Truth be told, there are at least a few billion political views

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, political science, textbooks

In addition to The Politics Book, which I reviewed about two weeks ago, I got Political Science for Dummies, by Marcus A. Stadelmann, PhD. The former book is mainly on the practical side, presenting history and practice. This book is more theoretical, plus broader in scope, because it deals more with international politics, and it is not until the fourth section (Chapters 14-17) that we find an explanation of the development of modern political camps across the spectrum. It is also more "textbook-y", and thus less pleasant to read, but I got through it.

When I took a Civics course in Seventh Grade, we learned this political spectrum, from Left to Right:

Radical – Liberal – Moderate – Conservative – Reactionary

However, other terms, that perhaps belong on different spectra, have showed up and are being bandied about as though people understood them. I suspect most do not. I see terms such as Progressive, Fascist, Authoritarian, and Totalitarian. We also hear much lately about Socialism, a little about Communism, and even less about Capitalism.

From my reading in recent months, and particularly from Chapters 16 and 17, I learned that modern Conservatism (I'll skip the fancy font from here on), in the U.S. at least, is derived from Classical Liberalism; that Pre-FDR Conservatism was a kind of Fascism in disguise; that Progressivism in the time of Teddy Roosevelt was a Moderate-and-rightward stance, which Wilson moved leftward, and FDR moved even further leftward, almost into Radicalism. That shift was carried out primarily in the Democratic Party, which in the early 1800's was so pro-Slavery that the Civil War resulted, and which created Jim Crow America for about 80 years, but then morphed into a super-Liberal party by embracing the Civil Rights Movement (mainly after the murder of Dr. King), jumping in front of that parade as though they'd created it. This movement to the Left had the result that the Republican Party, which was originally Liberal in the Classical Liberal sense, was labeled Conservative. Republicans eventually embraced the label. But from about 1940 to 1970, it was hard to tell who was a Liberal and who was a Conservative, even with a scorecard.

(Side note: A Conservative conserves, keeping what works already, and making change slowly. Environmentalism is at its core a Conservative value, for example. Liberalism is more about freedom than about change, but Liberals are more willing to embrace change, particularly in the direction of more freedom for a greater number. Progressivism as now practiced is for changing everything, discarding the old regardless of its possible value.)

The left-shift of the D party, while the R party largely stayed put, has been called "switching places", but that's only if you accept that the midpoint between the political stance of the R's and the D's has been a straight line through time axis. It was anything but.

Where do Socialism and Capitalism come in? They are not political entities, but economic. When Marx and Engels published their theory of Communism in The Communist Manifesto, more than 170 years ago, they thought a changeover to Communism would be almost automatic. As it turned out, Socialism is so against the grain of human nature that it has to be enforced, and Communism as they envisioned it was rendered moot by welfare programs that modified Capitalism without eliminating it. So Communism changed, primarily under the iron thumb of Joseph Stalin, leading to the modern understanding that Socialism has to be enforced by a strong central government, and such enforcement is Communism. I am reminded of this statement:

If people were perfect, Socialism would work; but if people were perfect, Socialism wouldn't be needed. (No source found)

I do know who said this:

If a man under age thirty is not a Socialist, he has no heart. If a man over forty is still a Socialist, he has no head. —Winston Churchill

Politics and Economics overlap, and feed on one another. Why? I summarize them thus:

• Politics is about the use of power (I like to say, it is about forcing people to do what most people will do anyway)
• Economics is about the allocation of money (more broadly, resources)

Money by itself is useless, unless you have the power to make use of it. Power by itself is useless, if you can't afford to engage it. They need each other.

By taking a step back, we can identify the core tenets of true Liberalism, now called Conservatism in the U.S.:

• Liberty for persons, independent of one's citizenship.
• Minimal government interference in the private affairs of persons.
• Each person is responsible for his or her own decisions and actions. Corollaries:
• If such actions result in damage to another, the government may sanction the offender.
• Persons may request legal remedies for damages against an offender.
• Taxation is kept to the minimum required to carry out governmental functions.

Those last few items indicate that some amount of government is necessary, to prevent anarchy, or the rule (at least locally) by the strongest. How the powers of government are defined and shared with the people are the subject of most political writings. The usual framework is that laid out by Aristotle nearly 2,400 years ago. Without getting into the details here, the usual, and growing, preferred form of government is the Constitutional Republic, in which the Constitution defines the power-sharing arrangement. Long ago I learned this proverb about the difference between Republicanism (representative Democracy) and Communism:

In a Democratic Republic, whatever is not forbidden is allowed. In a Communist Dictatorship, whatever is not mandatory is forbidden.

