laguardiathinks

[laguardiathinks]

Every year I make a goal of it to read two books a month. Every year I make a list. I usually end there, but this year I thought I’d jot down some impressions of each book and post / share the list. Here you go! (The list is in the order I read the books).

1. Sails On The Horizon -- Jay Worrall, 284 pp

* This is the first of three books by Jay Worrall in a series of Royal Navy historical fiction in the vein of Patrick O’Brian or C. F. Forester. It doesn’t measure up to either of them, but it’s a fun read nonetheless. This first of the three is the better of the two I read this year.

2. Wanderer -- Sterling Hayden, 434 pp

* Sterling Hayden was a movie star in the golden age of Hollywood. He had a self destructive urge to chuck the career and go sailing in schooners. The book is well written, entertaining, but frustrating to watch as Hayden screws up his life, marriage and family. Fascinating insight into the HUAC hearings and the red scare. Great read.

3. Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, 418 pp

* I need to read it again. There were so many deep insights in this book into how people think. Kahneman and his partner were the subjects of Michael Lewis’s most recent book, “The Undoing Project”. I haven’t read that one yet, but this one was one of the best I read this year.

4. In The Garden of Beasts -- Erik Larson, 365 pp

* Erik Larson writes good books. Years ago I read “Isaac’s Storm”, a gripping account of the worst natural disaster in US history, a hurricane that hit Galveston and killed 6000 people. This book puts you into the days leading up to the Nazis coming to power. The fascinating part is that you are in the heads of people who don’t yet know how the story is about to turn out, sort of like all of us today.

5. Essential Dutch Grammar -- Henry R. Stern, 84 pp

* Essential if you want to speak Dutch.

6. Any Approaching Enemy -- Jay Worrall, 274 pp.

* See above. Not as worth it as the first in the series.

7. Storm Passage: Alone Around Cape Horn -- Webb Chiles, 248 pp

* Webb Chiles is a serial solo circumnavigator in sailboats. He’s even done it in an open double masted canoe, I think. He writes pretty well about the experiences he’s had as well, and his books are available for download from his website. He’s part of what I’d call the “Cruiser’s Cannon”. If you’re interested in long distance journeying on a sailboat, read Webb Chiles along with the Pardey’s, Hal Roth, and some others.

8. Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind -- Michael J. Bradley, 324pp

* This is less about what’s wrong with teen agers and more of a guild for how parents can adapt and adjust to the crazy emotional swings of these years. I think it helped me to read the book. It definitely pointed out many of the things I was doing wrong, some of them embarrassing and painful.

9. In het donker is het veilig -- Els Beerten, 79 pp

* My first book in Dutch! Els is Greet’s aunt, and a well known author of both young adult books and full-on adult novels (Els came in second a few years ago for the Dutch language version of the Pulitzer Prize called the Golden Owl for her book “Alemaal Willen We de Hemel”.

10. Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans -- Louis Armstrong, 240pp

* It was fun to read a book in Armstrong’s own words. His voice is strong. There’s not a super compelling narrative. It’s more like sitting at his knee and listening to him reminisce about the old days in New Orleans. The book stops before he goes on to achieve most of his fame and is more a litany of his early heroes among the marching band and jazz hall giants of the teens and twenties.

11. The Unbanking of America -- How The New Middle Class Survives -- Lisa Servon, 184 pp

* I mostly red this for work, but it was a good primer on understanding why and how banks and other traditional financial institutions are not working for about half of America. It’s a quick read. Informative.

12. Admiral Hornblower In The West Indies -- C. S. Forester, 342 pp

* The last of the Horatio Hornblower series. Wow! These books are great! Along with Patrick O’Brian, historical fiction at its best. I’m excited to go on and read other Forester books like “The African Queen”.

13. Wizard's First Rule -- Terry Goodkind, 820 pp

* I’ve hear about and seen Goodkind’s books for years in the fantasy section of bookstores. I’ve had them recommended to me. I think this was a bit too sadomasochistic for my tastes, kind of like what you might expect if Stephen Sagal took up writing about sorcerers and dragons. I won’t be reading more of his seemingly endless series of books.

