Nonfiction
William Bernstein, If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly: Short pamphlet-free on his website -about saving for retirement in an uncertain world by an investment advisor to the wealthy who thinks that ordinary people are being deceived and shortchanged. Social Security will be around when today’s young adults retire, Bernstein says, but it probably won’t be enough, so everyone needs to pay off debt and save 15% for retirement. He doesn’t talk about how to pay off debt, but he does discuss what to do with that 15%: index funds, especially Vanguard index funds, which don’t charge much in fees and which keep you out of the hands of investment advisers, who exist to swindle you whether they consciously know it or not. (He says he knows Vanguard’s founder but isn’t a paid shill-his point is that Vanguard is owned by the people who buy into the funds, not by separate shareholders, and thus doesn’t have the same incentive to screw you as other funds do.) Quick read, good reminders.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: It’s easy to understand why Foucault was such an influential theorist; his explanation of the use of information collection and standardization to work on the body, in places from prisons to hospitals to armies to schools, offers a powerful theoretical apparatus with lots of applications across countries, times, and situations. That said, if you’ve read summaries elsewhere, it’s not clear to me that you need to read this book (cf. Bowling Alone). One very striking thing to me, since I also just finished Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, was how much these two books described the exact same thing: the extension of categorization, surveillance, and manipulation to poor people, who gain “identity” by being classified and recorded. By contrast, rich people gain identity (and even acclaim) by being above the law-that’s not Foucault’s focus, but he mentions it. Thus the modern army and modern capitalism go hand in hand.
John Turner, Brigham Young: Biography of the man who took Mormonism from its genesis with Joseph Smith to near-control of Utah, and managed its Weberian transition from being led by a prophet to being led by a church, with an administrative hierarchy capable of surviving in the long term. Young is not larger than life; he makes many mistakes, mostly financial; he has complicated relationships with his multiple wives, some of whom seem to be married out of convenience and others for passion; he says contradictory things about women over time, but always stays racist; he gets crankier as he gets older; he supports the slaughter of non-Mormons in various circumstances and then gets cagey about it in order to keep the federal government’s heavy hand from coming down. Turner repeatedly notes that Young’s positions weren’t unique in his time-though massacring a bunch of white Protestants and getting away with it was pretty unusual. I should probably read a biography of Smith for comparison.
Matt Taibbi, The Divide: Don’t read this unless you can tolerate wanting to scream a lot. Taibbi brilliantly contrasts the treatment of the rich and the poor in various ways, particularly with respect to the criminal justice system. He writes viciously about the frauds of the big banks and the high-level decisions not to prosecute anyone because … it’s not really crime, and money fines are okay, and so on. Then he contrasts the experience of mostly black and brown young men who get arrested-and therefore implicated for life in the criminal justice system, and disadvantaged or outright barred from getting various opportunities in education and jobs-and processed without concern for their factual guilt. As he says, one could imagine an argument for a system that was lenient across the board, or one that was harsh across the board, but there is no non-awful defense of our current system. There are moments of black humor, not just in the Kafkaesque nightmare of low-level arrests, but in descriptions of financial frauds, such as the justification for giving O.J. Simpson of all people a liar’s loan that enabled him to get a mortgage even with huge outstanding judgments against him that ensured he couldn’t actually afford a house-a note in his file that “he didn’t do it.” Ha ha ha sob. Recommended for anyone who can handle heartburn.
