The Golden Compass under review

It’s a sad day when a Canadian school board pulls your favourite children’s book from the shelves in dozens of libraries because it is allegedly ‘anti-religious.’ To be fair, Philip Pullman‘s The Golden Compass does take a critical stance on dogma and on hierarchical organizations. Elements can be taken as specific criticisms of the Inquisition and other religious abuses. At the same time, the book is engaging, well-written, and excellent. In characterization, creativity, and content it puts the Harry Potter books to shame, while also tackling much more important themes. The book was recognized by with the Carnegie Medal in 1995, and was selected by the Carnegie judges as one of the ten most important children’s novels in the past 70 years in 2007.

While the Halton Catholic District School Board clearly does have some responsibility for the selection of books in its school libraries, this choice is a mistake. If their students are going to have any kind of meaningful religious life, they are going to need to engage with criticisms of faith. That doesn’t necessarily mean giving them each a copy of The God Delusion, but it does require maintaining an atmosphere where questioning and discussion are possible. Simply stripping out high quality books that raise awkward questions is educationally irresponsible and theologically dubious in a faith supposedly based on personal relationships between individuals and God.

[Update: 4 December 2007] Emily has written a post about this book and another about the process of reading it.

I Am America (And So Can You!)

Drawn faces

Stephen Colbert is famously critical of books. He should probably have retained his skepticism rather than publishing I Am America (And So Can You!). Without the benefit of his live delivery, his style of humour is not particularly effective and most of what the book covers is well worn ground for avid watchers of The Colbert Report. Colbert is at his best when he is dynamic; he does not sit well on motionless pages.

The book is not entirely without entertaining elements, but does not do enough overall to justify the price or the time.

The Bottom Billion

Paul Collier‘s slim and informative volume is true to my recollection of the man from Oxford. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It is engaging, concise, and powerfully argued. It is also unsparing in its criticism. Collier explains that the ‘developing world’ consists of two groups of states: those experiencing sustained growth and thus seeing their standard of living converging with those in the rich world and those that are ‘stuck’ in poverty, with stagnant growth or absolute decline.

Poverty traps

The ‘stuck’ states – where the world’s poorest billion inhabitants are concentrated – are trapped in one of four ways: by conflict, natural resources, being landlocked with bad neighbours, and by bad governance. States can be trapped in more than one simultaneously and, even when they escape, there are systemic reasons for which they are unusually likely to fall back into one. The discussion of the traps is particularly informative because of how quantitative methods have been used in support of anecdotal arguments.

Not only are ‘bottom billion’ states unusually likely to suffer from conflict, corruption, and similar problems, but some of the most important paths to growth used by states that have already escaped poverty are closed to them. To grow through the export of manufactured goods, you need both low wages and economies of scale. Even if wages in Ghana are lower than those in China, China has the infrastructure and the attention of investors. The presence of export-driven Asian economies makes it harder for ‘bottom billion’ states to get on a path to development.

Solutions

Collier’s proposed solutions include aid, military intervention, changes to domestic and international laws and norms, and changes to trade policy. Much of it is familiar to those who have followed development debates: the problems with agricultural tariffs, the way aid is often used to serve domestic interests rather than poverty reduction, corruption within extractive industries, and the like. His most interesting ideas are the five international ‘charters’ he proposes. These would establish norms of best practice in relation to natural resource revenues, democracy, budget transparency, postconflict situations, and investment. Examining them in detail exceeds what can be written here, but it is fair to say that his suggestions are novel and well argued. He also proposes that ‘bottom billion’ states should see import tariffs in rich states immediately removed for their benefit. This is meant to give them a chance of getting onto the path of manufacture-led growth, despite the current advantages of fast-growing Asian states. His idea that states that meet standards of transparency and democracy should be given international guarantees against being overthrown in coups is also a novel and interesting one.

Position in the development debate

Collier’s book is partly a response to Jeffrey Sachs’ much discussed The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. Sachs pays much more attention to disease and has more faith in the power of foreign aid, but the two analyses are not really contradictory. Together, they help to define a debate that should be raging within the international development community.

Collier’s treatment is surprisingly comprehensive for such a modest volume, covering everything from coups to domestic capital flight in 200 pages. The approach taken is very quantitatively oriented, backing up assertions through the use of statistical methods that are described but not comprehensively laid out. Those wanting to really evaluate his methodology should read the papers cited in an appendix. Several are linked on his website.

