[book] The Gluten Lie

Most people will think Alan Levinovitz, a Professor of Religion, an unlikely author of a diet book, particularly one like this that refutes many of the most popular diet fads. But in fact it’s one of the best health books I know. Nobody should read a diet or health book without reading this one first.

In my half-century of life, I can remember science being applied to so many different health claims that I’ve forgotten all the now-discredited ones that were once popular, but Levinovitz provides some reminders. Take MSG, for example, which began its road to public vilification with a letter to the editor of New England Journal of Medicine by a doctor who had a bad experience at a Chinese restaurant. Throughout the 1970s it was implicated as the cause of so many ailments that it became the subject of much serious scientific inquiry that all turned up negative. To this day, many people are convinced MSG causes headaches, yet no well-designed study has ever found any difference between MSG and a placebo.

MSG, like gluten and most of the other substances that have come and gone in the public favor, is a nocebo, an inert substance that causes harm because of the expectation of harm, not from anything real. On and on it goes with many other embattled foods. Wheat gluten is just the latest, most popular example, following in the footsteps of a whole line of defamed foods: salt, cholesterol, red meat, soy, and on and on.

Part of the problem is that, for many substances, there really are some people who are negatively affected. Celiac Disease is real for some people, just as sugar is a problem for diabetics and lactose causes stomach distress for many. But just because something negatively affects some people doesn’t mean it’s bad for the rest of us.

Levinovitz’ religious studies background makes him uniquely qualified to see the parallels between various health claims and religious belief. Claims about food are often couched in terms that, with a slight tweak of terminology, would be entirely appropriate coming from a church pulpit. Here are some examples:

You are what you eat: this idea can be traced to Galen, but it’s still in us. It’s why it’s so easy to sell the American public on the idea that eating fat makes you fat. Similarly, it’s not hard to convince some people that meat-eating, and its association with killing of animals, will make you more likely to be cruel to other humans.

If it tastes good it must be bad. It’s not hard to see the Puritan streak in much of the American discussion of the dangers of processed foods. We like the taste of sugar too much, leaving us at the mercy of Evil Corporations (Satan) who exploit our innocent addictions (The Fall) in order to make Big Profits. The truth, unfortunately, it more complex.

The monotonic mind. Religious people are comfortable with black and white conditions. To an Orthodox Jew, pork is 100% bad. The only optimal amount of coffee to a Mormon is zero. But with health, the rules are more complex. A glass of wine at a meal can be healthy for many people, but any positives go away quickly if you drink too much. Food is rarely if ever a black and white health vs unhealthy situation. The dose makes the poison. 

Levinovitz gives many more interesting examples, including critical comments about Bulletproof’s David Asprey, Chris Kresser, and even Gary Taubes. Few diets or diet gurus are 100% bad, of course, and that’s why many will find the book frustratingly difficult to pin down. There’s a little something critical for everyone.

The most entertaining part of the book was the final two chapters, helpfully printed on darker paper to make it stand out. Levinovitz invents an entirely new diet fad, written uncritically in the first part, and then overwritten with his own comments in the second. At first, you’ll be tempted to think Levinovitz’ book is just like so many other diet books, which go into detail taking down other ways of eating, only to return with the One True Diet. But that’s why the second part is so interesting: as he might do with religious commentary, Levinovitz picks apart each of his own dietary claims to show how deceptive they are, how they fit into well-worn patterns, and why you shouldn’t be fooled.

That said, the book does offer one piece of dietary wisdom, but sadly it’s not the one most people are primed to hear. Moderation.  Period. Don’t eat too much.

Perhaps not a satisfying conclusion to some people, but perhaps that’s to be expected when you take all the religion out of eating.

[book] Epidemic of Absence

Ecosystems go all the way up and all the way down. Just as humans affect -- and are affected -- by the bigger world of animals, forests, oceans, and sky, we are also part of a deeper micro-sized world of bacteria and viruses, many (most?) of them far older than we are, and constantly adapting to all the harshness of life, including the new realities of human-made antibiotics and hygiene. Control over nature is an old goal of science, but nature is never fooled forever. The great bridges and dams that make one side of our lives better can have unforeseen consequences to other parts of our world. 

So it is with the micro world too. Even the simplest steps we take to keep clean or warm, conveniences like indoor plumbing or heating, induce changes to unseen world of microbes, which not only outnumber us but out-class us in diversity and complexity. Eliminate one from our lives and who knows what it will do.

 

Moises Velasquez-Manoff presents an intriguing and sometimes terrifying survey of what little is known about the microbes around us. Focusing on allergies and autoimmune diseases, he writes in detail about the "hygiene hypothesis", that as the world gets richer and cleaner, our under stimulated immune systems get bored and turn on the body itself. A whole range of new diseases, from hay fever to asthma to crohn's disease, all seem to co-occur with modernity. People of the same genetics and culture -- Finns separated by the Iron Curtain, for example -- suffer these diseases at very different rates. Even zoo animals develop afflictions unknown in the wild.  The more "clean" and "modern" you are, the more you invite previously unheard of conditions. 

 

Even more intriguing is the "old friends" hypothesis, that having co-evolved with us, many of these microbes are actually necessary for health. From digestion to mood, when you take away the organisms that have covered us for millions of years, you invite trouble. Sadly, by driving many of these creatures to extinction -- an inadvertent result of hygiene practices intended to wipe out other afflictions -- we may be adversely affecting our human ecosystem in ways we don't yet understand. Wipe out a wolf population to spare human livestock and the deer begin to trample wild plants, carving the forest in unpredictable directions. There is some good, of course, but some bad too, and the scary part is that science doesn't know way too little about which is which.

