365 Ways to Become a Millionaire

Another intrusion of a book that Dubya might actually read. This one's so simple he could probably even understand most of it. It reminded me quite a bit of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book to the point that I considered reviewing it as a comment on that review...

A brief and critical review of 365 Ways to Become a Millionaire (Without Being Born One) (Revised Edition) by Brian Koslow

Consider it a kind of predictive review? Based on reading the book, I have a number of predictions about the author, though I'm unlikely to take the time to test them.

First, an observation about the title: The title is a lie. Doesn't bode very well for the rest of the book, eh? Actually, the book is a list of trivial tips and bits of advice. Many of the entries say that they will lead to more money, but there is nothing in the book that could, even with major stretching, be interpreted as an actual "way" to make a million dollars, and there are certainly not "365 Ways" here. Wear expensive shoes because some people will notice? Give us a break.

There are three main themes of the advice in the book. One theme can be summarized as "be a good person" for various reasons that will contribute to your ability to earn more money. The second theme is "watch for for opportunities and be prepared to seize them". The third theme is to be aware of spending money, which is usually in the form of tips about how to save small amounts of it. However this third theme is also confused by advice about when to spend more money, usually for the sake of making a favorable impression on someone. The author would probably argue for a fourth theme about managing people effectively, but his advice on that topic is so confusing and contradictory that I can't figure out which part to focus on as a possible theme.

The substance of the book could be effectively condensed into 5 or 10 pages--but that wouldn't have made much money for the author or his publisher, the Wall Street Journal (which was also plugged within the book (as an unnamed business newspaper)). Actually the best summary of the book is probably the author's own comment on page 148, in entry #304, where he reports that the book is essentially a collection of verbal notes he recorded as he was walking to work one summer. He loves his electronic gadgets, evidently--except for his advice against watching television, which is probably the best tip in the book.

In summary, I'm sure glad I only borrowed it for a few days from the library. I was a skeptic before I read it, but my current conclusion is that the author is basically a wheeler dealer and legal con man. He's smart enough to avoid overtly criminal enterprises, but mostly just a sharp dealer who wouldn't want to talk about how he made his first million (and he never mentions any related details in the book), but who decided the easy and safe path to making more millions was by teaching other people how to fake sincerity.

A parting editorial comment: I'm pretty sure that he didn't even read his own book all that closely because I'm almost sure that entry #270 on page 130 was almost identical to an earlier entry. I actually went to Google Books to check, but I wasn't at all surprised to discover that no preview was available. Even the snippets would have deflated the purchase value of this book to zero.

A Short Comment on Interventions by Noam Chomsky

I just wanted to record a short reaction to the last part of his essay "The Social Security Non-Crisis" in this book. Though everything he says on the topic is sound, I myself feel that the most important argument for social security is one that he doesn't mention. Meaningful 'social security' frees people to enjoy their lives and spend their money while they are young enough to enjoy spending it, and spending that money and living more happily is also going to stimulate the economy by increasing the demands for goods and services that actually contribute to the demand for producing economic goods.

The REALLY free market alternative is that you should be trying to save lots of money while you are young, you should live like a total miser, because once you live one day beyond what you can pay for, you are free to start starving. I think the free market version works poorly because accumulating money is not a useful activity in itself, but more importantly because no one can see the future, so it is fundamentally impossible to guess how much money needs to be saved. I suppose the free market extremists could argue that everyone should try to save enough to live off the interest, but that fails the universality principle (as Chomsky usually refers to the Golden Rule). If everyone had a million dollars, the resulting devaluation of money is the same as if no one had a million dollars, so we're back to square one.

In general, and especially considering how upset his adversaries are, Chomsky's writing is remarkably boring and tedious. Not the consequences of his reasoning, which are often quite troubling, but in his presentation he simply focuses on very mundane facts and rarely resorts to anything resembling fancy analysis. Most of the time he just changes the actors to expose the hypocrisy. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how clearly he separates words from the realities those words claim to describe--but perhaps that is only fitting for a linguist with such deep insight into the nature of language itself.

The God Delusion

Definitely a book of the sort that Dubya would never touch. However, religious fanatics (like Dubya) are still welcome--to the trap, as will soon be explained... (By the way, I'm still reading a lot these days, but not reviewing many of them here, mostly in light of the apparent lack of interest as evidenced by the scarcity of comments.)

Analytic Review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Much of this review is going to be scientifically critical of the book, even though I think it's an excellent read and well worth your time. If the search engines are properly doing their stuff, then I believe this review may most likely be found most often by religious fanatics desperately looking for ammunition to use against Professor Dawkins. Well, plenty of ammunition to be found here, but it's fundamentally a trap, so I feel obliged to give you fair warning.

