On “Libraries in the Ancient World” by Lionel Casson ****

This work is a short exploration of the development of the earliest libraries. I'd read the first chapter on the tablets that were found of ancient libraries in Mesopotamia some time ago, and I was familiar with much of the material on Roman libraries from another book that focused solely on those and that was much more thorough. But Casson's book is a good introduction to the subject.

As he notes, our knowledge of the Mesopotamian libraries comes from the fact that the societies used clay tablets and the burning of said libraries helped to make such tablets permanent, like clay jars. Most such works are merely archival records of sundry government and market materials, but some literary works also have come down to us this way. The libraries were largely for the government, the king, and the priests—the educated elite who needed the information to run the nation. Our knowledge of Egyptian libraries is less thorough, because the Egyptians wrote on papyrus, which doesn't last so long (despite the dry Egyptian climate, which has helped to preserve some such works—just not much from before the first century).

Another chapter focuses on the Alexandrian library, which started largely because a particular ruler had a desire to prove his intellectual acumen and to make the farily new city a capital for intellectualism. It was a library largely aimed at societal thinkers. The library burned a couple of times; alas, it appears that war was the largest culprit to the destruction of the library.

Another chapter focuses on the Greeks, whose libraries usually featured an open-air collonade that was used for reading. This was different than the later Roman libraries, which were usually all indoors and which generally included both a Greek section and a Roman section.

Some attention is also given to book technology. Papyrus, which was common in Egypt, gave way to more durable parchment, which came to be used elsewhere. And then, in turn, scrolls, around the first century CE, began to give way to codexes (our modern book format). Christians, as has been written elsewhere, played a role in this, as codexes were their preferred format: culturally, not Jewish and not pagan, but also much easier to use and transport. Christian books, as the author brings out, could be purchased much like other books were.

Indeed, attaining books at this time may have involved purchase but also could involve copying. An author who wanted publication generally made the work available by making a number of copies to share. Authorship obviously wasn't about money; it was about reputation and getting one's ideas out there. Only those who actually made the copies (to sell) were likely to make anything off a book.

On "Jewish New Testament" edited by David H. Stern ****

I purchased David Stern's Jewish commentary on the New Testament years ago, curious about it after my dad himself had purchased a copy. He bought the complete set, with the New Testament also, in hardcover, so when he died, it was one of the items I inherited. I don't think otherwise that I'd have bothered with the Bible--it's a Jewish translation, really, a paraphrase, of the New Testament. The commentary at times is very handy; the New Testament, I figured, well, I have plenty of other translations.

But this was a good read, insofar as Stern's choice of using Jewish words for various concepts in the New Testament, makes the New Testament unfamiliar in some ways, which made me pay a bit more attention, especially to common scriptures that I know so well by heart that I otherwise would pass over at this point without really rethinking. In this sense, the Jewish New Testament was a great aid in in meditation, which in turn makes me think about how I probably should venture out from the few translations I tend to favor more often.

On "Generation of Swine" by Hunter S. Thompson ****

There are turns of phrase that make Thompson a fun read for that purpose alone. Like so many of his books, however, the overall reportage remains dated, and because Thompson puts such a personal twist on everything, it's somewhat uncertain how much is really of value as historical record.

This book covers the last half of the Reagan years, including the Iran-Contra scandal and the election of George H. W. Bush. As with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail of 72, Thompson's preference for the Democrats is obvious, though his preferred candidate gets knocked out by a sex scandal. All this is stuff in living memory for me, which perhaps made it somewhat more interesting than his work about the McGovern candidacy. Still, because these are collections of newspaper articles, the whole seems less than the sum of its parts, and I didn't find myself pulled along in the book as I would a long-form piece.

When Thompson is at his peak, his editorial is less about current events and more about something else. My two favorite articles in this text, and the likely reason I kept this book on my shelf after first reading it decades ago, focus on making up a story and on giving advice. In one, Thompson sends his assistant out to get a tattoo so that he has something to put in his column; in the other, he writes about the youngsters and having children for his good buddy, the illustrator Ralph Steadman. As the years left for me on this planet wind down, however, I don't see myself rereading this book again.

On "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI" by Cory Doctorow ****

This book was lent to me by a coworker because he thought it might be useful for a class we're teaching together. Indeed, AI has changed a lot about our world and about teaching as well. I'm not sure exactly how this book specifically--or passages from it--would be useful in the class, but I'll be curious to hear my coworker's thoughts.

That said, this was a quick and breezy read that was very informative, and it being Doctorow, also provocative. Doctorow takes the stand that the AI buzz is primarily a bubble. I'd agree. I see a lot of parallels to what happened in the 1990s with the dot.com boom. Everything is being transformed by AI the way that everything was being transformed by the Internet. The only problem was that there was so much hype that even things that were not being transformed worked off this idea of the Internet transforming it. A few years after the bust, folks laughed at things like lobsters.com: your one-stop shop for lobsters delivered straight to your home. But even as those ideas gave way to reality, some of the more audacious ideas just needed a bit more time to come to fruition. At this point, you probably could get lobsters delivered to your home, though it would likely come through a marketplace like Amazon rather than a site devoted solely to lobsters. In this same way, we're looking for transformation by AI at things Doctorow says AI cannot do. I'm not sure he's right about that, though he's surely right about the speed with which some folks expect said transformation. Case in point would be his examples of architecture transformation. A group of architects laid off their draftsmen because AI can render pictures in a few minutes what it would take a draftsman days to do. Of course, if that's the case, as Doctorow points out, it won't be too long before people realize they don't need architects either, since people could go straight to the program to design a building. But what the AI cannot do is render blueprints based on those renderings, because it's based on algorithms regarding what pixel goes next to which; that the architect says that's just a step away is false, Doctorow notes. That may be true, at present, but I don't see why such an algorithmic program couldn't eventually be written to map blueprints to renderings, even if blueprints are much more complex and have little one-to-one correlation with renderings. They could be made to have such correlations. On the other hand, it isn't going to happen tomorrow. That's probably a decade or two away, as were many of the transformations made possible by the internet.

So in Doctorow's view, AI is not ultimately coming for most of our jobs. Companies who fire employees based on this will be woefully regretful, because the AI simply can't do what companies claim it can. On some level, this is true. But on another level, I'd say we will still need fewer people in some jobs. I think of the advent of the printing press. That put a lot of scribes out of work--but not all. Where, say, 167 scribes might have been needed to render 500 copies of a 100-page pamphlet in 30 days; 50 people could do that work in 3 days. But it would not have been cost or time effective to use a printer for just one or two copies of a 4-page document; scribes still had a function. Meanwhile, other jobs would have come into existence, like those who create the block type. And also more text would have been made available and prices would have dropped. Books would no longer be so scarce, and so the volume of text would make up to some extent for the jobs that would have otherwise been displaced. Further efficiencies in printing as centuries progressed would reduce work hours further, but each time with offsets in terms of other jobs and more volume.

Doctorow hates chatbots for customer service. Indeed, I'd agree that a company that gets rid of all customer service for AI is stupid if it wants a good reputation. But for basic queries, chatbots may actually have value, allowing a company to queue only truly unique queries to a human. (Of course, the whole point, in many cases, is crappy customer service, in order to avoid returns, which chatbots are perfect for.)

What's scary about what Doctorow writes is the bubble itself. One-third of the stock market's value is wrapped up in seven companies, all on the forefront of AI and the irrational exuberance around it. When the exuberance fades, the market will crash and so will a number of jobs and fortunes with it. It'll be like the dot.com bust or the housing bust all over again, but worse. Doctorow explains well how it is such companies come to have so much value (irrationally, I would say). It all has to do with P&E, profit and earnings. If you've got a taxi cab company that makes $200k profit on a million dollars of earnings per year, you're doing well, but if you do that every year, you don't really have much to offer to a stockholder beyond steady profit. If, by contrast, you're new tech, and you're promising taxis without drivers and ultimately a lot bigger profits, your loss this year on $200k of earnings is not enough to scare me away as a stockholder. It's the potential that's important. Next year, you make $400k in earnings and still show a loss, but those earnings keep going up each year. At some point, you might show a profit. In fact, you might someday show a huge profit. It's that potential that makes me want to invest. If eight years from now, you're making $5 million in earnings and $1 million in profits, that's a much better investment than the stable taxi company, especially if I got in early. Of course, if you're still taking a loss, if your earnings are still going up, maybe it'll still work out. Eventually, though, the tech company either goes under as investors grow tired of losses or it becomes stable, which means it's making a steady profit on a steady set of earnings, and there's no more grand potential. This explains how Ford's stock is cheap while Tesla's is through the roof, even though Ford makes many more vehicles and even makes electric vehicles. Ford is seen as stable rather than as having huge potential. This seems somewhat silly to me, as an investor, though, if one part of Ford's business does the same as Tesla's whole business.