 

I am extremely fortunate to have been spared many of the awful afflictions presented in this book: hay fever, peanut allergies, asthma, eczema and more. So little is known about how to treat the sometimes terrible discomforts involved, and if you suffer from them, you may understandably be willing to try just about anything, including treatments with parasites like hookworm, so mainly you want to know: does it work?  The answer is maybe, but not definitely, and you may also introduce other problems. The author recounts how he self-inflicted in a Tijuana clinic (sadly, the treatment is illegal in the US) and yes, it helped. But the side effects (headache, diarrhea) were no picnic, and the treatment is no cure: to maintain relief from allergies, he needs to continue taking the worms. With no independent auditors in place, you run the risk of acquiring other diseases along with the worms: HIV maybe or hepatitis -- the cure can be worse than the disease.  

 

This definitely was one of the best science books I've read in a long time, and if you or a loved one suffers from autoimmune diseases, you'll appreciate the well-written and thorough survey of what is known. I doubt there is any work nearly as good; I think this is one of those areas of science that is so new, and so potentially different from centuries of medical progress, that you really need somebody like this author -- not a scientist, but a science journalist -- to look into the issues and present them for you (which he does, well, and with the right amount of both optimism and skepticism).

 

A sampling of some ideas:  how pregnancy is central to the passing of important microbes.  Yes, you should lick your baby's pacifier, and chew their food for them if you can -- the microbes in your saliva are highly optimized for your genes and environment.  Even autism may have a microbe component: some kids reverse their symptoms when fighting a fever, or an infection. H. pylori, the strange bug whose role in ulcers earned its discoverers a Nobel prize, may actually be necessary in many of us.  

 

In fact, the lesson of h. pylori or the EVB virus is a good summary of many of the bugs around us: often they are neither all good nor all bad. Nature is not a fight between pure good and pure evil, but rather a constant tension among multiple constituencies vying for power. Rather than focus on permanently vanquishing one or another "foe", we need to consider the entire ecosystem and realize how little we really know after all. 

[book] How We Learn

Who doesn’t want to be better at learning? Learn faster, more efficiently, with better recall…that’s this book, by Benedict Carey, a journalist who has long been tracking the science of learning. The whole book is worth reading, but here are a few of my takeaways:

• Use the spacing affect, aka “distributed learning”. There is a whole science of how much and how often you should repeat something in order to seal it in memory. Not too often, just enough space between practice, not too seldom. Nowadays you can get software to help with this.  Good idea.
• Testing is another form of learning, so do it on yourself all the time. Spend about 1/3 of your time studying and 2/3rds testing yourself (flashcards, re-writing your thoughts, etc.)
• Distraction can actually be good, but only if: you’ve focused long enough on the task to feel stumped. When that happens, take a break and do something else for a while.
• Systematically alter your practice: change the place where you study, change the background noises or music. If you study the same material in two different places, you’ll learn the material better than if you studied it in the same, familiar location.
• Sleep is free learning: never go to bed without a problem to review in your mind. Think of it as “learning with your eyes closed”.

There is much more to absorb from this book, and I’m sure I’ll continue coming back to the concepts regularly.

 

[book] The Rise of Superman

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler is mostly about extreme sports — the people behind really crazy activities like kayaking off a 56.7 meter waterfall or snowboarding off impossibly-high cliffs). If that part interests you, then you’ll hear insider accounts of the various legends you already know about. I’m not an extreme sport-watcher, but I came away with new respect for the people who do that stuff: they’re the modern day equivalents of great explorers past, like Magellan or Pizzaro. 

But the interesting part to me was the discussion of “flow", the mental state achieved by these people and by anyone working at peak performance.  Flow, also known as “being in the zone” or in religious contexts something like satori or enlightenment, is a place where every ounce of your being is fully alive, where you are “acting on all cylinders” and being the best you can be. Kotler dissects this state with scientists like Keith Sawyer and many others, including neuroscientists who study the phenomenon and divide it into these stages:

• Struggle: trying to amp up and get a handle on problem, focusing with all your might. Very nerve-wracking here.
• Release: the ‘aha’ moment
• Zone: now you’re in pure perfection
• Recovery: consolidate memories 

And these neurochemicals:

• dopamine (pleasure producer like cocaine)
• norepinephrine (like speed)
• endorphins (opiates more powerful than morphine)
• anandamide (“bliss”, inhibits ability to feel fear)
• serotonin (helps cope with distress)

 Flow is about focus and concentration, and it happens in groups too. Here are some of the key characteristics:

• serious concentration
• shared, clear goals
• good communication (immediate feedback)
• equal participation
• element of risk
• familiarity: the group has a common knowledge base
• blending egos
• sense of control
• close listening
• always say yes

There’s obviously much more to say about Flow, but I found many of the lessons were buried in anecdotes about extreme heroes, who if that’s your thing will be more interesting to you than it was to me. Still, I definitely want to learn more, especially about some of the Quantified Self devices mentioned, like BrainSport from SenseLabs (formerly Neurotopia) and of course the Flow Genome Project.

Interestingly, Kotler is also co-author with Singularity University and X-Prize Peter Diamondis of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, a book I’ll have to add to my reading list.

[book] Missing Microbes

Another fantastic book, by Martin Blaser, professor of microbiology at NYU: Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues.

Microbes, a word that refers to microscopic lifeforms like bacteria, archaea, and viruses have been around way longer than anything else, and show far more variety than any visible life. If you imagine a circular clock face representing the degrees of microbiological difference between various life forms, humans and corn plants would be separated by only a single degree — the rest of the clock is an unimaginable variety of life, so different from us and inhabiting every nook and cranny on earth, from the radioactive sludge inside a dark nuclear plant to high in the atmosphere. Life is everywhere, and almost all of it is microbial. But as ubiquitous and resilient as these microbes are, many of those that matter most to humans have been under attack for the past century because of antibiotics, and the resulting changes may be the root cause of many modern afflictions, from obesity to autism to diabetes to cancer.