To any religious fanatics among the readers: In order to really understand the criticisms here, you need to adopt a scientific frame of mind, which is fundamentally poisonous to your religious frame of mind. Just parroting the arguments won't work. If you don't actually understand the arguments, it will only take a few moments of discussion to expose you as a mindless parrot, though it's more likely that you'll mangle the arguments even before you can finish presenting them. To actually use these arguments, you have to understand them, and to understand them, you would have to destroy the foundation of your own religious fanaticism.

Let me try to suggest an analogous approach that you religious fanatics should be able to appreciate. Imagine that you really wanted to study the merits of competing religions. The scientific approach to your religious faith would require you to perform some kind of scientific experiment, such as comparing your religion to some other religion. The most obvious experiment would be to abandon faith in your current religion and start to believe in some other religion. It won't work to just study the rituals or watch how the members behave and join in. In your faith-based reality, you must HAVE the faith or the faith has no meaning to you. Of course, you can't do this, because that would mean that your original faith had become wrong--until you switched back to it. However, you can't even imagine doing that kind of experiment because 'faith doesn't work that way'.

You religious fanatics are crucially unable to deal with the reality of truth in the limited way we humans can deal with that truth, which is also a partial and evolving truth--and therefore you can't actually deal with the reality of scientific criticism. You think probabilistic estimates of truth are a weakness, whereas they are just a reflection of our human limitations and the way the real world works. The point of science is precisely that we can get better--but we can never become perfect. We can acquire more knowledge, but we can never acquire absolute knowledge of the actual world. (The world of mathematics is a special case--but as noted below, it lacks the attribute of existence.) In contrast, the point of faith is to pretend to perfection--which always breaks down to some simplistic and empty shortcut, such as 'faith in Jesus' or 'the Bible is the inerrant word of God'.

If you are a religious fanatic, you might as well stop now. You'll never be able to understand or use these criticisms. Dawkins would apparently argue for trying 'to save you' from your ignorance, but I regard that as basically preposterous. I think the mind of a religious fanatic is damaged beyond any hope of freedom or wisdom. (Shades of Dijkstra's reaction to BASIC?) In the best case, you might switch to a less harmful form of fanaticism. Your ignorance is proud and willful--where 'proud' is defined by your 'saved' status and 'willful' is your own will. I'm reminded of a religious fanatic I know who likes to projectively blame the willful part on the so-called will of god. God's chosen people, eh? (What a clever meme, but the book's treatment of memes is also good, and I won't comment further on that topic.)

I also must confess that I'm quite unconcerned about wasting your religiously fanatical time in some relatively harmless reading if you choose to ignore my polite warning. Most religious fanatics believe in miracles, though I'd regard it as a kind of miracle if I 'reached' the mind of any sincere fanatic.

Now let's go back to the more general target readership, which in the case of this typical blog, is just a projection of the author's own style of thinking. I claim to be a rational scientist of sorts, so I hope that a rational scientist will be entertained or even enlightened.

Time for an overall summary: I think this book is quite good, handling many complicated topics with deftness and some humor. In most places I'm in complete agreement with the author. I think, there are a couple of places that could be improved, and only one place where I think substantial rewriting is called for. That's a short passage of a couple of pages, and in such a large book, that's quite a good job by the author. Going a bit beyond the scope of the book, I would also like to comment on the fundamental logical collapse of religion into evolution.

Mostly for the sake of politeness, I had better clarify my usage of "religious fanatic". One of the weaknesses of this book is that it seems to basically lump all religious people together, and it seems the only metric of interest is whether they are more or less harmful. The basic view in the book is that all of the religious followers are just harmful.

In contrast, I think there are legitimately religious people who are NOT fanatics and who are basically harmless (with apologies to the shade of Douglas Adams as admired by the author). My view is actually closely related to what Dawkins addresses under the label "NOMA", for "non-overlapping magisteria". The book addresses this topic fairly well, so all I'll note is that there are some religious people who can accept the world as it is, even including science and logic, which uniformly forces them to reject any literal interpretation of the founding documents of any of the conventional religions, obviously including the Bible and going right up to the latest and most amusing Scientology tracts. Such people basically hold that there is another sphere of meaning beyond the ken of science, even though most of them also try to pick and choose some conventionally religious elements to fit into their larger view. However, the sincerely religious people of this ilk are not defensive about their beliefs, and very few of them would even be motivated to read this book or its reviews. (At the same time, I have to note that such people seem very scarce, at least in my experience. Also, I think that a super-intelligent god would have been aware of information theory before we discovered it in the last century, and such a god would therefore have used information theory to make sure any messages were not mangled in transmission.)

