable.  Although I have a sneaking suspicion that the policy just might may have been instituted to make sure that a black candidate couldn't win if two white candidates split the vote.  Does anyone know which actually costs the state more (per capita), holding a runoff or manually reviewing all the ballots?

Of course, the efficient way to deal with multiple candidates is the preferential or instant runoff ballot where voters rank the candidates and then when someone is eliminated, his or her votes are redistributed to the voter's second choice.  It means that you can vote for a "minor party" candidate without feeling like your vote is wasted — and when my 5th grade class used it for our presidential vote in 1980, John Anderson did in fact win.

Australia actually uses this system in their parliamentary elections, and it seems to work for them.  Cambridge MA uses a version of it for city council elections where first they reallocate the "extra" ballots  of candidates who got more votes than needed.  That link indicates that they have moved to using scan cards for these elections — when I lived nearby, they did it all on paper, and you could hang out and watch them move the ballots from one pile to another.  I wonder what fraction of ballots are spoiled there — it's pretty confusing if you're not used to it.

I was fascinated by this story in the NY Times about how the demand for Spam has risen as the economy gets worse.  What it tells me is that there's a lot of people who consider meat — even in the form of highly processed parts — essential to their diet.

Even if I ate pork, I can't imagine ever buying Spam.  If I don't have the money for regular meat, I'd rather eat vegetarian meals than Spam.  (Yes, I do occasionally eat beef hot dogs, which are only marginally closer to the "real meat" side of the spectrum.)

As I've said before, I think that my willingness to do without meat is a large part of the reason that we didn't have trouble doing the Thrifty Food Plan experiment.  The market basket that the plan is based on includes allowances for a reasonable amount of meat — for an adult male, they assume 0.63 pounds of beef/pork/lamb and 2.55 pounds of poultry per week.  (The equivalent numbers are actually slightly higher for adult women.)  When we were following the TFP budget, we were eating significantly less meat than that.

The TFP is overall an interesting construct.  It's designed to be low-budget, to meet all the RDIs for nutrients, and to follow the food pyramid, but it's also based on what low-income people actually eat.  It's not a fully artificial construct of "how little could one spend and still have a nutritionally adequate diet."  So, no, they don't expect you to eat oatmeal, eggs and lentils day after day.  And it includes a fair amount of convenience foods.  (Although they do note that they were unable as a result to get down to the recommended levels of sodium consumption, even assuming no added salt at the table.)

So what about you?  If you're not a vegetarian, do you feel deprived without meat?  What substitutes are acceptable and what are not?

This week’s book is Mother on Fire: A True Motherf#%&ing Story about Parenting, by Sandra Tsing Loh.  I had high hopes for this book, as I generally enjoy Loh’s essays in The Atlantic, in particular those about how she sent her kids to public school in Los Angeles and the world didn’t collapse. 

Unfortunately, Loh’s decision to send her kids to public school is the conclusion of this book, not the beginning.  Most of the book is an extended meditation on how terribly unfair it is that two artists don’t earn enough to send their kids to fancy private schools.   I can’t say I’m terribly sympathetic.

The book is based on her one-woman show, and it does have some funny moments.  My favorite was her discussion of how she suddenly became famous when she was fired from public radio for cursing on the air.  But it’s not a good sign when, of the four humorous quotes on the back of the jacket, three of them show up in the first chapter.  And making fun of the pretentiousness of ultra-expensive liberal private schools is shooting fish in a barrel. 

A couple of weeks ago, Planet Money tried to explain why deflation is a bad thing.  They basically gave two answers:

1)  Both inflation and deflation can spiral out of control, but a strong central bank has more things that it can do to control inflation (mostly raise interest rates).   The Fed can’t lower interest rates below zero, and it’s getting pretty close that wall already.

2) When people expect prices to drop, they don’t want to buy things now that they can get cheaper next year.  And businesses don’t want to invest today in order to make things that they’ll have to sell for less next year.  So consumption and investment both drop.

The first answer makes sense to me, but I’m not entirely convinced by the second one. It certainly seems to apply to houses.  But we’ve been living in a world for the past several decades where consumer electronics get better and cheaper every year.  Everyone knows that if you wait for the next Apple upgrade cycle, you’ll be able to buy an iPod that is smaller, has new features, and costs less.  But it hasn’t stopped people from rushing out to buy.

So, is the overall economy more like buying a house, or buying an iPod?  Well, there’s not much that people buy other than houses that are investments, rather than consumption.  And I’m not convinced that the reason people aren’t buying cars is that they think they’ll be cheaper at a future date — rather, it’s that they’re afraid to borrow when they might lose their job (or can’t get credit).

Am I missing something?

It appears that the $700 billion bailout fund isn’t going to be used to buy "toxic assets" from the banks after all.  I’m not sure how I feel about that. 

On the one hand, the folks at Planet Money have been telling me since before the bailout bill passed that most economists think a stock injection plan makes more sense than buying assets of unknown value.  On the other hand, Congress certainly thought they were giving Treasury authority to buy lousy assets, not all this other stuff.   Neel Kashkari, who is running the bailout office, may be doing the right things.  But no one elected him anything, and no one confirmed his appointment.  And I’m enough of a believer in checks and balances to think that
maybe the Treasury ought to be going to back to Congress and saying
"this is what we want to do and why."

I also think the fact that Kashkari is literally a rocket scientist* (well, technically an aerospace engineer) is a symptom of what’s been wrong with the American economy.  There’s just been so much money sloshing around the financial sector that it’s been sucking smart people away from jobs where they actually do something productive.  Being an engineer is on average a good-paying job, but it’s not a winner take all job — very few engineers make more than $200,000 a year. 

*For what it’s worth, David Kestenbaum at Planet Money has a PhD in Physics.  I haven’t been able to find anyone working in finance who is literally a brain surgeon by training.

Because of the vagaries of school schedules, it happened that my kids both had school today, and I had the day off from work.  Since it was my birthday as well, when T. headed out to take N to preschool, I got back in bed and finished reading Stephenie Meyer’s The Host.

I got The Host out of the library after reading Flea’s review.  The only thing that I feel compelled to add is that I didn’t think the premise was all that original, having read Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series.  But it was well done, and kept me turning the pages.

The other novel I’ve read recently is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski.  This has been getting all sorts of rave reviews, but I have to admit that I was underwhelmed by it.   I could tell from the beginning that it was loosely based on Hamlet (characters named Trudy and Claude sort of give it away), but when the ghost of Edgar’s father appeared, much of my willing suspension of disbelief went away.  Oh yeah, and the Ophelia character is a dog.