14. Barbarian Days - A Surfing Life, William Finnegan, 447pp

* Finnegan’s writing can lay a great deal of claim to why we live in the Bayt Area and why I surf. He wrote an article in the early 90’s for the New Yorker called “Playing Doc’s Games” that I read and thought “I want that!” It described big wave surfing at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. It painted a picture of surfing as wild and cerebral way more of a calling than I had ever expected. The book is more melancholy than I thought it would be, and Finnegan has decidedly love-hate relation with the pursuit. It was a great book. Along with “Caught Inside” by Daniel Duane, I’d rank it as my favorite surfing book.

15. The Billionaire and the Mechanic -- Julian Guthrie, 336 pp

* This is the story of Larry Ellison’s multiple America’s Cup campaigns and of the involvement of the San Francisco Yacht Club. The book was a great window into sailboat racing, the history and maneuvers around the Cup. I think I understand it now. It is also a gripping blow-by-blow of the multiple campaigns. The book even managed to humanize Ellison a little bit.

16. Hillbilly Elegy -- J. D. Vance, 261 pp

* Lots of hype about this one. It would have been hard to live up to it. Call it “Angela’s Ashes of Ohio”. Part of my ambivalence is realizing that I come partly from the same stock as Vance. I called my grandparents “Mamaw and Papaw” too.

17. Sacred Hoops -- Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty, 224 pp

* Mindfulness and basketball. I ended up getting to know and liking Phil Jackson. The book wasn’t particularly well written, but it did provide a privileged perspective.

18. Body of Lies -- David Ignatius, 349 pp

* This is a great spy novel. At a company offsite this year we had Hank Crumpton, former head of counter terrorism under Bush 2 and bona fide spy for many years come speak with us. Someone asked which portrayal of spies in popular media comes closest to reality. He said David Ignatius.

19. A People's History of the United States --Howard Zinn, 688 pp

* The history of the US told from the perspective of women, slaves, Native Americans and the working class. It turns out we suck in many, many ways. There are high ideals on which the country was founded, but we’ve spent the majority of our history not nearly living up to those ideals. We’re still not today. This was a bear of a book to get through, but it felt important and edifying the whole time. Glad I read it. I wish we could do better as a country.

20. Around the World in Eighty Days -- Jules Verne, 297 pp

* It’s a classic! It still holds up to reading. The classics are classics for good reason.

21. Hyperion — Dan Simmons, 482 pp

* How did I go so long without knowing about this series from Dan Simmons!? Some of the best science fiction I’ve ever read, right up there with Asimov’s Foundation series or Ender’s Game, but with a deep injection of classic literature (Chaucer!!) and poetry (Keats and Yeats!!).

22. Single & Single — John Le Carré, 345 pp

* I love Le Carré. It is spy fiction, but quietly, masterfully and elegantly written. Read anything by him.

23. The Fall off Hyperion — Dan Simmons, 517 pp

* See above. The first book in the series is really the set up. This is the payoff. There are others, but these first two books provide a complete story arc.

24. Sad Cypress — Agatha Christie, 191 pp

* Timeless popcorn.

25. Stormy Weather — Carl Hiaasen, 400 pp

* Present-day popcorn. Hiaasen is a columnist at the Miami Herald. He pulls many of his story ideas from the actual news. His books are a riot, filled with whacky characters on crazy capers with antiheroes and the backdrop of swamps and gators.

26. Doctor No — Ian Fleming, 232 pp

* I’ve never read a Bond novel. I wanted to see where the movies came from. It was interesting from a historical perspective, but dated, racist, mysogenistgic, and contrived. The funny thing is that the movies seem to do better by taking it all further and taking it less seriously.

[laguardiathinks]

What Happened?

Let me tell you a story.

I don’t know if this is true, but it might be. It’s a story that I’ve started telling myself to explain how the nation has ended up with Donald J. Trump as president-elect. It feels true. It is certainly not complete, nor is it the only story that could accomplish an explanation, but oh well. Here goes.

