My Amazon Review of Bob Woodward's and Robert Costa's "Peril"

 

Dangerous Transition

 

Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa have written a widely quoted book on the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency and the first six months of Biden’s.  When reading about Trump’s last days in office I was expecting the worst and it was far worse than what I imagined. The man is evil. Fortunately, there were a few people in the Trump Administration who put the Constitution over their boss.

 

Now when reading an unsourced book that is Woodward’s style you have to guess who his sources were and what were their motivations. It is obvious that Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley was a source and he just today admitted he spoke to the authors and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was obviously a source. They both come off well. A.G. William Barr was certainly a source and after enabling Trump early on, he refuses to go along with Trump’s “stop the steal.” My guess in talking to the authors he was trying to salvage his reputation. We also have Senator Lindsey Graham singing arias to the authors. He wants to have it both ways by saying Trump lost while remaining his golf buddy.

 

We saw a torn Vice President Mike Pence who finally goes along with Dan Quayle’s advice that he had no discretion in counting the electoral college ballots. How after the January 6^th insurrection, could Pence remain loyal to Trump is beyond me? Indeed, Milley characterized January 6^th as a dress rehearsal for what was to come, alluding to the 1905 uprising in Russia. Further Utah Senator Mike Lee played an important role in keeping Pence on the straight and narrow. Further with all of the subpoenas flying from the January 6^th Committee we will soon find out what exactly happened in the Trump White House on that day. What Woodward and Costa disclose has been widely reported, but I am sure there is much more.

 

The authors also discuss the Biden campaign and the early months of his administration. They portray Biden as very hands on with COVID-19 asking penetrating questions and the same goes double for his questions on Afghanistan. My guess the authors got their information from Mike Donilon and now Chief of Staff Ron Klain. I wish it were true, but my guess is that they were exaggerating.

 

With respect to Afghanistan, we all know that Biden supported withdrawal in the early days of the Obama Administration. Biden believed that the military rolled Obama and that was not going to happen to him. Simply put he was dead set on withdrawal. According to Woodward and Costa Biden asked many questions pertaining to Afghanistan, but not very many about the geo-strategic consequences. Several years ago, I had the good fortune to discuss this issue with former Joint Chiefs Chair Mike Mullen and former Secretary of Defense/CIA Director Bob Gates. My question to them was whether or not the U.S.’s retreat from the broader Middle-East (Morocco to Pakistan) was strategic or tactical? Both answered tactical with the hope it wasn’t strategic. Well, Biden answered that question with disastrous consequences. It is strategic. Further the way too academic Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan turned out to be completely clueless about what would happen after the U.S. announced its withdrawal.

 

With respect to domestic policy the authors go into a great deal of detail in examining how the $1.9 Trillion rescue plan passed. Then as now Senator Joe Manchin was a key player. The bottom line is that Manchin did not want Biden to fail on his first major effort and that is why it passed. Biden may not be so lucky with his reconciliation bill now before the Congress.

 

Woodward and Costa have written a very important first draft of history. It is well worth the read. And with Trump still holding sway over the GOP, we are still in peril.

For the full Amazon URL see: Dangerous Transition (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of William Silber's "The Power of Nothing to Lose: Hail Mary Effects.............."

 

Asymmetric Bets

 

N.Y.U. emeritus professor William Silber has written a book about the influence of asymmetric bets have had on our lives. He is basically writing about the importance of high payoff low risk bets in the sense that the better has nothing to lose and much to gain.  As his title notes the “Hail Mary” pass in football comes into play when a team is losing by less than a touchdown with seconds to go. Thus, the quarterback has no choice but to throw a long pass for a score. If he connects the team wins and if he doesn’t the team loses, but it would have lost anyway. Hence, nothing to lose.

 

In series of vignettes Silber discusses the risks that second term president take when they know they don’t have to face the voters again. His example is Woodrow Wilson going from anti-war in 1916 to all-out war in 1917. Other vignettes, among others, include Rosa Parks refusing to leave a white only section on a Montgomery bus, Hitler’s gambling it all at The Battle of the Bulge, Washington crossing the Delaware and Nick Leeson’s ever larger positions in his failed attempt to cover up his trading losses at Barings’ Singapore office in 1995.

 

This last example is of personal significance to me. I was working at Salomon Brothers at the time and was quoted in a Bill Safire column in The New York Times saying that what Leeson did could not happen in the U.S. securities markets. Everything hit the fan at Salomon’s Singapore office, and I was required to grovel which included writing a letter to Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew himself.

