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After all the twisted racial history of the United States Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas was confirmed by the Senate with the smallest margin of victory in more than 100 years, with little professional scrutiny and with a level of manipulative political rancor that diminished everyone directly involved. The effect on Thomas, we learn from this impeccably researched and probing biography, was to reinforce the chronic contradictions with which he has long lived.
Thus, although he seriously believes that his extremely conservative legal opinions are in the best interests of African-Americans, and yearns to be respected by them, he is arguably one of the most viscerally despised people in black America. It is incontestable that he has benefited from affirmative action at critical moments in his life, yet he denounces the policy and has persuaded himself that it played little part in his success. He berates disadvantaged people who view themselves as victims of racism and preaches an austere individualism, yet harbors self-pitying feelings of resentment and anger at his own experiences of racism. His ardent defense of states’ rights would have required him to uphold Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, not to mention segregated education, yet he lives with a white wife in Virginia. He is said to dislike light-skinned blacks, yet he is the legal guardian of a biracial child, the son of one of his numerous poor relatives. He frequently preaches the virtues of honesty and truthfulness, yet there is now little doubt that he lied repeatedly during his confirmation hearings — not only about his pornophilia and bawdy humor but, more important, about his legal views and familiarity with cases like Roe v. Wade.
Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher conducted hundreds of interviews with Thomas’s friends, relatives and colleagues for “Supreme Discomfort,” in addition to doing extensive archival research. Although Thomas refused to be interviewed, this was not a serious handicap, given his vast paper and video trail and his volubility about his feelings. The authors superbly deconstruct Thomas’s multiple narratives of critical life-events — the accounts vary depending on his audience — and it says much for their intellectual integrity that though they are clearly critical of their subject, their presentation allows readers to make their own judgments. Thomas is examined through the prism of race because, they argue, “that is the prism through which Thomas often views himself,” and their main argument is that “he is in constant struggle with his racial identity — twisting, churning, sometimes hiding from it, but never denying it, even when he’s defiant about it.”
The first third of the book assiduously assembles the shards of his life from his birth in Pin Point, Ga., to his nomination to the Supreme Court by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, and it casts new light on the social and psychological context in which Thomas fashioned himself. Pin Point, where he spent his first six years, comes as close to a scene of rural desolation as is possible in an advanced society. This is black life in the rural South at its bleakest, in which the best hope of the law-abiding is a job at the old crab-picking factory. It is in this sociological nightmare that a 6-year-old boy, by some miracle of human agency, discovers the path to survival through absorption in books. Born to a teenage mother, abandoned by his father when he was a year old, plunged into the even more frightening poverty of the Savannah ghetto, Thomas, along with his brother, was eventually rescued by his grandparents.
Thomas has made a paragon of his maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, an illiterate man who, through superhuman effort, native intelligence and upright living, was able to provide a fair degree of security for his family. Anderson cared deeply for the downtrodden, and the hard turn in Thomas’s adult individualism cannot be attributed to him. Indeed, it turns out that the man Thomas reveres disapproved strongly of his conservative politics.
Three other important forces shaped Thomas. In addition to white racism, he suffered the color prejudice of lighter-complexioned blacks. This dimension of black life has been so played down with the rise of identity politics that it comes as a shock to find a black person of the civil rights generation who feels he was severely scarred by it. Thomas says that growing up, he was teased mercilessly because his hair, complexion and features were too “Negroid” and that his schoolyard nickname was “ABC: America’s Blackest Child.” The authors seem inclined to believe contemporaries of Thomas who claim that he exaggerates and has confused class prejudice with color prejudice, as if class prejudice were any less execrable. On this, I’m inclined to believe Thomas, although, given where he now sits, the wife he sleeps with, the child he has custody of and the company he keeps, it might be time to get over it.
But Thomas bears the scars of yet another black prejudice: not only was he too black, he was also culturally too backcountry. Coastal Georgia is one of the few areas in America where a genuinely Afro-English creole — Gullah — is used, and Thomas grew up speaking it. In Savannah he was repeatedly mocked for his “Geechee” accent and was so traumatized by this that he developed the habit of simply listening when in public. That experience, Thomas claims, helps explain his mysterious silence on the Supreme Court during oral arguments. This seems a stretch, since Thomas is now an eloquent public speaker and an engaging conversationalist who, like most educated Southerners north of home, erased his accent long ago.
Another revealing aspect of Thomas’s upbringing is his difficult relationship with women. He is now reconciled with his mother, but for much of his life he resented and disapproved of her. She, in turn, acknowledges that she preferred his more compassionate brother, who died in 2000. The event that most angered the black community was Thomas’s public rebuke of his sister for being on welfare. The person most responsible for adopting and raising him was his step-grandmother, yet it is his grandfather, who initially spurned him and had abandoned Thomas’s own mother, who gets all the credit. His first career choice was to be a Roman Catholic priest, and he actually spent a year in a seminary, presumably anticipating a vow of chastity. For all his bawdy humor, he was extremely awkward with women, and his bookishness did not help. This hints, perhaps, at one source of his later troubles.
Up to the point of Thomas’s confirmation hearings, this book is a finely drawn portrait that surpasses all previous attempts to understand him. The remainder of the work is more wide-angled. Merida and Fletcher, who are journalists at The Washington Post, take us through the tumultuous hearings, then examine Thomas’s career and personal life up to the present: his complete embrace by the extreme right (he is a friend of Rush Limbaugh’s); his performance on the court; his relationship with Antonin Scalia, an ideological ally who some people think heavily influences Thomas’s thinking; and his secluded private life. We learn interesting things about him — for example, the stark contrast between his sometimes unfeeling legal opinions and his often compassionate personal relationships; the fact that he has quietly facilitated the confirmation of very liberal black judges, often to their amazement; and that he is probably the most accessible of the justices and enjoys the admiration and abiding loyalty of his clerks.
The treatment of Thomas’s legal doctrine, however, is pedestrian. Whatever one’s reservations about his “originalist” philosophy — notoriously, he has held that beating a prisoner is not unconstitutional punishment because it would not have appeared cruel and unusual to the framers — recent evaluations of his opinions by scholars like Henry Mark Holzer and Scott Douglas Gerber indicate that they should be taken seriously. Well, by lawyers anyway. We have also gone beyond the question of “who lied” in our assessment of the hearings. Of greater import would have been a critical examination of the bruising politics behind these hearings, the way both sides manipulated Thomas and Anita Hill, and the questionable ethics and strategic blunder of the left in focusing on Thomas’s sexuality, given America’s malignant racial history on this subject, instead of on his suspect qualifications for the job.
Nonetheless, the book remains invaluable for any understanding of the court’s most controversial figure. It persuasively makes the case that “the problem of color is a mantle” Thomas “yearns to shed, even as he clings to it.” In doing so, it brilliantly illuminates not only Thomas but his turbulent times, the burden of race in 20th-century America, and one man’s painful and unsettling struggle, along with his changing nation’s, to be relieved of it.
Orlando Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author of “The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s ‘Racial’ Crisis.”
Saturday, June 16
RIP Richard Rorty, American Philosopher
Stanley Fish
One day in early 1980, I bought a book and boarded a train in Philadelphia's Penn Station, intending to get off at Swarthmore. I missed the stop because I was so absorbed in the book that I never even noticed that we were pulling in and out of a series of small towns. The book was Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and by the time I finally got to my destination, I was an acolyte. What drew me in and held my passionate attention was not only the daring and bravado of the argument, but the extraordinary power of a style that was at once briskly colloquial—that is, without philosophical pretension—and extraordinarily precise. I later came to know that, in this case at least, the style was the man. When reading Rorty, one always hears the voice—deep, low, a bit gravely, world-weary, and so deadpan that it seems indifferent to the sentences it is uttering; sentences that are limpidly aphoristic and appearing not to do much; although in succession, like perfectly rounded bullet beads on a string, they acquire the force of a locomotive. That was surely their effect on an audience. When Rorty concluded one of his dramatically undramatic performances, the hands shot up like quivering spears, and the questions were hurled in outraged tones that were almost comically in contrast to the low-key withdrawn words that had provoked them.
Why outrage? Because more often than not a Rortyan sentence would, with irritatingly little fuss, take away everything his hearers believed in. Take, for example, this little Rortyan gem: "Time will tell; but epistemology won't." That is to say—and the fact that I have recourse to the ponderously academic circumlocution "that is to say" tells its own (for me) sad story—if you're putting your faith in some grandly ambitious account of the way we know things and hoping that if you get the account right, you will be that much closer to something called Truth, forget it; you may succeed in accomplishing the task at hand or reaching the goal you aim for, but if you do, it will not be because some normative philosophy has guided you and done most of the work, but because you've been lucky or alert enough to fashion the bits and pieces of ideas and materials at your disposal into something that hangs together, at least for the moment. Or, in other, and better words, "Time will tell; but epistemology won't."
A good way of teaching Rorty is simply to give students a baker's dozen of sentences and invite them to tease out the thought of the man who produced them. I have my own "top 10," and the list includes: "The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not." "A conviction which can be justified to anyone is of little interest." "One would have to be very odd to change one's politics because one had become convinced, for example, that a coherence theory of truth was preferable to a correspondence theory." "What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French." "It seems to me that I am just as provisional and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Sturmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause."
That better cause is the cause of expanding and extending our "sense of 'we' " and bringing more and more persons and vocabularies under the same ecumenical umbrella. At times the ecumenism could be disconcerting. Once at a conference Rorty indicated agreement with an account of his work that seemed to me to be antithetical to its very core. I rose and said so, and he agreed with me, too. I thought, no, it has to be one or the other of us. I still hadn't learned the lesson he was teaching, and now, like everyone else, I will be trying to do so in his absence.
One day in early 1980, I bought a book and boarded a train in Philadelphia's Penn Station, intending to get off at Swarthmore. I missed the stop because I was so absorbed in the book that I never even noticed that we were pulling in and out of a series of small towns. The book was Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and by the time I finally got to my destination, I was an acolyte. What drew me in and held my passionate attention was not only the daring and bravado of the argument, but the extraordinary power of a style that was at once briskly colloquial—that is, without philosophical pretension—and extraordinarily precise. I later came to know that, in this case at least, the style was the man. When reading Rorty, one always hears the voice—deep, low, a bit gravely, world-weary, and so deadpan that it seems indifferent to the sentences it is uttering; sentences that are limpidly aphoristic and appearing not to do much; although in succession, like perfectly rounded bullet beads on a string, they acquire the force of a locomotive. That was surely their effect on an audience. When Rorty concluded one of his dramatically undramatic performances, the hands shot up like quivering spears, and the questions were hurled in outraged tones that were almost comically in contrast to the low-key withdrawn words that had provoked them.
Why outrage? Because more often than not a Rortyan sentence would, with irritatingly little fuss, take away everything his hearers believed in. Take, for example, this little Rortyan gem: "Time will tell; but epistemology won't." That is to say—and the fact that I have recourse to the ponderously academic circumlocution "that is to say" tells its own (for me) sad story—if you're putting your faith in some grandly ambitious account of the way we know things and hoping that if you get the account right, you will be that much closer to something called Truth, forget it; you may succeed in accomplishing the task at hand or reaching the goal you aim for, but if you do, it will not be because some normative philosophy has guided you and done most of the work, but because you've been lucky or alert enough to fashion the bits and pieces of ideas and materials at your disposal into something that hangs together, at least for the moment. Or, in other, and better words, "Time will tell; but epistemology won't."
A good way of teaching Rorty is simply to give students a baker's dozen of sentences and invite them to tease out the thought of the man who produced them. I have my own "top 10," and the list includes: "The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not." "A conviction which can be justified to anyone is of little interest." "One would have to be very odd to change one's politics because one had become convinced, for example, that a coherence theory of truth was preferable to a correspondence theory." "What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French." "It seems to me that I am just as provisional and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Sturmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause."
That better cause is the cause of expanding and extending our "sense of 'we' " and bringing more and more persons and vocabularies under the same ecumenical umbrella. At times the ecumenism could be disconcerting. Once at a conference Rorty indicated agreement with an account of his work that seemed to me to be antithetical to its very core. I rose and said so, and he agreed with me, too. I thought, no, it has to be one or the other of us. I still hadn't learned the lesson he was teaching, and now, like everyone else, I will be trying to do so in his absence.
Wednesday, June 13
Michael Berube's latest
Over the past few weeks I’ve become aware of a serious problem in the liberal blogosphere. Thanks to the prestigious Golden Winger Awards, presented annually by the even more prestigious Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and a Pony, we have a reliable system for recognizing some of the most dedicated and remarkable forms of wingnuttery online and in print — you know, those gems from Hugh Hewitt or Jonah Goldberg that remind us just how much fun it can be to read the work of our compatriots on the right. And yet there is no “high-culture” version of the Kippies with which we can reward America’s leading wingnut intellectuals — no, really now, I mean the “respectable” ones — when they indulge in the kind of discourse we ordinarily associate with Clownhall.com or Bill O’Reilly.
The immediate occasion of this reflection is this Wall Street Journal op-ed in which I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is hailed as a “fallen soldier.” The essay is written as a letter to George Bush, and it concludes rather eloquently:
The prosecutor, and the jury and the judge, had before them a case that purported to stand alone, a trial of one man’s memory and recollections. But you have before you what they and the rest of us don’t — a memory of the passions and the panic, and the certitude, which gave rise to the war. And a sense, I am confident, of the quiet and selfless man who sat in the outer circle when your cabinet deliberated over our country’s choices in Iraq, and in those burning grounds of the Arab-Islamic world. Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can’t be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.
Eloquent, I say, and yet somehow . . . what is le mot juste? Ah, yes, I know: batshit insane. Indeed, the more you break it down, the more insane it gets: if Bush fails to pardon Libby, he is leaving behind “a soldier in your — our — war in Iraq.” (Somehow I imagine that Libby will fare better in later life than most of the actual soldiers languishing in Walter Reed and in VA hospitals across the country.) For Libby was engaged in that most noble enterprise of all, helping to blow a covert agent’s cover in order to help the Bush Administration make a fraudulent case for war.
Still, I must admit that there is at least one paragraph in this essay that sounds as if it were written by an undergraduate on an all-nighter:
In “The Soldier’s Creed,” there is a particularly compelling principle: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.
If, like me, you’ve graded stacks of survey-class essays, you know the idiom of those first three sentences: From the beginning of time, readers have thrilled to the brave deeds recorded in the Iliad…. And yet, folks, the author of this essay is no callow undergraduate. He is no Victor Davis Hanson wannabe from the depths of NewsMax. He is no Dorito-flecked lieutenant in the 101st Fighting Keyboarders. He is, rather, Professor Fouad Ajami, the Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. Yes, I know, SAIS is Neocon Central Headquarters. But unlike, say, The Corner, it is serious business. And it is home to some Very Serious People — like Ajami, who sits on the Board of Advistors of the journal Foreign Affairs and counts among his many awards and distinctions a 1982 MacArthur “genius” fellowship in the arts and sciences.
So where, I ask you, is the MacArthur-level Golden Winger for him?
Or take the case of poor Robert Brustein. About a month ago, in response to the latest “study” published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (official motto: David Horowitz with a human face), Brustein published a little screed in TNR’s “Open University.” Before I get to the nut graf (so to speak), let me explain a bit of the context.