We are a divided nation. A little more than half of us picked one candidate, a little less than half the other. Here’s one part of my story: neither half is composed entirely of fools or evil people. We are basically good and decent. All of us. Neither half wants the other half to suffer.

Here’s a second bit of the story. There are real policy camps. One of them, the one I’m in, thinks that social justice is important. It thinks that it’s right for all of us (represented by our government of the people, by the people, for the people) to take care of those who truly need help, so it believes in things like welfare and government supported health care. It believes in equality for all, and that the government (of the…etc) should help us all establish and preserve that equality when we can’t ourselves. It believes that there are big problems facing our environment and that the government should step in to protect it and reverse the problems where the dynamics of the free market refuse to — this camp is not anti business, but is anti-unfettered business. This means regulations. This questions whether a multi-billion dollar corporation is a “person” who should have zero limits on efforts to turn government to its own ends. The camp thinks that there are companies in the financial sector that continue to behave poorly and threaten our collective economic environment in the same way that others have affected the actual environment, and that government regulation is the right way to try to curb this. It believes that the only true and final path to equality for women must include reproductive freedom.

There’s another camp that believes, rightly so, that this is a dangerous world. That our government (of the…etc) should protect us from the dangers out there including terrorism, disease, and crime. Internationally, strong military is necessary to ensure this protection. This second camp believes that there is such a thing as right and wrong and that laws should be on the side of the right. It is right to protect children and the sanctity of life, especially when the children are un-born and don’t yet have a voice. It believes in the right of property and in the American dream of self advancement through hard work and perseverance. Hard work should not be penalized by having the government take away the fruits of this labor through taxes. The country has been made great and prosperous through the strength of ingenuity, innovation, and business growth. Unnecessary regulation hobbles this engine of our strength. This camp believes that individuals who skirt or break the rules should be held accountable and not be provided the benefits of the hard work of others. The benefits of liberty and opportunities of our country should be for the people of our country. We are a nation of immigrants, but we have rules about coming to this country that must be followed, other wise it will be exceedingly difficult to maintain the liberties we have.

The things these camps believe are not opposite, nor are they mutually exclusive. The camps have a differing set of priorities. These priorities lead to very different methods of governing.

This election wasn’t about all that. OK. Of course it was about all that, but shifting opinions or membership in those camps is not what changed the course of this election. Those camps are well established. They’ve been so since at least the 1960’s and a very large majority of America is solidly in one or the other. Elections have been won and lost by convincing voters who stand at the fringes of those camps, and who hold only loosely to the priorities of the camps, to switch sides. But this election wasn’t about a group in the middle with nothing better to do than pick a camp. It was about a monstrous concern to which both camps were blind. I’d argue that both Obama elections were about the same monstrous concern, though neither camp saw it as such.

Let’s talk about self-driving cars. They’re a key part of my story.

Across almost all of our states, the job with the most people doing it is truck driver. Over the years this job has shifted from primarily manufacturing and farming, through secretarial and knowledge work to where it is now truck driving (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state). Our economic history has been a Darwinian evolution of creative destruction. New competitors to old industries and companies arise. New technologies that allow efficiencies are invented (read “we don’t need all those people to do that stuff any more.”) Sure, people are displaced, but the march of competition also creates vast new opportunities, or at least it used to. Since the industrial revolution, we’ve seen huge agricultural efficiency gains that nearly eliminated the need for farm labor. From the ’70’s and ’80’s onward, the dual forces of automation and globalization have dramatically reduced the labor needed for manufacturing. The IT revolution from the ’80’s onward dramatically reduced the need for clerical workers. The pace of change is accelerating. The IT revolution also enabled the growth of a call center / customer service industry that became one of the major employers in middle America in the ’90’s and 2000’s, but voice automation and the rise of Internet-driven self help has pushed employment back down. Retail, particularly big-box stores grew up and are now under pressure from near instant delivery from on-line retailers. Even our shift to renewable energy, which holds the key to the future survival of the planet, has decimated the labor-intensive coal mining industry (granted this shift was also helped by very cheap natural gas).