The topic of atheists actually leads to one of my anecdotal disagreements. He argues that atheists are not religious fanatics, and that agnostics are just fence sitters. I have actually known a very devout atheist, and I would not be so kind. He was just as fanatical as any religious fanatic I can recall, and with no better justification. As regards the agnostic side of this question, Professor Dawkins regards himself as an agnostic, though very close to the atheist end of the scale of religious belief. I also regard myself as an agnostic, though basically because a negation cannot be proven. At the same time, I'm convinced you need to use extremes of mental gymnastics to imagine such a diabolical god who would lie to our faces on such a scale. Should we give some credit to the Christians who blame Satan while somehow exonerating God for his poor delegation skills?

The part of the book that reviews the various arguments for the existence of god is quite good and seems complete (though my own academic studies of these topics were many years ago). He also does a good job of surveying the arguments against the existence of any god, though he doesn't actually mention one of my current favorites: Most of the so-called mainstream religions insist that man was created in God's image while at the same time insisting that God is perfect and powerful. However, given how imperfect we human beings are, there has to be some kind of contradiction there. I can actually partially resolve the paradox by considering the mathematical domain of mental models, say of the triangle or of a perfect line in Euclidean space, but the problem of that approach is that existence is NOT one of the attributes of such mental models, and even physical space itself is ultimately curved and 'imperfect'. We all have awareness of that sort of shadow of perfection, but the real world cares not. It simply is as it is (which is broadly addressed in the book under the topic of the anthropic principle).

One of the specific arguments that bothered me in spite of his disclaimers and vague references to competing hypotheses was the notion of evolutionary selection in favor of gullibility in children. Rather I would argue for evolutionary selection in favor of being lovable, where obedience to the parents is only one of the favored attributes of being lovable. I regard generalized belief in authority figures as an extension of the child's faith in the parents, and especially faith in the 'godlike' primary caregiver. It's basically hard to raise children, and lovable children have a much better chance of making it, even today, though much more so in the hunter-gatherer days in which virtually all of our own evolutionary development took place. (As far as the development of our culture is concerned over the last few thousand years, our own evolutionary development is essentially negligible, as I've noted elsewhere in relation to the Fermi Paradox. I actually was lucky enough to persuade Bill Maher to ask a related question to Professor Dawkins on his Real Time program, if you like tenuous personal links.) The medical evidence is that most children didn't even survive their first year, no matter how lovable they were and how much their parents actually loved them. I do acknowledge that seems to be a naturally rebellious period in adolescence, but I suspect that is probably desirable in an evolutionary sense for disrupting nuclear families and encouraging genetic diversity--but the child's religious views have been determined and solidified well before that point.

What I regard as a major area of disagreement in the book involves his Chapter 9, where he thinks there is a special and anomalous status around such usages as "a Christian child" or "a Jewish child". He wants to treat this as a misleading label of belief, and argue in favor of such usages as "a child of Christian parents". However, it seems fairly obvious that it is more a matter of depth and that this usage is similar to some other labels that he does not consider. He compares the religious labels to other belief-based labels that would not be used for children, but he does not consider any examples of deeper labels such as "an American child", "a black child", "a Mexican child", or "an immigrant child". The essential boundary here clearly seems to be the presumption of inherited traits. Few people change their nationality from whatever they were born with, and few people change their religion from whatever their family practiced. He wants to change our consciousness in hopes of influencing people, so that more people would be aware of the possibility of changing their religious beliefs, but I think linguistic usage will follow reality, and I would even predict that there are cultures and languages where his recommended usage already prevails.

Now for what I regard as the largest weakness of the book, a topic which he only addresses indirectly, mostly under the subtopics of 'imaginary friends' (A.A. Milne's Binker) and consolation. I would put it as 'people are weak, and they know it, and they actively desire faith to compensate for their personal weakness'. Faith also addresses the reality that they are also intellectually lazy and foolish, though most of them are less willing to admit to those traits. In particular, I'm reminded of a religious acquaintance who boasts about 'her strength' based on her belief in having a superior crutch. She thinks she has a super-intelligent crutch in the form of a god who has chosen to save her, while she ever-so-humbly professes her unworthiness. Certainly not an unusual encounter, but merely a relatively recent one.

Another way to look at this weakness is that it's quite hard to be a really good and objective scientist. In a complicated world, we don't have the time to check the evidence for everything, so we have to start by taking a lot of things on faith. Sometimes we decide which things, but often not. From this viewpoint, I'd say that there are basically two attributes of scientists. The less important one is the willingness to accept new evidence. That may sound strange, but I think there are a lot of good-enough scientists who are just running on their hunches. In many of those cases, their hunches are well founded and they achieve solid results, but in plenty of cases the main thing they accomplish is to disprove their own assumptions, even if they personally refuse to admit their mistakes. However, the more important attribute of the rare great scientist is an ability to figure out WHICH evidence to search for. Sometimes it involves looking at old evidence differently. In that case, the evidence exists, but no one else can see its true meaning. After all, the ultimate meaning of any evidence is in how we interpret it. The important thing is that the scientist will look at the actual meaning of evidence (even when it is just an improvement on earlier interpretations), while the religious fanatic is looking for 'absolute' meaning as a handout from some god.