Here are just a few of the facts you’ll learn in this book:

• Specialized lab mice that are raised germ-free may appear outwardly normal, but their blood contains only 52 out of the 4200 compounds found in normal mice. The implication is that microbes in the gut and skin generate many thousands of chemicals — vitamins, hormones, and more-- that are important for life.
• Gut microbes produce a native compound similar to valium, normally cleared out by the liver. End-stage cancer patients often slip into a valium-induced coma when their livers fail.
• Veridans streptococci usually live harmlessly in the mouth and serve to prevent Step A infections by simply crowding out other bacteria. But when they get into the heart, they are the major cause of heart valve infections.
• The FDA doesn’t require labeling for products (like milk or organic apples) that contain less than 50mg of tetracycline. That seems like a trivial amount, with no possible affect on your health, but the dosages add up: drink milk every day and you have ingested a noticeable amount after a week.
• Your gut bacteria produce 80% of the serotonin your brain uses to remain calm and promote good sleep. There are certainly many other examples of important hormones produced, not by the body, but by microbes.

Many, many more facts and ideas, well worth reading.  Highly recommended.

 

[book] All Natural

The subtitle of this book by Nathanael Johnson explains why I read it: "a skeptic's quest to discover if the natural approach to diet, childbirth, healing, and the environment really keeps us healthier and happier.”   I’m a skeptic (check),interested in diet (check), healing (check) and the environment (check).  (I’m interested in childbirth too, but frankly any opinions there belong to my wife, not me).

Johnson is such a nice writer, giving such good weight to all the evidence, that the book can be an unsatisfying read. A good summary would be "Hmm, there might be something to these all-natural lifestyles, but there's something to the mainstream way too."

I liked his concise description of three assumptions behind all “mainstream” nutrition:

1. Molecules matter, food is irrelevant.
2. Everyone is the same.
3. Institutions, not individuals, should be in charge of diet

As a raw milk fan, I agree with these points, so I especially enjoyed the book’s discussions about the discoveries of people like Bruce German,  food chemist at UC-Davis who studies bifidobacterium infantis, the only microbe that thrives on oligosaccharides. These make up the bulk of human milk but can't be digested in the stomach without a bacterium. Turns out  we need these microbes to allow milk to go through a nipple and turn into a solid inside the stomach again — another instance of germs that are essential for health.

Also, did you know that kids who drink raw milk for the first time have no adaptation to Campylobacter jejuni, a pathogen in raw milk? According to Johnson, (p. 97) "Just about everyone injured by milk has been a child or an immune-compromised adult”.

There’s much more to like about this book, including the conclusions, which like adult life itself, are frustratingly lacking in black and white answers.  All the more reason that individuals should be in charge of their own choices.

 

What's the appendix for?

My appendix was removed when I was five years old, at the hands of a well-meaning country doctor who thought it would cure my chronic childhood tummy aches. The finest medical scientists at the time knew, of course, that the appendix is a vestigial organ, an evolutionary leftover that was not needed in modern humans and would probably, in future generations, evolve itself away. I guess I’m proof, half a century later, that those scientists were right: you can live a perfectly healthy life (well, almost) without an appendix.

Still, the idea has always nagged at me and lately I’ve started reading the fascinating science writer Rob Dunn, who I learned about through one of his old blog posts at Scientific American. He summarizes his evidence in his book The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today, but the basic idea is that the appendix helps re-populate your gut bacteria after a major crash — a bout of food poisoning, say, or some terrible infection that takes over before your immune system has a chance to respond.

What’s inside a healthy person's appendix anyway?  Answer: immune tissue, various (normally good-for-you) bacteria, and IgA antibodies — all stuff that seems like you wouldn’t want to just cut out of a person, like that long-forgotten surgeon did to me.

Dunn’s book is interesting throughout, and besides the appendix discussion here are some additional things I learned:

• Humans have taste buds in their gut (see Wu, S. et all in PNAS 99:2392-2397 . What are they doing in there? Who knows, but catfish have them all over their bodies. Maybe the sense of taste includes some measure of what’s already in our tummies.
• Specially-modified mice that have no bacteria in their guts seem to live okay, but they need 30% more calories to get the same amount of nutrients as normal mice.
• You may think you react with similar horror to something violent as you do to something pathogenic.  You feel the same stress, same heart rate increase and other body signs either way.  But your immune system can tell the difference (as measured by changes in measures of immune system response). 

There’s much more to like in the book as well as the other Rob Dunn writings. Definitely recommended.

 

By the way, if you would like to know more about what’s on my reading list, and (especially if you have suggestions for things I might like!) please follow me on Goodreads.

 

 

[book] War! What Is It Good For? by Ian Morris

As with his seminal “Why the West Rules”, Stanford Professor Ian Morris’ new book makes you repeat “Aha!” as he explains the big picture of history with remarkable ease. Instead of simply telling a story, he gives the rules behind the story: how societies naturally evolve, almost inevitably, in fixed directions.  “Maps, not chaps”, as he summarizes it: geography matters more than great people in how history unfolds.

This time Morris presents the history of warfare, and how — bad as it is for the people involved at the time — normal people are better off when larger “Leviathan” states incorporate smaller, weaker political units. The Roman Empire, cruel as it was much of the time, provided law and order, secure trade routes, and long-term stability that ultimately brought more good than bad. The same goes, with rare exceptions, for all great empires, including the modern world’s Pax Americana.  The ironic paradox of history is how, the more swords you have, the more plowshares you get. When you’re strong enough that nobody can challenge you, generally nobody does, and the overall result is peace.

It leads to a cycle that, in Morris' telling, ultimately seems so predictable: for example, Britain’s role as globocop in the late 1800s slowly ended due to its own success in creating vigorous new markets, which later became rivals, especially Germany. Similarly, China’s rise — tied as it is with the US economy — can only weaken America’s undisputed globocop role, especially in strategic southeast Asia. How will it end?

One hint comes from the tectonic shifts identified in the National Intelligence Council Global Trends 2030:

• growth of the global middle class
• wider access to lethal and disruptive technologies
• shift of economic power toward the East and South
• unprecedented and widespread aging
• urbanization
• food and water pressures
• return of American energy independence

Combining these trends, he references Ramez Naam’s books, Nexus and Crux  as examples of how the merging of computers and people may have an affect on the future. We’ll be fine if the US maintains its globocop role till then; not so much otherwise.

Let's hope.