I didn't care much for Doctorow's title (it seems too obscure), but the idea itself is worthy. Doctorow notes that most AI proponents have the usefulness of the technology backwards (though it helps them promote it, which is the whole idea). AI, they say, will do the work, and humans will just check it. This enables tons of many fewer workers. Doctorow notes how AI can help someone do a faster and better job, but the idea that humans become just the quality checkers is a bad one, like putting the brain in the AI (the horse head) and having the humans do the grunt work rather than the other way around. It's arguably less efficient, and it leads to workers/checkers not really knowing how to do the job and thus how to do the actual checking. If I never write code anymore, how will I know where the AI messed up its code? Writing code, at least the nonrepetitious part of it, is more interesting than reading it. Why give the good job to the AI?

But AI, as Doctorow notes, often doesn't even do much of what it's cracked up to do. He writes of the Turk, the medieval machine that could play chess but that turned out to be an illusion: a little human actually guided the machine's moves. Many times, that's what is the case with supposed AI. Some demonstrations of things like self-driving cars have actually had human engineers controlling the car remotely. Again, this is all part of the hoopla to drive stock prices.

This brings us to the role of "creatives." Doctorow notes that AI-created stuff carries no property rights. Some companies want this changed, but creatives should stand pat. AI is a great assistant. But the idea that AI can create instead of the person would render the person pointless. That's what big companies want. The creative jobs, which don't pay well anyway, go away, which renders questionable how much money AI actually saves. However, if there's no copyright for AI-rendered stuff, that makes it public domain, which means there's no profit to be made in, say, books created by AI. Anyone can take that book and reprint it as their own.

On “Early Egyptian Christianity” by C. Wilfred Griggs ****

This book covers the history of Christianity in Egypt until 451 CE. Griggs lays out the basics in his introduction and again in his conclusion. In between, he provides a useful summary of what probably occurred.

Of course, how exactly Christianity got to Egypt is something of a mystery. We know little of the history until the second century. Griggs posits that before the end of the second century, many versions of Christianity existed. At that point, the bishop of Alexandria positioned himself as superior to other churches and aligned himself with the church in Rome. Most important, he took over the school that had been forged in Alexandria but that wasn't actually run by church authorities. This attempt to assert authority isn't to say other churches in Egypt fell in line; they continued in many ways on their own path. One of those paths was monasticism, which wasn't much in line with the Catholics.

Athanasius in the early fourth century reconciled with the monks and brought them into the regular Catholic church. However, controversies (over Arianism) and fights over leadership continued. Further, Constantinople took on an increasingly important role in the Catholic faith, displacing Alexandria in importance, to the chagrin of Alexandrian bishops. This set up the slow split of Egyptian Christianity into Coptic Christianity and away from the Catholic church, most especially following the Council of Chalcedon.

On “The Twelve” by C. Bernard Ruffin ****

This is the fourth book I've that focuses, in some way, on each of the twelve apostles following the books of the New Testament. It is not as good as Sean McDowell's Fates of the Apostles, which focused chiefly on how they died and is a bit formulaic in chapter setup but which is also more up to date, more readable, and more focused on sources. Nor is it as good as Brian Liftin's After Acts, which also is somewhat formulaic, does not cover all twelve apostles thoroughly, and is often lacking is source citations, but which is very readable. However, it is better than William Steuart McBirnie's The Search for the Twelve Apostles, which while thorough and quotes heavily from sources, is kind of a drag of a read and seems too heavily focused on burial places and relics. Ruffin's book covers each of the twelve and is somewhat thorough; however, like McBirnie's work, the writing at times drags. It also seems a bit too heavily and uncritically dependent on legends and Catholic teaching (though I have no idea whether Ruffin was actually Catholic). Unfortunately, it's unlikely that any book will ever satisfactorily fill one's curiosity about the twelve after the events of the New Testament or even about them in terms of their background and biography, since in some cases, all we know of them in the New Testament is a few scattered quotes and their names.

Although I was familiar with most of this material, there were things I learned—or perhaps was reminded of that I'd forgotten. Ruffin engages in some closer readings of the New Testament text and raised for me some perceptions that I hadn't yet come across. Take, for example, the two callings of Peter, one while fishing and another with his brother Andrew coming to tell him to come meet Jesus. Ruffin puts these together, with the idea that Peter met Jesus once, and then was actually called to discipleship sometime later while fishing. There were also some descriptions of Jesus's extended family that I was only vaguely aware of—for example, the idea that Matthew was conceivably a cousin of Jesus. James Tabor makes much of how virtually all the disciples were related to Jesus and tries to make the case that all three of his brothers were among the twelve (or maybe that's Jeffrey Butz's argument or maybe both—I get these ideas and whose they are confused). But in making such a case, Tabor's claims begin to stretch credulity, and one feels that the writer has an agenda. Ruffin clearly has an agenda also, but that agenda would not be forcing familial relationships on Jesus's disciples, as such would seem more to discount his belief that Jesus was God in the flesh than to serve it, insofar as if so many of his followers were family members, it's easier to make a case that this was a familial conspiracy. In that sense, at least on this account, Ruffin comes across as a bit more believable, when he makes cases for at least five the apostles possibly being cousins. Another interesting claim: That Philip the deacon and apostle were the same. He notes that the twelve may well have wanted an apostle as one of the seven deacons to preserve doctrinal truth, and Philip, who would work heavily among the Samaritans and whose Greek name suggests a connection to the diaspora community, would have fit the agenda well.

Anyway, the book was worth the read, even if it took longer than I would have expected for a book of its size.

On "From Paul to Valentinus" by Peter Lampe ****

More than any other book I've read in recent years (or perhaps ever), this one reminded me of the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning, of going from a large point and seeing how all the small points of evidence fit within it versus gathering all the small points of evidence to discover some larger point. Lampe's work seems heavily invested in the latter. In a way, that's great. He can dismiss what others have accepted as givens and start afresh, perhaps coming to the same conclusion and perhaps not. No assumptions. (The degree to which anyone does only inductive or deductive reasoning is questionable. Any argument is a mix of both. We all have our biases. And even if one present an argument inductively, some of that argument has likely been built on deduction.) The focus on the little things is illuminating, but it's also a bit tiresome, as for vast parts of the book, one doesn't necessarily see where Lampe is going. It's just a bunch of seemingly disjointed facts, until of course he finally gets to his conclusions.

The first part of the book looks at where Christians lived within Rome. He does this in part by looking at how the earlier writers describe those communities. But more interesting is when he looks at where Christians tend to be buried, which end up corresponding to the other evidence. In all, he finds Christians most heavily located along the Via Appia and in a neighborhood called Trastevere, which was at the time very densely populated and heavily full of immigrants. In all, early Roman Christians seem to be mostly immigrants and not terribly well off. Part of the reason Christians could be blamed for the burning of Rome under Nero was that their communities were not heavily affected--as such, they would seem to be the natural perpetrators.

The second part of the book provides biographies of known named Christians. Details here were at times interesting, but on the whole this section was less intriguing than the former. Of course, his named Christians do seem to be wealthier and more prominent (for obvious reasons). Even so, he notes how Aquila and Prisca were probably not wealthy people. Their business was one with less social standing than others; they likely lived in the same building in which they worked, and that business was also the "home" in which their church met. Moving so often for them was not a sign of wealth but of seeking work opportunities. Among the named Christians are several slaves and freemen who were affiliated in some way with the emperor's family, though some slaves could be quite well off. Only a very few people were associated with the senatorial elite, and mostly this was wives rather than the actual senators, for whom such Christian affiliation would have been a death sentence. There is a lot of emphasis in early writings on the well-off supplying for the needs of poor, of which there were many more.