There is another major weakness in the book that involves non-religious evil, specifically related to his short section about Hitler and Stalin. This is probably the only place where I felt his argument was quite weak and incomplete. The crucial aspect of both Hitler and Stalin was that they were religious fanatics, but the followers of new cults, not established religions. As much as the old mainstream religions hate the concept of evolution, the process of creating new religions has changed over the years, along with the kinds of religions that are created.

The big-picture perspective is that many new cults have similar periods of militant extremism, often associated with their transition to the status of an established religion. From a sociological and historical perspective, the mechanism is pretty simple to understand. Initially the cult is harmless, most often dismissed as a lunatic fringe. As the cult grows, it may become a threat to the existing society, usually to the religious institutions but sometimes to the existing government itself. If the threat is imaginary or weak, then the cult will soon be crushed and disappear, but in many cases the threat is quite real, and the suppression of the cult fails. Quite often the self-defense period includes a militaristic response by the cult, initially just for survival, but then that same successful military organization is often used for aggressive expansion. There are many examples throughout history, and Professor Dawkins even cited some of them, though he didn't consider them from this perspective. He did consider the technological ramifications, however, and it was technology that made the scale of these recent crimes possible. It would have been hard for Hitler to create a factory for the mass production of death until after Henry Ford had created the concept of a factory for the mass production of cars... The technology remains morally neutral, and we can only speculate what Genghis Khan would have done with a nuclear weapon. (At the same time, I would argue that technology is, on the long-term average, more often used for good purposes than evil ones. The latest example is the mostly successful handling of the H1N1 influenza, which I believe had the potential to be far worse than the Spanish Flu epidemic after WW I.)

The other aspect is the change in the kind of religions which appear in the form of cults. My semi-humorous version is that "the standards of historical scholarship were very lax in those days" when the old mainstream religions were crafted. The book does talk a little bit about the historical process of editing the New Testament, but I'd have liked to see more about the Old Testament and the Koran, too. In particular, I've read that most of the Old Testament seems to have been assembled into its current form by two editors, with the first one focused on the five main books of the Old Testament, mostly drawing on Sumerian sources, before the more famous 'Redactor' did the final editing. However, those sorts of stories and fables just wouldn't work these days, and modern religions have very different bases, though several recent religions (such as the Mormons) have copied much of the archaic style. Religions like Lenin's flavor of communism or Hitler's Nazi Party were mostly economic religions, but they were following the traditional historical trajectory of rapid growth followed by suppression leading to a militaristic and extremist response.

Covering these topics properly would have greatly extended the book in this non-biological direction, so perhaps that is why Professor Dawkins treated the topic in such a shallow manner. However, I want to go even further and consider a fundamental paradox that I feel should be addressed. If the religious people insist on rejecting science and the use of our human intelligence to deal rationally with the world, then they condemn us to follow Mother Nature's path--the path of evolution. In the normal course of evolution, there is no planning. Every population struggles at the edge of starvation. The evolutionary process is to let them breed as much as possible, which naturally maximizes the evolutionary competition leading to improvement--though Ma Nature doesn't see it that way. Life is just about finding new niches to exploit, and Ma Nature doesn't worry about the casualties. Plenty more life where that came from--but it's a mighty tough life for those that are living it. (Give the Christian Scientists credit for illogical consistency--but they'll never catch on more widely. Most religious fanatics are quite willing to rationalize to allow for the use of antibiotics over God's will.)

As I was working on this review I checked Google Books (in my Internet lobe), trying to locate a specific quote in the book (only to discover that their page numbers don't match my edition). However, I think it is worth noting that a number of the books I did find were religiously motivated attacks on this book. Professor Dawkins has evidently touched quite a nerve. Actually, he mentions some of his critics within the book itself. I was actually kind of amazed that the fanatics think they can address reason with faith. What are they so afraid of? Yes, I'm personally sure that objective reality will eventually grind their fantasies to dust, but that's the way of the world, after all. (I was not amazed that none of those critics apparently believed in their own criticisms strongly enough to make their books freely available via Google Books. Then again, I'd be unlikely to read one, even if it was free. Right now I'm reading a Buddhist book, which is evidently a response to that popular Christian book about the purpose-driven life.)

Just as evidence of the closeness of my reading, I'll note that on page 175 the word "unparsimonious" was spelled incorrectly, without the first "n". I also was interested by his cryogenic freezing comments on page 402, in conjunction with a note I made considering death as the loss of a unique and inexplicably beautiful pattern.