My favorite books about diet and health

Making a list of favorite books is hard because your favorites change over time, often due to reading something that becomes a new favorite. 

Perhaps it’s easier to be like Tyler Cowen and simply read a ton, absorb what you can, and move on. With that attitude, books are like people you bump into on the street, or who you converse with once on a long train ride. They influence you to various degrees, sometimes more, sometimes less, but in the end it’s all about ideas. Good ones can be packaged in anything from a book to a blog post; don’t be too obsessed with the format, and certainly don’t feel you have to read the whole thing if you get distracted.

I don’t dispute that, but there’s another reason to track favorite books: as a handy introduction to yourself, so others can get a sense of who you are and where you’re coming from.

So with that said, here are my favorite books about diet and nutrition:

• In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto   Pollan, Michael
  If you’re confused about diet, this is the best advice yet. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”. 
• Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It     Taubes, Gary
  A well-researched, easy to read but thorough discussion of obesity that concludes that carbohydrates, not calories, are key. The simple, seemingly obvious belief that a person’s weight is a function of “calories in and calories out” will seem much less obvious and mostly wrong by the end of this book.
• The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health     Durant, John
  The best summary so far of the motivation and principles of ancestral health. The author is a student of Steven Pinker’s, from Harvard, and writes with a general, more academic orientation rather than as a how-to manual. The basic principle, that the modern world is not our natural habitat, makes much sense, and I like the way he applies that rule to diet and exercise, plus sleep and much more.
• Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health     Robinson, Jo
  A highly practical summary of fruits and vegetables: which are good for you and why. Every page includes interesting, often counter-intuitive tips to eat more healthily. Examples: frozen blueberries are just as healthy as fresh, but broccoli loses most of its nutrition within hours after picking. Carrots cooked with butter are much healthier than raw. Excellent and useful throughout.
• All Natural: A Skeptic's Quest for Health and Happiness in an Age of Ecological Anxiety     Johnson, Nathanael
  Although frustratingly equivocal in its conclusions, I liked the survey of the advantages and disadvantages of “mainstream” versus “alternative” approaches to health, on everything from childbirth, vaccinations, and raw milk.

Far out theories

Some of my favorite health books go slightly beyond the known — or thought-to-be-known — science, and deliberately introduce some speculative ideas, useful both as a reminder of how little science can currently explain and also a hint of ways our view of the world could radically change in the future.

Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease     Ewald, Paul

Published in 2002, this book raises the intriguing possibility that most (perhaps all) serious diseases are caused by infections. Certain types of cancers (e.g. HPV) are already known to have viral origins, but imagine how our thinking would change if — when — someday science discovers infectious agents behind other cancers, heart disease, diabetes, and more. Reading this with other books about the role of microbes has made me far more sensitive to the possibility that science and medicine could one day undergo a huge shift in the way that health and disease are diagnosed and treated.

An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases     Velasquez-Manoff, Moises

Another book that explains the provocative idea that our immune systems need regular stimulation by parasites and other infectious agents, without which we risk unpleasant side effects like allergies, diabetes, and many other nasty conditions. The remarkable correlation between the hygiene of modernity and the rise of autoimmune diseases makes for powerful evidence that science is far behind in understanding all the consequences of our current lifestyles.

Books I don’t like

Maybe later I’ll put together my list of the books (and authors) I don’t care to recommend. I read a ton, including of books that don’t resonate so well with me or about which I seriously disagree. Understanding that list can perhaps save you some trouble, either because you’d prefer to avoid the mistakes I’ve made, or because you’d like even more evidence that I am an incompetent idiot.

[book] Proust and the Squid

I can’t remember who recommended this book to me, but as you’ll see by the end of this post, I feel compelled to write down what I learned from my reading of it.

The author,  Maryanne Wolf, a child development professor at Tufts in the Center for Reading and Language Research gives a detailed explanation of what happens — neurologically, socially — when we read, arguing that literacy is a cultural and learned trait that we should treat differently from the rest of our language instincts for communicating and thinking. If it took humans two thousand years to develop the written language, how can we expect children to adapt their minds properly after only two thousand days? (roughly the 7 years or so it takes to become functionally literate).

I came away with two thoughts: first, that reading well almost always means writing well; the best way to learn is to do. The author references this quote from Socrates (in Plato’s Phaedrus 275a), spoken to the inventor of writing:

You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

Second, I’m thinking of the wisdom of the US Constitution, which admits that the text alone is not sufficient — a living, human trained judiciary is necessary to truly understand the meaning. Or the Catholic religious tradition, which says that we need both the text and the trained priesthood to understand the full meaning of the Bible. I’m back on my rant against those who claim to be knowledgeable just because they read The New York Times or whatever.

Understanding requires much more than simply knowing. I’m going to spend more time doing and less time reading.

I'm a Stimulator? or a Mover?

Top Brain, Bottom Brain by Kosslyn and Miller

I didn't like this book, but having taken the trouble to read it, I'll at least try to summarize what I learned. I put it on my pile due to the praise from my favorite thinker Steven Pinker, but it didn't live up to my unrealistic expectations. The basic idea, drawn from author Kosslyn's deep neurological expertise, is that human brains, complex as they are, can be usefully summarized as carrying two main functions: planning and perceiving. Obviously the functions are highly interactive, so resist the temptation to oversimplify, but neverthless, you can identify four "Cognitive Modes" based on which function is dominant (or not) in a particular situation.

	Highly-utilized Top	Minimally-utilized Top
Highly-utilized Bottom	Mover Mode	Perceiver Mode
Minimally-utilized Bottom	Stimulator Mode	Adaptor Mode

People who are prone to “Mover Mode” are good at planning and execution. Perceivers, on the other hand, don’t initiate complex plans but are good at putting perceptions into context to understand the implications.
Stimulators, while often creative and original, tend to shoot off in a direction without much forethought, sometimes at the expense of social harmony. Adaptors, by contrast, are easy-going and flexible, but can be frustratingly directionless.