Environmental issues

Environmental issues receive scant attention in this analysis. When mentioned, they are mostly derided as distractions from the real task of poverty reduction. It is fair enough to say that environmental sustainability is less of a priority than alleviating extreme poverty within these states. That said, the environment is one area where his assertion that the poverty in some parts of the world is not the product of the affluence in others is most dubious. It is likely to become even more so in the near future, not least because of water scarcity and climate change.

Climate change receives only a single, peripheral mention. This is probably appropriate. Surely, the effects of climate change will make it harder to escape the traps that Collier describes. That doesn’t really change his analysis of them or the validity of his prescriptions. The best bet for very poor states is to grow to the point where they have a greater capacity to adapt and will be less vulnerable to whatever the future will bring.

Littera Scripta Manet

Emily and I have devised a scheme for mutual education: we are each to select five books that the other person will read. Each book is assigned the span of one month to be acquired, read (however challenging it may be), and commented upon on respective blogs. My comments will obviously be here; hers will be on eponymous horn (like me, she has ensured eternal confusion by having a title unrelated to her URI). Discussion can then occur between the two of us and other readers by means of comments.

The intent behind the scheme is to select books that are both educational in themselves and revealing insofar as they reflect the character of the person who recommended them. Indeed, books that played a substantial role in developing character could be ideal for this sort of exchange.

I am going to need to spend some time seriously contemplating what ought to be on my list. One virtually never gets the opportunity to make a claim on so much of another person’s time.

Which books would the varied and interesting readers of this blog select?

Reloaded with non-fiction

I have officially abandoned my earlier initiative to finish all my pending books before purchasing more. Mostly, that is because I finished all the non-fiction on my list and all of the fiction I have read recently has been depressing. While much of the non-fiction can also be dispiriting, it feels less like emotional self-flagellation to read it.

My new crop of non-fiction:

  • Bodanis, David. Passionate Minds. 2006
  • Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. 2007
  • Easterly, William. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. 2006.
  • Overy, Richard. Why the Allies Won. 1995.

The Easterly book was endorsed by Emily Paddon during one of our pre-seminar conversations in Oxford. It is also one of those books that I have heard mentioned in conversation often enough to feel concerned about not having read. The Collier book is clearly on a related theme. I saw Paul Collier speak many times at Oxford and always found him candid and informative. Richard Overy’s book was one of the best I read in the course of two history seminars at Oxford; I look forward to having the chance to take my time in reading it, rather than having it as one of several urgent items in an essay’s source list. Finally, I got the Bodanis book because I have heard it well recommended and know little about Voltaire and even less about Emilie du Chatelet.

I will certainly finish the fiction eventually, but I will do so interspersed with meatier stuff.

Fugitive Pieces

Grief Grafitti

Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces is too overwhelming a book for me: overwhelming with sadness, with detail, with history, and with language evocative of inescapable grief. As such, it took me many weeks to read. One passage does a particularly good job of succinctly encapsulated the inescapable historical anguish that makes this small book so heavy:

History is the poisoned well, seeping into the groundwater. It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.

That kind of curse extends to all the characters in the book. None find any comprehensive solace; none manage to lift their feet above the boggy terrain of the past and make their way to a firmer present shore. The book presents a number of brief illuminations, but each has the ultimate character of being palliative rather than redemptive:

But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it’s not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it’s the world’s brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.

These people are swept along like houses carried by hurricane waters – whether floating towards tragedies or temporary reprieves from grief. The point is hammered home with talk of tornadoes transporting people or ripping them apart; lightning providing unexpectedly cooked geese, straight from the sky, or simply flattening people. Michaels’ people do not possess agency of the kind that we perceive ourselves to have, and which is essential to optimism.

The author’s approach to thought is almost completely unlike my own. Rather than focusing on patterns, both the author and the protagonists focus on details. Rather than drawing comprehensible conclusions from extrapolated data, they draw opaque, personal, emotional conclusions – as veiled as modern poems. The book is beautiful and powerful, but also soul-sapping and exhausting. It is a book with depths to reward you for your struggle.

In a way, this book is the antithesis of Nabokov’s Lolita. There, inherent ugliness is flawlessly concealed by language that has the power to immerse your whole mind in the succession of sounds and syllables. In Fugitive Pieces, your mind can never quite get to the language because it is hampered at all times by the heaviness of grief.