Once again, to review my overall conclusions, I think this book is an interesting and thoughtful summary of many complicated topics. If you're interested in these topics, and I admit that I am, then you'll find it a good use of your time. However, I'm somewhat befuddled what all the fuss is about.

What Happened

Notes for a Review of What Happened (Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception) by Scott McClellan

Hmm... It appears that "what happened" here was that I wrote up the following notes as I was reading the book, but then lost interest in doing a full review. The book was weak enough that isn't worth much effort, and I guess that is about as negative as a review can get? I definitely don't feel like rereading the book to refresh my memories, so I guess I'll just summarize the main impression that remains some months after reading the book: McClellan seems like a nice guy, but incredibly naive, and even though he was physically inside the White House at the time, either he was completely outside of the real discussions or he is a much better liar than I think he is. My main conclusion from reading the book was that he was just an innocent patsy, and that's why his version of the events became so hopeless tangled once he started noticing reality again.

Cheney's secret plot really to plant WMDs or evidence of an Al Qaeda link to Saddam?

Lots of missing topics and incidents.

Detailed notes as I read:

Page 14: Silly mistake of "legendary successor's expense" in reference to Sam Houston, his "predecessor", not "successor".

Page 58: Glaring counterfactual statement about the Florida recount. Gore did suggest a statewide recount. (Only to be expected that there was no mention anywhere in the book of the eventual recount.)

Page 116: His own muddled typology of lying: "Partisans in Washington have become very sophisticated in the ways they murk it up with partial truths, political spin, misrepresentations, distortion, and an overall lack of intellectual honesty." No acknowledgment of his involvement in any of these things, but I guess it hit me harder since Walter Cronkite had passed away a few days before.

Page 132: "He doesn't worry about acknowledging the holes in his case or the valid points against his own arguments." Basically trying to defend his own approach to his job, not noting that such a lawyer would be utterly incompetent and would be blindsided and destroyed every time he walked into a courtroom.

Page 162: The insertion "later determined to be unfounded" (about Dubya's speech with the infamous 16 words about uranium) is a major self-contradiction. Elsewhere in the book he's noted that the claim had been debunked and removed from a prior speech. However, this is mostly part of the larger self-contradiction of acknowledging the Dubya White House was a bubble while treating it like the universe. (Reminds me of the joke about the mathematician who puts the fence around himself and announces "I define myself as outside.")

Pages 165-6: 'the fact that a president "didn't know" may not be a meaningful defense'. I'm not sure why he tried to confuse the issue with the double quoted "didn't know", but I am sure that ignorance of the law is NO excuse.

Page 177: Hadley is offering to resign for "an honest mistake" is either a radical definition of "honest" or another example of delusional in-the-bubble thinking.

Page 179: The reference to "gotcha reporting" is another example of belittling or misrepresenting his opponents for the kind of spin he never acknowledged using.

Page 181: Dismissing Karl Rove's opponents as "partisan critics". I wonder what other basis Rove could possibly be evaluated on? Is there any non-partisan metric for Rove?

Page 191: He actually includes the dishonest or incompetent case analysis. However, on the next page he just dismisses it as an image problem, not a fundamental paradox of bad government.

Page 229: I was struck by his "we employed" where he vaguely acknowledges his own contribution to the "spin and evasion", though the main thrust of the book was how that wasn't his intention.

Page 238: Seems to be a self-contradiction with Dubya's "French Toast" joke, but maybe it was somehow funny in context. On it's face, it seems to be the only example of Dubya's humor and a contradiction to McClellan's claim that Dubya is actually a funny guy.

Pages 278-9: Defensive story of Dubya's guitar photo during the Katrina fiasco as a problem in public relations and a failure of the staff to protect Dubya from these sorts of things. Overall another good example of the internal contradiction of trying to portray Dubya as a responsible leader who crucially depends on his staff.

What is Democracy?

Selective Reactions to What is Democracy? edited by Richard Ketchum

Really ancient book this time, from 1955. Perhaps the amazing thing is that it somehow wound up in a public library in Japan and stayed there all these years? It's quite an eclectic volume, and it's really hard to imagine how the various topics were selected. I could list the various topics, but I feel like I'd be defying you to make any sense of the list, except that "good = democracy" and all of the good things are supposed to be somehow uniquely linked to democracy. However, one especially weird topic was the praise of radiation and the potential for nuclear power, though atomic power plants were only prototypes at that time. It's the last major topic of the book, and spans quite a few pages in the relatively small book.