Every so often, outfits like ACTA put out these “studies” in which they “demonstrate” that (a) professors hate America, (b) Ward Churchill is everywhere, and (c) professors hate Shakespeare. I am not exaggerating (very much), I assure you. One of ACTA’s recent pamphlets (published in May 2006) was indeed called How Many Ward Churchills? (.pdf) You’d think they would milk the suspense — dear me! just how many Ward Churchills are indoctrinating our impressionable little children? — but apparently ACTA didn’t think its readership would have much of an attention span, since the pamphlet starts on page one with the heading “How Many Ward Churchills?” and proceeds to conclude on page two of a 50-page booklet that “Ward Churchill is Everywhere.” You know, sorta like Elvis.
This year, they’ve come up with a new “study,” The Vanishing Shakespeare (another .pdf). Now, in order to appreciate this kind of work, you have to consider its intended audience. (I’m told that the original title was ZOMG! They Are Killing Shakespeare OH NOES!!, which I think captures the spirit of the thing.) The primary audience, of course, consists of people who know nothing about English literature (or college courses in English literature) except that Shakespeare was America’s greatest writer and that Hamlet’s soliloquy from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is truly sublime. They even open the “study” with the tag line, “Oh! What a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” which, I believe, is very literary. (Although that’s actually Ophelia talking about Hamlet’s “madness,” so it’s a kinda embarrassingly bad literary allusion if you’re trying to suggest that Shakespeare is being abandoned for Dangeral Studies.) And then they follow it up with another very literary reference: “the American Council of Trustees and Alumni researched how Shakespeare fits into English curricula at 70 of the nation’s leading colleges and universities. What we found is, to quote the Bard, ‘the unkindest cut of all.’” Zounds! The unkindest cut! That is extra extra literary. Certainly the authors of this study have brushed up their Shakespeare! Indeed, perhaps English professors are honoring the Bard more in the breach than the observance! That should make everyone concerned with higher education outraged that our college campuses are like the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns, breathes forth contagion on the world, and thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i’ the adage, is sicklied o’er with care!!!
But there’s a secondary audience, as well — an audience made up of sundry Andrew Aguecheeks who are (a) generally knowledgeable enough about English literature to know who Andrew Aguecheek is and (b) always ready and willing to believe whatever the wingnut culture warriors tell them about Dangeral Professors Today and Why We Hate Shakespeare. Last time around, it worked like a charm — yes, dear readers, believe it or not, ACTA has actually pulled this rabbit out of this old hat before! Back in 1996, when ACTA was known as the National Alumni Forum and was led by Lynne Cheney, they put out the exact same kind of “study”, which was duly reported in the New York Times under the headline, “At Colleges, Sun Is Setting on Shakespeare.” Hey, so maybe that’s why Shakespeare is vanishing! The sun was going down on him in 1996, and now no one can see him! That’s what happens when the sun goes down! That’s why Shakespeare wrote the immortal sonnet, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me.”
(One serious aside about these “studies.” They survey English departments to see how many of us require classes in Shakespeare. The funny thing is that most English departments don’t need to have Shakespeare requirements. Believe me, Shakespeare is doing just fine in English departments, and he’s been doing fine for a good long time. In fact, if someone were actually serious about trying to find out about Shakespeare’s place in the English curriculum, s/he would look at the total number of Shakespeare courses offered in English departments. But that’s only if someone were actually serious about this kind of thing.)
All right, now back to Brustein. Brustein starts off like so:
A recent report isued by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni documents what we already know: Shakespeare is no longer valued in our educational system.
In other words, ZOMG! They are killing Shakespeare OH NOES! And look what they’re replacing him with:
The report takes note that abandoning Shakespeare does not mean that our higher education system is abandoning requirements. No, it’s just that there are now more urgent things to include on the reading list. “While Shakespeare and other traditionally acclaimed authors such as Chaucer and Milton are no longer required, many institutions such as Rice, Oberlin, and Vanderbilt require students to study ‘non-canonical traditions,’ ‘under-represented cultures,’ and ‘ethnic or non-Western literature.’”
“And at the University of Virginia,” the report continues, “English majors can avoid reading Othello in favor of studying ‘Critical Race Theory’ which explores why race ‘continues to have vital significance in politics, education, culture, arts, and everyday social realities,’ including ’sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism.’”
But now for the nut graf. After swallowing the ACTA line whole, and getting the ague in his cheek as a result, Brustein concludes somewhat less eloquently than did Ajami on Libby:
A recent newspaper cartoon shows two young girls walking out of a school. One turns to the other and says, “I have two mommies.” The other replies, “How much is two?”
–Pause.–
All right. I may be reading too much into this, but don’t blame me — I learned how to read from guys like Shakespeare. And to my ears, this sounds a little bit strange. It sounds like Robert Brustein, the founding director of the Yale Repertory Theater and Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, the former dean of the Yale School of Drama, a senior research fellow at Harvard, and the theater critic of the Even the Liberal New Republic, has suggested that ACTA’s latest ZOMG They Are Killing Shakespeare OH NOES study has something to do with (a) a young girl who says she has two mommies and (b) another young girl who does not know how to count to two. And again, I don’t want to “interpret” this in a way that violates the “author’s” “intention” (especially since it is a “citation” and not a “use” of the cartoon), but it sounds a little bit like Robert Brustein, the founding director of the Yale Repertory Theater and Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, the former dean of the Yale School of Drama, a senior research fellow at Harvard, and the theater critic of the Even the Liberal New Republic, is making some kind of correlation between Heather Has Two Mommies and children who are unable to count. It almost sounds as if Brustein is suggesting that These Kids Today learn a lot about lesbianism in Our Schools Today but nothing about simple math (and, uh, therefore, Shakespeare). And it sounds as if Brustein is now getting his material from Mallard Fillmore.
If that’s the case, I ask again: where are the Kippies for such as these? For oh! what semi-noble minds are here o’erthrown!
The immediate occasion of this reflection is this Wall Street Journal op-ed in which I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is hailed as a “fallen soldier.” The essay is written as a letter to George Bush, and it concludes rather eloquently:
The prosecutor, and the jury and the judge, had before them a case that purported to stand alone, a trial of one man’s memory and recollections. But you have before you what they and the rest of us don’t — a memory of the passions and the panic, and the certitude, which gave rise to the war. And a sense, I am confident, of the quiet and selfless man who sat in the outer circle when your cabinet deliberated over our country’s choices in Iraq, and in those burning grounds of the Arab-Islamic world. Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can’t be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.
Eloquent, I say, and yet somehow . . . what is le mot juste? Ah, yes, I know: batshit insane. Indeed, the more you break it down, the more insane it gets: if Bush fails to pardon Libby, he is leaving behind “a soldier in your — our — war in Iraq.” (Somehow I imagine that Libby will fare better in later life than most of the actual soldiers languishing in Walter Reed and in VA hospitals across the country.) For Libby was engaged in that most noble enterprise of all, helping to blow a covert agent’s cover in order to help the Bush Administration make a fraudulent case for war.
Still, I must admit that there is at least one paragraph in this essay that sounds as if it were written by an undergraduate on an all-nighter:
In “The Soldier’s Creed,” there is a particularly compelling principle: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.
If, like me, you’ve graded stacks of survey-class essays, you know the idiom of those first three sentences: From the beginning of time, readers have thrilled to the brave deeds recorded in the Iliad…. And yet, folks, the author of this essay is no callow undergraduate. He is no Victor Davis Hanson wannabe from the depths of NewsMax. He is no Dorito-flecked lieutenant in the 101st Fighting Keyboarders. He is, rather, Professor Fouad Ajami, the Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. Yes, I know, SAIS is Neocon Central Headquarters. But unlike, say, The Corner, it is serious business. And it is home to some Very Serious People — like Ajami, who sits on the Board of Advistors of the journal Foreign Affairs and counts among his many awards and distinctions a 1982 MacArthur “genius” fellowship in the arts and sciences.
So where, I ask you, is the MacArthur-level Golden Winger for him?
Or take the case of poor Robert Brustein. About a month ago, in response to the latest “study” published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (official motto: David Horowitz with a human face), Brustein published a little screed in TNR’s “Open University.” Before I get to the nut graf (so to speak), let me explain a bit of the context.
Every so often, outfits like ACTA put out these “studies” in which they “demonstrate” that (a) professors hate America, (b) Ward Churchill is everywhere, and (c) professors hate Shakespeare. I am not exaggerating (very much), I assure you. One of ACTA’s recent pamphlets (published in May 2006) was indeed called How Many Ward Churchills? (.pdf) You’d think they would milk the suspense — dear me! just how many Ward Churchills are indoctrinating our impressionable little children? — but apparently ACTA didn’t think its readership would have much of an attention span, since the pamphlet starts on page one with the heading “How Many Ward Churchills?” and proceeds to conclude on page two of a 50-page booklet that “Ward Churchill is Everywhere.” You know, sorta like Elvis.
This year, they’ve come up with a new “study,” The Vanishing Shakespeare (another .pdf). Now, in order to appreciate this kind of work, you have to consider its intended audience. (I’m told that the original title was ZOMG! They Are Killing Shakespeare OH NOES!!, which I think captures the spirit of the thing.) The primary audience, of course, consists of people who know nothing about English literature (or college courses in English literature) except that Shakespeare was America’s greatest writer and that Hamlet’s soliloquy from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is truly sublime. They even open the “study” with the tag line, “Oh! What a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” which, I believe, is very literary. (Although that’s actually Ophelia talking about Hamlet’s “madness,” so it’s a kinda embarrassingly bad literary allusion if you’re trying to suggest that Shakespeare is being abandoned for Dangeral Studies.) And then they follow it up with another very literary reference: “the American Council of Trustees and Alumni researched how Shakespeare fits into English curricula at 70 of the nation’s leading colleges and universities. What we found is, to quote the Bard, ‘the unkindest cut of all.’” Zounds! The unkindest cut! That is extra extra literary. Certainly the authors of this study have brushed up their Shakespeare! Indeed, perhaps English professors are honoring the Bard more in the breach than the observance! That should make everyone concerned with higher education outraged that our college campuses are like the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns, breathes forth contagion on the world, and thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i’ the adage, is sicklied o’er with care!!!
But there’s a secondary audience, as well — an audience made up of sundry Andrew Aguecheeks who are (a) generally knowledgeable enough about English literature to know who Andrew Aguecheek is and (b) always ready and willing to believe whatever the wingnut culture warriors tell them about Dangeral Professors Today and Why We Hate Shakespeare. Last time around, it worked like a charm — yes, dear readers, believe it or not, ACTA has actually pulled this rabbit out of this old hat before! Back in 1996, when ACTA was known as the National Alumni Forum and was led by Lynne Cheney, they put out the exact same kind of “study”, which was duly reported in the New York Times under the headline, “At Colleges, Sun Is Setting on Shakespeare.” Hey, so maybe that’s why Shakespeare is vanishing! The sun was going down on him in 1996, and now no one can see him! That’s what happens when the sun goes down! That’s why Shakespeare wrote the immortal sonnet, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me.”
(One serious aside about these “studies.” They survey English departments to see how many of us require classes in Shakespeare. The funny thing is that most English departments don’t need to have Shakespeare requirements. Believe me, Shakespeare is doing just fine in English departments, and he’s been doing fine for a good long time. In fact, if someone were actually serious about trying to find out about Shakespeare’s place in the English curriculum, s/he would look at the total number of Shakespeare courses offered in English departments. But that’s only if someone were actually serious about this kind of thing.)
All right, now back to Brustein. Brustein starts off like so:
A recent report isued by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni documents what we already know: Shakespeare is no longer valued in our educational system.
In other words, ZOMG! They are killing Shakespeare OH NOES! And look what they’re replacing him with:
The report takes note that abandoning Shakespeare does not mean that our higher education system is abandoning requirements. No, it’s just that there are now more urgent things to include on the reading list. “While Shakespeare and other traditionally acclaimed authors such as Chaucer and Milton are no longer required, many institutions such as Rice, Oberlin, and Vanderbilt require students to study ‘non-canonical traditions,’ ‘under-represented cultures,’ and ‘ethnic or non-Western literature.’”
“And at the University of Virginia,” the report continues, “English majors can avoid reading Othello in favor of studying ‘Critical Race Theory’ which explores why race ‘continues to have vital significance in politics, education, culture, arts, and everyday social realities,’ including ’sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism.’”
But now for the nut graf. After swallowing the ACTA line whole, and getting the ague in his cheek as a result, Brustein concludes somewhat less eloquently than did Ajami on Libby:
A recent newspaper cartoon shows two young girls walking out of a school. One turns to the other and says, “I have two mommies.” The other replies, “How much is two?”
–Pause.–
All right. I may be reading too much into this, but don’t blame me — I learned how to read from guys like Shakespeare. And to my ears, this sounds a little bit strange. It sounds like Robert Brustein, the founding director of the Yale Repertory Theater and Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, the former dean of the Yale School of Drama, a senior research fellow at Harvard, and the theater critic of the Even the Liberal New Republic, has suggested that ACTA’s latest ZOMG They Are Killing Shakespeare OH NOES study has something to do with (a) a young girl who says she has two mommies and (b) another young girl who does not know how to count to two. And again, I don’t want to “interpret” this in a way that violates the “author’s” “intention” (especially since it is a “citation” and not a “use” of the cartoon), but it sounds a little bit like Robert Brustein, the founding director of the Yale Repertory Theater and Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, the former dean of the Yale School of Drama, a senior research fellow at Harvard, and the theater critic of the Even the Liberal New Republic, is making some kind of correlation between Heather Has Two Mommies and children who are unable to count. It almost sounds as if Brustein is suggesting that These Kids Today learn a lot about lesbianism in Our Schools Today but nothing about simple math (and, uh, therefore, Shakespeare). And it sounds as if Brustein is now getting his material from Mallard Fillmore.
If that’s the case, I ask again: where are the Kippies for such as these? For oh! what semi-noble minds are here o’erthrown!
Tuesday, June 12
Digital Maosim
Introduction
In "Digital Maosim", an original essay written for Edge, computer scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier finds fault with what he terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".
His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".
And he notes that "the Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites".
Where is this leading? Lanier calls attention to the "so-called 'Artificial Intelligence' and the race to erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent."
Read on as Jaron Lanier throwns a lit Molotov cocktail down towards Palo Alto from up in the Berkeley Hills...
—JB
--------------------------------
DIGITAL MAOISM
by JARON LANIER
My Wikipedia entry identifies me (at least this week) as a film director. It is true I made one experimental short film about a decade and a half ago. The concept was awful: I tried to imagine what Maya Deren would have done with morphing. It was shown once at a film festival and was never distributed and I would be most comfortable if no one ever sees it again.
In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie.
Twice in the past several weeks, reporters have asked me about my filmmaking career. The fantasies of the goblins have entered that portion of the world that is attempting to remain real. I know I've gotten off easy. The errors in my Wikipedia bio have been (at least prior to the publication of this article) charming and even flattering.
Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure. In my particular case, it appears that the goblins are probably members or descendants of the rather sweet old Mondo 2000 culture linking psychedelic experimentation with computers. They seem to place great importance on relating my ideas to those of the psychedelic luminaries of old (and in ways that I happen to find sloppy and incorrect.) Edits deviating from this set of odd ideas that are important to this one particular small subculture are immediately removed. This makes sense. Who else would volunteer to pay that much attention and do all that work?
The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It's been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it's a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that's actually interesting information.
No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.