The book goes into plenty of detail, much backed by neurology, and with multiple anecdotal examples of how this plays out in real life. Unfortunately, the examples seem contrived and un-researched (Sarah Palin is an example of a “Stimulator”, Michael Bloomberg is a “Mover”).

So which brain type am I? Well, there is a handy test in the book (and online here) but I had a hard time with many of the questions. Some just seemed irrelevant to me (e.g. "when you buy furniture.." or "clothes" -- something I rely on my wife for), but others, I just didn’t understand ("do you observe surfaces?” huh?).
Partly because the questions didn’t make sense, I took the test twice: the first time I scored “Stimulator”. But I tried again and this time I scored “Mover.”  So which am I really?  I guess I’ll need to use both top and bottom of my brain to figure that out.

If you’re really into neurology, you have to read anything by this author, but you’ll probably be as disappointed as I was. Shrug.

[book] Manage Your Day-to-Day

This is a short, easy-to-read, summary of tips for how to be more productive and more creative. The bottom line: focus.

Here are some of the specific tips worth remembering:

• Do your most creative work first thing in the day, before everything else.
• “Feel the frequency”: set up a routine, doing the same things at the same time.
• Defend your creative time against all interruptions: schedule it on the calendar and treat it seriously.
• It’s harder to see day-to-day progress on long, big (and hence worthwhile) projects, so invent metrics to enable self-tracking.

Two specific ways to break mental blocks:

• [Ray Bradbury]: make a list of random word pairs, then force yourself to piece together a story about them.
• [Edward de Bono] Repetition is the enemy of insight. Take a starting point that has nothing to do with your project and work from there.

Most of these tips are found elsewhere, so I didn’t think this was a breakthrough book, but it’s a readable and inspiring.

[book] How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

Long-time journalist Joe Studwell (The Economist, Far East Economic Review, etc.) and now "mid-career PhD at Cambridge University” (what I’d love to do!) has thought about Asia for decades and concluded that three “interventions” are behind the successful Asian economies:

1. First, maximize output from agriculture
2. Next, direct all investment and entrepreneurs toward manufacturing
3. Meanwhile, tame the financial sector to focus capital on intensive small-scale agriculture and on manufacturing development

Using examples from Japan, Korea, Taiwan to prove his point, and counter-examples from Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia, he shows in detail how government policies built on land reform helped struggling poor countries develop economies built on full employment through agriculture and the “garden-level” productivity that comes when people do everything by hand, without machines.  Countries without land equality couldn’t breed the light manufacturing that comes from the demand created by farmland product surpluses.

With rising surpluses from agriculture, successful governments targeted industry, but with an important caveat: only if the products were competitive internationally. This way, even if your officials are corrupt (inevitable), their money has to come from success in other countries. Selling natural resources breeds corruption because the gains all go to whoever controls the resources; in export-based manufacturing, corruption is useless unless a developed economy buys your stuff.

All the while, successful economies tame the banks to ensure their interests are aligned with both agriculture and industry.

One interesting aside that got my attention is how little education matters:

• 55% of Taiwanese were illiterate at the end of WW2 and 45% remained in 1960.
• S Korea literacy in 1960 was lower than 2010 Ethiopia
• Meanwhile, Philippines has the highest university-educated students in SE Asia and places like Cuba have some of the highest literacy and university engineering grads in the world.

So far so good, and I liked his overall analysis.

But generally I found him overusing the term “market failure” and underusing the equivalent danger “government failure” (aka public choice). Like the similar analysis I didn’t like from Martin Jacques, I have the following thoughts:

• His argument would be more persuasive if he analyzed all countries that apply his formula. He touches on India, but what about Africa, southern and eastern Europe, South America, etc.? (Note that he deliberately excuses Singapore and Hong Kong from his analysis because they don’t fit his thesis).
• Culture plays a role, perhaps the biggest role. Japanese or Koreans would have been successful under a lot of different development models. They are driven people, with a deep level of pragmatism that you can’t ignore. There is a contrast between these people and other cultures. There just is.
• State-directed capitalism, of the form this author likes (i.e. “not driven by free market ideology”), may be good at helping your country win in a basic industry (steel or cars). You know the road map, you know how to measure success.
• Japan, the example I know best, has plenty of successes that were not driven by the state. Honda and Sony are the classic brands that thrived in spite of government inattention.
• Predictability and stability are good attributes for the state, and here again Korea and Japan and Taiwan have some advantages. Governments can change, but the overall sense of drive is hard to kick out (it’s that culture again)

I have much more to say about this (check out this review by John Williamson, the man who coined the term “Washington Consensus” that Studwell pans) but overall I thought the book was well-written but with much to dispute.

 

[book] Last Days of the Inca

Having just attended the excellent Peru exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, I was inspired to finally read this highly-recommended book detailing the Spanish conquest. If you've read the opening chapter of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, you already know the story: How on earth did an invading army of only 168 Spaniards defeat an army of 80,000 warriors who were defending on their home turf an empire of ten million people? The invaders had no knowledge of local geography or food supplies and no backup force. How did they do it?

Francisco Pizarro was a poor, rural Spaniard who arrived in the New World only a few years after Columbus’ initial landing, but by 1513 was together with Balboa at the first European sighting of the Pacific Ocean. After hearing of Cortez’ conquest of Mexico in the 1520’s, Pizarro teamed up with Diego de Amalgro to form a company intent on finding another empire. After one failed trip south, they made a more successful visit to the village of Tumbez, where they found natives who seemed to have access to lots of gold and silver trinkets – an incentive for the Spaniards to keep trying. Pizarro traded with these natives for two young boys, who he sent to Spain to learn Spanish and become interpreters for his next voyage.

The big expedition happened in 1531, with168 Spanish recruits (most of whom had never been soldiers before), 100 horses, and an assembly of others including African slaves, "merchants" (?), and women servants. Almagro stayed behind to raise more money and troops while Pizarro took the force into the heart of the Inca empire.

