Nonfiction: this mess we're in
Raising children: 2.0 took two pairs of boxer shorts, mushed them together, and insisted they were a baby. But she also maintained that she was the daddy and that the baby had two daddies, so perhaps I haven’t failed as a parent.
Edmund L. Andrews, Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown: It’s a good hook: economic reporter for the New York Times finds himself with a no-doc mortgage eating up his savings and endangering his marriage, because he was just as willing to take risks, hoping everything would work out, as the people he wrote about. He blames himself, but also the mortgage brokers willing to write ridiculous loans and the financial firms securitizing risk so that nobody in the chain had any incentive to care about whether people could pay these loans back-the big firms had the ability to appreciate the risks, but they thought they could just transfer those risks to someone else. As we now know, they couldn’t. Andrews isn’t particularly sympathetic-less so than he even thinks, probably, since he comes off like a guy who isn’t a physical abuser only because he manages to limit himself to emotional abuse and occasional violence against household items-but it’s hard to fault his point that as between borrowers and lenders we shouldn’t focus our disapproval on the borrowers, and we should be concerned that the lenders are getting bailouts without having to do anything for borrowers.
Andrews has also come under criticism for not disclosing in the book that his new wife had declared bankruptcy before they got married, which might be related to her-and his!-attitudes towards money as their problems built. They bought their house so that they’d have a big enough place for their combined families, but he was still paying so much alimony and she wasn’t getting the court-ordered child support, so his income didn’t match his actual ability to pay on the new mortgage; and there their troubles began. His personal story is interwoven with an account of how the mortgage crisis built and broke, but if you’ve been reading about this in the papers for a while there’s nothing new here. There is a point at the end where he recounts the evidence that subprime lenders targeted minorities, but he presents the “nondiscrimination” story that minorities were just riskier as about equally plausible-until he meets two (white) women who argue that they got worse loans because of their gender; one of them had essentially the same economic profile as he did and got her loan in the same area at the same time, but got a much, much worse loan, and his eyes were opened to the existence of bias! Well, as they say, let’s not focus on his lateness to the party and be glad that he showed up at all, I guess.
Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture: All my nonfiction recently seems to be about This Mess We’re In in varying ways. This book is loosely organized around the concept of low price, starting with the cognitive challenges it presents: we mistakenly think that discounts from originally high prices are somehow better than beginning with the ultimate price, even when that’s the same amount. But we also devalue cheap. Shell argues that the relentless pursuit of cheapness has led American producers and consumers to discount quality, and that quality has decreased a lot faster than price, so we’re not getting the benefit of our bargains. She looks at the environmental and social costs of cheapness-deforestation for disposable Ikea furniture, deskilling and lost jobs for products that used to require craft to make well, environmental devastation for cheap Asian shrimp, labor abuses for all sorts of goods made in China, and so on. Sometimes Shell’s tone crosses over into distaste for people who are willing to accept the knockoff over the original, especially when the product is fashion-based, but at core she’s arguing that almost everyone is harmed by cheapness, which has destroyed the good-quality middle that used to prevail. And cheap paperclips, she points out, can’t make up for the collapse in buying power many Americans have suffered with increasing income inequality, fewer high-paying jobs, and Wal-Mart as the pioneer of business practices; food may absorb less of a percentage of our budgets, but housing, education, and other things have become so much more expensive that we haven’t become wealthier, just busier and more ill-served by our buying habits.
Bee Wilson, Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee: Britain- and US-focused history of deliberately contaminated/mislabeled food, with an excursion to Asia as the story reaches the current time. Things have been bad since the development of large concentrations of people who don’t buy their own food, but they are worse when less enforcement is directed at the problem. Wilson argues that reformers can go wrong with overzealousness, insisting on definitions of purity that simply can’t be achieved, which has unfortunately sped the adoption of fake foods-produced from chemicals we don’t actually understand-that seem clean because they aren’t contaminated with dirt and insect heads. Real apples have the occasional worm, and that’s not the real problem: the problem is the people who spray them with toxic chemicals, whether as pesticide or to improve the color. I really want to give more money to food inspectors now.
The New Suburban History, eds. Kevin M. Kruse & Thomas J. Sugrue: More politically focused than Crabgrass Frontier, which all the authors take as a foundational text, the essays explore areas that Jackson did not go into detail on, though they don’t really disagree with his analysis other than to qualify it in certain ways. Essays consider segregation, the role of universities and research parks in shaping suburbia, visions of suburbia as Hell, African-American suburban experiences and aspirations, California’s tax revolt, claims for socioeconomic equity, and immigration. The most powerful for me was the first, David M.P. Freund’s Marketing the Free Market: State Intervention and the Politics of Prosperity in Metropolitan America, which argued that pervasive government interventions that allowed whites to move to the suburbs underwrote not just mortgages but a new narrative of racial innocence. By accepting the government’s own narrative that government intervention was only guaranteeing what the free market would naturally produce, and that this free market was necessary as an engine of American prosperity, whites were able to believe a number of related claims: African-Americans naturally drive down property values; white ability to move to the suburbs was a sign of deserved success; opposition to integration was not due to racism but to cold hard economic facts about property values. “It’s only natural, and thus we need to reinforce it with incentives and punishments”-the logic of oppression repeats itself again and again.