There was a well-publicized study in Nature last year comparing the accuracy of the Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica. The results were a toss up, while there is a lingering debate about the validity of the study. The items selected for the comparison were just the sort that Wikipedia would do well on: Science topics that the collective at large doesn't care much about. "Kinetic isotope effect" or "Vesalius, Andreas" are examples of topics that make the Britannica hard to maintain, because it takes work to find the right authors to research and review a multitude of diverse topics. But they are perfect for the Wikipedia. There is little controversy around these items, plus the Net provides ready access to a reasonably small number of competent specialist graduate student types possessing the manic motivation of youth.
A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out. Later in this essay I'll point out what constraints make a collective smart. But first, it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.
For instance, most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use.
When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannica has an editorial voice, which some people have criticized as being vaguely too "Dead White Men."
If an ironic Web site devoted to destroying cinema claimed that I was a filmmaker, it would suddenly make sense. That would be an authentic piece of text. But placed out of context in the Wikipedia, it becomes drivel.
Myspace is another recent experiment that has become even more influential than the Wikipedia. Like the Wikipedia, it adds just a little to the powers already present on the Web in order to inspire a dramatic shift in use. Myspace is all about authorship, but it doesn't pretend to be all-wise. You can always tell at least a little about the character of the person who made a Myspace page. But it is very rare indeed that a Myspace page inspires even the slightest confidence that the author is a trustworthy authority. Hurray for Myspace on that count!
Myspace is a richer, multi-layered, source of information than the Wikipedia, although the topics the two services cover barely overlap. If you want to research a TV show in terms of what people think of it, Myspace will reveal more to you than the analogous and enormous entries in the Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites.
The race began innocently enough with the notion of creating directories of online destinations, such as the early incarnations of Yahoo. Then came AltaVista, where one could search using an inverted database of the content of the whole Web. Then came Google, which added page rank algorithms. Then came the blogs, which varied greatly in terms of quality and importance. This lead to Meta-blogs such as Boing Boing, run by identified humans, which served to aggregate blogs. In all of these formulations, real people were still in charge. An individual or individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.
These Web-based designs assumed that value would flow from people. It was still clear, in all such designs, that the Web was made of people, and that ultimately value always came from connecting with real humans.
Even Google by itself (as it stands today) isn't Meta enough to be a problem. One layer of page ranking is hardly a threat to authorship, but an accumulation of many layers can create a meaningless murk, and that is another matter.
In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.
Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Whole Earth Review and the founding Executive Editor of Wired, is a friend and someone who has been thinking about what he and others call the "Hive Mind." He runs a Website called Cool Tools that's a cross between a blog and the old Whole Earth Catalog. On Cool Tools, the contributors, including me, are not a hive because we are identified.
In March, Kelly reviewed a variety of "Consensus Web filters" such as "Digg" and "Reddit" that assemble material every day from all the myriad of other aggregating sites. Such sites intend to be more Meta than the sites they aggregate. There is no person taking responsibility for what appears on them, only an algorithm. The hope seems to be that the most Meta site will become the mother of all bottlenecks and receive infinite funding.
That new magnitude of Meta-ness lasted only amonth. In April, Kelly reviewed a site called "popurls" that aggregates consensus Web filtering sites...and there was a new "most Meta". We now are reading what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algorithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously.
Is "popurls" any good? I am writing this on May 27, 2006. In the last few days an experimental approach to diabetes management has been announced that might prevent nerve damage. That's huge news for tens of millions of Americans. It is not mentioned on popurls. Popurls does clue us in to this news: "Student sets simultaneous world ice cream-eating record, worst ever ice cream headache." Mainstream news sources all lead today with a serious earthquake in Java. Popurls includes a few mentions of the event, but they are buried within the aggregation of aggregate news sites like Google News. The reason the quake appears on popurls at all can be discovered only if you dig through all the aggregating layers to find the original sources, which are those rare entries actually created by professional writers and editors who sign their names. But at the layer of popurls, the ice cream story and the Javanese earthquake are at best equals, without context or authorship.
Kevin Kelly says of the "popurls" site, "There's no better way to watch the hive mind." But the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?
Readers of my previous rants will notice a parallel between my discomfort with so-called "Artificial Intelligence" and the race to erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent.
There is a pedagogical connection between the culture of Artificial Intelligence and the strange allure of anonymous collectivism online. Google's vast servers and the Wikipedia are both mentioned frequently as being the startup memory for Artificial Intelligences to come. Larry Page is quoted via a link presented to me by popurls this morning (who knows if it's accurate) as speculating that an AI might appear within Google within a few years. George Dyson has wondered if such an entity already exists on the Net, perhaps perched within Google. My point here is not to argue about the existence of Metaphysical entities, but just to emphasize how premature and dangerous it is to lower the expectations we hold for individual human intellects.
The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.
Compounding the problem is that new business models for people who think and write have not appeared as quickly as we all hoped. Newspapers, for instance, are on the whole facing a grim decline as the Internet takes over the feeding of curious eyes that hover over morning coffee and even worse, classified ads. In the new environment, Google News is for the moment better funded and enjoys a more secure future than most of the rather small number of fine reporters around the world who ultimately create most of its content. The aggregator is richer than the aggregated.
The question of new business models for content creators on the Internet is a profound and difficult topic in itself, but it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it's easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday's moves in a conversation.
The artificial elevation of all things Meta is not confined to online culture. It is having a profound influence on how decisions are made in America.
What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments, and major universities have all gotten the bug.
As a consultant, I used to be asked to test an idea or propose a new one to solve a problem. In the last couple of years I've often been asked to work quite differently. You might find me and the other consultants filling out survey forms or tweaking edits to a collective essay. I'm saying and doing much less than I used to, even though I'm still being paid the same amount. Maybe I shouldn't complain, but the actions of big institutions do matter, and it's time to speak out against the collectivity fad that is upon us.
It's not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual.
I've participated in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys lately and have had a chance to observe the results. I have even been part of a wiki about wikis. What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization. Why isn't everyone screaming about the recent epidemic of inappropriate uses of the collective? It seems to me the reason is that bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology.
The collective rises around us in multifarious ways. What afflicts big institutions also afflicts pop culture. For instance, it has become notoriously difficult to introduce a new pop star in the music business. Even the most successful entrants have hardly ever made it past the first album in the last decade or so. The exception is American Idol. As with the Wikipedia, there's nothing wrong with it. The problem is its centrality.
More people appear to vote in this pop competition than in presidential elections, and one reason for this is the instant convenience of information technology. The collective can vote by phone or by texting, and some vote more than once. The collective is flattered and it responds. The winners are likable, almost by definition.
But John Lennon wouldn't have won. He wouldn't have made it to the finals. Or if he had, he would have ended up a different sort of person and artist. The same could be said about Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, Joni Mitchell, Duke Ellington, David Byrne, Grandmaster Flash, Bob Dylan (please!), and almost anyone else who has been vastly influential in creating pop music.
As below, so above. The New York Times, of all places, has recently published op-ed pieces supporting the pseudo-idea of intelligent design. This is astonishing. The Times has become the paper of averaging opinions. Something is lost when American Idol becomes a leader instead of a follower of pop music. But when intelligent design shares the stage with real science in the paper of record, everything is lost.
How could the Times have fallen so far? I don't know, but I would imagine the process was similar to what I've seen in the consulting world of late. It's safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the possibility of being wrong.
Except when intelligent thought really matters. In that case the average idea can be quite wrong, and only the best ideas have lasting value. Science is like that.
The collective isn't always stupid. In some special cases the collective can be brilliant. For instance, there's a demonstrative ritual often presented to incoming students at business schools. In one version of the ritual, a large jar of jellybeans is placed in the front of a classroom. Each student guesses how many beans there are. While the guesses vary widely, the average is usually accurate to an uncanny degree.
This is an example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a collective. It is that peculiar trait that has been celebrated as the "Wisdom of Crowds," though I think the word "wisdom" is misleading. It is part of what makes Adam Smith's Invisible Hand clever, and is connected to the reasons Google's page rank algorithms work. It was long ago adapted to futurism, where it was known as the Delphi technique. The phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.
But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania.
The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential.
What makes a market work, for instance, is the marriage of collective and individual intelligence. A marketplace can't exist only on the basis of having prices determined by competition. It also needs entrepreneurs to come up with the products that are competing in the first place.
In other words, clever individuals, the heroes of the marketplace, ask the questions which are answered by collective behavior. They put the jellybeans in the jar.
There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an individual. When a government bureaucrat sets a price, for instance, the result is often inferior to the answer that would come from a reasonably informed collective that is reasonably free of manipulation or runaway internal resonances. But when a collective designs a product, you get design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.
Here I must take a moment to comment on Linux and similar efforts. The various formulations of "open" or "free" software are different from the Wikipedia and the race to be most Meta in important ways. Linux programmers are not anonymous and in fact personal glory is part of the motivational engine that keeps such enterprises in motion. But there are similarities, and the lack of a coherent voice or design sensibility in an esthetic sense is one negative quality of both open source software and the Wikipedia.
These movements are at their most efficient while building hidden information plumbing layers, such as Web servers. They are hopeless when it comes to producing fine user interfaces or user experiences. If the code that ran the Wikipedia user interface were as open as the contents of the entries, it would churn itself into impenetrable muck almost immediately. The collective is good at solving problems which demand results that can be evaluated by uncontroversial performance parameters, but it is bad when taste and judgment matter.
Collectives can be just as stupid as any individual, and in important cases, stupider. The interesting question is whether it's possible to map out where the one is smarter than the many.
There is a lot of history to this topic, and varied disciplines have lots to say. Here is a quick pass at where I think the boundary between effective collective thought and nonsense lies: The collective is more likely to be smart when it isn't defining its own questions, when the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value,) and when the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree. Under those circumstances, a collective can be smarter than a person. Break any one of those conditions and the collective becomes unreliable or worse.
Meanwhile, an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions.
If the above criteria have any merit, then there is an unfortunate convergence. The setup for the most stupid collective is also the setup for the most stupid individuals.
Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals. These people focused the collective and in some cases also corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing projects. There's a lot of experience out there to work with. A few of these old ideas provide interesting new ways to approach the question of how to best use the hive mind.
The pre-Internet world provides some great examples of how personality-based quality control can improve collective intelligence. For instance, an independent press provides tasty news about politicians by reporters with strong voices and reputations, like the Watergate reporting of Woodward and Bernstein. Other writers provide product reviews, such as Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal and David Pogue in The New York Times. Such journalists inform the collective's determination of election results and pricing. Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable, as has been demonstrated in many historical instances. (Recent events in America have reflected the weakening of the press, in my opinion.)
Scientific communities likewise achieve quality through a cooperative process that includes checks and balances, and ultimately rests on a foundation of goodwill and "blind" elitism — blind in the sense that ideally anyone can gain entry, but only on the basis of a meritocracy. The tenure system and many other aspects of the academy are designed to support the idea that individual scholars matter, not just the process or the collective.
Another example: Entrepreneurs aren't the only "heroes" of a marketplace. The role of a central bank in an economy is not the same as that of a communist party official in a centrally planned economy. Even though setting an interest rate sounds like the answering of a question, it is really more like the asking of a question. The Fed asks the market to answer the question of how to best optimize for lowering inflation, for instance. While that might not be the question everyone would want to have asked, it is at least coherent.
Yes, there have been plenty of scandals in government, the academy and in the press. No mechanism is perfect, but still here we are, having benefited from all of these institutions. There certainly have been plenty of bad reporters, self-deluded academic scientists, incompetent bureaucrats, and so on. Can the hive mind help keep them in check? The answer provided by experiments in the pre-Internet world is "yes," but only provided some signal processing is placed in the loop.
Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful in the pre-Internet world can be understood in part as modulating the time domain. For instance, what if a collective moves too readily and quickly, jittering instead of settling down to provide a single answer? This happens on the most active Wikipedia entries, for example, and has also been seen in some speculation frenzies in open markets.
One service performed by representative democracy is low-pass filtering. Imagine the jittery shifts that would take place if a wiki were put in charge of writing laws. It's a terrifying thing to consider. Super-energized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax-code on a frantic, never-ending basis. The Internet would be swamped.
Such chaos can be avoided in the same way it already is, albeit imperfectly, by the slower processes of elections and court proceedings. The calming effect of orderly democracy achieves more than just the smoothing out of peripatetic struggles for consensus. It also reduces the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an over-excited state when too many rapid changes to answers coincide in such a way that they don't cancel each other out. (Technical readers will recognize familiar principles in signal processing.)
The Wikipedia has recently slapped a crude low pass filter on the jitteriest entries, such as "President George W. Bush." There's now a limit to how often a particular person can remove someone else's text fragments. I suspect that this will eventually have to evolve into an approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the Internet arrived.
The reverse problem can also appear. The hive mind can be on the right track, but moving too slowly. Sometimes collectives would yield brilliant results given enough time but there isn't enough time. A problem like global warming would automatically be addressed eventually if the market had enough time to respond to it, for instance. Insurance rates would climb, and so on. Alas, in this case there isn't enough time, because the market conversation is slowed down by the legacy effect of existing investments. Therefore some other process has to intervene, such as politics invoked by individuals.
Another example of the slow hive problem: There was a lot of technology developed slowly in the millennia before there was a clear idea of how to be empirical, how to have a peer reviewed technical literature and an education based on it, and before there was an efficient market to determine the value of inventions. What is crucial to notice about modernity is that structure and constraints were part of what sped up the process of technological development, not just pure openness and concessions to the collective.
Let's suppose that the Wikipedia will indeed become better in some ways, as is claimed by the faithful, over a period of time. We might still need something better sooner.
Some wikitopians explicitly hope to see education subsumed by wikis. It is at least possible that in the fairly near future enough communication and education will take place through anonymous Internet aggregation that we could become vulnerable to a sudden dangerous empowering of the hive mind. History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind outbursts have been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious, and these are only a small sampling. I don't see why there couldn't be future social disasters that appear suddenly under the cover of technological utopianism. If wikis are to gain any more influence they ought to be improved by mechanisms like the ones that have worked tolerably well in the pre-Internet world.
The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.
These are just a few ideas about how to train a potentially dangerous collective and not let it get out of the yard. When there's a problem, you want it to bark but not bite you.
The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.
In "Digital Maosim", an original essay written for Edge, computer scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier finds fault with what he terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".
His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".
And he notes that "the Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites".
Where is this leading? Lanier calls attention to the "so-called 'Artificial Intelligence' and the race to erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent."
Read on as Jaron Lanier throwns a lit Molotov cocktail down towards Palo Alto from up in the Berkeley Hills...
—JB
--------------------------------
DIGITAL MAOISM
by JARON LANIER
My Wikipedia entry identifies me (at least this week) as a film director. It is true I made one experimental short film about a decade and a half ago. The concept was awful: I tried to imagine what Maya Deren would have done with morphing. It was shown once at a film festival and was never distributed and I would be most comfortable if no one ever sees it again.
In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie.
Twice in the past several weeks, reporters have asked me about my filmmaking career. The fantasies of the goblins have entered that portion of the world that is attempting to remain real. I know I've gotten off easy. The errors in my Wikipedia bio have been (at least prior to the publication of this article) charming and even flattering.
Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure. In my particular case, it appears that the goblins are probably members or descendants of the rather sweet old Mondo 2000 culture linking psychedelic experimentation with computers. They seem to place great importance on relating my ideas to those of the psychedelic luminaries of old (and in ways that I happen to find sloppy and incorrect.) Edits deviating from this set of odd ideas that are important to this one particular small subculture are immediately removed. This makes sense. Who else would volunteer to pay that much attention and do all that work?