 

There are real lessons here, one of which is be wary when you are opposed by someone who has nothing to lose. My one wish would have been for Silber to discuss the power of nothing to lose in academic politics. Simply put, there is much merit in the wag that the reason why fights in academia are so fierce is because the stakes are so small. Tenured faculty have nothing to lose.

For the full Amazon URL see: Asymmetric Bets (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Carlo Rovelli's "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution"

 

The Philosophy of Quanta

 

Physicist Carlo Rovelli has offered up his philosophical review of the quantum revolution largely through the eyes of Werner Heisenberg. We see the 23-year-old Heisenberg in 1925 on the barren North Sea Island of Helgoland where he develops probabilistic matrix equations that explains the movement of electrons. Rovelli takes it one step further where in the physics of small particles everything is relational. That harks back to Einstein’s 1905 Theory of Special Relativity.

 

Heisenberg is challenged by a wave theory authored by Erwin Schrodinger which eventually fall by the wayside. His discussion of Schrodinger’s famous cat thought experiment is, to my mind, is marred by him viewing the cat has asleep or awake, when in fact Schrodinger was discussing whether or not his cat was dead or alive.

 

In the book we meet the great physicists of that age, Plank, Bohr, Dirac and Born. Where Rovelli loses me is where veers off into a host of philosophical notion to explain the interdependence of all objects. Nevertheless, you get a sense of the importance of Heisenberg did on Helgoland in 1925 and that underpins much of modern electronics today.

For the full Amazon Review see: The Philosophy of Quanta (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Nicholas Wapshott's "Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market"

 

The Clash

 

The theme of Nicholas Wapshott’s book is the clash of ideas between superstar economists Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson over the role of government in the economy as played out in series of columns in Newsweek magazine starting in 1966 and lasting through the early 1980’s. Although Wapshott quotes from many of the columns, nowhere is there to be found are the full-length columns of the two protagonists. Because I was an avid reader of those columns when they came out, I was looking forward to rereading at least a few of them. I view this a significant failure of the book.

 

You can view this book as a follow-om to Wapshott’s “Keynes Hayek” book of a few years ago where the role of government was debated in the context of the deflationary 1930’s compared the inflationary 1960’s and 70’s. As an aside, it is not as good as his earlier work. Wapshott makes it out as duel, but in fact both Friedman and Samuelson were friends since their college days in the early 1930’s who were very respectful of each other. Wapshott makes Friedman out as an outsider arriviste, when in fact he was president of the American Economic Association in 1968 where his presidential address set the stage for the great debate about economic policy.

As America’s leading Keynesian Samuelson’s neoclassical synthesis was under attack as his paradigm could not explain the stagflation that was occurring in the U.S. and Western Europe. Simply put inflation was existing side by side with high unemployment. Friedman’s answer was monetarism which took the profession by storm in the 1970’s because it accurately explained the inflationary processes that were underway. However, by the early 1980’s it ceased to work and when crises came in 2008 and 2020, it was Samuelson’s Keynesian playbook that was trotted out to save the day.

 

Wapshott rightly characterized Friedman as a politician seeking to get his libertarian views implemented, while Samuelson was far less motivated by politics. Naturally Freidman as a politician rubbed many of Samuelson’s colleagues the wrong way and took his attacks on their views all too personally.  Along the way Wapshott offers up pretty good biographies of both Freidman and Samuelson. The book is a good read for econ geeks, of which I am one.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Clash (amazon.com) 

My Amazon Review of Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary"

 

Junior High School Teacher Meets Space Alien

 

Software engineer turned sci-fi writer Andy Weir has offered up a novel that space nerds will love. The proof of this is over 31,000 reviews on Amazon. His protagonist is Ryland Grace, a former university professor of molecular biology whose heterodox views force him out of academia, and he ends up teaching junior high school science. Nevertheless, because his heterodox papers caught the attention of the powers that be, he is drafted into a global program to save the earth from being frozen because a mysterious force is draining the sun of its energy. That force is a stream of high energy microbes called astrophage.

 

Grace ends up on up on a mission to a distant star that seems to be unaffected.  The mission is a continuous series of near disasters that overwhelms the reader. The best I can tell, the physics of what is happening seems to be correct. Along the way Grace meets up with a spider-like space alien who breathes ammonia who is also on a similar mission to save his planet. So much for a spoiler alert.

 

I enjoyed the book, but Weir put too many “perils of Pauline” moments in his plot. It became exhausting over time. My guess is that when the motion picture comes out, much, but not all, of that will be edited out.

For the full Amazon URL see: Junior High School Teacher Meets Space Alien (amazon.com)