To close, Lampe looks at "fractionation" in the Roman church--that is, the division of the church into house churches. What did this mean for church structure, centralization, government, and doctrine? Lampe finds that most Christian groups in Rome were mostly independent, which allowed for disparities in doctrine and for great tolerance for such disparity among the groups. Valentinians, he finds, for example, mixed with other Christians; they weren't a distinct group meeting separately, except perhaps in addition to regular meetings. Those who did separate early, such a Marcion, did so in part because they made themselves pariahs but insisting on the properness of their views to the denigration of others; in other words, they as much separated themselves as the larger church separated from them.

There was no bishop overseeing the Roman congregations until very late. Lampe sees Victor as being the first to really attempt to lay down such power over all the groups, pushing out some who don't belong in his view. Some earlier elders, like Anicetus, Soter, and Eleutherius, were prominent, but they were more firsts among equals or men charged with dealing with outsiders in communication or gathering various congregational materials for the poor. It was these responsibilities that led to the eventual centralization of Roman church authority. (Jewish synagogues, Lampe finds, were similarly separate in power in Rome, unlike, say, in Alexandria, where there was a central council, into which all synagogues fed.)

These are intriguing ideas, though as Lampe acknowledges, there had to have been some degree of cooperation among elders of the various groups, for people like Clement or Soter to speak for all of them.

What does this suggest to me about those groups that continued to hold on more to Jewish practices? Alexandria's comparative centralization could mean that Jewish Christians were more quickly dismissed from the synagogues in total, leading to an earlier break with such traditions. The removal of Jewish people in general after 115 and the Kitos War would have also created an even cleaner break. In Rome, it would seem that some synagogues may have remained open to Christians, although Nero's reign of terror might have been a motivating factor in Jews separating from Christians earlier as well. Similarly, with a looser set of Christian groups, some groups may have remained more inclined to hold on to said traditions. That is, indeed, the argument of some regarding why Victor made the proclamation he did regarding the Quartodecimans, those who observed Passover rather than Easter. Some from Asia Minor likely held on to those traditions in their meetings in Rome, causing Victor to confront and attempt to remove not just them from fellowship but also all the congregations of Asia Minor. Much to think about.

On “Inside Roman Libraries” by George W. Houston ****

I didn't quite get what I was looking for from this book, but I didn't think I would. (I'm really wanting to know more about how Christian books were spread and what role a libraries may have played. Clearly, many individual churches had such works, as they read from them at a services, and clearly those works reached beyond the church, because other writers refer to them or Christians refer other people to them, as if they could be obtained. But claims that such books were deposited in libraries, as I've read, never seem to be backed up with hard evidence.) Houston does exactly as his title suggests: He explores Roman libraries as they existed between roughly 100 BCE to about 400 CE. The first chapter is excellent, as are the later chapters. That first chapter lays out some basics about such libraries—how they were financed, how they could be quasi-public, how manuscripts were obtained. There weren't really “public” libraries in the way that we think of libraries, but there were libraries that were open to the public, and there were libraries that were open to a small set of users (say, the people who were part of a specific society). Libraries (that is, people who collected books) could obtain books via professional booksellers/scribes, via copying a book out for themselves, via having a slave copy it out for them; the emperor had his own collection, and that might be obtained also through government seizure for crime or as plunder from war. Sometimes these books would also be sold off.

After that, Houston focuses for several chapters on some very specific collections, looking particularly at lists of books that were maintained for particular libraries. Such lists were not, as he notes, catalogs; books likely were organized by subject and author but similarly loosely. Houston focuses on scrolls, not codices, which were not so popular during this period. (I read somewhere, now I don't remember, that even Christian writers used scrolls rather than codices except for for works of Scripture, which is interesting.) He goes into how scrolls were stored and what might damage them and so on. But because the focus is on specific lists—a collection of mostly philosophy, a collection of mostly comedy, and so on—these middle sections are a bit dry.

Finally, he steps back again and looks at the architecture of such libraries. He notes that they usually had windows for ease of reading—and that these windows actually had glass or were very thin marble, allowing for light but keeping out rain and insects. This was news to me. Often, statues were in such facilities—of the sponsor, the emperor, a god, or of authors. There were likely seats but perhaps not so much tables; scribes might play a role in some libraries but not in most.

Then he goes into the personnel. There was a commissioner of the library for the emperor. Local libraries likely had directors. Then there were likely slaves underneath them working. Books were likely not free to be handled by patrons in terms of browsing and they certainly weren't available to be checked out; rather, a reader would ask a worker to get the book for him or her, and then that person would read the work on site. Books, after all, were super expensive, with each being copied out by hand. Most lasted about a century before being worn out. When trying to obtain a book from which to make one's own copy, much effort often was expended. Some copies were poorly transcribed. That was one purpose of the emperor's collection: as a resource to the government but it also served as a resource from which to find decently accurate works. I'm glad books are so much easier to obtain today.

On "Christianity at the Crossroads" by Michael Kruger ****

This is a basic introduction to Christianity in the second century. As such, it's a good summary of the various issues that the second century presents for scholars to explore, written for lay people. I found the early parts a bit basic, retreading much that I've read elsewhere, covering the second-century society and culture, the basic practices and possible government forms, the manner of worship and meeting, and so on.

In chapter 4--about halfway through the book--is where Kruger really starts to get down to an argument that he explores more fully in another book: namely, he discusses how diverse the second century was in terms of belief and practice (as per much modern scholarship, based around Walter Bauer's thesis that there wasn't really any such thing as a unitary Christianity early on). Kruger doesn't believe that, so after exploring the differing non-mainstream Christian groups, he proceeds in chapter 5 to show how there actually was an orthodox Christian faith all the way back in the second century, one that stemmed from the first century. He argues this primarily by discussing "the rule of faith"--that is, the basic tenets that made Christians, in fact, Christians, into which the non-mainstream did not fit: the idea that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, died, and rose the third day; that he was God in the flesh; and so on.

Chapters 6 and 7 are where this book really shine, which is not surprising, given that the chapters cover topics that Kruger specializes in and has written several other works on: namely, the canonization of the scripture and the literary culture of the early church. Kruger goes into more detail on these subjects elsewhere, but these two chapters seem a very good and detailed summary of the issues and are what make this book worth the time spent reading it, even beyond just the basic introduction.

On “The New Testament” by Bruce M. Metzger ****

This introduction to the background, growth, and content of the New Testament was much more interesting and potentially useful than I expected. I'd been under the impression that this leading biblical scholar, as the teacher of Bart Ehrman, was something of a liberal one, but his readings fit, rather, more often with the conservative school. In addition, the work being an introduction would seem to offer little more than basics, but it actually provides some strong readings of the various biblical works.

The first part of the work discusses culture of the time in which the New Testament was written, providing in roughly one hundred pages a summary of Jewish sects and Greek philosophical, as well as the Roman governmental structure. A second section discusses life of Jesus and the literary structures of his various sayings and stories. Metzger than discusses the church's early history and the travels of Paul. A large section summarizes each book of the New Testament and presents theories regarding each work's creation; the summaries sometimes provides a few close readings that are eye-opening. The book closes with a suprisingly conservative view of how the canon essentially self -authenticated long before its actual setting aside and with a discussion of the various translations and their limitations and advantages.

On “Misquoting Jesus” by Bart D. Ehrman ****

I'd been a little leery of this book, knowing Ehrman's penchant for calling into question basic tenets of Christianity, and that is, on the whole with this book, his point and purpose. His general thesis, as denoted in the introduction and conclusion is that because the text of the New Testament can't be perfectly known, it must not be inspired. But his general point, alas, does not necessarily follow from the evidence he provides. In between is a really good layman's introduction to textual criticism and to some of the issues that arise when trying to edit the Bible (the same issues, actually, that arise with editing virtually any book whose author no longer is alive). It was because I couldn't get ahold of Ehrman's Orthodox Corruption of Scripture that I ended up reading this layman's version. I actually wanted to know more about the various alternative versions of the text. And while not as thorough as that book, this one certainly provides some great case studies.