The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It's been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it's a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that's actually interesting information.
No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.
There was a well-publicized study in Nature last year comparing the accuracy of the Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica. The results were a toss up, while there is a lingering debate about the validity of the study. The items selected for the comparison were just the sort that Wikipedia would do well on: Science topics that the collective at large doesn't care much about. "Kinetic isotope effect" or "Vesalius, Andreas" are examples of topics that make the Britannica hard to maintain, because it takes work to find the right authors to research and review a multitude of diverse topics. But they are perfect for the Wikipedia. There is little controversy around these items, plus the Net provides ready access to a reasonably small number of competent specialist graduate student types possessing the manic motivation of youth.
A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out. Later in this essay I'll point out what constraints make a collective smart. But first, it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.
For instance, most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use.
When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannica has an editorial voice, which some people have criticized as being vaguely too "Dead White Men."
If an ironic Web site devoted to destroying cinema claimed that I was a filmmaker, it would suddenly make sense. That would be an authentic piece of text. But placed out of context in the Wikipedia, it becomes drivel.
Myspace is another recent experiment that has become even more influential than the Wikipedia. Like the Wikipedia, it adds just a little to the powers already present on the Web in order to inspire a dramatic shift in use. Myspace is all about authorship, but it doesn't pretend to be all-wise. You can always tell at least a little about the character of the person who made a Myspace page. But it is very rare indeed that a Myspace page inspires even the slightest confidence that the author is a trustworthy authority. Hurray for Myspace on that count!
Myspace is a richer, multi-layered, source of information than the Wikipedia, although the topics the two services cover barely overlap. If you want to research a TV show in terms of what people think of it, Myspace will reveal more to you than the analogous and enormous entries in the Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites.
The race began innocently enough with the notion of creating directories of online destinations, such as the early incarnations of Yahoo. Then came AltaVista, where one could search using an inverted database of the content of the whole Web. Then came Google, which added page rank algorithms. Then came the blogs, which varied greatly in terms of quality and importance. This lead to Meta-blogs such as Boing Boing, run by identified humans, which served to aggregate blogs. In all of these formulations, real people were still in charge. An individual or individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.
These Web-based designs assumed that value would flow from people. It was still clear, in all such designs, that the Web was made of people, and that ultimately value always came from connecting with real humans.
Even Google by itself (as it stands today) isn't Meta enough to be a problem. One layer of page ranking is hardly a threat to authorship, but an accumulation of many layers can create a meaningless murk, and that is another matter.
In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.
Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Whole Earth Review and the founding Executive Editor of Wired, is a friend and someone who has been thinking about what he and others call the "Hive Mind." He runs a Website called Cool Tools that's a cross between a blog and the old Whole Earth Catalog. On Cool Tools, the contributors, including me, are not a hive because we are identified.
In March, Kelly reviewed a variety of "Consensus Web filters" such as "Digg" and "Reddit" that assemble material every day from all the myriad of other aggregating sites. Such sites intend to be more Meta than the sites they aggregate. There is no person taking responsibility for what appears on them, only an algorithm. The hope seems to be that the most Meta site will become the mother of all bottlenecks and receive infinite funding.
That new magnitude of Meta-ness lasted only amonth. In April, Kelly reviewed a site called "popurls" that aggregates consensus Web filtering sites...and there was a new "most Meta". We now are reading what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algorithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously.
Is "popurls" any good? I am writing this on May 27, 2006. In the last few days an experimental approach to diabetes management has been announced that might prevent nerve damage. That's huge news for tens of millions of Americans. It is not mentioned on popurls. Popurls does clue us in to this news: "Student sets simultaneous world ice cream-eating record, worst ever ice cream headache." Mainstream news sources all lead today with a serious earthquake in Java. Popurls includes a few mentions of the event, but they are buried within the aggregation of aggregate news sites like Google News. The reason the quake appears on popurls at all can be discovered only if you dig through all the aggregating layers to find the original sources, which are those rare entries actually created by professional writers and editors who sign their names. But at the layer of popurls, the ice cream story and the Javanese earthquake are at best equals, without context or authorship.
Kevin Kelly says of the "popurls" site, "There's no better way to watch the hive mind." But the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?
Readers of my previous rants will notice a parallel between my discomfort with so-called "Artificial Intelligence" and the race to erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent.
There is a pedagogical connection between the culture of Artificial Intelligence and the strange allure of anonymous collectivism online. Google's vast servers and the Wikipedia are both mentioned frequently as being the startup memory for Artificial Intelligences to come. Larry Page is quoted via a link presented to me by popurls this morning (who knows if it's accurate) as speculating that an AI might appear within Google within a few years. George Dyson has wondered if such an entity already exists on the Net, perhaps perched within Google. My point here is not to argue about the existence of Metaphysical entities, but just to emphasize how premature and dangerous it is to lower the expectations we hold for individual human intellects.
The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.
Compounding the problem is that new business models for people who think and write have not appeared as quickly as we all hoped. Newspapers, for instance, are on the whole facing a grim decline as the Internet takes over the feeding of curious eyes that hover over morning coffee and even worse, classified ads. In the new environment, Google News is for the moment better funded and enjoys a more secure future than most of the rather small number of fine reporters around the world who ultimately create most of its content. The aggregator is richer than the aggregated.
The question of new business models for content creators on the Internet is a profound and difficult topic in itself, but it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it's easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday's moves in a conversation.
The artificial elevation of all things Meta is not confined to online culture. It is having a profound influence on how decisions are made in America.
What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments, and major universities have all gotten the bug.
As a consultant, I used to be asked to test an idea or propose a new one to solve a problem. In the last couple of years I've often been asked to work quite differently. You might find me and the other consultants filling out survey forms or tweaking edits to a collective essay. I'm saying and doing much less than I used to, even though I'm still being paid the same amount. Maybe I shouldn't complain, but the actions of big institutions do matter, and it's time to speak out against the collectivity fad that is upon us.
It's not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual.
I've participated in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys lately and have had a chance to observe the results. I have even been part of a wiki about wikis. What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization. Why isn't everyone screaming about the recent epidemic of inappropriate uses of the collective? It seems to me the reason is that bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology.
The collective rises around us in multifarious ways. What afflicts big institutions also afflicts pop culture. For instance, it has become notoriously difficult to introduce a new pop star in the music business. Even the most successful entrants have hardly ever made it past the first album in the last decade or so. The exception is American Idol. As with the Wikipedia, there's nothing wrong with it. The problem is its centrality.
More people appear to vote in this pop competition than in presidential elections, and one reason for this is the instant convenience of information technology. The collective can vote by phone or by texting, and some vote more than once. The collective is flattered and it responds. The winners are likable, almost by definition.
But John Lennon wouldn't have won. He wouldn't have made it to the finals. Or if he had, he would have ended up a different sort of person and artist. The same could be said about Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, Joni Mitchell, Duke Ellington, David Byrne, Grandmaster Flash, Bob Dylan (please!), and almost anyone else who has been vastly influential in creating pop music.
As below, so above. The New York Times, of all places, has recently published op-ed pieces supporting the pseudo-idea of intelligent design. This is astonishing. The Times has become the paper of averaging opinions. Something is lost when American Idol becomes a leader instead of a follower of pop music. But when intelligent design shares the stage with real science in the paper of record, everything is lost.
How could the Times have fallen so far? I don't know, but I would imagine the process was similar to what I've seen in the consulting world of late. It's safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the possibility of being wrong.
Except when intelligent thought really matters. In that case the average idea can be quite wrong, and only the best ideas have lasting value. Science is like that.
The collective isn't always stupid. In some special cases the collective can be brilliant. For instance, there's a demonstrative ritual often presented to incoming students at business schools. In one version of the ritual, a large jar of jellybeans is placed in the front of a classroom. Each student guesses how many beans there are. While the guesses vary widely, the average is usually accurate to an uncanny degree.
This is an example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a collective. It is that peculiar trait that has been celebrated as the "Wisdom of Crowds," though I think the word "wisdom" is misleading. It is part of what makes Adam Smith's Invisible Hand clever, and is connected to the reasons Google's page rank algorithms work. It was long ago adapted to futurism, where it was known as the Delphi technique. The phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.
But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania.
The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential.
What makes a market work, for instance, is the marriage of collective and individual intelligence. A marketplace can't exist only on the basis of having prices determined by competition. It also needs entrepreneurs to come up with the products that are competing in the first place.
In other words, clever individuals, the heroes of the marketplace, ask the questions which are answered by collective behavior. They put the jellybeans in the jar.
There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an individual. When a government bureaucrat sets a price, for instance, the result is often inferior to the answer that would come from a reasonably informed collective that is reasonably free of manipulation or runaway internal resonances. But when a collective designs a product, you get design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.
Here I must take a moment to comment on Linux and similar efforts. The various formulations of "open" or "free" software are different from the Wikipedia and the race to be most Meta in important ways. Linux programmers are not anonymous and in fact personal glory is part of the motivational engine that keeps such enterprises in motion. But there are similarities, and the lack of a coherent voice or design sensibility in an esthetic sense is one negative quality of both open source software and the Wikipedia.
These movements are at their most efficient while building hidden information plumbing layers, such as Web servers. They are hopeless when it comes to producing fine user interfaces or user experiences. If the code that ran the Wikipedia user interface were as open as the contents of the entries, it would churn itself into impenetrable muck almost immediately. The collective is good at solving problems which demand results that can be evaluated by uncontroversial performance parameters, but it is bad when taste and judgment matter.
Collectives can be just as stupid as any individual, and in important cases, stupider. The interesting question is whether it's possible to map out where the one is smarter than the many.
There is a lot of history to this topic, and varied disciplines have lots to say. Here is a quick pass at where I think the boundary between effective collective thought and nonsense lies: The collective is more likely to be smart when it isn't defining its own questions, when the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value,) and when the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree. Under those circumstances, a collective can be smarter than a person. Break any one of those conditions and the collective becomes unreliable or worse.
Meanwhile, an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions.
If the above criteria have any merit, then there is an unfortunate convergence. The setup for the most stupid collective is also the setup for the most stupid individuals.
Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals. These people focused the collective and in some cases also corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing projects. There's a lot of experience out there to work with. A few of these old ideas provide interesting new ways to approach the question of how to best use the hive mind.
The pre-Internet world provides some great examples of how personality-based quality control can improve collective intelligence. For instance, an independent press provides tasty news about politicians by reporters with strong voices and reputations, like the Watergate reporting of Woodward and Bernstein. Other writers provide product reviews, such as Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal and David Pogue in The New York Times. Such journalists inform the collective's determination of election results and pricing. Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable, as has been demonstrated in many historical instances. (Recent events in America have reflected the weakening of the press, in my opinion.)
Scientific communities likewise achieve quality through a cooperative process that includes checks and balances, and ultimately rests on a foundation of goodwill and "blind" elitism — blind in the sense that ideally anyone can gain entry, but only on the basis of a meritocracy. The tenure system and many other aspects of the academy are designed to support the idea that individual scholars matter, not just the process or the collective.
Another example: Entrepreneurs aren't the only "heroes" of a marketplace. The role of a central bank in an economy is not the same as that of a communist party official in a centrally planned economy. Even though setting an interest rate sounds like the answering of a question, it is really more like the asking of a question. The Fed asks the market to answer the question of how to best optimize for lowering inflation, for instance. While that might not be the question everyone would want to have asked, it is at least coherent.
Yes, there have been plenty of scandals in government, the academy and in the press. No mechanism is perfect, but still here we are, having benefited from all of these institutions. There certainly have been plenty of bad reporters, self-deluded academic scientists, incompetent bureaucrats, and so on. Can the hive mind help keep them in check? The answer provided by experiments in the pre-Internet world is "yes," but only provided some signal processing is placed in the loop.
Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful in the pre-Internet world can be understood in part as modulating the time domain. For instance, what if a collective moves too readily and quickly, jittering instead of settling down to provide a single answer? This happens on the most active Wikipedia entries, for example, and has also been seen in some speculation frenzies in open markets.
One service performed by representative democracy is low-pass filtering. Imagine the jittery shifts that would take place if a wiki were put in charge of writing laws. It's a terrifying thing to consider. Super-energized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax-code on a frantic, never-ending basis. The Internet would be swamped.
Such chaos can be avoided in the same way it already is, albeit imperfectly, by the slower processes of elections and court proceedings. The calming effect of orderly democracy achieves more than just the smoothing out of peripatetic struggles for consensus. It also reduces the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an over-excited state when too many rapid changes to answers coincide in such a way that they don't cancel each other out. (Technical readers will recognize familiar principles in signal processing.)
The Wikipedia has recently slapped a crude low pass filter on the jitteriest entries, such as "President George W. Bush." There's now a limit to how often a particular person can remove someone else's text fragments. I suspect that this will eventually have to evolve into an approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the Internet arrived.
The reverse problem can also appear. The hive mind can be on the right track, but moving too slowly. Sometimes collectives would yield brilliant results given enough time but there isn't enough time. A problem like global warming would automatically be addressed eventually if the market had enough time to respond to it, for instance. Insurance rates would climb, and so on. Alas, in this case there isn't enough time, because the market conversation is slowed down by the legacy effect of existing investments. Therefore some other process has to intervene, such as politics invoked by individuals.
Another example of the slow hive problem: There was a lot of technology developed slowly in the millennia before there was a clear idea of how to be empirical, how to have a peer reviewed technical literature and an education based on it, and before there was an efficient market to determine the value of inventions. What is crucial to notice about modernity is that structure and constraints were part of what sped up the process of technological development, not just pure openness and concessions to the collective.
Let's suppose that the Wikipedia will indeed become better in some ways, as is claimed by the faithful, over a period of time. We might still need something better sooner.
Some wikitopians explicitly hope to see education subsumed by wikis. It is at least possible that in the fairly near future enough communication and education will take place through anonymous Internet aggregation that we could become vulnerable to a sudden dangerous empowering of the hive mind. History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind outbursts have been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious, and these are only a small sampling. I don't see why there couldn't be future social disasters that appear suddenly under the cover of technological utopianism. If wikis are to gain any more influence they ought to be improved by mechanisms like the ones that have worked tolerably well in the pre-Internet world.
The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.
These are just a few ideas about how to train a potentially dangerous collective and not let it get out of the yard. When there's a problem, you want it to bark but not bite you.
The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.
Sunday, June 10
It's time to talk about the birds and the bees.
What Dad didn't tell you about the birds and bees.
By William Saletan
No, I don't mean sex. You've already heard that story: Boy meets girl, sperm meets egg, a baby grows in mommy's tummy. That's the way of all flesh. Or so you were told.
Well, you know how it is with the stories we tell kids. We leave a few things out. The truth about babies is that sometimes, there's no sperm. There's just an egg, but a baby hatches anyway. Many bees don't have daddies. Neither do some birds. It's called parthenogenesis—literally, virgin birth. We're finding more and more animals that can reproduce this way, and we're learning how to engineer it in others. We're even tinkering with mommy-daddy procreation in humans. If you think sex is kinky, wait till you see the alternatives.
In bees, fertilized eggs become females. Unfertilized eggs become males. Even without a queen, some female honeybees can keep a colony going by laying eggs that fertilize themselves.
Birds do it, too. Up to 30 percent of unfertilized turkey eggs can spontaneously begin to develop. In one study, selective breeding boosted the rate above 40 percent. A 1975 U.S. government report documented more than 50 mature turkeys that were never fathered.