Look at the four items listed above, ignoring for the moment the two sub-points. More could be added, but these are sufficient to show that modern American Conservatism has taken the mantle of Classical Liberalism, and still holds it.

A conclusion the book's author reaches echoes that of a number of philosophers of politics: while many nations carry on republicanism within their borders, the world as a whole is anarchical, in which the nations, thought of as persons with a great variation in power and control, act selfishly. Although wars for territorial acquisition are now outlawed by (mostly) general agreement (AKA treaties held by the United Nations), other kinds of wars happen. These days war is more likely to occur along ideological lines. Thus, we've been in a slow-burning World War III since the first set of attacks by Muslim extremists against America in the late 1990's. The attacks of 9/11/2001 were their main successful "battle". Don't think Radical Islam has given up. They've been beaten back temporarily. If nothing else works, Islam in general has a program of outbreeding the rest of the world until it can become the new superpower.

Looking inward, I find that, while I have thought of myself as Conservative for decades, I find I am actually a Liberal, in the classical sense. In the U.S. I pass for Conservative, but I suspect my political and economic views are considered Liberal and Capitalist in the rest of the world.

Those being called "Liberal" by the "Conservative" talk show hosts aren't Liberals, not really. They are Totalitarians. Consider the four points above again, with their contrasts:

• Individual Liberty versus Nanny Statism that "protects" people from themselves.
• Minimal governmental interference versus Total government control.
• Personal responsibility versus Universal guilt.
• Minimal taxation versus Income redistribution.

The items on the right are the fundamental tenets of the leaders of today's Democratic Party. That is about as far from Liberalism as you can get. Politically, it is Fascism. Economically, it is Communism.

I have done more ranting than reviewing here. I'm not ashamed of that. The current state of affairs is worth a good rant. This book just gave me the tools to rant more accurately.

Politics in a nutshell

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, textbooks

As the 2020 general election approached, I found myself reading about political science, and getting confused. As one proverb has it, the two major American political parties "switched sides" a half-century ago. I found this isn't strictly true. I knew already that the Republican Party was originally liberal, with "liberal" referring to personal liberty for individuals, and that from that stance, slaves were individuals who deserved liberty. The Democratic Party of the time was considered conservative, focusing on "conserve" what is and don't change it.

Then I learned that classical liberals stood for several critical matters, principally:

• Individual Liberty
• Personal Responsibility
• Small Government
• Low Taxes

Furthermore, classical liberalism was most prevalent in England in the 1600's, and came to America where it became American conservatism over the next century or so. The four matters listed above are considered "conservative" by modern commentators.

So did the R's and the D's really switch sides? No, in the post-WW2 period, when the civil rights movement began to prevail, leading Democrats were against integration of society and defended the Jim Crow legislation that subjugated the Blacks. But after about 1970, the D's changed. The earlier tension during anti-war (anti-Vietnam war) demonstrations, between "America, love it or leave it!" and "America, change it or lose it!", led to the "change it" folks going to law school and running for office. These neoliberals—they avoid the term "radicals"—have since taken over the Democratic Party and embraced the label "liberal", seeing that the Republican Party had settled into being called "conservatives". Classically, the R's have actually remained liberal, as the term is properly defined, while the D's jumped two spaces to the left to become radicals. As I write this we are awaiting the outcome of the election, with little clear direction as to what will emerge.

To help myself think through these things I got a couple of books about politics and political science. The first is The Politics Book, published by DK, a Random House imprint, with a host of contributors and editors. As with other The X Book volumes by DK, the subtitle is "Big ideas simply explained."

I included the book cover, something I seldom do, to show the style of the illustrations within. I call this "brutal chic", and it reminds me of Soviet poster art of the 1950's. Inside, each major era is prefaced by a two-page spread of gigantic black text on stunning red. I wonder if the editors know that a red/black banner symbolizes Anarcho-Syndicalism?

According to the book's glossary, Syndicalism is a relatively new ideology, less than 100 years, described thus:

"An early 20th-century ideology that emerged as an alternative to capitalism and socialism. …it advocated the seizure of a nation's means of production—and the overthrow of its government—in a general strike by workers' unions, and the organization of production through federation of local syndicates."

Based on that description, the more recent prefix "Anarcho-" is redundant. The ideology is popular in Europe. May it stay there!

The book has articles between one and six pages in length based on the writings and ideas of 102 major political figures and philosophers, from Confucius to Robert Pape, plus short items (~100 words) on another 37 persons.

