Teddy White had a fascination with politics and power that probably approached some kind of clinical obsession.  We follow him from his early days as a reporter in China, before the outbreak of WWII, and then through the war years in Asia, reconstruction in Europe, and then 60’s and 70’s presidential politics in the US.   Throughout, he describes his fascination with the big players:  Chiang Kai Check, Mao Tse Tsung, MacArthur, Monnet, Harriman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and his efforts to cultivate relationships with these men.

Obviously he had to get to know them, he was reporting back for Time and other weeklies.  But he seems to have been very very eager, for reasons that go beyond the merely professional, to hobnob and get to know these guys.  As if he got his personal thrills, his shivers in life, from being around the movers and the shakers.  A fascinating self-portrait, because it would seem like the next logical step would be to try to become one of the movers and shakers.  And you see him dip his toe in, with advice given here, messages passed there, that go beyond, arguably, the duties of a journalist.  But he always backed away, retreating to the safety of his self-avowed journalistic professionalism.  A moth playing with a candle fire, fluttering around it, backing away as soon as it feels the heat on its wings.

So you get a double treat here, a great tour of 20th century politics, and a portrait of a very complicated, driven, yet somewhat repressed, personality.

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This interview on You Tube is a nice digest of the book.

Why read the book?  It’s a lot more persuasive than Mr. Olberman’s production, very well written, and loaded with facts and statistics that make Klein’s argument seem incontrovertible.

Is it?

Milton Friedman sounds quite convincing defending himself in interviews.  No surprise there, he managed to convince many very smart and strong minded heads of state all over the world to give his ideas a try.

Regretfully, I haven’t read much about Milton Friedman.   But from what I can gather from this book, he was a free market purist.  He believed that the free market could solve all ills, and that the smallest state intervention in the free market was the worst of all possible problems.  Klein claims, and seems to prove quite well, that Friedman’s theories, when put into practice, are as extreme, draconian, and murderous in reality as the theories of Communism taken to an extreme and put into practice.  

Students of Friedman spread out from the University of Chicago in the 60s to practice what they had learned.  What they realized, and with Friedman’s encouragement did not shy away from, is that the drastic economic reforms that are required to create a truly free market economy are impossible to impose on a democratic society.  The people will vote against them every time.  So a great shock that paralyzes a democracy, that numbs people to the point that they cannot fight back, must occur for the reforms to be put into place.  Once the reforms are in, the people will recover and grow into the new free market system.

The great shock, when the theory was first tried in the 70s, was murderous dictatorship, as experienced in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia.

When Poland and China in the late 80s, and Russia in the early 90s, moved towards capitalism, the reforms were again authoritatively managed.

More recently, his theories have been put into practice following natural disasters, such as the Tsunami of 2004, Katrina in 2005, and in the worst realization of his ideas ever, in the man-made disaster that is Iraq.

Looking back on the 20th century with this book as a lens, I get the impression that to oppose Communism, the Western world needed an ideology as extreme and radical as Communism.  Milton Friedman gave it to us: pure, unfettered capitalism.  The United States, to Friedman’s great chagrin, was far too socialist, and it’s democracy far too strong, to experiment with his ideas.  So he and his students experimented elsewhere, starting in Latin America.

When Communism finally collapsed, it could be argued that Friedmanism was the only idea left, and that it could now progress unopposed.  And it certainly did.  In the US, the non-regulation of new derivatives in the early 90s, the dot com bubble, the housing bubble, the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, the contractor free for all  in the Iraq war, were all signs and symptoms of freer and freer markets.   Friedmanism had nothing  left to defeat except itself (isn’t that how it is with all extremist ideas?), which finally seems to have happened in 2008, with the credit crisis and the collapse of the financial system.  

So lo and behold, in 2009 we find even investment bankers believing in the third way, the middle way, the more socialist way.  Which brings me back to my lesson, that anyone advocating living an idea to it’s extremes is a crackpot to be avoided at all costs.  It will be interesting to see who is the first to show us what socialism taken to an extreme looks like.

These people would be outliers, they sit far outside the bell curve of normal achievement.  Gladwell looks at various sets of outliers, such as professional hockey players, pc/software industry moguls, the robber barons of the industrial revolution, iconic musicians, etc, and finds that there are very specific circumstances that increase the odds of success for certain sets of people.