Lately, parthenogenesis has been verified in various snakes and lizards, extending the list to about 70 vertebrate species, including fish, frogs, and chickens. But the beasts at the top of the food chain—lions, sharks, Komodo dragons—seemed impervious.
Then, in December, Nature delivered the first shock: "Parthenogenesis in Komodo dragons." Tests showed that seven juvenile dragons in European zoos were unfertilized offspring, known as parthenogens.
Still, the process hadn't been proved in sharks or mammals. And there seemed to be a good reason why. An egg that fertilizes itself makes two identical sets of chromosomes, including sex chromosomes. In birds, snakes, and most lizards, two identical sex chromosomes make a male. That allows parthenogenesis to function as a DNA survival mechanism, since an isolated female—close your ears, kids—can produce a son and mate with him. But in sharks or mammals, this wouldn't work, since two identical sex chromosomes—XX—make a female.
Or so we thought. Three weeks ago, Biology Letters delivered the second surprise: "Virgin birth in a hammerhead shark." A perfectly formed baby shark had appeared in a tank in Nebraska. Tests proved she, too, was a parthenogen.
Why hadn't we found parthenogenesis in these animals before? Because we hadn't looked. Several sharks have mysteriously reproduced in captivity in recent years. Scientists now think parthenogenesis is responsible. Of the two sexually mature female Komodo dragons in Europe, both are now known to have reproduced this way. Every parthenogenic dragon is male, which may explain in part why males heavily outnumber females. In snakes, the array of known parthenogenic species continues to grow.
For explaining everyday life—babies, puppies, puberty—the mommy-daddy story of procreation works fine. But at life's edges, conventional biology, like conventional physics, breaks down. As you approach the speed of light, time slows and distances shrink. And as you approach extinction, genes find new ways to pass themselves on. Scientists call it "reproductive plasticity." A Komodo dragon manufactures a mate. A shark's got to do what a shark's got to do.
Parthenogenesis is just one of nature's tricks. Worms can divide into smaller worms. Female turtles can store sperm for years. Sea bass can change their sex. Hermaphroditic sharks can fertilize their own eggs. Male ants can commandeer eggs to clone themselves. Some lizard species have reproduced for ages with no apparent male input.
Mammals are different. We have a mechanism called imprinting, which foils parthenogenesis. But we've also developed an organ that can foil imprinting: the human brain. A few years ago, scientists produced 10 mice, two of them apparently normal, by manipulating a couple of genes so that eggs could fertilize each other. The scientists predicted "even greater improvements in the efficiency of parthenogenetic development in mice," and they vowed to try next with pigs.
Will we try parthenogenesis in humans? We already have. Biotech companies are rushing to industrialize it, with one claiming "a dominant patent position in the production of human embryonic stem cells by parthenogenesis." The stem-cell version of parthenogenesis can't make babies, but the mouse version might. Theoretically, it would enable two lesbians to create a child—not a clone, but a mixture of genes from each parent, just like you or me.
We're not there yet, but we're on the way. Two years ago, British officials authorized human procreation using sperm, nuclear DNA from one woman, and mitochondrial DNA from a second woman. Three weeks ago, they proposed legislation that would approve the creation, for research, of "a human embryo that has been altered by the introduction of any sequence of nuclear or mitochondrial DNA of an animal." The categories we've taken for granted—mommy, daddy, people, animals—are blurring. We're losing our innocence.
But there's no going back to the days when humans weren't beasts and everyone had a daddy. Those days never existed. O brave old world, that has such creatures in it.
-Washington Post, June 2007
By William Saletan
No, I don't mean sex. You've already heard that story: Boy meets girl, sperm meets egg, a baby grows in mommy's tummy. That's the way of all flesh. Or so you were told.
Well, you know how it is with the stories we tell kids. We leave a few things out. The truth about babies is that sometimes, there's no sperm. There's just an egg, but a baby hatches anyway. Many bees don't have daddies. Neither do some birds. It's called parthenogenesis—literally, virgin birth. We're finding more and more animals that can reproduce this way, and we're learning how to engineer it in others. We're even tinkering with mommy-daddy procreation in humans. If you think sex is kinky, wait till you see the alternatives.
In bees, fertilized eggs become females. Unfertilized eggs become males. Even without a queen, some female honeybees can keep a colony going by laying eggs that fertilize themselves.
Birds do it, too. Up to 30 percent of unfertilized turkey eggs can spontaneously begin to develop. In one study, selective breeding boosted the rate above 40 percent. A 1975 U.S. government report documented more than 50 mature turkeys that were never fathered.
Lately, parthenogenesis has been verified in various snakes and lizards, extending the list to about 70 vertebrate species, including fish, frogs, and chickens. But the beasts at the top of the food chain—lions, sharks, Komodo dragons—seemed impervious.
Then, in December, Nature delivered the first shock: "Parthenogenesis in Komodo dragons." Tests showed that seven juvenile dragons in European zoos were unfertilized offspring, known as parthenogens.
Still, the process hadn't been proved in sharks or mammals. And there seemed to be a good reason why. An egg that fertilizes itself makes two identical sets of chromosomes, including sex chromosomes. In birds, snakes, and most lizards, two identical sex chromosomes make a male. That allows parthenogenesis to function as a DNA survival mechanism, since an isolated female—close your ears, kids—can produce a son and mate with him. But in sharks or mammals, this wouldn't work, since two identical sex chromosomes—XX—make a female.
Or so we thought. Three weeks ago, Biology Letters delivered the second surprise: "Virgin birth in a hammerhead shark." A perfectly formed baby shark had appeared in a tank in Nebraska. Tests proved she, too, was a parthenogen.
Why hadn't we found parthenogenesis in these animals before? Because we hadn't looked. Several sharks have mysteriously reproduced in captivity in recent years. Scientists now think parthenogenesis is responsible. Of the two sexually mature female Komodo dragons in Europe, both are now known to have reproduced this way. Every parthenogenic dragon is male, which may explain in part why males heavily outnumber females. In snakes, the array of known parthenogenic species continues to grow.
For explaining everyday life—babies, puppies, puberty—the mommy-daddy story of procreation works fine. But at life's edges, conventional biology, like conventional physics, breaks down. As you approach the speed of light, time slows and distances shrink. And as you approach extinction, genes find new ways to pass themselves on. Scientists call it "reproductive plasticity." A Komodo dragon manufactures a mate. A shark's got to do what a shark's got to do.
Parthenogenesis is just one of nature's tricks. Worms can divide into smaller worms. Female turtles can store sperm for years. Sea bass can change their sex. Hermaphroditic sharks can fertilize their own eggs. Male ants can commandeer eggs to clone themselves. Some lizard species have reproduced for ages with no apparent male input.
Mammals are different. We have a mechanism called imprinting, which foils parthenogenesis. But we've also developed an organ that can foil imprinting: the human brain. A few years ago, scientists produced 10 mice, two of them apparently normal, by manipulating a couple of genes so that eggs could fertilize each other. The scientists predicted "even greater improvements in the efficiency of parthenogenetic development in mice," and they vowed to try next with pigs.
Will we try parthenogenesis in humans? We already have. Biotech companies are rushing to industrialize it, with one claiming "a dominant patent position in the production of human embryonic stem cells by parthenogenesis." The stem-cell version of parthenogenesis can't make babies, but the mouse version might. Theoretically, it would enable two lesbians to create a child—not a clone, but a mixture of genes from each parent, just like you or me.
We're not there yet, but we're on the way. Two years ago, British officials authorized human procreation using sperm, nuclear DNA from one woman, and mitochondrial DNA from a second woman. Three weeks ago, they proposed legislation that would approve the creation, for research, of "a human embryo that has been altered by the introduction of any sequence of nuclear or mitochondrial DNA of an animal." The categories we've taken for granted—mommy, daddy, people, animals—are blurring. We're losing our innocence.
But there's no going back to the days when humans weren't beasts and everyone had a daddy. Those days never existed. O brave old world, that has such creatures in it.
-Washington Post, June 2007
Saturday, June 9
Libby goes to jail
The judge who sentenced I. Lewis Libby Jr. to prison this week issued an order dripping with sarcasm after receiving a supporting brief from a dozen prominent legal scholars, including Alan M. Dershowitz of Harvard and Robert H. Bork, the former Supreme Court nominee.
The judge, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in Washington, said he would be pleased to see similar efforts for defendants less famous than Mr. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
“The court trusts,” Judge Walton wrote, in a footnote longer than the order itself, that the brief for Mr. Libby “is a reflection of these eminent academics’ willingness in the future to step up to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions.”
“The court,” he added, “will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries.”
The judge, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in Washington, said he would be pleased to see similar efforts for defendants less famous than Mr. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
“The court trusts,” Judge Walton wrote, in a footnote longer than the order itself, that the brief for Mr. Libby “is a reflection of these eminent academics’ willingness in the future to step up to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions.”
“The court,” he added, “will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries.”
Friday, June 8
Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko
excerpt from Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB, by Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko.
The "I" of the excerpts is Goldfarb—a dissident scientist who left Russia in the 1970s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he went to work for George Soros directing charitable initiatives in Russia. He befriended Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko in the 1990s. He is currently executive director of the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, an umbrella group set up by Boris Berezovsky.
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Whoever chose polonium to kill Sasha did so because the chances of its ever being discovered were close to zero. It could not be easily identified chemically: the toxicology lab found only low levels of thallium, a minor contaminant of polonium production. Polonium was unlikely to be detected by its radioactivity, since common Geiger counters were not designed to detect alpha rays. Polonium is perhaps the most toxic substance on earth: a tiny speck is a highly lethal dose, and one gram is enough to kill half a million people. But it is absolutely harmless to a handler unless it is inhaled or swallowed. Most important, polonium had never been used to murder anyone before, so practically no one in the expert community—toxicologists, police, or terrorism experts—would have been looking for it or expecting it. It was sheer luck, plus Sasha's phenomenal endurance, that it was found. He had received a huge dose. Had he died in Barnet Hospital within the first two weeks, his death would have been attributed to thallium, meaning that anyone could have given it to him.
The irony is that once it was detected, polonium became a smoking gun. No amateur killer—even one awash with money—could have used it.
Any perpetrator who came up with the idea of employing polonium for a sinister purpose would necessarily have to have a high level of sophistication and knowledge of physics, medicine, and radioactive surveillance procedures, not to mention an understanding of polonium's production and distribution. All in all, it would have required a touch of genius, combined with tremendous resources—and access to polonium in the first place—to develop a murder plan of this sort on an ad hoc basis. Only an established organization with expertise in the area of science-based poisoning could have perpetrated this crime.
Ninety-seven percent of the known production of polonium, about 85 grams annually, takes place in Russia. Some is exported for industrial use, primarily to the United States. The Russian nuclear reactor that produces polonium is subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, such that each production cycle is supposed to be logged and recorded, although the IAEA does not register polonium per se.
Polonium, once it has been identified, is a detective's dream. Like an invisible dye it marks everything it touches, and it cannot be washed off. Once the right equipment is used, traces of polonium are detectable in a dilution as unimaginably weak as a millionth-of-a-millionth part. If someone, say, turns on a light in a hotel room with a contaminated hand, the light switch will be radioactive for months. From the amount and distribution of radioactivity on an armchair, an investigator can tell whether it was the right or the left hand that left the trace, and whether the hand was contaminated from the outside or the radioactivity came from the tiny droplets of sweat of someone who ingested the poison. In other words, traces left by a perpetrator and a victim are distinguishable from each other.
The Scotland Yard detectives uncovered several polonium trails in and out of London. Again, no official information has been released as this book goes to press. However, enough has been leaked from reliable sources to London newspapers to reconstruct a more or less complete picture, and the investigators essentially confirmed these leaks to Marina.
Within hours of Sasha's death, HPA radioactivity hunters identified and closed off several contaminated sites in London, including Itsu, the sushi restaurant on Piccadilly where Sasha met Mario Scaramella, and the bar in the Millennium Hotel where he had tea with the Russians. As the investigation progressed, they added dozens of other places to the polonium map; the eventual list included offices, restaurants, hotel rooms, homes, cars, and airplanes in several countries. Hundreds of people all over Europe showed varying degrees of polonium contamination, spreading from the epicenter of the "tiny nuclear bomb" exploded in London. When the dust settled, the investigators had a pretty complete understanding of how to read the map. As the Scotland Yard liaison officer told Marina, "We know exactly who did it, where, and how."
One of the polonium trails uncovered was left by Sasha. On the morning of November 1, 2006, he was clean. Detectives discovered a ticket in his pocket that led them to the bus that he took to Central London that day. No traces of polonium were found on the bus.
At about 6 p.m. Akhmed Zakayev picked him up from Boris Berezovsky's Mayfair office to bring him home to Muswell Hill. After that trip, Zakayev's Mercedes was rendered unusable by the tremendous amount of radioactivity Sasha left on the front seat.
Apparently the poisoning occurred in the Millennium Hotel bar, at around 5 p.m. Investigators found the teapot that was laced with the poison, which in turn contaminated the kitchen, including the dishwashing machine. The concentration of polonium at the hotel bar was apparently the highest of all, and it was airborne—indicating that the powder had been slipped into the pot of tea—because seven workers in the bar and several patrons tested positive for polonium. Between the Millennium bar and the time Zakayev picked him up, Sasha stopped at Boris's office, where he used the fax machine. Accordingly, some radioactivity was found on the machine.
Everything that he touched after returning home was heavily contaminated. The amount of radioactivity shed during the first three days of his illness—that is, before he was taken to the hospital—was enormous. According to an early estimate, it would cost more than £100,000 ($200,000) to clean the house to make it safe to reinhabit. Six months later, Marina and son Tolik were still unable to return home.
Of all the people who were in contact with Sasha, Marina was the most exposed, since she cared for him and cleaned up during the three days of extensive vomiting. She tested positive for ingesting polonium—thankfully, not enough to cause an immediate health hazard. Remarkably, her levels were not even high enough to leave their own secondary trail. This is significant because it suggests that anyone who did leave a radioactive polonium trail did not pick up the poison from Sasha. Most likely, such a person was in direct contact with polonium himself. Tolik, who stayed in the same house for three days but had much less physical contact with his father, has not been contaminated at all.
Apart from Sasha, Andrei Lugovoy left a polonium trail. With his associate Dmitry Kovtun, Lugovoy's school friend and army buddy and a veteran of GRU army intelligence Lugovoy had two meetings with Sasha, on October 16 and November 1.
The levels and spread of radioactivity left behind suggest that he handled polonium directly, rather than ingesting it, because there were significant traces of radioactivity. The body dilutes polonium before excreting it in sweat; the amounts that would have had to be ingested to produce traces equal to those of Lugovoy would almost certainly be lethal.
When Scotland Yard releases its computer-aided simulations of radioactivity spread, it will be possible to say exactly where and how the poison was handled before it ended in Sasha's teapot. What can be said at this point is that Lugovoy was shedding radioactivity before Sasha was exposed on November 1. For example, Lugovoy contaminated the leather sofa in Boris's study when he visited him on October 31
There was a trail of polonium from Lugovoy's previous visit to London, on October 16–17: in hotel rooms, offices, restaurants, and on the British Airways plane that took him back to Moscow. It was during that visit that the Itsu sushi restaurant on Piccadilly was contaminated, the one that Sasha and Mario Scaramella also visited on the day of his poisoning. That coincidence was the source of much initial confusion until it was established that on November 1 Sasha and Scaramella sat at a different table than the one occupied by Lugovoy, Kovtun, and Sasha two weeks earlier.