The start of the book and, indeed, some passages later on are very basic. Such made me reflect on the difficulty writers have who are aiming at a general audience. How much is too general? How soon can one delve into specifics. But soon enough, Ehrman drops into literacy rates in the ancient world (they were low, but Ehrman takes the lowest end of estimates as a given) and the nature of how early texts were copied. The earliest texts, as he notes, were copied not by professionals but by what few literate members there were among the Christian community. Most of the time this would have been those who also were rich enough to have large enough homes to host Christian gatherings. As there were a number of Christian beliefs, some “scribes” would have had a willingness to change texts to fit an agenda. (The fact that our texts are as close as they are to one another would itself seem to be something of a miracle, but Ehrman focuses on differences not on similarities.) A few centuries in, the role of copying was taken over by professionals, but the damage of these early years was already done. There were no really reliable manuscripts. But I'm not so sure this reading of the history is correct. Professionals, as Ehrman brings out in his examples, were inclined to make similar errors or even deliberate changes as well.

This is the situation we find ourselves in when we come to the translations into English. The King James Version, which has so affected every English translation since, was itself based on a faulty manuscript, according to Ehrman, one of the most faulty of them all. Other reading of mine, however, shows this claim to be debatable, counterarguments that Ehrman largely ignores. The issue, of course, as Ehrman brings out, is that with varying manuscripts, editors are left trying to figure out what the original actually was. We have, in many cases, older manuscripts than those that were used to translate the KJV. Differences there would seem to indicate that some of the later manuscripts reflect changes made to the text that weren't in the original. But our early manuscripts, alas, are also often from particular regions and reflect, arguably, changes that were made in that region. They might be older, but there is possibly a reason that the variations in those texts didn't show up in later versions: They weren't the accepted or best text. It's impossible, often, to know. Ehrman describes some of the ways in which scholars attempt to figure out which really is more accurate. One way is by looking at what is the more difficult reading. It's more likely that a scribe would have changed something to be easier to read or understand than to be more difficult. This makes sense to a point, but it's no given. Another, Ehrman does not, is also regional variation. Copyists in one part of the world might have a manuscript with an error that is copied from frequently, an error or variation that doesn't exist in manuscripts in other parts of the world.

Ehrman himself admits that the vast majority of the changes to the text are mere typographic errors that are easily enough discerned. It's in the places where such changes make a difference to meaning that issues arise. But even here, some of these variations don't seem quite as profound as Ehrman makes them out to be. Whether Jesus looks on a disabled man with grace or anger when healing in one passage in Mark makes a little difference in the context and even to an extent in how we read Mark generally, but when we look at the overall point of the Gospels, I don't think it signficantly changes Christian teaching. One can read such a passage both ways and find value in each.

And I can totally understand the difficulties scribes and editors are up against. Sometimes a passage is unclear. If there's no author to ask, one is left sometimes with a difficult decision. Is this weird thing an inadvertant error or was that what the author really wrote and intended? It happens even when editing contemporary texts. The more interesting observations are those where Ehrman claims the text was changed deliberately. Some of these are more obvious than others; others are certainly open for debate, though how one reads other parts of the New Testament will often affect whether one believes these were later changes.

In the end, I found this book really engaging and informative. And while I don't think that Ehrman's overall point is ultimately convincing, denying that some parts of the Biblical text are difficult to discern is not the best means toward valuing faith. It's better to acknowledge that we don't know everything, even as we look to the overall themes of the New Testament text.

On “Early Christianity in Alexandria” by David Litwa ****

We don't know much about Christianity in Alexandria before about 180, when folks like Dionysius, Pantaenus, and most especially Clement and Origen show up on the scene. Or at least, that's the usual story. Litwa claims that we actually know quite a bit about Christianity before these folks arise, if only we stop overlooking the obvious. Christianity in Alexandria was not what we have come to think of as orthodox. It predates all that and nourished quite different views of Jesus than those that have come to be adopted by the church centuries later.

A major point in this claim comes in the form of the Jewish community itself, which was highly Hellinized, at least among some of the intellectual class. Our source for that sort of info is, of course, Philo, the Jewish philosopher who resided in the city around the time of Jesus who adopted Platonic thinking to Jewish scripture. Jewish Christians simply fell in line with such Jewish thinking. Case in point for Litwa is Apollos. I'm not convinced that Apollos was a thinker in line with Philo and with Christian thinkers who would later be termed gnostics, but Litwa tries to make a case for it from Paul's writings about Apollos and about false teachers in his letters to the Corinthians. (For me, the two simply don't fit well together. Paul doesn't seem one for subtlety when it comes to people he disliked, so I don't see him writing positive things about Apollos in one place (although Litwa reads Paul, even in such passages, as actually placing himself above Apollos, thus snubbing him) and then writing such sarcastic and denigrating things about “ministers” more generally, while actually meaning Apollos among them.

But after those early chapters, as Litwa notes, Jewish people were essentially for a few decades removed from Alexandria, around 117. This left primarily non-Jewish Christians, who did their best to use the Jewish scriptures but read them in allegorical ways, like Philo, finding in them valuable lessons even while giving up the Jewish rites connected with them. Mix those ideas with others from Greek philosophy and from Greek and Egyptian mythology, and you end up with a unique form of Christianity, one that most would come to see as not Christian at all: These would be the followers of people like Basilides and Valentinus. Such teachers, however, at the time were no less Christian than those who would eventually win the doctrinal debate going on among early Christians. Transmigration, the idea that Jesus was never really human or that the god of the Jews was some other, lower god who was not the real one—many of these things found space in the theologies of the Alexandrian Christians, until, of course, they didn't, because other Christians won out. But truly, as Litwa notes, even Origen and Clement dabbled in such ideas, even if those men eventually got adopted into what become the Catholic Church.

Litwa's book is a good corrective to the manner in which we often think about early Christianity. Although I'd argue that such thinking was not that which reflected the early apostles, at least as preserved in our New Testament, it's clear that other Christianities existed from early on. Those, however, were not the ones that eventually came to be the Christianity we know. (Even so, such ideas subtly changed much of what Christians have come to believe in the millennia since the New Testament was put together.)

On “Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner ****

I saw the film probably fifteen years ago. I was expecting, as such, the book to have a lot more than the film did, but I'm not sure that it did. My memory isn't that fresh, obviously, but many of the same stories show up in this book and don't seem told in particularly deeper ways. As such, this book was a little bit of a disappointment. In fact, as becomes obvious after reading the appendixes, the book is built upon a series of scholarly articles written by Levitt that were dumbed down for a popular audience by Dubner. One could say that each chapter is like one of those articles, rewritten for a popular audience (and gladly so, as is obvious from one blog post included in the appendix that is laden with tables and econ speak).

Still, Levitt has an interesting way at looking at the world and applying econ to it, and Dubner has a way with making that all accessible to noneconomists. As such, this book is really interesting, even if the movie seems to have actually been about as thorough as the book. Among the findings: Some teachers cheat for their students on standardized tests. We can tell because the same questions are often answered right and wrong by large swaths of a class that deviate from the general population. Some sumo wrestlers likewise “throw” contests toward the end of the season, since as with British soccer, a sumo wrestler on the edge could, with a loss, drop to a lower level. Suddenly, toward seasons end, some matches that should be givens end up being the other way around in terms of wins. Real estate agents are likely not to work as hard to make their customers an extra ten thousand dollars as we ourselves might be, because in the end, that ten thousand is only one-fifty to the agent. We can tell because agents tend to take a week longer to sell their own houses and make the extra money. Drug dealers, unless they are at the top of the pecking order, make less than minimum wage. Why bother? Because, as with aspiring actors and other hopefuls, the lower drug dealers hope/think they'll make it big one day. Why did crime go down in the 1990s and thereafter? Abortion was leglized in the 1970s, resulting in fewer unwanted children. Unwanted children, apparently, means crime. Such would suggest that parenting makes a great difference in a child's life, but the next chapter discounts that: apparently, parents don't really affect what children become much at all. What's more important is genetics. Educated, well-off, socially involved, older parents end up with more successful kids than those who spank or who live in a better neighborhood or are interested in the arts. Finally, names can help with people getting interviews (we're less likely to call back someone with a supposed “Black” name than a “white” name), but in the long term may not affect one's overall success. Name popularity moves from the high class to the low.

The edition I read ended with three appendixes: one with the article that inspired the book, one with various newspaper articles in response to the book; and one with various blog entries. Some of these were enlightening to the topics covered in the book, while others seemed like tangential material being used as an excuse to produce a new edition. In that sense, the book is not unlike the podcast, which for me seems hit and miss. Sometimes there are some real though-provoking gems, and other times, it just seems like someone is trying to fill radio time.