To make a long story short, Pizarro and his men overcame the odds through repeated use of trickery (to kidnap and kill the reigning emperor), and careful “divide-and-conquer” techniques (appointing a puppet emperor). But the Spaniards got carried away, and soon the “puppet”, Manco Inca, led a full-scale backlash that almost restored the Inca empire.

But the Inca suffered from two fatal errors in their counter-attacks: the first was, in their illiteracy, to miscalculate the importance of writing, thinking that captured, valuable documents would “send a message” if handed over, covered in blood, to besieged Spaniards, when in fact they carried valuable intelligence that saved the day. The second mistake was their habit, in battles, of sending the most important, most seasoned general to lead the charge, thinking that would be a symbol of bravery to the hesitant troops following him when in fact it merely demonstrated his irreplaceability when he inevitably was killed.

Reading this with modern eyes, I can’t help think how awful were these European invaders, who committed so many atrocities, against the natives and against themselves. Ultimately nearly all the key Spanish leaders were killed in various civil wars amongst themselves; Francisco Pizarro himself was assassinated by disillusioned supporters of his former business partner.

Still, the defending Incas were no saints either, themselves guilty of unspeakable cruelties against those who resisted their own conquests, just ninety years before the Europeans arrived. Ultimately, history proceeds in many, sometimes ugly directions and it’s pointless to guess what might have happened. But maybe there is a lesson in here about the value of bravery, of hutzpah, in the face of seemingly ridiculous odds and how that can make all the difference between being a conqueror and the conquered.

Is there such a thing as a "generic" apple?

When you eat any food, shouldn't you care more about the particular piece you are eating, rather than the generic values listed in an app or book about calorie counting or nutrition?  The nutritional value of something as plain as an apple will depend on:  its variety (Gala? Fuji? McIntosh?), size, harvest date, length and conditions of storage, which parts you eat (peel? seeds?), and even what other items you may eat along with it.

Ultimately, the real value is whatever nutrition your body absorbs from it after your internal microbes pick it apart, and once the rest of your meal and environment are taken into account. In fact, there is such a wide variation in nutritional value that [I bet] some of the apples you might eat are actually less nutritious than foods we normally think of as “bad”.

I have a deeper appreciation for these importance nutritional differences, and the subtleties missing from nutrition labels after reading a new book by Jo Robinson: Eating on the Wild Side- The Missing Link to Optimum Health. It’s chock full of practical advice like:

• Slice/chop/press garlic, then let it rest for ten minutes before cooking to boost its nutrition.
• Cooked carrots have 2x the beta carotene of raw carrots.  Cut your own sticks for carrots; the baby kind are much less nutritious.  Then eat them mixed with fat (e.g. butter) to amplify the nutrition.
• Red cherry tomatoes have 12x more lycopene than red beefsteak tomatoes
• Canned artichoke hearts are among the most nutritious vegetables in the supermarket.
• Same with canned beans: which are healthier than fresh, and have more oxygen radical absorption than red wine or blackberries.
• Broccoli loses half its nutrition when you nuke it. Much better to steam for 4 minutes, or sauté in olive oil and garlic.

There are many, many more tips like this, backed by with tons of references from years of reading medical and nutrition journals. It’s changed the way I think about food, and made me look at apples much less generically.

 

[book] The Goal

This book came recommended by none other than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and he’s right: it’s one of the better business books I’ve ever read. Written in a breezy, dialog style, it reads as much like a novel as a how-to book.

The “goal” in the title refers to the fundamental purpose of any business: Turn a net profit, with high ROI, while maintaining cash flow. How you do that: reduce operational expense and reduce inventory while simultaneously increasing throughput.

These principles are generalizable to any situation where you want to be more efficient, and the author suggests a “theory of constraints” based on a set of “five focusing steps” to help you do this:

1. Identify the system’s constraints (aka bottlenecks) that prevent the organization from obtaining more of the goal in a unit of time.
2. Decide how to exploit the constraints to get more out of them.
3. Subordinate everything, realign the entire organization as necessary to support the decision above.
4. Elevate the system constraints, making any other major decisions necessary to increase the capacity at the constraint (bottleneck)
5. If in these steps, a constraint is broken, go back to step 1. Never allow a constraint to continue solely due to inertia.

Like most good theories, these ideas seem obvious – nearly trivial – when you finally notice them. I suspect the applications are more obvious in well-established systems than in situations where you’re building something new. But even then, it’s healthy advice to be aware of bottlenecks to manage your system as efficiently as possible

I can see how they apply to the field I know best (software development), and I’m surprised I haven’t run into this book before.

[book] Wealth and Power

I read this because, with all the recommendations I'd received, well, I had to. When I first moved to China and was looking to start reading up about the place, I followed the advice of David Moser on an early Sinica Podcast to "read anything by Orville Schell". When none other than Sinica host Kaiser Kuo mentioned that Schell had a new book coming in June 2013, I immediately put it into my reading queue and this week I finished it.

A nice overview of key people in China's past two hundred years, the book has chapters with the usual suspects like Mao, Chiang Kai Shek, and the Qing Empress Dowager Cixi, but you really should read it for its descriptions of less well-known (to the West) people like Wei Yuan (the guy who during the Opium Wars first worried about China's "humiliation"), Liang Qichao (the scholar/journalist whose New Citizen journal influenced everyone remaking China in the early 20th Century), Chen Duxiu (energetic founder of the CCP, who introduced Mao to communism but was later ostracized) and dissidents like Liu Xiaobo (winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize).

After reading the devastating Jung/Halliday book Mao: The Unknown Story, I found Schell's relatively mainstream depiction of both Mao and Chiang Kai Shek to be bland. Unless you're not already familiar with Edgar Snow's cheerful picture of Mao as heroic fighter against Nationalist corruption, you can skip those chapters. I'm being dramatic, of course -- anyone whose byline is on the Tiananmen Papers is no lackey for the CCP -- but to a curious, outside observer like me, deep skepticism is justified about everything people assume is true about Mao, and this book largely repaints the standard picture in ways that ensure the authors won't have their China visas revoked.