What Lugovoy was doing with polonium in London during the October 16 visit is a mystery. One hypothesis is that there were two attempts to put polonium into Sasha's meal; the first one, possibly at Itsu, did not work out, so there was a second attempt, which succeeded. Another hypothesis is that the October 16 meeting was a dress rehearsal.
For me, there is yet another possibility: that the operation on October 16 went wrong, yet left a trail of contamination; in short, it was screwed up. So for the November meeting, the handlers sent a professional killer, "the third man." The intermediaries served only to bring the hit man into contact with the target. This third-man theory has been promoted in the press by the ex-spy Oleg Gordievsky, who quotes his own anonymous sources. There was a "tall man with Asian features" on a flight from Hamburg on October 31. He was captured by airport surveillance cameras and then vanished without a trace. The passport he used to enter Britain was from a European country, but the investigators were unable to trace him to any hotel or to any flight leaving the country.
The police never gave Marina any hint in support of the third-man theory, but they have not disputed it, either. It is consistent with what Sasha told me and others: Lugovoy brought along a man whom Sasha had never seen before and who had "the eyes of a killer."
Finally, there was yet another man, Vladislav Sokolenko, who was associated with Lugovoy on November 1. His role is unclear, although he apparently was not contaminated by polonium.
There is no doubt that many questions will be answered in court—if the perpetrators are brought to trial. If the Crown Prosecution Service concludes that the perpetrators cannot be realistically apprehended, the police may still release the file. Then we would see not only the detailed polonium maps, but also the record of the minute-by-minute movements of Sasha, Lugovoy, and others through the streets of Central London, which are fully covered by CCTV surveillance cameras.
The story would be incomplete without considering a few alternative murder theories, which have been discounted after the polonium trails told their tales.
First, there was Mario Scaramella, a hapless political consultant who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. His relation to Sasha had to do with a squabble in Italian politics about some old and unproven allegations that the Italian prime minister Romano Prodi had been a KGB spy since the cold war. Back in 2004 Sasha told the Italian parliamentary commission investigating those rumors that once he had overheard his mentor General Trofimov referring to Prodi as "our man." The conversation with Trofimov, however, took place in 2000, after the Prodi-KGB scandal broke out in Italy in October 1999. So Trofimov could have been only repeating hearsay. In any case, it is unlikely that someone would deploy polonium in 2006 to kill Sasha for an inconsequential statement he made in 2004. Scaramella tested positive for polonium, but only in minute amounts.
Then there was Yulia Svetlichnaya, a Russian graduate student in Britain who briefly made headlines by claiming that Sasha had planned to blackmail a "Russian oligarch," not Berezovsky, who "had a connection with the Kremlin, a connection with Putin." Svetlichnaya had met Sasha while doing research for her book and he had corresponded with her.
There were numerous suggestions that Sasha's former colleagues in the URPO or some other rogue elements among present or former FSB officers had a motive for killing him. This theory became particularly popular when it was reported that a Russian Spetsnaz commando unit was using Sasha's image for target practice.
There was also a report by Yuri Shvets, another former KGB officer living in Washington, that Sasha had been compiling a file on a "prominent Kremlin figure" as part of a due diligence research for a commercial client.
All these theories suffer from two faults: they fail to explain access to polonium and the involvement of Andrei Lugovoy.
To my mind, no midlevel rogue officer, no hired hand, no hastily assembled hit squad could possibly get unauthorized access to the material, which, after all, is as suitable for a massive terror attack as any weapon of mass destruction: Polonium-210 is more toxic than anthrax and as good for making a dirty bomb as plutonium. Only the top levels of the Russian government should have access to it. And I am convinced that in the Russian government, all matters related to the London dissident group are personally controlled by the president. The London operation simply could not have been authorized without his knowledge.
Likewise, only a very persuasive argument could have brought Andrei Lugovoy into the project. After all, he is not a poor man, but worth somewhere around $20 to $25 million; he would not have done it for money. He did not have any motive to kill Sasha. Only a very powerful interest could have convinced him to get involved.
Why would anyone go to such lengths to kill a man living in a rented house in Muswell Hill? Here I agree with Putin: whatever Sasha had done or would do was not worth the trouble. He was not the ultimate target; his death was a means to an end. A very important end that justified the awesome means. There is only one credible murder motive—the one that Lord Tim Bell named even before Polonium-210 and Andrei Lugovoy became part of the equation: to pin a murder on the other side in the unending contest of wills between Putin and Berezovsky.
Regardless of Scotland Yard's confidence that they know "who did it, where, and how," they are unlikely to ever see their suspects in court. On 22 May, 2007, the Director of Public Prosecutions in the UK, Sir Ken Macdonald, called for the early extradition of Andrei Lugovoy, "so that he may be charged with murder—and be brought swiftly before a court in London to be prosecuted for this extraordinarily grave crime." But that the Russians will agree to his extradition appears highly unlikely." Instead of assisting the British investigation, the Russian government has been pursuing its own.
The Russian probe is designed as a mirror image of the British: there are detectives, witnesses, suspects, and a working theory, which balance everything that the Brits have to offer. Every British finding has a Russian counterfinding, every statement a counterstatement. Even the rhetoric is reciprocal. The Russians are using classic disinformation tactics, which are as reminiscent of the old KGB style as is the murder itself. The Kremlin-controlled press blasts the Western media for a cold war–style propaganda campaign.
As was outlined in a New York Times interview of Lugovoy published on March 18, 2007, the Russian countertheory regards him, not as a perpetrator, but as "an injured party," the victim of a murder attempt with polonium that occurred during the first visit to London on October 16. After being contaminated, he claimed, he carried traces of polonium back to Moscow, and then again to London on his second visit. In the Russian frame of reference, the reciprocal pair of suspects are Zakayev and Berezovsky.
In April 2007 Russian investigators flew to London to question Boris and Akhmed, balancing Scotland Yard's visit to Moscow to interview Lugovoy and Kovtun in December 2006. In response to the British identification of Lugovoy as a suspect in Sasha's murder, the Russians are likely to retaliate by charging Boris and Zakayev with an attempt on Kovtun. Because the case will never go to court, the question of who killed Sasha will never be officially resolved. The press will keep presenting a "balanced" view. Without a judicial conclusion, Sasha's murder will turn into a zero-sum game between two conflicting conspiracy theories, each the mirror image of the other. On the two ends of the hall of mirrors—with Sasha's body in the center—are the two main protagonists of this story, Boris and Putin, one the nemesis of the other. One of them did it. The choice is in the eye of the beholder.
A friend of mine who lives in Moscow said, "For you it's Putin, which is understandable because you work for Boris Berezovsky and live in the West. But I live in Moscow and Putin is my president. Not just a president, but someone who, rightly or wrongly, is adored and revered by most of the people. He restored our national pride and self-confidence. He is like the queen of England. If I imagined for a moment that he is the murderer, I couldn't live in this country. So it simply must be Boris, regardless of what evidence you produce. Boris is supposed to be vile."
My friend represents a better part of Russia, its conscientious class. He wants to believe it was Boris. The majority, I am sure, are the opposite: they want to believe it was Putin—and they are proud of him for it. Litvinenko, in their view, was a traitor, and the president got him. With polonium. Serves him right. That's what vlast—the "right of power" enjoyed by Russian leaders—should be: awesome.
The "I" of the excerpts is Goldfarb—a dissident scientist who left Russia in the 1970s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he went to work for George Soros directing charitable initiatives in Russia. He befriended Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko in the 1990s. He is currently executive director of the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, an umbrella group set up by Boris Berezovsky.
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Whoever chose polonium to kill Sasha did so because the chances of its ever being discovered were close to zero. It could not be easily identified chemically: the toxicology lab found only low levels of thallium, a minor contaminant of polonium production. Polonium was unlikely to be detected by its radioactivity, since common Geiger counters were not designed to detect alpha rays. Polonium is perhaps the most toxic substance on earth: a tiny speck is a highly lethal dose, and one gram is enough to kill half a million people. But it is absolutely harmless to a handler unless it is inhaled or swallowed. Most important, polonium had never been used to murder anyone before, so practically no one in the expert community—toxicologists, police, or terrorism experts—would have been looking for it or expecting it. It was sheer luck, plus Sasha's phenomenal endurance, that it was found. He had received a huge dose. Had he died in Barnet Hospital within the first two weeks, his death would have been attributed to thallium, meaning that anyone could have given it to him.
The irony is that once it was detected, polonium became a smoking gun. No amateur killer—even one awash with money—could have used it.
Any perpetrator who came up with the idea of employing polonium for a sinister purpose would necessarily have to have a high level of sophistication and knowledge of physics, medicine, and radioactive surveillance procedures, not to mention an understanding of polonium's production and distribution. All in all, it would have required a touch of genius, combined with tremendous resources—and access to polonium in the first place—to develop a murder plan of this sort on an ad hoc basis. Only an established organization with expertise in the area of science-based poisoning could have perpetrated this crime.
Ninety-seven percent of the known production of polonium, about 85 grams annually, takes place in Russia. Some is exported for industrial use, primarily to the United States. The Russian nuclear reactor that produces polonium is subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, such that each production cycle is supposed to be logged and recorded, although the IAEA does not register polonium per se.
Polonium, once it has been identified, is a detective's dream. Like an invisible dye it marks everything it touches, and it cannot be washed off. Once the right equipment is used, traces of polonium are detectable in a dilution as unimaginably weak as a millionth-of-a-millionth part. If someone, say, turns on a light in a hotel room with a contaminated hand, the light switch will be radioactive for months. From the amount and distribution of radioactivity on an armchair, an investigator can tell whether it was the right or the left hand that left the trace, and whether the hand was contaminated from the outside or the radioactivity came from the tiny droplets of sweat of someone who ingested the poison. In other words, traces left by a perpetrator and a victim are distinguishable from each other.
The Scotland Yard detectives uncovered several polonium trails in and out of London. Again, no official information has been released as this book goes to press. However, enough has been leaked from reliable sources to London newspapers to reconstruct a more or less complete picture, and the investigators essentially confirmed these leaks to Marina.
Within hours of Sasha's death, HPA radioactivity hunters identified and closed off several contaminated sites in London, including Itsu, the sushi restaurant on Piccadilly where Sasha met Mario Scaramella, and the bar in the Millennium Hotel where he had tea with the Russians. As the investigation progressed, they added dozens of other places to the polonium map; the eventual list included offices, restaurants, hotel rooms, homes, cars, and airplanes in several countries. Hundreds of people all over Europe showed varying degrees of polonium contamination, spreading from the epicenter of the "tiny nuclear bomb" exploded in London. When the dust settled, the investigators had a pretty complete understanding of how to read the map. As the Scotland Yard liaison officer told Marina, "We know exactly who did it, where, and how."
One of the polonium trails uncovered was left by Sasha. On the morning of November 1, 2006, he was clean. Detectives discovered a ticket in his pocket that led them to the bus that he took to Central London that day. No traces of polonium were found on the bus.
At about 6 p.m. Akhmed Zakayev picked him up from Boris Berezovsky's Mayfair office to bring him home to Muswell Hill. After that trip, Zakayev's Mercedes was rendered unusable by the tremendous amount of radioactivity Sasha left on the front seat.
Apparently the poisoning occurred in the Millennium Hotel bar, at around 5 p.m. Investigators found the teapot that was laced with the poison, which in turn contaminated the kitchen, including the dishwashing machine. The concentration of polonium at the hotel bar was apparently the highest of all, and it was airborne—indicating that the powder had been slipped into the pot of tea—because seven workers in the bar and several patrons tested positive for polonium. Between the Millennium bar and the time Zakayev picked him up, Sasha stopped at Boris's office, where he used the fax machine. Accordingly, some radioactivity was found on the machine.
Everything that he touched after returning home was heavily contaminated. The amount of radioactivity shed during the first three days of his illness—that is, before he was taken to the hospital—was enormous. According to an early estimate, it would cost more than £100,000 ($200,000) to clean the house to make it safe to reinhabit. Six months later, Marina and son Tolik were still unable to return home.
Of all the people who were in contact with Sasha, Marina was the most exposed, since she cared for him and cleaned up during the three days of extensive vomiting. She tested positive for ingesting polonium—thankfully, not enough to cause an immediate health hazard. Remarkably, her levels were not even high enough to leave their own secondary trail. This is significant because it suggests that anyone who did leave a radioactive polonium trail did not pick up the poison from Sasha. Most likely, such a person was in direct contact with polonium himself. Tolik, who stayed in the same house for three days but had much less physical contact with his father, has not been contaminated at all.
Apart from Sasha, Andrei Lugovoy left a polonium trail. With his associate Dmitry Kovtun, Lugovoy's school friend and army buddy and a veteran of GRU army intelligence Lugovoy had two meetings with Sasha, on October 16 and November 1.
The levels and spread of radioactivity left behind suggest that he handled polonium directly, rather than ingesting it, because there were significant traces of radioactivity. The body dilutes polonium before excreting it in sweat; the amounts that would have had to be ingested to produce traces equal to those of Lugovoy would almost certainly be lethal.
When Scotland Yard releases its computer-aided simulations of radioactivity spread, it will be possible to say exactly where and how the poison was handled before it ended in Sasha's teapot. What can be said at this point is that Lugovoy was shedding radioactivity before Sasha was exposed on November 1. For example, Lugovoy contaminated the leather sofa in Boris's study when he visited him on October 31
There was a trail of polonium from Lugovoy's previous visit to London, on October 16–17: in hotel rooms, offices, restaurants, and on the British Airways plane that took him back to Moscow. It was during that visit that the Itsu sushi restaurant on Piccadilly was contaminated, the one that Sasha and Mario Scaramella also visited on the day of his poisoning. That coincidence was the source of much initial confusion until it was established that on November 1 Sasha and Scaramella sat at a different table than the one occupied by Lugovoy, Kovtun, and Sasha two weeks earlier.
What Lugovoy was doing with polonium in London during the October 16 visit is a mystery. One hypothesis is that there were two attempts to put polonium into Sasha's meal; the first one, possibly at Itsu, did not work out, so there was a second attempt, which succeeded. Another hypothesis is that the October 16 meeting was a dress rehearsal.
For me, there is yet another possibility: that the operation on October 16 went wrong, yet left a trail of contamination; in short, it was screwed up. So for the November meeting, the handlers sent a professional killer, "the third man." The intermediaries served only to bring the hit man into contact with the target. This third-man theory has been promoted in the press by the ex-spy Oleg Gordievsky, who quotes his own anonymous sources. There was a "tall man with Asian features" on a flight from Hamburg on October 31. He was captured by airport surveillance cameras and then vanished without a trace. The passport he used to enter Britain was from a European country, but the investigators were unable to trace him to any hotel or to any flight leaving the country.
The police never gave Marina any hint in support of the third-man theory, but they have not disputed it, either. It is consistent with what Sasha told me and others: Lugovoy brought along a man whom Sasha had never seen before and who had "the eyes of a killer."
Finally, there was yet another man, Vladislav Sokolenko, who was associated with Lugovoy on November 1. His role is unclear, although he apparently was not contaminated by polonium.
There is no doubt that many questions will be answered in court—if the perpetrators are brought to trial. If the Crown Prosecution Service concludes that the perpetrators cannot be realistically apprehended, the police may still release the file. Then we would see not only the detailed polonium maps, but also the record of the minute-by-minute movements of Sasha, Lugovoy, and others through the streets of Central London, which are fully covered by CCTV surveillance cameras.