Joan C. Williams & Rachel Dempsey, What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know: Another entry in advice for professional women, with a heavier emphasis on racialized elements of experience, along with measured criticism both of “man up!” approaches and “act like a lady” approaches; one size does not fit all. The four patterns are “prove it again” (women face negative presumptions again and again); the tightrope (don’t be too nice or too mean); the “maternal wall” (motherhood as work death); and “tug of war” (older women have different expectations than younger, and sometimes women accept business cultures in which only one woman can succeed and try to be that woman at others’ expense). I was most interested in “prove it again,” which the authors discuss in subvariants: (1) men are judged on their potential, whereas women are judged on their achievements, which means women aren’t given the same chances; (2) whatever characteristics male candidates have turn out to be the keys to success, a finding teased out by several clever experiments varying qualifications; (3) men’s successes are attributed to skill and women’s to luck, while mistakes are the opposite; (4) objective requirements are applied strictly to women and leniently to men (see (1)); and (5) women are assumed to be gossiping/not engaged in work while men are presumed to be talking about business. They offer various microstrategies for dealing with these structural barriers, but throughout emphasize that the problem is indeed structural and can’t be solved on an individual level. Among the advice: document your accomplishments; form a “posse” that celebrates each other’s accomplishments; “no random acts of lunch”-follow up on networking, and engage in reciprocal exchanges of favors, even if that’s just crediting someone with helping you succeed; say no to office housework or negotiate for something in return for doing it.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: It’s easy to understand why Foucault was such an influential theorist; his explanation of the use of information collection and standardization to work on the body, in places from prisons to hospitals to armies to schools, offers a powerful theoretical apparatus with lots of applications across countries, times, and situations. That said, if you’ve read summaries elsewhere, it’s not clear to me that you need to read this book (cf. Bowling Alone). One very striking thing to me, since I also just finished Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, was how much these two books described the exact same thing: the extension of categorization, surveillance, and manipulation to poor people, who gain “identity” by being classified and recorded. By contrast, rich people gain identity (and even acclaim) by being above the law-that’s not Foucault’s focus, but he mentions it. Thus the modern army and modern capitalism go hand in hand.
John Turner, Brigham Young: Biography of the man who took Mormonism from its genesis with Joseph Smith to near-control of Utah, and managed its Weberian transition from being led by a prophet to being led by a church, with an administrative hierarchy capable of surviving in the long term. Young is not larger than life; he makes many mistakes, mostly financial; he has complicated relationships with his multiple wives, some of whom seem to be married out of convenience and others for passion; he says contradictory things about women over time, but always stays racist; he gets crankier as he gets older; he supports the slaughter of non-Mormons in various circumstances and then gets cagey about it in order to keep the federal government’s heavy hand from coming down. Turner repeatedly notes that Young’s positions weren’t unique in his time-though massacring a bunch of white Protestants and getting away with it was pretty unusual. I should probably read a biography of Smith for comparison.
Matt Taibbi, The Divide: Don’t read this unless you can tolerate wanting to scream a lot. Taibbi brilliantly contrasts the treatment of the rich and the poor in various ways, particularly with respect to the criminal justice system. He writes viciously about the frauds of the big banks and the high-level decisions not to prosecute anyone because … it’s not really crime, and money fines are okay, and so on. Then he contrasts the experience of mostly black and brown young men who get arrested-and therefore implicated for life in the criminal justice system, and disadvantaged or outright barred from getting various opportunities in education and jobs-and processed without concern for their factual guilt. As he says, one could imagine an argument for a system that was lenient across the board, or one that was harsh across the board, but there is no non-awful defense of our current system. There are moments of black humor, not just in the Kafkaesque nightmare of low-level arrests, but in descriptions of financial frauds, such as the justification for giving O.J. Simpson of all people a liar’s loan that enabled him to get a mortgage even with huge outstanding judgments against him that ensured he couldn’t actually afford a house-a note in his file that “he didn’t do it.” Ha ha ha sob. Recommended for anyone who can handle heartburn.
Joan C. Williams & Rachel Dempsey, What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know: Another entry in advice for professional women, with a heavier emphasis on racialized elements of experience, along with measured criticism both of “man up!” approaches and “act like a lady” approaches; one size does not fit all. The four patterns are “prove it again” (women face negative presumptions again and again); the tightrope (don’t be too nice or too mean); the “maternal wall” (motherhood as work death); and “tug of war” (older women have different expectations than younger, and sometimes women accept business cultures in which only one woman can succeed and try to be that woman at others’ expense). I was most interested in “prove it again,” which the authors discuss in subvariants: (1) men are judged on their potential, whereas women are judged on their achievements, which means women aren’t given the same chances; (2) whatever characteristics male candidates have turn out to be the keys to success, a finding teased out by several clever experiments varying qualifications; (3) men’s successes are attributed to skill and women’s to luck, while mistakes are the opposite; (4) objective requirements are applied strictly to women and leniently to men (see (1)); and (5) women are assumed to be gossiping/not engaged in work while men are presumed to be talking about business. They offer various microstrategies for dealing with these structural barriers, but throughout emphasize that the problem is indeed structural and can’t be solved on an individual level. Among the advice: document your accomplishments; form a “posse” that celebrates each other’s accomplishments; “no random acts of lunch”-follow up on networking, and engage in reciprocal exchanges of favors, even if that’s just crediting someone with helping you succeed; say no to office housework or negotiate for something in return for doing it.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.