Based just on the quantity of coverage, the compilers are most sympathetic to liberal and neoliberal and socialist ideologies. I was hoping for better explanation of conservatism, but the handful of items are sloppy and uninformative. Of course, I understand that the English conservatism of the 1600's and 1700's didn't migrate to America, or rather, Toryism died away after 1776. But the shift from classical liberalism to American conservatism is unmentioned in this book.

I read the book carefully, realizing its bias, as an exercise in "know your enemy." I retain my orientation to classical liberalism, while adding that I strongly support conservative foreign policy and a strong defense. Both R's and D's have allowed the Federal government to get too big and too intrusive. I call it creeping totalitarianism. If it can be rolled back without bloodshed, that's good. I fear it cannot.

Water as the next fuel – for War

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, textbooks, water, hydrology

I have been saying since the 1980s that the wars of the 21^st Century will be fought over water. Similar, and quite definite statements are found in the last chapter of a 634-page text, Groundwater for the 21st Century: A Primer for Citizens of Planet Earth by John A. Conners. But water wars are not his focus, knowledge is. The aim of Dr. Conners is to educate the populace, the "Citizens" of his title. 'Tis a pity none can similarly educate national and business leaders whose focus is the next election or quarterly profit/loss statement.

Though the author claims the book was not written as a textbook, it is one. In fourteen chapters it covers the field of groundwater science quite thoroughly at a layman's level, if you don't mind an occasional equation and a little chemistry here and there. Though I spent the past week reading the book, I'd have taken twice as long had I not been able to skim much of the material.

What is groundwater? Simply put, it is all the water beneath our feet. In most parts of America, particularly the rainy East and Southeast, you can dig a foot or two down and see water seep into the hole. That is groundwater trickling out into view.

How much is there? A lot, but the rub is, there are a lot of us and we use a lot of water. At this point, I'll take a brief aside: Units are used quite inconsistently throughout the book. Sometimes we find square miles or cubic miles, and at others square or cubic kilometers. Sometimes a volume is in gallons, then in liters, and larger amounts may be in acre-feet or cubic whatever. Sometimes a conversion between Metric and (mainly) English units is given, sometimes not. Here I will use SI (the "official" Metric set of units, out of 3 flavors of Metric), and convert when necessary. So again, there is a lot of water, but there are billions of us, and the more affluent we are, the more water we use. On average, and American wastes an amount of water weekly that is equal to the entire water budget of a person in a Third World country, for a year.

How is it being used? From quite well to quite abominably. In the rich West we take it for granted unless it is our job to worry about it. This is not always wise. I once lived on a hill high above a flood plain. On this flood plain there were several mobile home communities. The typical setup was this: each trailer/manufactured home sat on about a half acre of ground. In the front yard near each house was a water well. On a flood plain the water table, which is the upper limit of groundwater connected to the nearby river, is at a depth of several feet, so the wells were shallow. Guess what was in every back yard? A septic tank and outflow field. The tank and piping were typically set shallower than the water table, meaning that whatever came out the pipes tricked down into the groundwater. I wonder if anyone living there ever considered that they were drinking their own slightly filtered toilet waste...and their neighbors'!

Most groundwater is extracted for agricultural use. At one point, we find that the minimum requirement of water needed to produce one day's food is about 3,000 liters. You only need a few liters to drink, and a few more to sponge bathe and to clean eating utensils. Depending on what we eat, our agricultural water use can be even higher. It takes 200 liters to produce one hen's egg, more than 15,000 l per kg of beef and 1/3 of that per kg of chicken meat. On the herbivory side, an apple tree consumes 125 l per apple, it takes more than 1,800 l to grow 1 kg of wheat, and once the wheat is milled and made into bread, each slice has 60 l of water use hidden within.

In addition to overt and semi-overt water consumption, a hidden "consumption" of water is contamination and pollution. To pollute water is to render it unusable, or at the very least, risky to use. I once heard a European water policy expert discuss laws—I don't know if they are on the books or only proposed—that mandate every manufacturing plant that wishes to release "used" water into a waterway, must put the outfall upstream of its own inlet. That supposedly gives them incentive to clean the water up before releasing it. But it doesn't address whether a company might do only partial cleanup of effluent, and more thorough cleanup of water it is using, only as needed on a process-by-process basis. A clever enough company might still pollute, but at lower cost than thoroughly cleaning their effluent. So I'd go further. I favor a law requiring that every executive and manager and salaried employee be required to live in a dwelling that has its water supply hooked up directly to the outflow from the plant: to drink the water, to cook with it, to shower or bathe with it, to wash their clothes and water their lawns and gardens with it.