Secrets and Lies

Ottawa church

Computer security is an arcane and difficult subject, constantly shifting in response to societal and technological forcings. A layperson hoping to get a better grip on the fundamental issues involved can scarcely do better than to read Bruce Schneier‘s Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World. The book is at the middle of the spectrum of his work, with Beyond Fear existing at one end of the spectrum as a general primer on all security related matters and Applied Cryptography providing far more detail than non-experts will ever wish to absorb.

Secrets and Lies takes a systematic approach, describing types of attacks and adversaries, stressing how security is a process rather than a product, and explaining a great many offensive and defences strategies in accessible ways and with telling examples. He stresses the impossibility of preventing all attacks, and hence the importance of maintaining detection and response capabilities. He also demonstrates strong awareness of how security products and procedures interact with the psychology of system designers, attackers, and ordinary users. Most surprisingly, the book is consistently engaging and even entertaining. You would not expect a book on computer security to be so lively.

One critical argument Schneier makes is that the overall security of computing can only increase substantially if vendors become liable for security flaws in their products. When a bridge collapses, the construction and engineering firms end up in court. When a ten year old bug in Windows NT causes millions of dollars in losses for a company losing it, Microsoft may see fit to finally issue a patch. Using regulation to structure incentives to shape behaviour is an approach that works in a huge number of areas. Schneier shows how it can be made to work in computer security.

Average users probably won’t want to read this book – though elements of it would probably entertain and surprise them. Those with an interest in security, whether it is principally in relation to computers or not, should read it mostly because of the quality of Schneier’s though processes and analysis. The bits about technology are quite secondary and pretty easily skimmed. Most people don’t need to know precisely how smart cards or the Windows NT kernel are vulnerable; they need to know what those vulnerabilities mean in the context of how those technologies are used. Reading this book will leave you wiser in relation to an area of ever-growing importance. Those with no special interest in computers are still strongly encouraged to read Beyond Fear: especially if they are legislators working on anti-terrorism laws.

The World Without Us

Around the globe, every natural system is being affected by human behaviour: from the composition of deep oceanic sediments to mountaintop glaciers. As such, the concept behind Alan Weisman’s extraordinary book The World Without Us is both ambitious and illuminating. Using a combination of research, expert consultation, and imagination, he projects what would happen to the Earth if all 6.7 billion human inhabitants suddenly vanished. Within weeks and months, all the nuclear power plants will melt down; the massive petroleum refinery and chemical production complexes will burn, corrode, and explode; and nature will begin the slow process of reclaiming everything. Over the course of decades and centuries, the composition of all ecosystems will change as farmland is retaken and once-isolated patches of wildlife become reconnected. Cities will fall apart as bridges stretch and compress with the seasons and foundations fail on account of flooding. In the end, only bronze sculpture and ceramics are likely to endure until our red giant sun singes or engulfs the planet in about five billion years. More broadly, there is reason to hope that radio waves and some interstellar space probes will endure for billions of years.

Weisman uses his central idea as a platform from which to explore everything from material science to palaeontology and ecology. The book is packed with fascinating tidbits of information – a number of which have been shamelessly plagiarized in recent entries on this blog. A few examples of especially interesting topics discussed are the former megafauna of North America, human evolution and migration, coral reef ecology, lots of organic chemistry, and the history of the Panama Canal.

In the end, Weisman concludes that the human impact upon the world is intimately linked with population size and ultimately determines our ability to endure as a species. As such, he concludes with the concise suggestion that limiting human reproduction to one child per woman would cut human numbers from to 3.43 billion by 2050 and 1.6 billion by 2100. That might give us a chance to actually understand how the world works – and how human activity affects it – before we risk being overwhelmed by the half-glimpsed or entirely surprising consequences of our energetic cleverness.

Whether you accept Weisman’s prescription or not, this book seems certain to deepen your thinking about the nature of our world and our place within it. So rarely these days do I have time to re-read things. Nevertheless, I am confident that I will pick up this volume again at some point. Readers of this blog would be well rewarded for doing likewise.

[4 November 2007] I remain impressed by what Weisman wrote about the durability of bronze. If I ever have a gravestone or other monument, I want the written portion to be cast in bronze. Such a thing would far, far outlast marble or even steel.