Not everything is good, however. In this book "bad = communism". Many of the examples are clearly twisted and even look humorous from the perspective of 2008. However, the ones that really bothered me were all the examples of nasty things that the communists were doing that sound exactly like what the Bush administration has been doing over the last seven years. In some cases, you can argue that the communists were wholesale criminals, while the BushCo kleptocrats are only retail criminals--but sometimes its the other way around. Many of the most 'touching' examples were in the highly slanted question and answer sections at the end of the book. For example, one question asked if the Soviet constitution protected human rights. Of course the reality was yes, that the Soviet constitution had lots of protected rights--but the book's official answer "from on high" was "No", because non-constitutional mechanisms were used to violate those rights. Shucks and darn. No one had better give the Dick Cheney any fresh ideas, eh? It rang especially loudly since the book had mentioned the Magna Charter in glowing terms a number of times, and though "habeas corpus" itself was not mentioned specifically, unjust and nonjudicial imprisonment was mentioned as a bad thing that a democracy would never do.

There were also a number of mentions of propaganda techniques that are now highly popular, but are only evil communist methods according to this book, and lots of poorly chosen examples... Overall it's more interesting as a testimony to the state of mind of those times than informative as a political science text... Read it and laugh?

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

A Highly Critical Review of Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki with Sharon L. Lechter

These reviews are supposed to be of books that Dubya wouldn't read, but this one is quite possibly a book that Dubya may have read and would almost certainly approve of. Yeah, it's full of lies, but they're the kind of lies that Dubya and his rich buddies would like to believe. To put it succinctly, the author might be monetarily rich, but he's intellectually and morally bankrupt. This book is a kind of manual for 'the goodness of greed', but when you actually think about it, you realize that the truth is otherwise. The essential premises are contradictions. Greed may seem good for a few winners, but he ignores the much larger numbers of losers and the total loss for society. The author claims everyone could use his methods to become rich, but if everyone did, then the society would collapse and we'd all starve to death. You can't eat money. Someone should run the numbers on what percentage of the population could actually use his strategies before society collapsed. I'm sure the author hasn't.

Basically I'm going to work through the book sequentially describing some of my stronger reactions, relying on the epistemology of lies described in my earlier review of Imperial Hubris. In brief, a Class 0 lie is an internal contradiction, Class 1 is a counterfactual statement, Class 2 is partial truth, and Class 3 is truth presented to seem false. (I'm not sure if there were any Class 3 lies here, but they are hard to spot, and I wasn't really looking closely enough for them.) Finally, I'll discuss my alternative economic perspective that is the foundation of my strong negative reactions.

The first part of the book was basically historical and autobiographical, and my main reaction was how contemptuous he was towards his own highly educated father. He tried to be polite about it, but it was quite clear that all of his comparisons and contrasts were in favor of his adoptive "rich dad", who was actually the father of his friend Mike. The essential story line here was that Mike's father wanted to teach his son how to be a successful businessman, and the author of this book basically went along for the ride (casting off his own contemptuously impoverished father), and wound up quite wealthy, though not nearly as rich as Mike (who inherited the large head start as well as the same training).

My first strong reaction was actually to a Class 1 lie on page 69, where he cites the golden rule as "He who has the gold makes the rules." Actually, this is a double lie. The actual golden rule is "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", which makes his so-called quotation a counterfactual statement. However, this lie is also a Class 0 lie of self-contradiction, though that wasn't apparent yet. After finishing the book, I realized that at no point in the book does he actually say anything about making rules. The entire emphasis of the book is on playing by the existing rules, and with no considerations of any rule-changing topic such as political lobbying.

(This part actually reminds me of a character in Crooked House by Agatha Christie. That character was very good at making money by skating along the edges of the laws. He was supposed to be so good at it that he often caused the creation of new laws, but he just moved to new niches and new cracks and continued making money--which also reminds me of a later section of this Rich Dad, Poor Dad book where he describes the importance of moving into new ways of making money, though he didn't mention changes in the laws, except in the passive sense that changes occur and create new opportunities.)

On page 85 he describes Ray Kroc as the founder of McDonald's. Having read a couple of books about McDonald's recently, I started by wondering about the intended sense of "founder" here. The key ideas of McDonald's came from elsewhere, but the main point in this book was that Kroc was really in the real estate business, not the hamburger business. I think this qualifies as a kind of Class 1 lie, since no one would claim that Kroc was a founder of the real estate business.

On page 89 is the first clear appearance of the central contradiction of the book. He is arguing for the acquisition of assets, which he files into eight categories (including a catchall "anything else"). The essential feature of these assets is that they all produce money, but none of them involve the owner in the actual production of anything. Yes, it is okay (according to the author) to buy a business that actually produces something--but only if you are *NOT* involved in the business. He actually words it as "Businesses that do not require my presence." Well, actually, it wouldn't matter if it didn't produce anything, since his criterion for being a desirable asset is only that it produces income. Remember that he is advocating that everyone should follow his guidance--but the result is that no one will produce anything and no one will actually have anything except for money. No wonder he didn't want to consider the actual golden rule.