OK, you say, "Dream on, dude!" Yeah, I know. The powerful always find ways to circumvent everything. That's why we need occasional revolutions.

Back to the book. In it we find that we are not using groundwater as fast as it is formed. The trouble is, groundwater varies in its purity and accessibility and in the cost to retrieve and transport it. The "cheapest" groundwater is mainly in underground formations, called aquifers, that are not being replenished very fast. In most of the world, we are extracting water that won't be replaced. It is called water mining. Only once it is gone will we turn to more costly water, and maybe one day we'll learn to use the water that is being replaced the most rapidly. But, give us time, and we'll find a way to outstrip even that supply. We need, not more water, but wiser water use. In the usual case, we do only what we are forced to do. This will most likely continue.

The book has no call to action. It is entirely educational. People need to understand what is actually out there, and what is actually going on. The learning itself will trigger action. That is the author's hope.

It's the money, stupid!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, economics, economists, textbooks

It weighs about a kilogram and contains 104 chapters in 331 pages (plus apparatus): The Economics Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, edited by Niall Kishtainy and written with six other contributors. It is a great reference book, if used with a few caveats in mind.

Firstly, it is best to read through once. Then keep it handy to browse as needed. The ideas presented are in historical order, beginning with Aristotle's promotion of private property and ending with Charles Goodheart's analysis of the boom and bust cycle as it is mirrored, and typically forecast, by the housing market. A key element of the apparatus is the Directory of persons, 2-3 column inches about 37 of the most important figures in historical and contemporary Economics. The "Key Thinker" behind each chapter is usually also limned in a mini-biography of 200-300 words.

Secondly, the ideas are presented with very little value judgment, though with some indication of their level of controversy. It took me a while to determine that many of them contradict one another. For example, many influential economic ideas have been based on the consumer or investor as a rational being, while more recent work in the psychology of economic decision-making makes it clear that nearly any pronouncement with the word "Efficient" in it is incorrect, and possibly disastrously wrong.

An example of this is the excessively random nature of stock market valuations. I say "excessive" because most economists define "random" to mean that the expected variations follow a "Normal" or "Gaussian" distribution. In The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb claims that these variations follow a Cauchy distribution, in which the probability of extreme events is much, much greater than you would expect from a Normal distribution. Thus, the 1929 crash, in which the entire market lost half its value in a single day. Based on the variation seen over the prior several decades, you would expect a 50% variation to have a probability of once per several million years, and a 25% variation—remember 1987?—to occur once in many thousands of years. But 1987-1929 is only 58 years.

My own analysis does not support a Cauchy distribution, but it does indicate a "fat tailed" distribution somewhat closer to Cauchy than Gauss. Based on realistic analysis, the 35% drop over a few weeks in 2009 (22 years after 1987) should have been no surprise. But it caught everybody who wasn't simply lucky. Investors expect Normal randomness, but can't deal with excessive randomness.

I like how the book is laid out. Most chapters, and many "in between" essays, are introduced with cool clip art. This item illustrates "The Last Worker Adds Less to Output Than the First," first analyzed by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in 1767. This maxim applies to many assembly-line operations, but not, for example, to the work of teams. In extreme cases, if any team member is missing, the work cannot proceed at all.

Every chapter is introduced by a gray section outlining the progress of ideas surrounding the key idea by the key thinker. The layouts often include capsule flowcharts that illustrate how a concept was derived (You'll need to click on this image to be able to read any of it). And this example also shows a capsule biography of Léon Walras (1834-1910), who studied the stability of free markets.

The book is worth having around to review and compare and contrast the various ideas. Modern economic trends are quite different from those that held sway even in the recent past, but they owe a lot to who and what has gone before. Those who still believe Karl Marx was right about abolishing private property (even my toothbrush?) may number in the single digits (most of them named either Castro or Kim), but the sharpness of ideas that contradict Marx has been honed by reaction to his writings.

Economics is presented as a science. I would say, "Not yet." Certain scientific skills are used and various equations are created to explain economic activity at all levels. But that also goes for some really crackpot notions, such as that today we were supposed to get wiped out by an asteroid or volcano or something. Fortunately, economics is not crackpot (though some economists clearly were). At its root, it is the study of incentives and how humans react to them. This is most clearly brought out by Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics books. The clearest message of those books and of this one is that we are individuals, and different people react differently to the same incentive. However, as long as we react independently (a huge assumption), certain average behaviors emerge. Modern economics is just beginning to get a handle on some of the ways we actually react, dependently and co-dependently and so forth.