Hot Air

Meaghan Beattie and Tristan Laing

Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge is a concise and virtually up-to-the-minute examination of Canadian climate change policy: past, present, and future. Jeffrey Simpson, Mark Jaccard, and Nic Rivers do a good job of laying out the technical and political issues involved and, while one cannot help taking issue with some aspects of their analysis, this book is definitely a good place to start, when seeking to evaluate Canada’s climate options.

Emission pathways

Hot Air presents two possible emissions pathways: an aggressive scenario that cuts Canadian emissions from 750 Mt of CO2 equivalent in 2005 to about 400 Mt in 2050, and a less aggressive scenario that cuts them to about 600 Mt. For the sake of contrast, Canada’s Kyoto commitment (about which the authors are highly critical) is to cut Canadian emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012, which would mean emissions of 563 Mt five years from now. The present government has promised to cut emissions to 20% below 2006 levels by 2020 (600 Mt) and by 60 to 70% by 2050 (225 to 300 Mt). George Monbiot’s extremely ambitious plan calls for a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (75 Mt for Canada, though he is primarily writing about Britain).

While Monbiot’s plan aims to reach stabilization by 2030, a much more conventional target date is around 2100. It is as though the book presents a five-decade plan to slow the rate at which water is leaking into the boat (greenhouse gasses accumulating in the atmosphere), but doesn’t actually specify how to plug the hole before it the boat sinks (greenhouse gas concentrations overwhelm the ability of human and natural systems to adapt). While having the hole half-plugged at a set date is a big improvement, a plan that focuses only on that phase seems to lack an ultimate purpose. While Hot Air does not continue its projections that far into the future, it is plausible that the extension of the policies therein for a further 50 years would achieve that outcome, though at an unknown stabilization concentration. (See this prior discussion)

Policy prescriptions

Simpson, Jaccard, and Rivers envision the largest reductions being achieved through fuel switching (for instance, from coal to natural gas) and carbon capture and storage. Together, these account for well over 80% of the anticipated reductions in both scenarios, with energy efficiency improvements, agricultural changes, waste treatment changes, and other efforts making up the difference. As policy mechanisms, the authors support carbon pricing (through either a cap-and-trade scheme or the establishment of a carbon tax) as well as command-and-control measures including tightened mandatory efficiency standards for vehicles, renewable portfolio standards (requiring a larger proportion of energy to be renewable), carbon management standards (requiring a larger proportion of CO2 to be sequestered), and tougher building standards. They stress that information and subsidy programs are inadequate to create significant reductions in emissions. Instead, they explain that an eventual carbon price of $100 to $150 a tonne will make “zero-emissions technologies… frequently the most economic option for business and consumers.” This price would be reached by means of a gradual rise ($20 in 2015 and $60 in 2020), encouraging medium and long-term investment in low carbon technologies and capital.

Just 250 pages long, with very few references, Hot Air takes a decidedly journalistic approach. It is very optimistic about the viability and affordability of carbon capture and storage, as well as about the transition to zero emission automobiles. Air travel is completely ignored, while the potential of improved urban planning and public transportation is rather harshly derided. The plan described doesn’t extend beyond 2050 and doesn’t reach a level of Canadian emissions consistent with global stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations (though it would put Canada on a good footing to achieve that by 2100). While the book’s overall level of detail may not satisfy the requirements of those who want extensive technical and scientific analysis, it is likely to serve admirably as an introduction for those bewildered by the whole ecosystem of past and present plans and concerned with understanding the future course of policy.

Children of Men

When was the idea of the post-apocalyptic future invented? I went to Blockbuster tonight in hopes of renting some clever comedy. Because of the unavailability of certain titles, recommendations from staff, delayed consequences from my trip to Morocco, and random factors, I ended up watching Children of Men instead. It makes for an uncomfortable accompaniment to my ongoing reading of The World Without Us. Then, there is Oryx and Crake and 28 Days Later. Even Half Life 2 had similar nightmare-future police-state fixations.

I wonder if it could be traced back, Oxford English Dictionary style, to the point where the first work of fiction emerged that envisioned the future as a nightmarish place. Furthermore, the first such fiction to envision human activities as the origin of the downfall. I wonder if ancient examples could be found, or whether it would all be in the last hundred years or so.