Here are a few essential circumstances for success:

• World class mastery of any subject requires about 10000 hours of practice, whether it’s hockey, programming, music, whatever.  Professional hockey players, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, the Beatles, Mozart, all had ten thousand hours of practice in their fields before becoming successful.  They got a lot of their practice in as teenagers.  It’s tough to get ten thousand hours in starting from scratch as an adult.  So, if you’re still looking for something to be good at, think about what you always gravitated towards as a kid, and what skill that may have sharpened.
• In academics and athletics, being more mature (older, basically) at the beginning of the school year or practice season has been statisticaly proven to give kids an advantage.  The cutoff date for hockey leagues in Canada is January 2.  Kids born closest after January 2 have a size and strength advantage.  This explains why most Canadian professional hockey players are born in the first half of the year.  A similar advantage accrues in academics to children born just after a school system’s cutoff date.  So parents aiming for high acheivers, plan your conceptions accordingly.
• Advantages accrue to those already advantaged.  This is a sad one.  Can be rather defeating if dwelled on too long.   Basically, those kids deemed more talented will be bumped up to the A league, the gifted and talented class, the magnet school, whatever.  Makes sense.  We’re not going to give Fullbright scholarships to those needing the most help, we’re going to give them to those deemed most capable of acheiving great things with them.  So, if you’ve got a talent, get it nurtured early, so you can pull ahead with it.
• The culture you were brought up in can be more determining of success than your IQ.  Gladwell compares two well known geniuses, and explains that the one who was not successful as an adult (he is known simply for having an incredibly high IQ) was disadvantaged by his anti-social, poor upbringing.  Middle and upper class families tend to socialize their children in a way that better prepares them to excel.  The children learn early on to expect to discuss their ideas, to defend their positions verbally, and to feel entitled to opportunities.  Kind of another take on the culture of poverty line of thought.
• Asians are good at math not because they have bigger math brains, but because their languages’ number naming systems are more logical.  English names for the teen numbers don’t make logical sense to a kid learning them for the first time:  eleven, twelve, thirteen..  where’s the pattern in the first three?   Also, you learn the teens, putting the number closest to the decimal point first, and then as soon as you get out of the teens, the number in the second decimal position comes first:  twenty one, twenty two, etc.  In Chinese, numbers past ten are simply named like: two tens one, or one ten three, names in which you practically learn to add as you are learning the names.  In Romance languages, there’s a fair bit of rote memorization of number names, and then assigning values to those names.  In Chinese, apparently, you learn ten number names, and all subsequent number names are just the mathematical expression of values.  Makes for pretty intuitive learning, and gives kids growing up with such a system a big head start.
• Timing.  Being born at the right time for a particular cultural shift.  A lot of the Silicone Valley software moguls were born in the first half of the 1950s.  This is not coincidence, it meant that when they were in their early twenties, out of high school, and before they were committed to families, a fair number of people, in the early 70s, had the opportunity to mess around with teletype computing, home computer kits, etc.   Similar birth timing story for Jewish lawyers who became New York champions of corporate takeover battles in the 80s: lucky to be born at the right time in the 1930s.  Similar story for the barons of the industrial revolution, born in the 1830s.

Gladwell uses a fair number of data sets and makes examples of real people who were blessed with fortuitous timing and who took the opportunities that came their way.  It all seems plausible, and its a fun read.  The nice thing about the book is that it doesn’t depress you, it kind of gets you thinking about what happy circumstances you can make the most of.

I guess this is a classic.  Mild on science fiction, heavy on historical tourism.  A great read for any New Yorker.  Si Morley, our cool chill protagonist, found languishing in a NYC ad firm in the 70s, gets recruited into a top secret government project to travel back in time.  The G-men decide to send him back to 1882 Manhattan, using the Dakota apartment building as the time machine.

It’s a very clever story, and serves up a wealth of information on life in Manhattan back then.

Students, if you have to read up on the 1880s for class, read this first.  It’s a history book with a plot.  All history books should be written this way.

James McManus recounts his trip to the 2000 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, where he was only supposed to cover the event (and a related kinky murder trial) for Harper’s Magazine.

Instead, without telling his editor, he decides to also enter the contest, and makes it to the final table!

I don’t play poker. Never could be bothered to learn, and I wouldn’t have picked up a book on any kind of card game, if it hadn’t been handed to me. But after reading this, I’m quite tempted to give poker a try.  McManus has explained the game so well, conveys the excitement so viscerally, that I want to be in that game too. Even for those of us who can’t tell a royal flush from a full house, McManus takes us all along and teaches it to us.   And he’s funny, and he knows drama.

The murder, eh. It’s just there to remind you how junky Las Vegas really is, in case you get swallowed in by all the genius, high quality, card and poker face strategy.

Kind of makes me want subscribe to Harper’s too.  Looks like they’ve got some fun-loving, gutsy editors, who seem to know just who to ask to write what, and just how much advance to give him to get his juices going.