On "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman ****

This work reads a lot like that of Hayek's. Friedman ties political freedom to capitalism or economic freedom. The reasons make a lot of sense in theory. The more power is concentrated in a few hands the less freedom there is. As such more and localer governments are preferred, giving one opportunity to move if displeased, as opposed to a strong central government. We should not expect government to work for us nor to work for government; rather we should ask what we can achieve through government, through voluntary association. This all sounds good. But then you get down to reality, and this is not always so great. Friedman gives the example of social security. We should have freedom to use that income as we see fit rather than the government taking it and only handing it back to us when old. Yes! Except, wait. How many will actually invest that money and have it on hand when old? And how many can afford to save like so? And what happens when people don’t? Do we just let them suffer, or do we end up paying anyway? (A better example is health care, where such freeloading ends up costing those who actually pay, because we aren’t generally cruel enough to just let the poor or the unwise die on the street.) Too much centralization is awful but a lack of centralized standards can be awful as well. There are reasons equality and well being are of importance; it’s a balancing act with freedom. That’s because free markets don’t dispense with power dynamics; they just move the from government to those with more resources.

Friedman next turns to the role government should play in the economy, which is solely as a rule maker and arbitrator. A key conflict he notes is the need to allow people via the market to make decisions and to combine at will while also keeping that combining from manipulating the market through monopoly. Friedman acknowledges that some industry is better with monopoly because of its nature— utilities such telephone and historically railroads. But what to do with such monopolies? There are three choices: let the government have the monopoly; let the government regulate the monopoly; or let the private monopoly flourish. Friedman actually proposes the latter as the least evil. He says that when the government controls the monopoly, at some point it interferes with innovation. An example is the railroad, which if it had not been regulated, would have eventually split up naturally in the face of new transport opportunities like cars and planes. Instead the government continues to regulate trains and the industry suffers. While deregulating trains might be good, given new technologies, I think letting a monopoly flourish when at its height likely would have kept those new industries from emerging. In the previous chapter Friedman had said all innovation came from private sector, but that is simply not true. Government has often seeded innovation: think of NASA. When it’s too costly and the reward to ethereal, private enterprise is not going to even try a particular innovation. Government can sponsor such.

Friedman tries to blame the Great Depression on government regulation, which seems ludicrous to me. Certainly failed fiscal policy may have helped it along, but the idea that government overreach always makes economic trouble worse seems like poppycock.

Here are some things Friedman would have the government get out of: national parks, farm and housing subsidies, bank regulation, tariffs, social security, business licensing, FCC. I’m dumbfounded. Licensing is a pain and can be abused, but it also protects consumers. FCC regulation helps distribute limited bandwidths so that we have media at all. And every time we deregulate something with the banks, we find ourselves in some economic collapse a decade or two later caused by people gaming the system. Government has a role to play, and that role does stomp on our freedom, but it’s so that others don’t do the same but without a regulator to try to make things somewhat even. I can empathize with the idea of trying to keep power out of the hands of a few, but Friedman puts way too much faith in the supposedly unbiased market. But once monopolistic behavior arises, control is still bound up with just a few people. A democratic government at least lets a wider swath of people at least attempt to keep things even.

On fiscal policy Friedman calls into question Keynesian economics. He notes that government expense to spur the economy do just the opposite, simply making things worse and bloating the government. He points to 1937 when government expenses were cut in the Great Depression and how all Econ troubles resumed. But that seems to me precisely the issue. The government wasn’t aggressive enough to truly put an end to the trouble until ww2. Nevertheless he claims that stimulus is never ending and raises inflation and takes as much from private sector as it gives. This would seem to be true but the idea is that such stimulus is to be temporary; we’re just not good at cutting. In that sense Friedman’s preference for tax cuts instead, if there is stimulus at all, has some point, because it would tend toward shrinking government instead of adding to it. But the problem is the same, since no one wants more tax just as no one wants less government service, so we still end up usually with permanent greater debt. A better means of stimulus might be in the form of grants to private sector: temporary and one time but helping to spur one hopes an economy that has sputtered. (His claim that government stimulus never works seems very dubious to me, having seen it used twice to deal with turmoil and also in reading of troubles in less regulated late 1800s. Yes stimulus leads to inflation, but it does help restore spending in low times more that nothing would. It stops the trouble from getting worse.

On the education front, Friedman espouses vouchers. He notes that ideally only parents would pay for kids, save that society does reap some benefit from an educated populace such that government payment is justified. Still a voucher system with minimum standards about what kids are taught gives parents more choice and drives innovation and excellence through competition. It would also put all people on the same level and better integrate schools. (I have middling feelings about vouchers. If someone who pays in to public school but chooses private schools on top of that now gets money back, that would take money from those who already have less. Minimum standards means government would now wield some authority over private schools. And finally who is to say that vouchers would pay for all of education. A high class institution could charge more and thus cut off poor, leaving them able only to attend poorer schools that can be paid fully by vouchers. Still, I like the idea of giving students more choice.) Friedman argues that only lower level schooling should be paid for and not anything like basket weaving or basketball, which only helps the individual and not the state. For this reason higher education, especially as related to professional programs should not be paid for or operated by the state. You want to be a doctor or plumber, you pay for that yourself because you reap the financial benefit. (Friedman doesn’t address how public education for some such programs can help society fill shortages, but I suppose the free market would do that just as well, since jobs in need would pay more and thus would be more likely to have people willing to pay for education in those fields.) This still leaves a problem for those too poor to pay for such vocational training. Friedman proposes loans based on income one makes after (say the loaner gets 10 percent of your earnings); he acknowledges this is in a way akin to slavery, however. This might be something the government could supply—then it’s more like a tax but only on the beneficiary. And in a sense that’s what has happened with students loans the government sponsors.

On civil rights, Friedman espouses a color-blind society—neither laws enforcing integration nor laws enforcing segregation. In principle I can agree; in practice, it is not realistic. On some level, it seems like we should be able to associate with whom we want, and as Friedman notes, those who choose not to serve part of a community necessarily weaken their economic status compared to others, because they're limiting their audience. Except—and Friedman shares this counterpoint—if a community forges a standard bias such that when one openly breaks that standard, one actually sees economic trouble one would usually not see. He compares race to taste, but in that there is a great problem. Taste may mean blues musicians are in higher demand than classical, but a musician can switch music genres. That’s a whole other world to race, and the like. Despite misgivings, I find it fair that government takes a swing at preventing such biases. Freedom of association is wonderful until one is one of those not free to associate. But it is a tricky proposition, with inherent contradictions, because we clearly allow such freedom in some circumstances while not doing so in others. But not forcing such a situation, one could argue, actually reduces the unity of the society and thus its ability to function.

The most interesting idea in Friedman’s discussion of monopolies is that there should be no corporate income taxes. Rather shareholders should be taxed on company profits. This would encourage larger dividends rather than companies keeping their capital. In turn money would be invested in new enterprises and where it is needed, rather than companies squirreling money away and trying to find new ways to reinvest. It actually would help small businesses more. Interesting argument. After corporations aren’t people but rather the people who make up the corporation. In this sense also corporations should not be involved in welfare and social things; their job is to make money for the investors. Making them worry over other things dilutes their purpose and takes away individual’s freedom. As a stockholder I shouldn’t be forced to give via the company to things I don’t want to give to.

Already noted is how Friedman is against licensing, which he sees as just another form of monopoly, usually perpetrated by those already in a business. He lays out three options for ensuring people belong in a business and says the first two are better options: registration, certification, and licensing. In the first, you put your name on a list, of say gun sellers. Then if we need to figure out where a gun came from we can do so. It also might involve a tax. Certificates involve noting you’ve passed certain criteria like a CPA; others can still enter the business but the certificate gives the educated a leg up and helps customers know a bit about the risk they’re taking if they hire someone else. Licenses keep people from entering a business if they don’t pass a test. Friedman shows how licenses essentially establish a monopoly in fields like medicine; he has a point. But how to keep from malpractice without a license? Let people sue more easily for bad behavior; then again, I’m not sure I’d want money in exchange for poor doctor care.

Next comes redistribution of income, which he says is ineffectively done in taxes and unfair. Luck will always play a role in wealth, along with merit. It’s unfair to penalize someone who manages to do well. He’s a proponent of the flat tax. I have not thought it a great idea insofar as I tend to think there needs to be a way to reset wealth for the sake of balancing societal power. Yet he has a point insofar as he shows how our tax system allows so many loopholes that in fact we end up not with a tax on the wealthy but on those who would otherwise become wealthy. We tax income, not wealth. We don’t tax capital gains at the same rate. And so on. He would tax all money made at the same rate with only a single standard deduction. I’ve always liked the simplicity of such an idea. Not sure of its effectiveness in practice.