The pace of technological advance disrupting bastions of people labor is accelerating and moving into areas we once thought inviolable. I had a discussion with David Filo the other day about music production, and he pointed out that we’re fast approaching the time when algorithmically generated pop music will be virtually indistinguishable from other pop. A friend at Google Labs has told me that machines are now far more accurate at reading xrays than humans. With technology, we’re now able to approach problems in new ways that defy human capabilities to match. This year we saw a computer program beat a human master at Go (the millenias old game of strategy), a feat thought impossible a decade ago, because the program was able to generate possible plays that a creative person would never have thought of. The computer was *more creative* than its human opponent.

Don’t get me wrong. These advances are astounding and inspiring. We live in a golden age in which nearly anything is possible. I’m not a Luddite, nor do I believe it is possible to slow the march of progress.

I haven’t forgotten self driving cars. The technology is incredible. It is entirely possible that children born today will never drive. If no one is driving, we will save the lives of approximately 40,000 people in the US alone who die each year in auto accidents. Without people at the wheel, we’ll realize enormous gains in automotive efficiency, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and maybe even reversing global warming. Self driving trucks will make our entire supply chain hugely more efficient and enable amazing possibilities. The generation of new wealth will be enormous. There will be new jobs created.

BUT.

Remember that the most popular job in nearly all states is truck driver. That job is about to go away, and the same population which, in its lifetime has experienced the disruption of Agriculture, Manufacturing, Information and Secretarial work, Call Center work and Retail will now see the door to another good living close down.

This is the problem that neither of the camps I talked about earlier has faced. The traditional rhetoric is “Its about jobs!” or “It’s the economy, stupid!” That’s correct, but it’s also very wrong. Look at this election. The current jobless rate is down to 4.9%. That’s really great if not historically low. The economy has been on a long-term growth tear. The markets are at all time highs. We’re all good, right? We should keep things as they are except those split-camp priorities above, right? Wrong.

We learned in this election that numbers hide the truth. The numbers showed that Clinton would win. She didn’t. The numbers show that we’re in a good place with respect to employment in America. We aren’t. It’s going to get worse, but it’s not just about jobs, per se.

For better or worse, employment has delivered meaning to our lives. When you meet someone for the first time, the second question after “What’s your name?” is “What do you do?” Our professions have become our identity. Work gives structure to our lives and purpose to our existence. What happens when the economy no longer needs our work? The disruption tidal wave has not really hit well educated knowledge workers yet, at least not full force. That’s why you saw many of them stay in their camps, traditional Democrat and Republican. It’s coming but not yet, and they’re at the high part of the land anyways. There’s more room to go up before the water swamps them.

But transportation: when that goes, what is the next good job for a large group of people? There are not many industries in rural America that are set to replace it and that won’t be themselves quickly disrupted. Not retail. Not medical. Not hospitality and food service.

The biggest camp swing in this election was from rural America. The same part of America that sees epidemics of opioid and meth addiction-despair. Neither camp’s establishment presented a credible path to a meaningful and useful future for these people. So what did they do? They spurned the establishment. They supported a candidate who would do something different and who promised to tear down the existing institutions that had failed to deliver them a meaningful future. They’re not a majority of America, but they will swing to the side that seems to offer hope. In 2008, President Obama offered that hope and change. They backed him (along with all of the members of the “liberal” camp who were always going to back the liberal candidate). This election, after not seeing the promised hope and change from the liberal side, and seeing a candidate who is clearly 100% old-school establishment, they backed Trump (along with all of the members of the “conservative” camp who were always going to back the conservative candidate.) They are the swing voters in the electorate, but the swing wasn’t affected by they type of splinter issue we’ve seen in the past such as abortion rights, gay marriage, or promises to end an unpopular war. The swing was effected by a search for meaning and purpose that neither establishment has been able to provide. Trump is not perfect, but he is not trying the same things expecting different results.

That’s why Trump’s victory, even in the face of all of his odiousness, makes sense. (And by the way, that’s why Brexit makes sense too.)