On page 102 I was struck by his reference to his "first Porsche". I felt this was a kind of self-contradiction for several reasons. The most important is that he is emphasizing the need to control expenses and frequently criticizes people who spend too much--but suddenly it's okay to buy a Porsche. Not to mention it's just his first one. He plays the humble game pretty often. Are we supposed to believe his second Porsche was an economy model?

On page 110 he suddenly changes his angle. The new crucial factor for success is this "factor" with various names, but basically the willingness to take risks. This is basically another Class 0 lie since he's now thrown away his various other criteria for success. Later on the same page, he says "it's not the smart that get ahead, but the bold." (He replays the same theme later on with regards to effusive praise of Texans. Again touching one of my Texan nerves...) Until this point he has frequently been speaking in praise of education, but it's increasingly clear that education can't insure you become rich, and getting rich is the only metric of success he cares about. I also regard it as a Class 2 lie, since he's ignoring the large number of losers, even including the bold ones. The unspoken deeper truth here is that the author thinks of himself as a winner, and he believes winners have no reason to think about all those pestilential losers.

On the next page he concludes that "There will be a dramatic increase in the number of new multimillionaires." Another obvious self-contradiction, though the easiest way to make it come true would be through hyperinflation caused by too many people creating too much bogus 'value'. This is actually related to the deeper reality of this chapter, except that he doesn't really consider what it means to say that "The Rich Invent Money".

On page 120 he says "So did Bill Gates" in terms of giving the market what it wanted. This is Class 1 since most of Microsoft's success has involved dictating to the market what Microsoft wanted to sell. Also Class 2 since it ignores the competitors that Microsoft crushed along the way.

Page 133 is another Class 0 section criticizing education. Lots of lip service to the value of education, but once again he is making it clear that the real metric is wealth measured in monetary terms.

Page 137 is probably the peak of his moral bankruptcy. Here he quotes in an approving way a "managing director" of a "major national pension consulting firm" who recommends the "Silver Bullet" plan for baby boomers without pensions. The explanation is "they can always blow their brains out" if they can't afford to keep eating. He certainly wouldn't want this advice to be applied to himself.

Still on page 137 he continues with a Class 0, 1, and 2 rant against "socialized medicine" forcing hospitals to kill patients old patients. The Class 1 part is just because the actual track record for socialized medicine is generally very close to non-socialized medicine, but consistently better for the specific group of people he claims are suffering. The Class 2 part is because he ignores such details as wealthy people still buying better medical treatment regardless of the rest of the system. However, the Class 0 part is actually related to his discussion of wealth elsewhere in the book, where he says wealth should be measured in terms of how long you can go without working. Well, according to his own criteria, functional social security would mean that everyone is wealthy--though that is clearly not his view, as made clear by his consistently hostile consideration of taxes. (Actually, the entire tax topic should be handled separately though I didn't flag those pages specifically. He never considers whether or not taxes produces any benefits--except that he frequently twists tax laws to his own advantage. He even had a Class 0 mini-history of taxation around page 95.)

On page 141 he gives ex-schoolteachers some credit in cases where they're earning lots of money. Does he know that McDonalds finds that former teachers are among the best candidates to manage their restaurants?

On page 147 he is arguing for the universality of his approach, though in a backwards and self-contradictory way. He has a list of "reasons", otherwise known as personality traits, that prevent some people from becoming rich. I felt the "reason" that was missing was "morality". In particular, he frequently cites examples from real estate, and often involving forced sales of various kinds. In other words, his approach to making money is to exploit other people's misfortunes.

A related example involved a special kind of state bond that he recommends buying because this bond pays 16%. He didn't really go into the details, but I strongly sensed this was another Class 2 lie where he was downplaying the negative sides, which (by indirect hints) involve the risks and the loss of liquidity in the land that is apparently required to secure the bond. Actually, the return of the bond might be 16%, but if it's linked to real estate that can't be sold, then the real return will actually be determined primarily by the value of the real estate after it becomes liquid again. However, there are also moral and contradictory aspects of this example, since it represents benefiting from the government taxes he keeps denouncing everywhere in the book. (He consistently attacks government, but there is nothing intrinsically wasteful about government that can't be matched by examples from private industry, and there's many important services that are legitimately and most effectively provided by government--and taxes are needed to pay for them.)

Another exemplary area where he boasted of his winnings was the stock market. For example, he boasted about a deal where he made a lot of money playing on America's increasingly dangerous dependence on oil. However, one the most immoral passages of the book was his defense of insider trading, basically claiming that all stock trading was more or less inside trading--and he just wanted to be as far inside as possible without actually getting arrested for it.

Returning to the progress through the book, on the next page (148) he claims that a small investment would eventually make you very rich because of the miracle of compound interest. Another Class 2 lie, since no one lives as long as his example, but also because conditions could never remain stable that long, or the money itself would adjust to be appropriately less valuable.