Unsurprisingly Friedman comes out against housing assistance, minimum wage, and social security. I see his point about housing assistance and his preference just to hand out money is less paternalistic; I see another solution in South America, where one program hands out half finished houses, giving people a home they own and a place they are invested in. Minimum wages have their problems, I will agree, but I do think establishing a baseline is important and useful. And I am not keen on the poverty of the old that would result if social security went away; there are reasons it was instituted.

That said removing all of the above programs might be fine if his other proposal were instituted: the negative income tax (or in other words the minimum livable income). This seems a bit surprising coming from a neoliberal. But it makes a lot of sense. It is the least paternalistic and offers the greatest freedom, while hopefully keeping folks from becoming indigent. In practice it might work (as some experiments have shown), or it might just lead to inflation in the manner that minimum wages do (or so the argument goes), such that the negative on the income tax does not really provide a livable minimum. (Indeed, I remain mostly skeptical. If we were all paid enough to survive just by living, I would venture that folks would be less inclined to work jobs they didn't like or want unless those jobs paid significantly more than the minimum given out by the government. I mean, why work if you're going to get paid whether you do or not? So some typically disliked job like fastfood would have to pay, I'd think, at least $500 more per month than what your negative tax would be. That would mean that prices would rise accordingly, which would result in that same vicious circle one gets with minimum wage.)

While I don’t buy into Friedman’s anti-Keynesian narrative, I find many of his ideas interesting and possibly better than how we manage the economy now. Much to think on.

On “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman ****

Admittedly, I got Thomas and Milton mixed up. Milton is now next on my list. Thomas is an economic journalist; Milton is the actual economist. Still, I would have ended up reading this book no matter on this same economics list. It was the rage twenty years ago, just shortly after I moved to Georgia. I remember lots of NPR interviews and the like. Interviews with the author made me uncomfortable, because the topic is one to make one uncomfortable—namely, globalization's effect on each and every person on the planet, which can have some rather difficult implications for any single person who is looking to maintain a job. At thirtysomething, this was scary; at fiftysomething, I should be even more scared, insofar as it would be much harder to change focus and grab some new career. The fifties were many of my parents' generation lost jobs; some ended up getting better work, but others struggled along at odd jobs for the next decade until social security kicked in and never really recovered financially. Still, what give me some condolence is that globalization didn't come for me in the intervening twenty years.

It's interesting reading Friedman's book in the context of the new Trump administration. One can look at much of what he's doing as a reaction to just the sort of things Friedman writes about, and at least according to Friedman, they are just about the worst reaction one can have. Cutting one's self off from the world—with trade barriers and anti-immigrant policies—are more likely to slow the economy than protect the jobs one has. That would be Adam Smith's view too: trade barriers are good only to protect industries that are essential to protect for the national interest, like, say, military weaponry and the raw materials that go into that. But one can see why cutting the nation off from the world would seem to be the initial reaction.

Friedman makes clear the globalization is likely to lower the relative wealth of the United States, that is, wealth relative to other nations. However, it is also likely to “grow the pie,” as conservatives have in the past argued about income inequality. That is, it doesn't matter if the rich get richer faster if everyone is getting richer. There isn't a limit on riches one shares.

The first part of Friedman's book focuses on how globalization takes place and what sort of technologies have allowed that to happen, with numerous stories about businesses that have put such technologies into practice, things like offshoring and special software and so on. One of the most interesting developments to me was the case of UPS, which I had been totally unaware of. Apparently, some manufacturers have outsourced the repairs on their products to UPS. What I mean by that is instead of some Asian electronics manufacturer having us ship the defective product all the way back to the factory, it'll arrange for UPS to do not just the delivery but the repair itself. Numerous companies have apparently done this, such that UPS has facilities that are set up to fix stuff. This cuts down on shipping time and cost, for a fee that UPS reaps from the manufacturer, and makes things more convenient for the consumer.

So how are we to cope with things like accounting and taxes and constumer service and, well, just about anything one can think to outsource, and then even things one thinks can't be outsourced, to another nation with a labor force hungry for work and a cheaper cost-of-living? Friedman notes that the easiest tasks have been those that have tended to be farmed out, the standard accounting, for example. That allows those living in the older richer economies to focus on creative and more difficult endeavours. To do that, we need to be on our game in terms of maintaining education. (Something that seems, again, awful in terms of how it is precisely in education that the current administration has seen fit to start many of its budget cuts.)

But even this seems a difficult maneuver to me, when so many of the workers in a place like India actually have great educations. Who's to say an engineer has to be American? One could have the top-notch engineer overseas just as easily do the same work cheaper. In that sense, while Friedman's education argument makes some sense, it also doesn't seem a cure-all. Friedman talks of how some people he know have developed throughout their careers, moving from one thing to another in terms of starting off as, say, illustrators, then moving to medical illustration, then some very narrow portion of the industry—each time, making the change in light of the fact that the previous task became too easy for others (often overseas others) to do using software and training and thus lowering the price of the service. One of the things that made me so anxious when I heard about this book at thirtysomething was the way in which Friedman really pushed education—or really, reeducation. But the thing is, I like learning and study, but I didn't want to be in school constantly, chasing a new certificate or degree every five years because the previous job is no longer necessary. It's tiring enough working forty hours a week; add constant night classes on top of that just to keep a job, it just seems like a drudging way to live.

One interesting proposal in that regard, however, is Friedman's idea of underemployment insurance or transitionary employment insurance. Instead of paying people money when they lose their job or reward them for training, pay people for taking a job in a new-to-them industry, even if it means lower pay. It makes sense. So you're an engineer, but the product you worked on and specialized in goes defunct after twelve years; you were in the higher levels of the company and now you are out of work. You're chasing another job with equal pay, but there aren't many left in that sector of the industry anymore. Instead, employment insurance would pay you not just to go to school for retraining but rather for taking more of an entry-level position in another industry. It would make up the difference, and then, on the job, as you gain more experience and move up and earn more money, the insurance would kick off. This seemed one of the best ideas in the book, which if ever implemented, really would help people in a globalizing and fast-changing economy, one that we really can't recede from and expect to remain relevant or well off. (Indeed, Friedman criticizes the Bush administration for doing to some degree just that in reaction to 9/11, with its focus on closing borders and old gas technologies, rather than being forward thinking, and here we seem to be doing that again—but to a much greater degree.)

On “The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christainity” by Jefery Butz ****

This biography of Just James, while fairly succinct, seems to cover most of the current research on the subject (at least through 2005). I was initially a bit skeptical of Butz's book, especially as in his preface, he pointed out how much he respects the work of Robert Eisenman, whose biography of James may qualify as one of the longest ever but is also one of the most kooky. But Butz doesn't quite try to tie James in with the Dead Sea Scrolls and make claims that the entire original Christrian movement was actually some kind of Essene movement revolved completely around Jesus's family and that it had only ever aimed at being some kind of worldly Jewish Messiah, though in some ways he comes close.

What I like about what Butz does is that he doesn't quite go so radically far. Rather, he tries to reclaim James and the early Christian movement as part of Judaism, and while he does fall into the common Protestant and often secular point of view that James and Paul were at cross-purposes, which colors many of the insights he manages to provide, he does still manage to show just how important James was to early Christians and how that early movement was signficantly Jewish in form and nature. (Plenty of newer works call into question the antinomial Paul who created some kind of new movement that had little in common with what Jesus actually taught.)

Some of the interesting insights include a correction of the common idea that James and the rest of Jesus's family did not support Jesus during his physical life—that is, that they were not convinced of his ministry until after his resurrection. Some of this interpretation comes from the way we have read certain scriptures out of context, and some has to do with how later generations want to portray Jesus. Butz argues, fairly convincingly, that the family probably had connections to Jesus's ministry well before his resurrection.

Butz also shows how James fit within Judaism, and while claims that James was a Pharisee seem a bit too far out to be believed to me, there is a case to be made that in many ways the early Christian movment had much in common with Pharisaism—and in that way, James, Paul, Jesus, and the whole lot would have been a kind of offshoot.