The story would be incomplete without considering a few alternative murder theories, which have been discounted after the polonium trails told their tales.
First, there was Mario Scaramella, a hapless political consultant who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. His relation to Sasha had to do with a squabble in Italian politics about some old and unproven allegations that the Italian prime minister Romano Prodi had been a KGB spy since the cold war. Back in 2004 Sasha told the Italian parliamentary commission investigating those rumors that once he had overheard his mentor General Trofimov referring to Prodi as "our man." The conversation with Trofimov, however, took place in 2000, after the Prodi-KGB scandal broke out in Italy in October 1999. So Trofimov could have been only repeating hearsay. In any case, it is unlikely that someone would deploy polonium in 2006 to kill Sasha for an inconsequential statement he made in 2004. Scaramella tested positive for polonium, but only in minute amounts.
Then there was Yulia Svetlichnaya, a Russian graduate student in Britain who briefly made headlines by claiming that Sasha had planned to blackmail a "Russian oligarch," not Berezovsky, who "had a connection with the Kremlin, a connection with Putin." Svetlichnaya had met Sasha while doing research for her book and he had corresponded with her.
There were numerous suggestions that Sasha's former colleagues in the URPO or some other rogue elements among present or former FSB officers had a motive for killing him. This theory became particularly popular when it was reported that a Russian Spetsnaz commando unit was using Sasha's image for target practice.
There was also a report by Yuri Shvets, another former KGB officer living in Washington, that Sasha had been compiling a file on a "prominent Kremlin figure" as part of a due diligence research for a commercial client.
All these theories suffer from two faults: they fail to explain access to polonium and the involvement of Andrei Lugovoy.
To my mind, no midlevel rogue officer, no hired hand, no hastily assembled hit squad could possibly get unauthorized access to the material, which, after all, is as suitable for a massive terror attack as any weapon of mass destruction: Polonium-210 is more toxic than anthrax and as good for making a dirty bomb as plutonium. Only the top levels of the Russian government should have access to it. And I am convinced that in the Russian government, all matters related to the London dissident group are personally controlled by the president. The London operation simply could not have been authorized without his knowledge.
Likewise, only a very persuasive argument could have brought Andrei Lugovoy into the project. After all, he is not a poor man, but worth somewhere around $20 to $25 million; he would not have done it for money. He did not have any motive to kill Sasha. Only a very powerful interest could have convinced him to get involved.
Why would anyone go to such lengths to kill a man living in a rented house in Muswell Hill? Here I agree with Putin: whatever Sasha had done or would do was not worth the trouble. He was not the ultimate target; his death was a means to an end. A very important end that justified the awesome means. There is only one credible murder motive—the one that Lord Tim Bell named even before Polonium-210 and Andrei Lugovoy became part of the equation: to pin a murder on the other side in the unending contest of wills between Putin and Berezovsky.
Regardless of Scotland Yard's confidence that they know "who did it, where, and how," they are unlikely to ever see their suspects in court. On 22 May, 2007, the Director of Public Prosecutions in the UK, Sir Ken Macdonald, called for the early extradition of Andrei Lugovoy, "so that he may be charged with murder—and be brought swiftly before a court in London to be prosecuted for this extraordinarily grave crime." But that the Russians will agree to his extradition appears highly unlikely." Instead of assisting the British investigation, the Russian government has been pursuing its own.
The Russian probe is designed as a mirror image of the British: there are detectives, witnesses, suspects, and a working theory, which balance everything that the Brits have to offer. Every British finding has a Russian counterfinding, every statement a counterstatement. Even the rhetoric is reciprocal. The Russians are using classic disinformation tactics, which are as reminiscent of the old KGB style as is the murder itself. The Kremlin-controlled press blasts the Western media for a cold war–style propaganda campaign.
As was outlined in a New York Times interview of Lugovoy published on March 18, 2007, the Russian countertheory regards him, not as a perpetrator, but as "an injured party," the victim of a murder attempt with polonium that occurred during the first visit to London on October 16. After being contaminated, he claimed, he carried traces of polonium back to Moscow, and then again to London on his second visit. In the Russian frame of reference, the reciprocal pair of suspects are Zakayev and Berezovsky.
In April 2007 Russian investigators flew to London to question Boris and Akhmed, balancing Scotland Yard's visit to Moscow to interview Lugovoy and Kovtun in December 2006. In response to the British identification of Lugovoy as a suspect in Sasha's murder, the Russians are likely to retaliate by charging Boris and Zakayev with an attempt on Kovtun. Because the case will never go to court, the question of who killed Sasha will never be officially resolved. The press will keep presenting a "balanced" view. Without a judicial conclusion, Sasha's murder will turn into a zero-sum game between two conflicting conspiracy theories, each the mirror image of the other. On the two ends of the hall of mirrors—with Sasha's body in the center—are the two main protagonists of this story, Boris and Putin, one the nemesis of the other. One of them did it. The choice is in the eye of the beholder.
A friend of mine who lives in Moscow said, "For you it's Putin, which is understandable because you work for Boris Berezovsky and live in the West. But I live in Moscow and Putin is my president. Not just a president, but someone who, rightly or wrongly, is adored and revered by most of the people. He restored our national pride and self-confidence. He is like the queen of England. If I imagined for a moment that he is the murderer, I couldn't live in this country. So it simply must be Boris, regardless of what evidence you produce. Boris is supposed to be vile."
My friend represents a better part of Russia, its conscientious class. He wants to believe it was Boris. The majority, I am sure, are the opposite: they want to believe it was Putin—and they are proud of him for it. Litvinenko, in their view, was a traitor, and the president got him. With polonium. Serves him right. That's what vlast—the "right of power" enjoyed by Russian leaders—should be: awesome.
Lies, Sighs and Politics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.
Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?
Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.
You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.
Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.
But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.
Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”
Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.
There wasn’t anything comparable to Mr. Romney’s rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, “we’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.
By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she’s received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?
Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”
Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites — including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we’re safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.
Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)
Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts — not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.
For if there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it’s that it matters who becomes president — and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush’s tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.
And I don’t know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.
In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.
Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?
Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.
You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.
Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.
But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.
Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”
Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.
There wasn’t anything comparable to Mr. Romney’s rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, “we’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.
By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she’s received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?
Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”
Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites — including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we’re safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.
Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)
Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts — not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.
For if there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it’s that it matters who becomes president — and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush’s tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.
And I don’t know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.
Wednesday, June 6
Larry Summers’s Evolution
Back in the 1980s, two young Harvard professors trying to reinvigorate the Democratic Party would meet at the Wursthaus restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., to have lunch and argue with each other. They must have made for an entertaining sight, one of them bearish and the other less than five feet tall, debating each other in a dark Harvard Square dive. The argument, in a nutshell, came to this. The smaller man — Robert Reich, a future secretary of labor — argued for something that he called “industrial policy.” Since the government couldn’t avoid having a big influence on the economy, he said, it should at least do so in a way that promoted fast-growing industries and invested in worthy public projects.
The bearish professor was Lawrence H. Summers, who was then the youngest person to have received tenure in the modern history of Harvard University. He loved to tackle big, broad questions, and, by his lights, industrial policy amounted to another version of the governmental meddling that had helped consign the Democratic Party to opposition status. How could bureaucrats know which industries and projects to support with tax credits? The better solution, Summers responded, was to get the economy growing fast enough that the problems of the middle class would begin to solve themselves. And the way to do this was to slow government spending and raise taxes on the wealthy, which would bring down the Reagan-era budget deficits and, eventually, interest rates. Once that happened, the American economy would be unleashed.
The debate, friendly as it was when Summers and Reich were having it, would come to dominate the struggle over domestic policy within the Democratic Party for more than a decade. Bill Clinton ended up embracing the centrist, business-friendly ideas of Summers and his mentor, Robert Rubin, and the situation played out just as they had predicted: interest rates fell, and along came a boom that helped almost everyone. In the late ’90s, the wages of rank-and-file workers rose faster than they had in a generation. A frustrated Reich left the Labor Department after Clinton’s first term, while Summers eventually ascended to the top job at the Treasury Department.
All of which makes it rather fascinating to listen to Summers talk these days. Having left the presidency of Harvard after a rocky five-year tenure, he has turned his attention back to economics. But he doesn’t sound like a triumphant Clinton alumnus who simply wants the country to return to the policies of the 1990s. He sounds, strangely enough, a little like Bob Reich.
On Oct. 30 of last year, Summers made his debut as a monthly columnist for The Financial Times. The column was titled “The Global Middle Cries Out for Reassurance.” He began by noting that the world’s economy had grown faster over the previous five years than at any other point in recorded history. “Yet in many corners of the globe there is growing disillusionment,” he continued. The main reason seems to be that the benefits of growth are flowing largely to only two groups: previously impoverished residents of Asia and an international elite. Summers’s favorite statistic these days is that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. Over the same span, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points. It’s as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent. This is why the usual assurances that come from people like Summers — that an open, technologically advanced global economy is inevitable and good — feel, as he himself wrote in The Financial Times, like “pretty thin gruel.”
Dealing with this anxiety — making globalization work for the masses — has become the central economic issue of the day in Summers’s mind. And since his Harvard presidency ended a year ago, he has set out on a search for solutions. To him, it seems like a natural sequel to the policies he pushed in the 1990s. To liberal Democrats, it seems long overdue. “I breathe a great sigh of wistfulness and relief and say, ‘Finally, they’ve come around,’ ” Reich says. “It was, I think, a fundamental failure on the part of the Democrats in the late ’90s not to face the structural changes that needed to be faced.”
Summers recently joined the board of Teach for America, in large measure to think more about education reform. He has also joined an advisory board of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state at the center of health care reform. (His gut instinct is that Massachusetts’s universal-coverage plan isn’t radical enough.) He has re-engaged in academic life, becoming the co-editor of a journal partly so he can nudge other economists to do research on big policy issues. With the Democrats back in control of Congress, he has testified at hearings and met privately with members to talk about inequality. His old friends and colleagues from the Clinton administration have now spread out to the Federal Reserve, Capitol Hill and, of course, Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In effect, Summers is assembling a virtual think tank. “I think the defining issue of our time is: Does the economic, social and political system work for the middle class?” he told me. “Because the system’s viability, its staying power and its health depend on how well it works for the middle class.”
At age 52, Larry Summers has already finished his first three careers. The son of two economists at the University of Pennsylvania and the nephew of two Nobel-winning economists, he enrolled at M.I.T. when he was 16. Then came the swift rise to tenure at Harvard, a flurry of research papers on seemingly every major topic in economics and an award called the John Bates Clark Medal, given every other year to the best economist under 40. “I’ve been around some pretty smart people,” said Jonathan Gruber, an M.I.T. economist and a former student of Summers’s. “But it’s a different level with Larry.”
The rap on him — in academia and later in Washington, where he moved in 1991 to become the chief economist of the World Bank — was always that he knew he was the smartest guy in the room and acted like it. At faculty seminars, he would sometimes interrupt another professor a few minutes into a presentation, succinctly summarize the undelivered portion, poke holes in the argument and offer suggestions about how to make the same points in more compelling fashion. To the great amusement of his colleagues at Treasury, he occasionally did the same thing to officials from foreign governments who had come to call on him.
But the notion that Summers can be a bully misses one thing: he likes it when people fight back. As Treasury secretary, he encouraged his own staff to disagree with him when they thought he was wrong. “He was incredibly open to people pushing back and challenging him,” said Timothy Geithner, the current president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who worked under Summers at Treasury. “It’s what he desires most. It’s how he thinks through things.” During a conversation I was having with him one morning in a Senate cafeteria, in the midst of explaining why he thought the pay of chief executives was economically rational, Summers stopped and said, “When I’ve thought about possible explanations for this, one is that I’m wrong.”
As a result of this intellectual playfulness, many people find it thrilling to talk with him. He loves to examine an idea from every possible angle, searching out the weaknesses in order to arrive at a better conclusion. Henry Kissinger has said that Summers should be given a permanent White House job, a sort of fixer of flabby policy ideas. Of course, Summers’s style, or lack of it, is also at the root of his well-publicized missteps.
By most accounts, he did learn to soften himself while in Washington, which helps explain his successful decadelong run there. Shortly after Clinton left office in 2001, Summers was given the most prestigious job in higher education. It’s hard to think of anyone else in public life today who has reached the pinnacle of three different careers. And Harvard was supposed to be the end of the Summers story. Given his age and his ambitions — his plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the life sciences, eliminate tuition for lower-income students and reinvigorate undergraduate education — he seemed destined to lead the university for the next 20 years.
But back in academia, where social skills are not a prerequisite for success, he seemed to forget that his new job had more in common with being a cabinet secretary than with being a professor. Most famously, he wondered aloud at an academic conference in 2005 whether innate differences helped explain why men dominated the top ranks of research science. He never recovered.
The most obvious place to land would have been Wall Street, and he talked with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. But he instead took a lucrative part-time job at a big hedge fund, D.E. Shaw. Summers’s main professional home remains, surprisingly, Harvard, where his wife, Elisa New, is a literature professor and he holds a distinguished endowed chair.
On a recent spring afternoon, he was the surprise guest speaker for the final meeting of a lecture course called Morality and Taboo, taught by Alan Dershowitz, the law professor, and Steven Pinker, the psychologist. They were prominent supporters of his presidency, and the occasion seemed ripe for self-justification. Summers has always kept the support of Harvard’s undergraduates, and when he was introduced, the students in the classroom gave him a 20-second ovation. Some stood. In his introduction, Dershowitz defended Summers’s remarks about gender and science as honest intellectual inquiry. But Summers wouldn’t have it. “I think it was, in retrospect, an act of spectacular imprudence,” he told the class. He still maintains that some critics mischaracterized his remarks, but the bottom line is that girls around the world came to think that the president of Harvard believed they couldn’t be scientists. “There are enormous benefits to being a leader of a major institution, but there are also costs and limitations,” he continued. “I thought I could have it both ways, and I was wrong.” Even when someone is defending him, Summers can’t hold back from a debate.
In many ways, the political path that he has followed over his career is also the path of his party. The decades after World War II were dominated by the Keynesian notion — shaped in part by one of his Nobel-winning uncles, Paul Samuelson — that government was good. But the stagflation of the 1970s caused a whole of generation of economists to look instead toward the market, which seemed far more efficient at allocating resources. Today Summers says he believes in markets as much as ever, and he begins almost any discussion of globalization by pointing out its benefits. Food, clothing, furniture and dozens of everyday items are more affordable than they once were. Interest rates are low, as is inflation, and recessions come less often. Bringing down the deficit in the ’90s, he argues, helped make this possible.
But Summers says he now has to reckon with a new reality. Despite good growth over the last four years, the pay of most American workers has barely kept pace with inflation. Technology and global trade are conspiring to let highly skilled workers do more — to be more productive and to play on a bigger stage — while at the same time making millions of other workers replaceable. The middle-class income gains of the Clinton years now look like an aberration, caused by a combination of low oil prices (which allowed a dollar to go further) and a financial bubble that made the job market unusually tight. “I don’t think my general orientation to the world has changed,” Summers says, noting that he favored interventions like tax credits for the poor during the ’90s and continues to worry about the deficit today. “But I think if you look at how the economy is working for average families, the sensible priority has shifted.” Geithner, the New York Federal Reserve president, puts it this way: “The facts have changed a little bit. That’s what Larry’s evolution reflects.”