The last chapters, with its late-breaking history of China between 1989 and Liu Xiaobo were the most interesting to me. China, having lately received the wealth and power it has been lacking for the past two hundred years, may have found in the CCP a powerful new form of adaptable government, one that is intensely pragmatic in ways that seamlessly replace the capriciousness of revolutionary Mao with the flexibility required to steer a huge country into modernity: "resilient authoritarianism", as Columbia professor Andrew Nathan calls it.

Another final anecdote I liked in the book quotes famous sinologist Douglas Fairbanks lecturing a student who wants to compare China too much to the West: "Mao didn't make the Chinese Communist revolution for you", he says. China is on its own timetable, and the interesting characters portrayed in Wealth and Power are reminders that you can't understand the future unless you understand what's happening in China.

 

 

[book] Adam Grant’s Give and Take

Seth Roberts blogged that this book is “the best in psychology in many years” and I think I agree. It’s similar to books by Malcolm Gladwell or Daniel Pink, full of easy-to-relate-to anecdotes backed by serious academic research. The claim is that success-minded people are divided into three categories: givers, matchers, and takers. The book presents evidence for why givers are the most successful in the long run – overly represented at the top of most fields – and how to avoid the mistakes that see givers overly represented at the bottom too: as doormats and pushovers.

Besides Seth Roberts’ blog, there is an excellent New York Times Magazine summary of the ideas, so I won’t bother laying out more details, but there was one concept in particular that interested me: the work of Amanatullah and Morris on negotiations. The women they studied weren’t particularly aggressive when negotiating for themselves, but got results as good as their male counterparts when negotiating on behalf of another.

If you’re a natural giver – you see yourself as doing things generally out of generosity or good will toward others – then one way to avoid being used is to imagine you are negotiating for somebody else. When the women studied were asked to negotiate a salary for another person, they ended up with much better results than when they negotiated for themselves.

Besides the obvious implication that I really should have my wife do all the negotiating in my family (which I already know is true), the easy trick is to approach any negotiation with the perspective that you are actually fighting on behalf of all the people in your life. You want a better salary or a good deal on a car, not for your own selfish gain, but because you want something better for your family. This idea of “relational accounting” is the purest form of giving, because you think through all the consequences of your actions, rather than simply demuring to the wishes of your counter-party.

The book is full of similar observations that make it well worth reading and I highly recommend it.

The future of college

College is such a critical part of modern life that sometimes we forget the difference between “college” and “education”.  Now that my children are closing in on that age, I’ve been thinking about it more.  How is college changing? How can I ensure my kids get the right education?

There are plenty of books (and seminars and consultants) that explain how to get into top colleges, but I don’t really want a how-to manual (maybe it’s my liberal arts education :-). This book, a well-written summary of the bigger and more important trends, was exactly what I needed. The author, Jeffrey Selingo, is a long-time editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, so his natural audience is people in the academic community, but I found it to be a good overview for interested parents too.

Higher education is in the midst of one of its biggest transformations ever.  Maybe you don’t need to worry just yet If you’re a tenured professor at a reasonably good school, but frankly if you’re just starting to consider a career in academia, you better think carefully because the reset that universities are undergoing will almost certainly make jobs in the Ivory Tower very different just a few years from now. Clay Christenson (The Innovator’s Dilemma) says the disruption is so big that in fifteen years half of universities will be bankrupt.

Technology is the immediate driver of urgency, but as Selingo notes, the problems in higher education are deeper and result from decades of societal attitudes and government policies that focus on the degree itself, as though no dollar amount is too much to justify additional spending on college.

It’s a vicious cycle.  See Bennett’s hypothesis:  “increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase”.  Academics will tell you the evidence for this is controversial, but to me it seems self-evident when you look at the rise of “resort colleges” with their expensive – but to immature 18-year-olds, appealing – amenities. When it can easily cost $200K to send a kid to a four-year college, there had better be a lot more value than free ice cream trucks (true story: Hill Point University in North Carolina uses that as one of its many gimmicks incentives  to persuade trick high school seniors into getting their parents to pay the outrageous tuition).

It’s not just tuition prices that are going up, even beyond whatever Baumol’s cost disease predicts. There’s grade inflation of course (did you know that 91% of Harvard students graduate with honors?)  but also an inflation in degrees themselves: with so many low-quality college degrees, it’s getting to the point where you need a master’s degree to stand out, with almost 700K awarded in 2009.  As Selingo writes (p10), "The number of people with a master's degree is now about equal to those with at least a bachelor's degree in 1960...it's probably only a matter of time before the doctorate is the new master's degree".

But the same forces that disrupted the music industry, then journalism, are now coming to universities, and for a similar reason: much easier distribution of information. Some of that, obviously, is the rise of online learning (the book goes into details everything from Khan Academy to Coursera), but better information affects more than just the learning itself. 

For example, it’s much easier to find a good college using several amazing new online resources: Naviance, the excellent detailed database of colleges which most good high schools already subscribe to, and ConnectEDU, which uses a student’s academic record to predict the best fits for colleges and majors. I think resources like this are much more valuable than the newly-fashionable parent-child college tours, which are really more of a family bonding experience than an objective way to learn about colleges.  Who on earth would make a decision based on the impressions of a quick visit – many of which, Selingo notes, are now guided tours put together by the same people who plan experiences at Disneyland.

Information is causing another disruption, thanks to new transparency about the the true ROI for individual colleges and majors. Virginia law requires its colleges to to publish data about the salary earnings of their graduates. In other states, even when colleges don’t want that information published, the company Payscale ranks schools using their extensive data about starting as well as mid-career salaries of their alums. The results are not good news for many schools, and you can see why a shakeout is long overdue.

If you or your kid are one of the few (one out of five, according to psychologist William Damon) who knows what they want to do in life, the coming changes to higher education will seem natural and overdue. For other kids, though (and their parents), the information in this book is indispensible: see his suggestions about overseas study, time off before/during college, preparing better in high school.

My college education, as wonderful as it was for me, will seem quaint and largely irrelevant much faster than we think. This book is a great introduction to how it will change.

