Grand unified books thread

[Eddie Teach]

Aye.

[crazy canuck]

They weaponized NBC? - You BASTARDS!

[Savonarola]

I've been reviewing a college level introductory physics book.  One of the problems involved converting furlongs per fortnight to mm/s.  (1 furlong per fortnight is .17 mm/s if anyone cares.)  I then discovered there's an entire system (perpetuated by computer scientist, as if you couldn't have guessed) with base units Fortnight, Furlong and Firkin

[Admiral Yi]

Just read a long review of T. Piketty's Capital and Ideology.

Here's the key excerpt from the review.

"The notion that people have an inviolable natural right [to] strictly private property cannot withstand analysis, since the accumulation of wealth is always the fruit of a social process, which depends, among other things, on publlic infrastructures...the social division of labor, and the knowledge accumulated by humanity over centuries.

[The Brain]

Just read a long review of T. Piketty's Capital and Ideology.

Here's the key excerpt from the review.

"The notion that people have an inviolable natural right [to] strictly private property cannot withstand analysis, since the accumulation of wealth is always the fruit of a social process, which depends, among other things, on publlic infrastructures...the social division of labor, and the knowledge accumulated by humanity over centuries.

Is that Piketty's view or the reviewer's view?

[Admiral Yi]

The reviewer summarizing Piketty's view.  Some of that line was quotes within quotes but I couldn't be arsed to type all that shit in.

[The Brain]

The concept of natural rights is weird to me. I wouldn't call the quoted argument a strawman since I'm sure people have argued for natural rights regarding strictly private property, but to me the argument misses the point. I don't have a problem with the government (excessively) taking strictly private property because it violates a natural right, I have a problem with it because it is destructive. Though in fairness to Piketty I assume he argues in the book that it isn't destructive.

[Admiral Yi]

I don't think Piketty was using natural right in the gun nut sense of the word, just his way of tagging the prevailing view of private property IMO.

Here's exec summary of his prescriptions.

Employees should have a decisive say in the management of their firms
Public services, especially education, should be vastly enhanced.
Every youngster would get a lump sum
Wealth tax of up to 90%

[The Brain]

For clarity: my problem with the concept of natural rights is with the mainstream idea of natural rights, not a gun nut version.

His prescriptions are a recipe for disaster. But that's what many people want.

[dps]

Here's exec summary of his prescriptions.

Employees should have a decisive say in the management of their firms
Public services, especially education, should be vastly enhanced.
Every youngster would get a lump sum
Wealth tax of up to 90%

No;  OK as far as education is concerned, but I'd want more details;  huh?; , and no.

[crazy canuck]

The review by the Nytimes may be more accurate than Yi's summary of a summary

For Piketty, rising inequality is at root a political phenomenon. The social-democratic framework that made Western societies relatively equal for a couple of generations after World War II, he argues, was dismantled, not out of necessity, but because of the rise of a "neo-proprietarian" ideology. Indeed, this is a view shared by many, though not all, economists. These days, attributing inequality mainly to the ineluctable forces of technology and globalization is out of fashion, and there is much more emphasis on factors like the decline of unions, which has a lot to do with political decisions

[The Minsky Moment]

I am still in the middle of the book.  While Piketty critiques what he calls "proprietarist" ideology, he also takes the claims seriously and states that it is a coherent philosophical system. The argument is more nuanced then Yi's review's excerpt would suggest.  Piketty's empirical analysis - in this book as in his prior book, does argue that under such a ideological regime, there is a strong tendency to ever increasing concentration of wealth and income - I just wrapped up the part where he analyzed France between the Revolution and WW1. He isn't approaching the problem dogmatically as the review would suggest but pragmatically in the sense of analyzing empirical and observable consequences of different political and institutional pathways.

The reviews of his last book were so ax grindy I would tend not to put much stock in the ones coming out now.  You just have to slog through the text and judge for oneself.

[The Brain]

I am still in the middle of the book.  While Piketty critiques what he calls "proprietarist" ideology, he also takes the claims seriously and states that it is a coherent philosophical system. The argument is more nuanced then Yi's review's excerpt would suggest.  Piketty's empirical analysis - in this book as in his prior book, does argue that under such a ideological regime, there is a strong tendency to ever increasing concentration of wealth and income - I just wrapped up the part where he analyzed France between the Revolution and WW1. He isn't approaching the problem dogmatically as the review would suggest but pragmatically in the sense of analyzing empirical and observable consequences of different political and institutional pathways.

The reviews of his last book were so ax grindy I would tend not to put much stock in the ones coming out now.  You just have to slog through the text and judge for oneself.

Please post your take on the book when you've finished it. There's no way I'll ever bother reading it myself and I trust your judgment over many others'.

[Gups]

Children of Time is a great book, really well paced and a number of interesting ideas. Not read the follow up yet. I've read quite a few of his, generally very decent for such a prolific writer (e seems to knock out 3 or 4 novels a year)

[Savonarola]

I've been reading Sean B. Carroll's "Brave Genius" a biography of Jacques Monod and Albert Camus.  I've just gotten to the fall of France, and the author is covering life during the first months of occupation.  He quotes some speeches of Winston Churchill; which I find myself reading in the Churchill voice.  He quotes a French language speech Churchill did; and I found myself wonder "Well how would that sound?"  As it turns out, not that different from his English language voice.

I finished this; I don't think the dual biography worked.  While they were friends; the only time Monod and Camus worked together was when Camus became critical of Stalinism; which was the same period when Lysenko's views became the doctrine of the Comintern (they had been the official views of the Soviet Union since 1940) which included a number of French scientists.  Monod was able to help Camus further his anti-Stalinist case.  Other than that it was two biographies messily glued together.  Carroll is a Microbiologist, and might have been better off just writing a Monod biography; as he goes into much greater depth on the story of Monod's discovery of the mechanisms of inheritance in bacteria.  The science is fairly advanced as well; (at least it's far beyond my knowledge of biology.)

Monod had helped smuggle some scientists out of Hungary after the Seven Days of Freedom; and the author went into some detail about them.  Prior to de-Stalinization university education in Hungary included a heavy dose of Soviet propaganda.  So much so that when one of the scientists taught that Mendeleev discovered the periodic table her students demanded to know which western scientist had really discovered it.