What’s striking today is how much Democrats on either side of the 1990s debate agree with one another. Most say that globalization itself cannot be held back, because it stems more from the inexorable march of technology than from any change in trade laws. Credit-card call centers have moved to India and Ireland because they can function there, not because a new law allowed them to go. Trying to prevent jobs from leaving will create the problems that protectionism always had, like higher inflation and slower economic growth. But leaving the market to work its magic also won’t do. Even the centrists within the party agree that the government needs to meddle in the economy more than it once did.
The model that most appeals to Summers is, in fact, the United States — in the decades after World War II. At the time, this country was opening itself to more global competition, by rebuilding Europe and signing financial agreements like Bretton Woods. But it was also taking concrete steps to build the modern middle class. In addition to the G.I. Bill, there were the Federal Housing Administration, the Interstate Highway System and a very different tax code. The history of progressivism “has been one of the market being protected from its own excesses,” Summers says. “And I think now the challenge is, again, to protect a basic market system based on open trade and globalization, to make it one that works for everyone or for almost everyone, at a time when market forces are often producing outcomes that seem increasingly problematic to middle-class families.”
A new social contract would look different, of course. The tax code of the 1950s, with a top marginal rate of 91 percent, stifled innovation. Today’s system goes too far in the other direction, Summers says, exacerbating inequality with loopholes and deductions that let a lot of affluent families avoid taxes, and the Bush tax cuts haven’t helped. Health care reform is another obvious priority. In Summers’s view, the current employer-based system, which creates insecurity for many families and big costs for companies, may need to be replaced by one in which the government pays for insurance but individuals choose what plan they want. It would be single payer, but not as England or Canada does it.
Summers becomes really excited by what he sees as the potential for a life-sciences revolution. It will happen only if government again does its part, though, and in the last few years federal support for medical research has failed to keep pace with inflation. A more sensible policy, he argues, has the potential not only to keep people healthy and alive for longer but also to create well-paying jobs. He likes to talk about “clusters” like Silicon Valley — in the life sciences and other areas — where groups of companies can feed off one another to become more productive. Moving jobs to a low-wage country then becomes less attractive. And the government can help create clusters, just as it built the highway system and the Internet. If you didn’t know any better, you might even refer to this idea as industrial policy.
Summers now occupies a funny place in the Democratic constellation. His various dust-ups over the years have left him with a fair number of enemies. But he also has a lot of influential fans, as well as the ability to inject an issue into the public debate merely by discussing it. Under a Democratic president, he would be an obvious candidate to run the Federal Reserve or the World Bank. But a more likely path could be the one taken by Kissinger, who has spent the last 30 years as a force in Republican foreign policy despite having been out of government. Summers may actually be better suited for this role than for some of the jobs he has held recently. It’s one in which the quality of an idea matters more than its delivery.
A freelance career would have its frustrations, but Summers has had some success in persuading others. Bill Gates has said he decided to devote much of his money to global poverty and disease after reading a 1993 World Bank report — a report that Summers instigated. His efforts to recruit poor students to Harvard helped make a national issue of the lack of low-income students at elite colleges. In India, where politicians say he influenced their own approach to trade agreements, they still quote him the way people here quote Alan Greenspan.
“I’m finding my way,” Summers said about his newest career, his fourth. “I think one has to be prepared to accept long causal chains. That is, if you’re trying to think about a problem and propose a solution, it does not happen the next day. But it affects the climate of opinion, and things go from being inconceivable to being inevitable.”
David Leonhardt writes a weekly economics column for The New York Times.
The bearish professor was Lawrence H. Summers, who was then the youngest person to have received tenure in the modern history of Harvard University. He loved to tackle big, broad questions, and, by his lights, industrial policy amounted to another version of the governmental meddling that had helped consign the Democratic Party to opposition status. How could bureaucrats know which industries and projects to support with tax credits? The better solution, Summers responded, was to get the economy growing fast enough that the problems of the middle class would begin to solve themselves. And the way to do this was to slow government spending and raise taxes on the wealthy, which would bring down the Reagan-era budget deficits and, eventually, interest rates. Once that happened, the American economy would be unleashed.
The debate, friendly as it was when Summers and Reich were having it, would come to dominate the struggle over domestic policy within the Democratic Party for more than a decade. Bill Clinton ended up embracing the centrist, business-friendly ideas of Summers and his mentor, Robert Rubin, and the situation played out just as they had predicted: interest rates fell, and along came a boom that helped almost everyone. In the late ’90s, the wages of rank-and-file workers rose faster than they had in a generation. A frustrated Reich left the Labor Department after Clinton’s first term, while Summers eventually ascended to the top job at the Treasury Department.
All of which makes it rather fascinating to listen to Summers talk these days. Having left the presidency of Harvard after a rocky five-year tenure, he has turned his attention back to economics. But he doesn’t sound like a triumphant Clinton alumnus who simply wants the country to return to the policies of the 1990s. He sounds, strangely enough, a little like Bob Reich.
On Oct. 30 of last year, Summers made his debut as a monthly columnist for The Financial Times. The column was titled “The Global Middle Cries Out for Reassurance.” He began by noting that the world’s economy had grown faster over the previous five years than at any other point in recorded history. “Yet in many corners of the globe there is growing disillusionment,” he continued. The main reason seems to be that the benefits of growth are flowing largely to only two groups: previously impoverished residents of Asia and an international elite. Summers’s favorite statistic these days is that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. Over the same span, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points. It’s as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent. This is why the usual assurances that come from people like Summers — that an open, technologically advanced global economy is inevitable and good — feel, as he himself wrote in The Financial Times, like “pretty thin gruel.”
Dealing with this anxiety — making globalization work for the masses — has become the central economic issue of the day in Summers’s mind. And since his Harvard presidency ended a year ago, he has set out on a search for solutions. To him, it seems like a natural sequel to the policies he pushed in the 1990s. To liberal Democrats, it seems long overdue. “I breathe a great sigh of wistfulness and relief and say, ‘Finally, they’ve come around,’ ” Reich says. “It was, I think, a fundamental failure on the part of the Democrats in the late ’90s not to face the structural changes that needed to be faced.”
Summers recently joined the board of Teach for America, in large measure to think more about education reform. He has also joined an advisory board of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state at the center of health care reform. (His gut instinct is that Massachusetts’s universal-coverage plan isn’t radical enough.) He has re-engaged in academic life, becoming the co-editor of a journal partly so he can nudge other economists to do research on big policy issues. With the Democrats back in control of Congress, he has testified at hearings and met privately with members to talk about inequality. His old friends and colleagues from the Clinton administration have now spread out to the Federal Reserve, Capitol Hill and, of course, Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In effect, Summers is assembling a virtual think tank. “I think the defining issue of our time is: Does the economic, social and political system work for the middle class?” he told me. “Because the system’s viability, its staying power and its health depend on how well it works for the middle class.”
At age 52, Larry Summers has already finished his first three careers. The son of two economists at the University of Pennsylvania and the nephew of two Nobel-winning economists, he enrolled at M.I.T. when he was 16. Then came the swift rise to tenure at Harvard, a flurry of research papers on seemingly every major topic in economics and an award called the John Bates Clark Medal, given every other year to the best economist under 40. “I’ve been around some pretty smart people,” said Jonathan Gruber, an M.I.T. economist and a former student of Summers’s. “But it’s a different level with Larry.”
The rap on him — in academia and later in Washington, where he moved in 1991 to become the chief economist of the World Bank — was always that he knew he was the smartest guy in the room and acted like it. At faculty seminars, he would sometimes interrupt another professor a few minutes into a presentation, succinctly summarize the undelivered portion, poke holes in the argument and offer suggestions about how to make the same points in more compelling fashion. To the great amusement of his colleagues at Treasury, he occasionally did the same thing to officials from foreign governments who had come to call on him.
But the notion that Summers can be a bully misses one thing: he likes it when people fight back. As Treasury secretary, he encouraged his own staff to disagree with him when they thought he was wrong. “He was incredibly open to people pushing back and challenging him,” said Timothy Geithner, the current president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who worked under Summers at Treasury. “It’s what he desires most. It’s how he thinks through things.” During a conversation I was having with him one morning in a Senate cafeteria, in the midst of explaining why he thought the pay of chief executives was economically rational, Summers stopped and said, “When I’ve thought about possible explanations for this, one is that I’m wrong.”
As a result of this intellectual playfulness, many people find it thrilling to talk with him. He loves to examine an idea from every possible angle, searching out the weaknesses in order to arrive at a better conclusion. Henry Kissinger has said that Summers should be given a permanent White House job, a sort of fixer of flabby policy ideas. Of course, Summers’s style, or lack of it, is also at the root of his well-publicized missteps.
By most accounts, he did learn to soften himself while in Washington, which helps explain his successful decadelong run there. Shortly after Clinton left office in 2001, Summers was given the most prestigious job in higher education. It’s hard to think of anyone else in public life today who has reached the pinnacle of three different careers. And Harvard was supposed to be the end of the Summers story. Given his age and his ambitions — his plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the life sciences, eliminate tuition for lower-income students and reinvigorate undergraduate education — he seemed destined to lead the university for the next 20 years.
But back in academia, where social skills are not a prerequisite for success, he seemed to forget that his new job had more in common with being a cabinet secretary than with being a professor. Most famously, he wondered aloud at an academic conference in 2005 whether innate differences helped explain why men dominated the top ranks of research science. He never recovered.
The most obvious place to land would have been Wall Street, and he talked with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. But he instead took a lucrative part-time job at a big hedge fund, D.E. Shaw. Summers’s main professional home remains, surprisingly, Harvard, where his wife, Elisa New, is a literature professor and he holds a distinguished endowed chair.
On a recent spring afternoon, he was the surprise guest speaker for the final meeting of a lecture course called Morality and Taboo, taught by Alan Dershowitz, the law professor, and Steven Pinker, the psychologist. They were prominent supporters of his presidency, and the occasion seemed ripe for self-justification. Summers has always kept the support of Harvard’s undergraduates, and when he was introduced, the students in the classroom gave him a 20-second ovation. Some stood. In his introduction, Dershowitz defended Summers’s remarks about gender and science as honest intellectual inquiry. But Summers wouldn’t have it. “I think it was, in retrospect, an act of spectacular imprudence,” he told the class. He still maintains that some critics mischaracterized his remarks, but the bottom line is that girls around the world came to think that the president of Harvard believed they couldn’t be scientists. “There are enormous benefits to being a leader of a major institution, but there are also costs and limitations,” he continued. “I thought I could have it both ways, and I was wrong.” Even when someone is defending him, Summers can’t hold back from a debate.
In many ways, the political path that he has followed over his career is also the path of his party. The decades after World War II were dominated by the Keynesian notion — shaped in part by one of his Nobel-winning uncles, Paul Samuelson — that government was good. But the stagflation of the 1970s caused a whole of generation of economists to look instead toward the market, which seemed far more efficient at allocating resources. Today Summers says he believes in markets as much as ever, and he begins almost any discussion of globalization by pointing out its benefits. Food, clothing, furniture and dozens of everyday items are more affordable than they once were. Interest rates are low, as is inflation, and recessions come less often. Bringing down the deficit in the ’90s, he argues, helped make this possible.
But Summers says he now has to reckon with a new reality. Despite good growth over the last four years, the pay of most American workers has barely kept pace with inflation. Technology and global trade are conspiring to let highly skilled workers do more — to be more productive and to play on a bigger stage — while at the same time making millions of other workers replaceable. The middle-class income gains of the Clinton years now look like an aberration, caused by a combination of low oil prices (which allowed a dollar to go further) and a financial bubble that made the job market unusually tight. “I don’t think my general orientation to the world has changed,” Summers says, noting that he favored interventions like tax credits for the poor during the ’90s and continues to worry about the deficit today. “But I think if you look at how the economy is working for average families, the sensible priority has shifted.” Geithner, the New York Federal Reserve president, puts it this way: “The facts have changed a little bit. That’s what Larry’s evolution reflects.”
What’s striking today is how much Democrats on either side of the 1990s debate agree with one another. Most say that globalization itself cannot be held back, because it stems more from the inexorable march of technology than from any change in trade laws. Credit-card call centers have moved to India and Ireland because they can function there, not because a new law allowed them to go. Trying to prevent jobs from leaving will create the problems that protectionism always had, like higher inflation and slower economic growth. But leaving the market to work its magic also won’t do. Even the centrists within the party agree that the government needs to meddle in the economy more than it once did.
The model that most appeals to Summers is, in fact, the United States — in the decades after World War II. At the time, this country was opening itself to more global competition, by rebuilding Europe and signing financial agreements like Bretton Woods. But it was also taking concrete steps to build the modern middle class. In addition to the G.I. Bill, there were the Federal Housing Administration, the Interstate Highway System and a very different tax code. The history of progressivism “has been one of the market being protected from its own excesses,” Summers says. “And I think now the challenge is, again, to protect a basic market system based on open trade and globalization, to make it one that works for everyone or for almost everyone, at a time when market forces are often producing outcomes that seem increasingly problematic to middle-class families.”
A new social contract would look different, of course. The tax code of the 1950s, with a top marginal rate of 91 percent, stifled innovation. Today’s system goes too far in the other direction, Summers says, exacerbating inequality with loopholes and deductions that let a lot of affluent families avoid taxes, and the Bush tax cuts haven’t helped. Health care reform is another obvious priority. In Summers’s view, the current employer-based system, which creates insecurity for many families and big costs for companies, may need to be replaced by one in which the government pays for insurance but individuals choose what plan they want. It would be single payer, but not as England or Canada does it.
Summers becomes really excited by what he sees as the potential for a life-sciences revolution. It will happen only if government again does its part, though, and in the last few years federal support for medical research has failed to keep pace with inflation. A more sensible policy, he argues, has the potential not only to keep people healthy and alive for longer but also to create well-paying jobs. He likes to talk about “clusters” like Silicon Valley — in the life sciences and other areas — where groups of companies can feed off one another to become more productive. Moving jobs to a low-wage country then becomes less attractive. And the government can help create clusters, just as it built the highway system and the Internet. If you didn’t know any better, you might even refer to this idea as industrial policy.
Summers now occupies a funny place in the Democratic constellation. His various dust-ups over the years have left him with a fair number of enemies. But he also has a lot of influential fans, as well as the ability to inject an issue into the public debate merely by discussing it. Under a Democratic president, he would be an obvious candidate to run the Federal Reserve or the World Bank. But a more likely path could be the one taken by Kissinger, who has spent the last 30 years as a force in Republican foreign policy despite having been out of government. Summers may actually be better suited for this role than for some of the jobs he has held recently. It’s one in which the quality of an idea matters more than its delivery.
A freelance career would have its frustrations, but Summers has had some success in persuading others. Bill Gates has said he decided to devote much of his money to global poverty and disease after reading a 1993 World Bank report — a report that Summers instigated. His efforts to recruit poor students to Harvard helped make a national issue of the lack of low-income students at elite colleges. In India, where politicians say he influenced their own approach to trade agreements, they still quote him the way people here quote Alan Greenspan.
“I’m finding my way,” Summers said about his newest career, his fourth. “I think one has to be prepared to accept long causal chains. That is, if you’re trying to think about a problem and propose a solution, it does not happen the next day. But it affects the climate of opinion, and things go from being inconceivable to being inevitable.”
David Leonhardt writes a weekly economics column for The New York Times.
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