Wrapping Up 2020

This year was tough all over.  In addition to the world-wide pandemic disaster and the US election disaster, your humble correspondent faced treatment for deadly illness.  (Ironically, I probably would have been homebound much of the year even without the pandemic.)

Nevertheless, the blog persists!  Without interruption!  The blog has surpassed 2500 days in a row of daily posts.

This year saw over 34K hits*, which is more than 90 hits per day on average. This is up 6K (>22%) from 2019.

Once again, much of this traffic has been a “long tail”, a hit here and there on old posts.  With about 3000 posts from almost 7 years, these dribs and drabs add up.

From the stats I have, the traffic has been extremely bursty.  Throughout the year, I see a week or 10 days with 50 hits per day, then 4 or 5 days with 250 or more hits, then another period of less traffic.   (The standard deviation was over 97, with a mean of 94) This happened again and again, with no clear pattern or known underlying driver.

Combined with the long tail already mentioned, it’s difficult to draw conclusions.

(*I should note that I am only using the default stats provided by wordpress.  I do not have enough information to know exactly how they are collected, or what possible sources of error or omission exist.)

Round Up

For convenience, here are some year end summaries.

---

Great Names For Bands

As always, I’ve noted some “great names for a band”.  Dave Barry pioneered this joke for many years in his columns.  My variation is mainly taken from or nearly quoted from actual, real, “I am not making this up” scientific and technical articles.

Here are this year’s bands:

Rocks from Ryugu
Rocks from Ryugu with Bennu Dust
Wing Models of Yi
The Great American Biotic Interchange
Venus Feelers
Skid n’ Bump – All-mechanical, Mostly Passive
Clockwork Cucaracha
Scotch Yoke Clinometer
Double Octopus
Compound Obstacles
The South Pole Wall  (also ia great name for a cocktail)
Solar Canals of Gujarat
Bottlebrush block copolymer photonic crystals
Antarctic Frogs
First Fossil Frog
Eocene High Latitude
Gondwanan Cosmopolitinism
Tape-spool boom extraction system
Flux Lobe Elongation
Magnetic Pole Acceleration
Towards Siberia
Possible common capture events
Radially Symmetric Fertile Parts
Pendicle Bending
Wing Heart
Scent Pads
Failed Squid Meal
Prey Seizure

---

Books Reviewed

As always, I wrote short reviews of books I read this year, usually appearing every Sunday.  Over the whole year, I reviewed 55 fiction and 24 non-fiction books.

Glancing at the list, I would especially recommend:

Fiction:

The City We Became  by N. K. Jemisin
October Man by Ben Aaronovitch (And other stories by Aaaronovitch)

Non-Fiction:

Trekonomics (2016) by Manu Saadka
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Here are the links for all the reviews.

Books Reviewed in the 4^th Quarter

Fiction

Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross
Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow
Missionaries by Phil Klay
A Visit From The Goon Squad (2010) by Jennifer Egan
Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty
Quillifer the Knight by Walter Jon Williams
October Man by Ben Aaronovitch
A Wild Winter Swan by Gregory Maguire
Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden

Non-Fiction

Billion Dollar Loser by Reeves Wiedeman
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) by Robin Wall Kimmerer
A World Beneath The Sands by Toby Wilkinson
The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter
Time of The Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger
Wagnerism by Alex Ross

Reviews From Q3

Fiction

Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen
Point B by Drew Magary
Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford
Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan
Love and Theft by Stan Parish
False Value by Ben Aaronovitch
Moon Over Soho (2011) by Ben Aaronovitch
Midnight Riot (2011) by Ben Aaronovitch
Whispers Underground (2012) by Ben Aaronovitch
Broken Homes (2013) by Ben Aaronovitch
Foxglove Summer (2014) by Ben Aaronovitch
Lies Sleeping (2018) by Ben Aaronovitch
The Hanging Tree (2015) by Ben Aaronovitch
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green
Life for Sale (1967) by Yukio Mishima
A Star Is Bored by Byron Lane

Non Fiction

14 Miles  by DW Gibson
Dark Towers by David Enrich
Trekonomics by Manu Saadka
1177 B. C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline
Empires of the Sky by Alexander Rose

