Recommended: The Myth of America's Decline

Josef Joffe, a German educated at Swarthmore and Harvard and now a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute and the Freeman-Spongli Institute for International Studies, has written an interesting book about the perennial America angst about oncoming doom. As he points out, the history of of predicting America's downfall starts before the America revolution, and has continued ever since. Sputnik, the so-called "missile gap", Vietnam, the malaise of the Carter years, the predicted rise of Russia, then Japan, and then China as global powers overtaking us have all been used to justify the recurring prophecy of America's downfall, usually to the political advantage of one presidential candidate or another.

Joffe examines all the usual justifications for these predictions and shows pretty convincingly that on closer examination all show just the opposite - that America is so far ahead of the rest of the world (in economy, education, military power, economic power, demographics, etc, etc,) that our political system can afford to do really stupid things and still not imperil our position as the only superpower. I confess that I myself have expressed some of these worries about America's decline in this blog from time to time.  Joffe's book has made me reexamine those worries.

Coincidentally, I had occasion earlier this week to be part of a panel reviewing new start-up companies in the area for funding possibilities. The experience was sobering - I spent all day listening to one brilliant entrepreneur after another pitch their innovations, and came away thinking that this country has little to worry about yet if there are this many bright, energetic, smart people pushing the  limits of science and technology and starting new companies.

This book is well worth reading and thinking about.

Sometimes.....

Sometimes I am simply aghast at how stupid people can be.  We have had months and months of revelations by Edward Snowden about how the NSA has been listening in on phone calls between everyone in the world, including world leaders. One would think our own State Department people might have gotten the message, and might have assumed that if we can do it so can others.

No, despite all the evidence that phone calls are insecure,  senior State Department official Victoria Nuland (she is an assistant Secretary of State, for goodness sakes!) just made a very, very impolitic phone call to our ambassador in the Ukraine which was recorded (probably by the Russians) and released to the world.  How dumb can one get?

Recommended: The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror

Bernard Lewis has written a number of very good books about the Middle East. This one, published in 2004, is especially important, because it is evident from the events of the past several decades that the American public in general, as well as the political elite in Washington, don't really understand the world view of the so-called "Arab street", and that has resulted in a number of expensive embarrassments and missteps in our foreign policy.  We tend (quite naturally) to think that the Arab world sees the world more or less the way we do.  But that is not the case - they see a very different world. Lewis does a good job of introducing us to that world view, and the historical antecedents that have shaped it.

Recommended: The Why Axis

The field of economics has been dominated for decades by academic theorists pumping out clever equations to explain economic activity and shape public policy. Gneezy and List represent a new, and probably much more promising approach – going out and doing real-world experiments to see how people actually behave, as opposed to how some theorist in an office thinks they behave. Ever wonder just why people are prejudiced – is it really animus or just economic self-interest?  Ever wonder what really would motivate ghetto kids to apply themselves in school? Ever wonder how to get people to give more generously to charitable causes? This book begins to give the answers, based on real data, not abstract theory.  This is a great book, and a welcome breath of fresh (data-driven) air in a field too often informed by ideology rather than reality.

Reminder: A full list of my recommended books, with their ISBN numbers, can be found in the book list on the sidebar to the right of this posting.

Recommended: Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

Not many years ago, no one knew if planets were common or rare. Now we know they are common, much more common than early estimates had predicted. That increases the odds that there is alien life out there among the stars, though it may mostly be very simple life. Lee Billings surveys the newly-exploding field of planet-hunting, describing in ways accessible to everyone – technical and nontechnical alike – the problems encountered in detecting distant planets and the emerging solutions. He also gives wonderful sketches of some of the main personalities involved. This book is both technically fascinating and spiritually inspiring. It brings back some of the excitement of the early space age, and it reminds one that life on our little planet is precarious, and we ought to pay more attention to preserving it. A great book!

Fad issues

It’s amazing to me how the public can get so worked up about nonsensical issues they don’t even understand. We seem to have issue fads just like we have diet fads.

One of the current hot issues is about genetically-modified foods. Hello?  Nature has been making genetically modified foods for about 4 billion years, and still does so all around the world every day in every species  – that’s what evolution is all about (except for those whose religious ideology requires them, against all evidence, to believe otherwise).  The difference is that nature does it randomly, with sometimes terrible results (think flu or ebola or HIV epidemics), while humans do it carefully in an attempt to do something useful, like increase the vitamin or protein content of a food.

When microwave ovens first came out there was a big fuss about how dangerous the radiation was, mostly by people who didn’t know the difference between ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons) and non-ionizing radiation (light bulbs, fireplaces, microwave ovens). This GM issue is about as silly as that one was.

The ASA boycott of Israel

The American Studies Association (ASA) called this week for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, as a protest against human rights violations in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank  It is an astounding piece of hypocrisy, even by the hypocrisy standards of liberal academia.  All it really proves is that rabid antisemitism is still alive and well, even in America.

Yes, some brutal things happen between Israel and the Palestinian communities.  Most of them initiated by the Palestinians, by the way.  I haven't heard of any Israeli suicide bombers blowing themselves up among civilians in the Palestinian territories. I keep wondering what the ASA people would suggest if, say, Mexico or Canada started firing random missiles into USA cities.  Terrorists took down two US buildings, and our response was to take down the government of two whole nations. So it is OK if we respond to terrorism, but not OK if Israel does?

I would be more impressed if the ASA initiated a boycott against other countries like, say, China, whose human rights abuses are much, much greater.  There are lots and lots of nations with worse human rights records than Israel.  Indeed, I suspect the US, in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is better qualified for an ASA boycott than Israel.    But in fact the ASA have simply displayed their antisemitism by singling out Israel.

I am glad to see that major universities like Harvard, Yale and Princeton have spoken out against this blatant antisemitism. More universities and academics need to do so.