The book ends with a call to unite the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths through a degree of compromise. It's not a strong ending to me, insofar as I don't think things like divinity of Jesus are really up for debate between the faiths. But the push to remind people of how Christainity started in Judaism is a worthy enterprise.

On "The Affluent Society" by John Kenneth Galbraith ****

I'm glad someone recommended that I read F. C. Hayek's Road to Serfdom, because this book, as it turns out, is in large part a response to that work, as well as an exploration of what one is to do when a society reaches a state where production outstrips the need for people to be constantly producing--that is, where there is a surplus of necessary goods.

Galbraith notes that he has some skepticism about the worship of free market instead of socialism proffered in books like Hayek's. Those truisms, he says, are not a given. Planned economies can do great things too, like launch Sputnik. Furthermore the challenge of modern society is not poverty as was the case throughout human history for most people. Why do some stay poor amid abundance for most in the moder world? How do we resolve? These are the questions Galbraith sets out to explore. It’s not just about the free market—free market simply offer you a difference in terms of who you serve: the blind free market instead of a government bureaucrat.

Conventional wisdom is what most speak; it is based on what we are comfortable with based on experience, but it is not based in current events. Sometimes situations have changed and conventional wisdom is outdated and wrong. Revolutions in thought occur at some point and become new wisdom. Examples: The liberal policies of the American revolution broke the national planning of colonizers. The welfare state broke the free market. Keynesianism broke the balanced budget. Are we on the cusp of another revolution? (Or at least, were we in the 1950s to the 1970s, when Galbraith was writing this?)

A main problem with the free market is a lack of equality; another is the lack of security in the business cycle. The hard working person is just as likely to fail by luck as succeed.

Galbraith then provides a short history of American economic thought, with special emphasis on a non-American with the strongest influence during the gilded age: Herbert Spencer and social Darwinism, out of which our special faith in the free markets perhaps derives and continues. With Spencer, the rich are the fit, the poor are the weak and are slated to drop off. It's no big deal if the weak drop off; in fact, it is poor form to help them because you’re allowing the less fit to survive.

The counter to Spencer is Marx who is just as much a pessimist and optimist but in other ways. Society will always produce too much, which drives down wages of the poor and kills jobs. When produce runs out and the poor go back to work, wages rise, which brings about higher production costs, which kills jobs and thus kills the continued productivity. And so on. The cycle repeats itself, getting worse and worse until revolution results. Even if disagreeing with Marx, he has had a great influence on economic theory.

There are three basic economic problems: productivity, inequality, and insecurity. These were what economists dwelt on till twentieth century and what Galbraith spends the rest of the book analyzing.

Galbraith notes that there’s been a loss of interest in inequality since about 1950. Why is that so, even though it is still exists? Because of increases in productivity. In rich societies, everyone is getting a bigger amount, even if their shares aren’t equal. In poor societies landowners took all the surplus or growth; in addition, in the 1970s showing off wealth became gauche, so rich became less known. (That certainly doesn't seem the case in the 1980s or 2000s, but maybe it was a bit the case in the 1990s.) Likewise the rich are less powerful than they once were, as they are rarely any longer both entrepreneurs and owners (again, this seems less true now in our tech billionaire age); rather, faceless stockholders own the wealth. (Galbraith provides numbers for the share of wealth owned by the few at the time; they are small compared with today, even though they were egregious even then.)

As for security, that has been resolved for commoners by social programs like unemployment and social security. For the rich, corporations have diversified and grown huge such that they can sustain losses in one area to gain in another and are too big to fail. Poor communities have little heavy desire for security, as they are simply struggling to stay alive, but as society grows affluent, the desire for insurance and the like is a result of what might be lost. The idea that security might make us less productive is a false one, as productivity has increased more with unemployment insurance and social security than without. (Galbraith fails to take into account many economies where people are less inclined to work, if they can't find the job they want, when unemployment is generous.)

Productivity is the obsession of the modern economist. Yet we define it narrowly. We take public service as being unproductive while producing private goods is productive. Actually, though, unemployment and government work helps stabilize the economy by providing production in downturns and thus keeping the private sector busier than it would otherwise be.

Satisfaction is never gained by an increase of goods. So there is no end to production. Yet it is rare goods, not easily obtained goods, that people want. This seems contradictory. Simply producing doesn’t mean you’ll sell the product produced. You have to have demand. That demand for product is based on seeing what others have and on advertising. Compare something you truly need versus something wanted. You know when you are hungry without someone telling you. The fact that someone has to inform you of a product through ads or comparison shows you don’t have to have it—it’s not a true need.

Production has become the system through which the economy grows. This came out of the depression when the solution was to get people back to work through producing stuff via government input. But the government never stopped pushing production and so we have way more stuff now than we used to.

Production is not that important really except insofar as it is necessary for security, that is, to keep people employed. Most people would choose to have low productivity and consistent jobs than high productivity and fewer jobs (this is Schumaker's argument too, in Small Is Beautiful). Contributing to this concern is the amount of debt people take on, which outpaces increased wages. It’s trouble waiting to happen.

How do we bring inflation under control to keep prices stable? When we raise prices, inevitably labor prices must rise. That means prices rise. It’s a loop. The key is more production so that prices need not rise to account for higher labor costs.

We attempt to spur or confine production through available cash—that is, by monetary policy or fiscal policy. Neither is fully effective and both affect sectors of society differently. Adjusting interest rates (monetary policy) has little effect except on smaller businesses, which are less able to invest in the future when rates are high. Big businesses have enough market share to inflate prices and consumers will generally just take out longer loans to deal with higher interest. Fiscal policy (adjusting tax rates) tends to interfere with stable employment, which then contradicts the goal of stabilizing prices. It seems there’s little solution. Galbraith seems to argue for price controls to a small degree here, even though he says that we’re historically averse to them. (Price controls lead to shortages, however, so I am not sure they are a real solution.)

Galbraith next turns to what he calls balance—social and investment. Social balance involves the public versus private economy. Our tendency is to see the public economy as a drain on the private, but the two go hand in hand, with the public usually lagging. If the private economy builds more cars, the public economy will require more roads for example or more traffic cops. We should not see the public economy as a drain on productivity; it enables continued productivity. Also of note in this regard is inflation, which Galbraith says eats into public expenditures as taxes do not rise as quickly (this seems a dubious claim to me) and taxes themselves (or rather the manner in which taxes address inequality, as the public sector tends to provide more for the poor but require more of the rich, which the haves do not like).

Investment balance has to do with how society tends to invest most in that which produces most and makes the most, which in turn becomes self fulfilling. A successful industry will develop faster than a more mundane one, leading to an imbalance in sectors. But what Galbraith really focuses on is education. Education enables industries to advance, as modern innovation rarely derives from uneducated people. But education is typically a public expenditure and thus not seen as directly productive. One could put education fully in the private sphere, but that would actually decrease freedom. This is a major point of contention with Hayek’s claim that the private sector ensures freedom rather than the public. If private industry funded all education, then people would have little choice in profession; industry would determine what can be studied and by whom.

This gets us to the crux of Galbraith’s argument, which is that in an affluent society, production should no longer be the main or only goal. After all, much production is unnecessary other than to encourage consumption: without ads few would know they lack a certain leisure good. Do we really want to force people to move or whatever to enable production of things we don’t actually have to have? But how, without such production, are we to have jobs—that is, the means to make money to live off?

The real concern in the economy is not production but employment and the income that comes with it. To break the dependence on production, Galbraith suggests unemployment compensation be closer to real wages. He claims this will lower production but not affect people's willingness to work. (I would suggest, based on European economies and the old communist regimes, that he is wrong. People tend to become pickier about jobs or not work to advance their positions if forced into jobs they dislike.) Or since some cannot work, a minimum living allowance (as some have recently proposed and experimented with), a likely better solution. To control inflation he suggests price and wage controls but only on corporations and unions, which control larger sections of the economy. This seems dubious also but possibly useful, insofar as indeed a large market share of a given thing does give one more ability to set prices and wages compared with a small employer or laborer.