This does not at all mean that I believe Trump will be a good president. He will be disastrous. He and the radical Tea Party, Alt-Right wing of the conservative movement he heads are cynical manipulators of the discontent of a small part of the electorate (and the rest of the conservative camp is complicit) purely for the gain of power and fame. They did not lead or cause this shift, but they are about to reap its benefits. I believe that because Trump has not focused on the real issue of jobs that provide meaning and relevance, he is doomed to the same fate as President Obama and the liberals in this election.

Now let’s talk youth and Bernie Sanders.

Where many people in rural America are facing the question of meaning and relevance in the face of rapidly narrowing employment possibilities right now, the youth of America are facing this specter as they peer out into their future. Thus, by my logic, the youth also should have been looking for change and not the status quo. They found him in Bernie Sanders. Both Trump and Sanders put forth an infrastructure plan (as did Clinton). They are taking a page from the New Deal which put millions of idle Americans to work while building our economic competitiveness. This is a short term stab at a long-term problem, but neither, to my knowledge, directly confronted the need for meaning. However, they both tapped into the unease. Sanders turned it towards the wealthy corporations, saying in effect “the reason you’re worried is because they’re taking your share.” Trump turned it towards fear. “It’s the immigrants. It’s the criminals. It’s the media. It’s the other.”

When Sanders lost his primary battle to Clinton, Trump suggested that his followers should lend him support. At the time, I thought this preposterous. Now I see the wisdom in it. Given election results, many may have, though I’ll leave that up to pollsters to verify. I think that what we’ve seen is the swing voters split along their leanings; the more conservative swing voters voted for their outsider candidate for lack of any other option. The more liberal, younger swing voters may have stayed home.

I didn’t understand all this before. As I said, my story may not be true, but it makes sense to me. The election went to Trump not because half of our nation has suddenly embraced a narcissistic, lying, bigoted demagogue but because he was the candidate in the race who was ready to try something different. The swing block may not even have articulated my “search for meaning” to themselves, but they felt it, and Trump at least said things that sounded as if he was going to address their discomfort.

Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump. My read of polls and numbers, combined with the fact that Hillary won the popular vote tells me that there is more confirmed support in America for the priorities of the liberal camp than those of the conservative. Add swing voters to this camp and you put Bernie over the top. I understand that now. I should have supported him over Clinton, recognizing that the status quo could not possibly have triumphed in this environment, but I wasn’t a swing voter and I was happy with the status quo. I was also blinded by the amazing possibility of our first woman president.

So where does this leave us?

Unfortunately, the swing electorate is now a loose cannon. I don’t know if you know where that phrase comes from. It has nothing to do with cannons firing. In old sailing warships, cannons on their wheeled platforms were tied in place with stout ropes. In storms, the ropes would sometimes work with the thrashing of the ship and come loose or break. Then you would have several tons of dense metal on wheels rolling about below decks on a wooden ship rolling through 30-40º of heel. It was terrifying. Men would lose limbs and lives getting crushed under careening artillery. Cannons would punch holes in the sides of ships and could literally sink them. The swing electorate has come untethered in a storm, and we as yet have no ropes of hope and meaning that can bind them. Trump was able to tilt the boat his way, and the cannon has swung in his direction. Much of our democracy could be crushed or sunk as a result. The cannon is not evil. It is necessary. But if the liberal camp wants a hope of surviving its swings, it needs to devise tethers that will hold; policies that will address the concerns of the parts of our electorate that are seeing dwindling options for meaning and relevance as the economy shifts. While it is the time to be vigilant about the cynical power grab by a demagogue, trampling of rights, and dangerous shifts of policy, it is not time to vilify the swing electorate that put the leaders there. This vilification (remember “basket of deplorables”?) is precisely what proved to the swing electorate that the status quo crowd was *not listening* to their pain. It’s time for empathy. It’s time for vision. We need to craft it together to carry us all forward and not leave a group of us without meaning and purpose. I believe it is the special responsibility of the tech sector to which I belong to lead the way. If we can invent the self-driving cars of our future, surely we can create jobs of meaning and purpose.