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Edmund L. Andrews, Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown: It’s a good hook: economic reporter for the New York Times finds himself with a no-doc mortgage eating up his savings and endangering his marriage, because he was just as willing to take risks, hoping everything would work out, as the people he wrote about. He blames himself, but also the mortgage brokers willing to write ridiculous loans and the financial firms securitizing risk so that nobody in the chain had any incentive to care about whether people could pay these loans back-the big firms had the ability to appreciate the risks, but they thought they could just transfer those risks to someone else. As we now know, they couldn’t. Andrews isn’t particularly sympathetic-less so than he even thinks, probably, since he comes off like a guy who isn’t a physical abuser only because he manages to limit himself to emotional abuse and occasional violence against household items-but it’s hard to fault his point that as between borrowers and lenders we shouldn’t focus our disapproval on the borrowers, and we should be concerned that the lenders are getting bailouts without having to do anything for borrowers.
Andrews has also come under criticism for not disclosing in the book that his new wife had declared bankruptcy before they got married, which might be related to her-and his!-attitudes towards money as their problems built. They bought their house so that they’d have a big enough place for their combined families, but he was still paying so much alimony and she wasn’t getting the court-ordered child support, so his income didn’t match his actual ability to pay on the new mortgage; and there their troubles began. His personal story is interwoven with an account of how the mortgage crisis built and broke, but if you’ve been reading about this in the papers for a while there’s nothing new here. There is a point at the end where he recounts the evidence that subprime lenders targeted minorities, but he presents the “nondiscrimination” story that minorities were just riskier as about equally plausible-until he meets two (white) women who argue that they got worse loans because of their gender; one of them had essentially the same economic profile as he did and got her loan in the same area at the same time, but got a much, much worse loan, and his eyes were opened to the existence of bias! Well, as they say, let’s not focus on his lateness to the party and be glad that he showed up at all, I guess.
Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture: All my nonfiction recently seems to be about This Mess We’re In in varying ways. This book is loosely organized around the concept of low price, starting with the cognitive challenges it presents: we mistakenly think that discounts from originally high prices are somehow better than beginning with the ultimate price, even when that’s the same amount. But we also devalue cheap. Shell argues that the relentless pursuit of cheapness has led American producers and consumers to discount quality, and that quality has decreased a lot faster than price, so we’re not getting the benefit of our bargains. She looks at the environmental and social costs of cheapness-deforestation for disposable Ikea furniture, deskilling and lost jobs for products that used to require craft to make well, environmental devastation for cheap Asian shrimp, labor abuses for all sorts of goods made in China, and so on. Sometimes Shell’s tone crosses over into distaste for people who are willing to accept the knockoff over the original, especially when the product is fashion-based, but at core she’s arguing that almost everyone is harmed by cheapness, which has destroyed the good-quality middle that used to prevail. And cheap paperclips, she points out, can’t make up for the collapse in buying power many Americans have suffered with increasing income inequality, fewer high-paying jobs, and Wal-Mart as the pioneer of business practices; food may absorb less of a percentage of our budgets, but housing, education, and other things have become so much more expensive that we haven’t become wealthier, just busier and more ill-served by our buying habits.
Bee Wilson, Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee: Britain- and US-focused history of deliberately contaminated/mislabeled food, with an excursion to Asia as the story reaches the current time. Things have been bad since the development of large concentrations of people who don’t buy their own food, but they are worse when less enforcement is directed at the problem. Wilson argues that reformers can go wrong with overzealousness, insisting on definitions of purity that simply can’t be achieved, which has unfortunately sped the adoption of fake foods-produced from chemicals we don’t actually understand-that seem clean because they aren’t contaminated with dirt and insect heads. Real apples have the occasional worm, and that’s not the real problem: the problem is the people who spray them with toxic chemicals, whether as pesticide or to improve the color. I really want to give more money to food inspectors now.
The New Suburban History, eds. Kevin M. Kruse & Thomas J. Sugrue: More politically focused than Crabgrass Frontier, which all the authors take as a foundational text, the essays explore areas that Jackson did not go into detail on, though they don’t really disagree with his analysis other than to qualify it in certain ways. Essays consider segregation, the role of universities and research parks in shaping suburbia, visions of suburbia as Hell, African-American suburban experiences and aspirations, California’s tax revolt, claims for socioeconomic equity, and immigration. The most powerful for me was the first, David M.P. Freund’s Marketing the Free Market: State Intervention and the Politics of Prosperity in Metropolitan America, which argued that pervasive government interventions that allowed whites to move to the suburbs underwrote not just mortgages but a new narrative of racial innocence. By accepting the government’s own narrative that government intervention was only guaranteeing what the free market would naturally produce, and that this free market was necessary as an engine of American prosperity, whites were able to believe a number of related claims: African-Americans naturally drive down property values; white ability to move to the suburbs was a sign of deserved success; opposition to integration was not due to racism but to cold hard economic facts about property values. “It’s only natural, and thus we need to reinforce it with incentives and punishments”-the logic of oppression repeats itself again and again.
comments on DW