Inadequate social balance between expenditures on private versus public items is best addressed by taxes, says Galbraith, but not those less flexible with inflation like property tax. Rather income tax is preferred, but most of that at this point is taken up by military expenditures. So to compensate we should have more sales tax. The poor are more affected by it; however, if that tax is used primarily for the public and especially the poor then taking away from consumption in the private sector to allow more consumption in public sector makes sense. We could use that tax for schools and the like, eventually leading to greater production anyway. Such taxes are also key to helping address poverty, because there is not more production but instead a better use of resources. (I’m not sure I buy this argument, as consumption taxes tend to be regressive; so one would essentially be taking money from the poor and handing it back to them in the form of government services—in other words, the government thus would be telling the poor how to spend, as it would do the spending for them.)

Galbraith closes with a discussion of how greater productivity has led to fewer hours and more leisure time, but a better way to address better productivity is also to make work more pleasant. As such there’s a new class, not a leisure class, but a new class: a group of workers who labor not primarily for money but for love of the work they do. Education is key to allowing this and should be the goal to bring most people into this class.

In a world where production is ample and there is no need to spend all our days just scrounging to survive, new ways of measuring economic value are needed that don’t simply count what has been produced, ways that actually somehow take into account our humanity. On this basic point, I guess, I would agree with Galbraith, but many of his policy solutions seem dubious. No matter, he offers much to think about in a mostly lucid way.

On “The United States and Britain in Prophecy” by Herbert W. Armstrong ****

I have not read this book since I was a teenager, and I was expecting to be somewhat underwhelmed, as I was with Armstrong's book on the millennium, but this one turned out to have a lot more heft than I anticipated. I remember, at the time I first read it, feeling like the author did an incredible job with the biblical material but that it wasn't too detailed when it came to the historical basis for the theory; that was my impression this time as well. But the book this time left me with a desire to go read up more on the subject historically to see the degree to which the biblical interpretation is accurate—and that's a good thing.

Having grown up being taught the these two countries forge the heart of ancient Israelite migrants, I find that my worldview, even today, to a large degree still falls back on that, even if I've had a few doubts through the years. I would say “it seems to be true,” but it's not a salvation issue. If the understanding is wrong, then in the end, it doesn't take away from the most important truths of scripture. (After all, I've heard other claims, that, for example, Japan is ancient Israel. I haven't looked into such with any seriousness, but I didn't grow up with such a theory either, so it's not where my mind first goes.) Rereading this book, however, made me see, as I noted, that there's a lot more reason to believe such might be the case biblically than perhaps I've recently thought much about.

The issue is, of course, that most modern scholars disagree with the historical thesis and that there are some good reasons for that. The number one reason is that the theory seemed to have found its greatest popularity during the height of British colonialism—that is, it was a way to justify certain racist views. It was, in other words, propaganda for Manifest Destiny and the like. So it is fair to be skeptical. At the same time, it is perhaps unfair to dismiss such ideas out of hand just because of their misuse. What one really has to do is go look at what really happened, insofar as that is possible. Most contemporary scholars are wary to do that in part because of the associated tropes. And so much of the history I've read through the years that ties the lost tribes of Israel to modern nations has been quite sketchy, based on similarities of names and the like—a possible coordinating fact but hardly strong proof around which to base an entire thesis–rather than really tracing the movements of peoples. More reading on the subject would go far in helping me see how such conclusions can be reached. But few serious scholars give the theory much time.

The last chapter of the book, alas, made me uneasy. It's the chapter where the author really lets readers know the troubles that are coming for these nations and pushes readers to join the church the author is associated with in order to escape. I suppose I can't argue with a sincere call to repentance, assuming that's what's going on, and as I see my country literally falling apart now, I can't help but think the author was right in that regard. But the chapter reminded me of many of the nightmares from my childhood, and the appeal to fear and to join one particular group is not something I am completely comfortable with now; it suggests to me these days a kind of insincerity. Repent, yes, but if it's just to save one's own skin and the key is joining one particular organization, something seems a bit off. I don't think a bunch of people just looking to save themselves is what God is after. I'm reminded of what someone said to me shortly after 9/11, namely that they were thinking of returning to church because they were scared of what was going to happen to them. I suppose fear can be a motivating factor for getting one back to doing the right thing, but if that's the whole motive and remains the motive, it's hardly a life of joy and such a choice is not likely to stick. And indeed, that person did not.

On “The Road to Serfdom” by F. A. Hayek ****

This author was recommended to me by someone who found out I was doing an economics reading list. I was not really looking forward to this work, as it Hayek was someone I'd never heard of and he seemed more of a minor figure such that reading him would take from others I would otherwise read as part of this list. When I read a bit about him, I was even more put out; he sounded like a huge right-wing, free-market capitalism fan, for which I already had a few such books on my list. I figured Smith and Marx to be enough in terms of older classics, Keynes and Galbraith for moderns, and then the rest would be applied and contemporary.

And indeed, as I started out on this book, Hayek's hit me in a lot of wrong ways. He seemed just too big a fan of the free market without any sort of government oversight. But as I read further, he made more and more sense—and he also seemed at times to contradict himself. That is, he seemed very heavy on avoiding government intervention in the economy, but then would backtrack and say that some intervention was okay. In some ways, it reminded me of the way Elizabeth Warren claims to be a friend of capitalism—but only capitalism done the right way.

What Hayek's book is really doing is arguing against socialism—whether on the right or the left. He was writing near the end of World War II, when the troubles that had risen to the fore in Germany with the National Socialists were very apparent. And he was fearful, he notes, that too many other nations, such as the United States and Britain, were drifting toward the same sort of socialist frenzy under the inane idea that socialism solves problems and creates a more equitable society. (He notes that this is actually more a book on politics than on economics, which seems true, save the economics has much to do with his political views.)

Here's where Hayek's big critique of such thinking really gives one much to ponder. He notes that when the government imposes its will on the forces of the market in the name of providing equity, it denies freedom to the people it rules. A planned economy essentially means that certain people will not be able to do as they wish, be it start a particular type of business, sell a particular item, or do a particular job. In that sense, socialism leads inevitably to totalitarianism. In this way of thinking, I would have to agree. The problem, of course, is that simply letting the market dictate things doesn't necessarily lead to a greater amount of freedom; that's because when a private corporation corners a market, now it's just the private corporation that dictates one's ability to start a new business, sell a particular item, or do a particular job. Which are you going to ask to control your fate? Hayek doesn't spend much time on this latter possibility—except he does at some point note the problems with monopolies. In that sense, he seems to imply that ultimate economic freedom for people can only exist when we are talking about small-time capitalists, not multinationals that control the fate of millions. And in that, too, I would agree, save that some industries require such an outlay of capital that they are impossible to run with such a small footprint. The guy down the street cannot decide that he's going to start building commercial airplanes with a small savings or a small loan; there are reasons there are really only a couple of viable commercial airplane manufacturers. In those sort of endeavours, it seems we really do have to fall back on either government involvement or a near monopoly.

And just as one thinks Hayek is espousing total free markets, he pulls back, admitting in places that the government does have a role to play. It is there to keep markets fair (this is where I thought of Warren), so that fraud and monopoly don't twist the market in ways that remove opportunity for everyone. He even at some point notes that the government should be involved in health care, which seems very much more of a socialist kind of argument in many people's views. Once the government starts getting involved in such things, it seems, it warps the market—that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's really a matter of the tradeoff one is willing to make, where one is willing to cede authority and freedom in the hope that a central-planning bureaucrat will be able to do better. I wouldn't want to live completely at the whim of the free market, nor would I want to live totally under the thumb of a government decision maker. Where that balance is is hard to say.

A late chapter in the book discusses a kind of world government. There, he argues against a socialist world government, noting that were we to have such, certain nation-states would insist on cornering the market in certain areas. There would not be the sharing of resources as one would hope. Instead, there would be resentment, the keeping down of certain nations and of the development of their own industries. Instead, he advocates a kind of world government that instead of mandating things would simply prohibit certain things—what sounds to me in some ways what would become the United Nations. One nation, for example, cannot invade another, lest all the other nations then unite to keep such an invasion from happening. Thus, we would have peace. Of course, the issue with this is apparent from the lack of success the UN has had. I mean, it requires other nations to be willing to sacrifice to stop another nation from taking advantage of others. But beyond that, what's the difference between a prohibition and a mandate? On some level, are they not similar things? If we refrain from mandating that a nation provides a living wage to its citizens, but prohibit a nation from starving its people, what's the difference?

Anyway, in the end, I'm glad Hayek was recommended to me. I found it particularly interesting reading in our current times.