[Book] Restless Empire by Odd Arne Westad

This is one of the best books I've read about China in a while. It helped me think about China’s modernization as a long, still unfinished process of slowly-increasing engagement with Westerners like me. At some point I’ll write up my thoughts and opinions generally, but meanwhile since iBook makes it easy for me to dump direct quotes that I underlined while reading, I’ll leave the following excerpts.  .

Chapter 1: Empire

• This pervasiveness of the state was closely linked to dreams of expansion. Qianlong believed that Qing rule was in form universal, in the sense that its principles should be applied by all peoples who were culturally advanced enough to appreciate and use them.

Chapter 1: Metamorphosis

• The Protestant religious awakenings in Britain and the United States in the 1820s and 1830s, combined with the increase in trade, meant that many Christian missionaries were able to operate on the edges of the empire. The first complete Bible in Chinese was published in British India in 1822, and other versions appeared over the next thirty years.

Chapter 2: Imperialisms

• Its control of the key bases and depots for the developing trade—Singapore, Hong Kong, and to a large extent Shanghai—anchored its primacy. But while the British controlled the structure, the Chinese supplied the infrastructure—the depots for East Asian trade were all Chinese cities, run as much by Chinese networks as by British authorities.
• Few societies have ever put more emphasis on the value of education in its various forms than did Qing China. Basic literacy rates were reasonably high compared to the rest of the world. Between a third and a half of men and up to ten percent of women could read. There were many schools in major cities, but competition for entry was fierce.
• Building on the knowledge transmitted by pioneers who had left earlier—people like Rong Hong (known in the West as Yung Wing), who had graduated from Yale in 1854 as the first Chinese with a US college degree—both the government and individual families began sending young people to America and Europe, and, as we shall see, a bit later also to Japan.
• “The English and the Americans are closely related, they have much in common, but they also differ widely, and in nothing is the difference more conspicuous than in their conduct,” observed Wu Tingfang, one of China’s first ambassadors to Washington. The democratic politics in the United States puzzled those who came: How could there be, many asked, collective decision making on administrative matters, when there was such extreme individualism in economic matters?

Chapter 5: Foreigners

• The numbers of foreigners in China varied year by year according to conditions in the country and internationally, but it is likely that the average in the first half of the twentieth century was between 300,000 and half a million (maybe surprisingly, the figures in 2005 were about the same). Of these, about half were Japanese subjects; the British, who long were the most influential, were never more than 15,000.
• The Salt Administration, which collected the salt tax that the state levied on both producers and importers, in the 1920s provided close to twenty percent of the state income.

Chapter 6: Abroad

• 9,000 Chinese wives went with their American husbands back to the United States after World War II. A number had married at a time when US immigration laws still forbade them from ever living in their husband’s country.
  [World War I was] by far the biggest and most concentrated mass transport of Chinese workers ever to go to another continent. It would have major consequences in terms of spreading information about Europe into even the remotest parts of China.
• The US government banned Chinese immigration in 1882. It is the only restriction Congress has ever enacted directed against all citizens of a specific country. The ban lasted up to 1943.
• Kim Il-sung, who after 1945 became the leader of North Korea, had an even closer relationship with China. Born in 1912, he grew up in a Christian Korean family in Manchuria and studied in Jilin City, where he started his activities against the Japanese occupation of Korea.
• [M]ore than 350 million people of European origin live outside Europe today, while only 40 million people of Chinese descent live outside China. Of the 3.5 million Chinese living [in the United States and Canada] two-thirds were born abroad.
• More than half of those over twenty-five have earned a college degree (as against a quarter of the general population), and they have a higher-than-average family income.
• By the 2000s, Singapore, with 77 percent of its population ethnically Chinese, was rated top on the free-market index alongside Hong Kong, even though the government continues to control around 60 percent of the total GDP.

Chapter 7: War

• In this second Sino-Japanese war, begun in 1937, two very different images of China came into conflict. One, held by most Japanese, came out of the nineteenth century and saw China as less a state than a geographic region with different power holders: Rival governments, local strongmen, and foreign representatives combined in different ways to keep some semblance of order, while advanced powers, such as Japan, promoted development within China. It was the advent of a nationalist central government, in the form of the Guomindang, with the stated purpose of resisting Japanese policies, that imperiled the image of a quiescent, pragmatic Chinese approach to international affairs.
• The war [with Japan] made it possible for the party to mobilize in its new bases in the northwest and behind the overextended Japanese lines, where the GMD state had collapsed. When the war began, the CCP was a small group, but in 1945—with 1.2 million members and 900,000 men and women under arms—it was a force to be reckoned with. Even more important than its numerical expansion, though, was the ability the party had gained to work with all segments of Chinese society through a system of centralized decision making. The war had made it possible for Mao Zedong and the group who had promoted his leadership to achieve two very different goals at the same time: Make all party members obey a secret and cloistered Mao-centered inner organization but present a moderate and cooperative outward image.
  Japan lost 400,000 men fighting in China (and 1,500,000 more in the other wars that the war in China started). China lost at least two million men in battle, and twelve million Chinese civilians died as a direct result of warfare.

Chapter 8: Communism

• But the detailed understanding of capitalist modernity that Marx had attempted was not at the center of Chinese Communism. Das Kapital, Marx’s main work, had not been fully translated into Chinese before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.1 While the United States gave the GMD government more than $1.9 billion in assistance between 1945 and 1950, equaling more than $40 billion in today’s money, it could neither control its policies nor determine China’s political trajectory.

Chapter 9: China's Asia

• Koreans feel a cultural and historical closeness with China. In opinion polls in South Korea in 2005, China was ranked equally with the United States—South Korea’s long-term ally—as a country South Koreans viewed favorably. Among those under forty, China had a clear lead in terms of being seen as friendly In the 1980s seventy percent of all Japanese felt an affinity to China, far more than for any other nation.
• [China] for the first time since the fifteenth century [has] a blue-water navy, with fifty submarines (ten nuclear) and seventy major warships.