Reviews From Q2

Fiction

88 Names  by Matt Ruff
Providence  by Max Barry
Shakespeare for Squirrels  by Christopher Moore
All Adults Here  by Emma Straub
Afterlife  by Julia Alvarez
Wake, Siren  by Nina MacLaughlin
How Much of These Hills is Gold  by C Pam Zhang
The Automatic Detective  by A. Lee Martinez
Tyll  by Daniel Kahlmann
The City We Became  by N. K. Jemisin
Little Fires Everywhere  by Celeste Ng
Arabella of Mars (2016) by David D. Levine
Arabella and the Battle of Venus (2017) by David D. Levine
Arabella the Traitor of Mars (2018) by David D. Levine
The Orphan’s Tales, Vol 1.: In the Night Garden (2006) by Catherynne M. Valente
The Orphan’s Tales: Vol 2.: In the Cities of Coin and Spice (2007) by Catherynne M. Valente

 Non Fiction

Istanbul  by Bettany Hughes
Tacky’s Revolt  by Vincent Brown
The Library Book  by Susan Orlean
The Lives of Bees  by Thomas D. Seeley
Unworthy Republic  by Claudio Saunt
How to Hide an Empire  by Daniel Immerwahr

 Reviews From Q1

Fiction

Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
Trace Elements by Donna Leon
Processed Cheese by Stephen Wright
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Highfire by Eoin Colfer
The Feral Detective by Jonathan Letham
Hi Five by Joe Ide
Agency by William Gibson
Zed by Joanna Kavenna
Naked Came The Florida Man by Tim Dorsey
A Small Town by Thomas Perry
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

Non Fiction

The Shadow of Vesuvius by Daisy Dunn
Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
Imagined Life by James Trefil and Michael Summers
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan
Island People (2016) by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
The Accursed Tower by Roger Crowley

Book Review: “The Price of Peace” by Zachary D. Carter

The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter

Rounding out this fall’s readings on the 20^th century, this biography of John Maynard Keynes is both timely and rounds out other readings on Wagnerism, philosophers, the creation of the CIA, Zepplins, as well as Picketty and debt .

I came for the ‘Bloomsbury in the 1920s’ soap opera, but really learned a lot from the history of the New Deal  and the counter revolution that has led us to…Clinton and Trump.

Keynes is the most famous economist I’ve never read.  Carter assures us that his magnum opus is unreadable, so I guess I have an excuse.

But there is so much more to Keynes than his academic books.  He was a public intellectual, and sometimes political insider.  His ideas were far more successful in America than at home in the UK, indeed, FDR’s New Deal was very much a demonstration of Keynesian political economics.

Keynes also influenced subsequent generations of economists. Indeed, Carter argues that Keynes basically invented the field of economics and the profession of economic policymaker.  Of course, much of his influence was negative, as a foil for reactionary politics and political economics.  But even his strongest detractors often followed his lead without acknowledgment.

But Keynes’ big ideas were more than economics, it was about using national government to foster a good life for its people.  Carter shows that FDR’s ‘four freedoms’ are basically Keynes’ program.  In particular, the ‘freedom from want’—“a healthy peacetime life” everywhere in the world—is the essence of Keynes’ radical vision.

It is still a very radical vision.  ( FDR’s phrase “everywhere in the world” always gives me goose bumps.   Sue me for being a crazy romantic.)

In short, this book is actually a history of political economics of the last 100 years.  And it’s been a hell of a ride, from the “golden age” of Edwardian empires, through world wars, depression, the global cold war, another depression, and out again into…a new “golden age” of free trading empires.  Sigh.

I learned quite a bit about US political economics of my own lifetime.  I lived through it, and had my own intuitions about the, well, often dubious directions of US policy.  Carter clarifies some of what I only intuited.  I thought it was a bad idea at the time, and now I know why it really was a bad idea.  Sigh.

Carter doesn’t specifically discuss it, but he actually explains much of the political economics that drives the power of Trumpism (even if Trump doesn’t actually grasp the issues very clearly).  WTO style free trade, NAFTA, and naive engagement with China have cost many ordinary Americans jobs, money, and power, just as Keynes would have predicted.   They also did not promote political freedom abroad as advertised, just as Keynes would have predicted. And this fruitless economic punishment has led to exactly the sort of political radicalization Keynes worked so hard to prevent in the 1920s in Europe.

Carter shows us that the technical economics of Keynes and his intellectual descendants and opponents really misses the point.  The point isn’t to optimize the economy with math, the point is, or should be, to make a good life for everybody.  And that is a political objective, and must be done through political means, not through the magic of supposedly self-regulating markets or any other magic IS-LM curve.

Anyone who tells you that government should stay out of economics is really just telling you that he’s winning big with current government policies.  Economics is politics, but politics is bigger than economics.  Keynes constantly strove to create economics that would achieve the kind of political world he wanted to see.  He didn’t succeed, but his legacy should be a constant effort to make the world better—for everyone.

---

1. Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, New York, Random House, 2020.

 

Sunday Book Reviews