Near the end of the book he suddenly introduces another Class 0 lie as he tries to make himself look moral. He speaks of the value of donating to charity and criticizes his own father for being too poor to donate more. Since it completely clashes with the rest of the book, it's clear that this is just a moral bandaid--and if you believe it, you would probably be the kind of sucker who helped him make most of his money.

From my notes I see the topic of inheritance taxes wasn't cited concretely. Suffice it to say that he's against them. Only the children of rich kids should be entitled to that advantage--which again contradicts his universal claims.

One more topic was the Marine Corps, which he mentions in a number of places and recommends as a learning experience that contributed to his abilities to make lots of money. Remembering my own experiences in the Corps, I'd agree to the learning experience part, but as far as learning to make money, I'd just say "Not so much."

In conclusion, I have to regard the author as totally immoral, someone who eagerly accepts benefiting from other people's miseries and failures. His only metric of personal value is cash, and his only concern is with making sure he has as much as possible. Why did he write this book? My current hypothesis is that the most important reason is that he found it to be an easy way to make more money (especially since most of the editorial grunt work was apparently done by someone else), and secondarily, he is trying to 'make peace' with the memory of his pro-education father--his real father, the poor fool who spent his life teaching and supporting teachers. I rather hope his father's ghost doesn't find out about it.

His vision of humanity is that we are basically vicious animals, but this author sees money as the only important law of the human jungle. Therefore the goal of his life is to collect as much money as possible. Apparently a life with lots of money is more valuable than a life without money. The author makes it clear that his adoptive rich dad was better in his opinion than his relatively impoverished father.

My conflicting view is that people are basically equal, and the poor people contribute, too, both as people and to the economy. My perspective is that it is essentially wasteful for one person to accumulate extreme wealth. Not just the first Porsche, but *ALL* of his Porches are wasteful. To actually drive the economy, it's better if lots of people are spending money, and happy to do so, rather than fearfully protecting their small amounts of cash. If they believe that social security is going to keep them from starving to death, then they can spend their money. Yes, there is a problem if people go into debt, but encouraging personal deficit spending is a problem of its own created mostly by immoral advertisers and greedy bankers. (Medical expenses are important, too, but special. No one wants to be sick, but no one can predict their exact medical expenses, and statistical treatment is the only approach that makes sense. Obscene profits for insurance companies and trying to skip over some people or letting them skip over themselves are fundamentally bad.) Basically the systems in France and Sweden make more sense to me. Lots of people seem happy and secure there. They pay high taxes, but they believe they get good values, especially in terms of economic security in exchange for their taxes.

The Naked and the Dead

Another memorial book, since the author passed away just recently. Not up to even attempting a full review just now, so...

A few reactions to and comments about The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Starting with the spoiler alert and capsule review. I really can't say much of anything about this book without giving things away. However, it is a good book, and it's worth reading for its various merits, and if you're at all inclined to do so, for now you might as well take my word for it and you should go ahead and read it, and you can read my meanderings later on. I think you'll even be surprised by the way the book transitions, but I definitely think there's plenty of interesting material there. Now you've been warned, and I'm about to start giving things away. Are you sure you don't want to go read it first?

The book is mostly a character study, and even though the characters are fictitious, they feel amazingly true to life. He really does capture the spirit of real people and places all over America. Part of this is done in the shifting viewpoints of the main story of the battle for the imaginary island, but there are also 'time machine' snippets of mini-biographies of various characters.

The reason this is qualifies as a book Dubya wouldn't read is because of the profoundly anti-war message. At first it seems like it is glorifying the heroism of the soldiers, but in the end the whole thing just seems pointless. The leading character, the platoon sergeant, has to be dismissed as a vicious killer, and his brave men as a bunch of cowards who are just most afraid of him. One of the nicest characters in the book is the lieutenant who is set up and effectively murdered by the sadistic sergeant, though the Japanese do the actual shooting. The character that Mailer probably most closely identified himself with is killed by falling off a cliff for no particular reason in a pointless 'mission' that is ultimately aborted by a wasp's nest. Turned out that the outcome of the campaign had already been determined some months ago, but the American intelligence was so poor that they just didn't know it yet. If they had interrogated a few of the prisoners they were so eager to exercute, they would have known that, and the main result of the delay before they find out is to make the slaughter go more quickly in the end. Probably the most heroic effort in the entire book was the futile attempt to rescue the wounded soldier, but all that accomplishes is to cause a lot of extra suffering before he dies--and then they lose the body, too. The general's main concern is to rewrite the official history so he can claim credit for a flanking invasion that didn't matter, either.

There was an interesting part starting from page 247 about the big lie and the prediction that America would have a big Red scare and then slide into fascism. Considering when it was written (around 1946), that part of it looks pretty prescient, even amazing.