I’m no economist, but I am (I hope) a non-stupid reader of the news and someone who tries to pay attention. So as an everyday educated reader, I think I can plausibly assess these books for other similar readers. Basically, I can recommend Lanchester’s I.O.U., and I have a couple of things to say about Stiglitz, but can’t really recommend it.

Lanchester’s also a novelist, and boy can he tell a story. Each chapter has villians (mostly) and heroes (some), and a bit of a plot, especially in the first half and the last chapter (the middle sections flag a bit). The best parts of the book come in the first half where Lanchester provides humble parables that get to what such instruments as “credit default swaps” are all about. Here and there are little gaffes (I remember a mistake about statistics somewhere in there), but for the most part, it’s compelling. Having read around in Stiglitz (who is a Nobel winner), who has a similar account but more aimed at policy, it would seem that for the most part Lanchester is telling the truth. His overall conclusion about the state of the economy is extremely dire, and in the last chapter he goes a bit berserk, explaining our doom. Basically as a society we Americans have shot our credit cards. Now we have to pay. And it’s going to take decades. Sorry. Now really is the time to move to Canada.

Stiglitz’s book is more about policy, with a heavy dose of “I told you so.” It is highly repetitive. The basic message seems to be that the rewards structure in the American/European economies massively over-rewards finance, and especially short-term gain. Stiglitz firmly believe that the way out is to make massive investment in people via the educational system and other mechanisms. He likes to point out that for all of the praise of market-self-regulation and privatization, all of the best universities and colleges in the United States are not-for-profit. He uses this fact as a counter-argument about the merits of unfettered profit-driven capitalism.

Here’s the bit I want to pick out: One interesting aspect of the book is that for Stiglitz, a real culprit in the overall imbalance in capitalistic rewards is the underpricing of natural resources. Infuriatingly, this point does not seem to be broken out as a separate section, and the book has no index (!). But here’s a representative bit:

[We need a new economic model] — sustainability will require less emphasis on material goods for those who are overconsuming and a shift in the direction of innovative activity. At a global level, too much of the world’s innovation has been directed at saving labor and too little at saving natural resources and protecting the environment — hardly surprising given that prices do not reflect the scarcity of these natural resources. There has been so much success at saving labor that in much of the world there is a problem of persistent unemployment. But there has been so little success at saving natural resources that we are risking environmental collapse. (p. 192)

The other place where this comes up is in a remarkable section called “What You Measure is What You Value, and Vice Versa” (pp. 283-285) which takes square aim at the inability of GDP to measure what is really important about the health of economies (in Stiglitz’s view, it would be a measure of sustainability or even “happiness”). Here he talks more about the depletion of the natural resources, but the point about prices is to say that GDP is too high because the real costs of energy aren’t taken into consideration.

I would love to read a review of Stiglitz that breaks out his position on energy more schematically.

I paid attention to the Presidential primary and general elections like everyone else, and even drove up to New Hampshire to see one candidate in person. I kept up enough to know that during one period, Hillary Clinton was said to be a “sure thing,” while later, it was rumored that her campaign was totally disorganized.

This book sorts all that stuff out, with significant “deep background” quotes from almost all of the players. It’s a good read. At Amazon, there are a lot of complaints that the book is slanted towards Obama, but I don’t think that’s really the case. If anything, there’s not enough about Sarah Palin.

By far, the most compelling chapter is the one on John and Elizabeth Edwards. It’s even more shocking and depressing that what you might have read in reviews. If even 25% of it is true, they are both do for some serious psychological counseling.

The book reminded me how much promise there was for these candidates.

The history of UK punk has been told so many times, and so well, that it’s hard to believe that the story can be told again. But it can. Dave Thompson’s London’s Burning is a recollection of his mid to late teenage years, when he saw all of the groups in their earliest gigs: The Sex Pistols, of course, but also those a bit more afield, such as the Adverts, and the ones you haven’t heard of who were in the orbit of punk but didn’t get much attention — such as Masterswitch.

There are a few things that really stand out in this memoir. The first is the radical importance of reggae. English music was in a dead period, and white kids needed their revolution. The music at hand in 1974 and 1975 with the revolutionary message was reggae. Each chapter starts with a list of tunes in “heavy rotation” in the author’s mind, and until we get well into the 1976, it’s dominated by reggae. The lists are very interesting as well, because it is a distinctly “street” collection of reggae tunes. I think you’d have a hard time finding all of these as downloads.

Thompson is always well aware of the circumambient economic situation. Of course, all of the other books talk about how there were no jobs and workers were miserable under Maggie. But Thompson remembers that in the late 70s, no one had a theory; they just had misery:

[F]or anybody looking to draw conclusions from the events which ultimately cause 1976 to shape the landscape of the decades to come, it is only the sweet fortunes of hindsight that sllow even a vague hypothesis to take shape. For the people on the ground, in the frontline, at the sticky end of the pointed stick, 1976 was the same as 1975 was the same as 1974 was the same as 1973 and so on ad infinitum.

There were still no more than three channels on the telly; the programming still ended around midnight with the rousing chords of the national anthem. Some shows were still being broadcast in black and white. The pubs closed at eleven . . . [However, hindsight] might view the mid-1970s through a monochrome lens, but life was not gray, it was not flat, and it was not grim. A lot of people had a lotof fun in the 1970s . . . The big difference between “then” and “now” was that people were making their own fun then, as opposed to waiting for some multimedia conglomerate to package it up and deliver it to their door. (pp. 102-103)

Thompson is also good at pinpointing how 1976 was different from 1982: In 1976, Thompson says, the situation of the miserable economy “was not merely without precedent, it seemed to be without remedy as well” (p. 98). By 1982, punks had a pattern. So . . . 1976 becomes all the more interesting because it was all improvisation and invention.

The last thing I would say about this nifty book is that it’s great on the bands that got lost: Roogalator, the Rumour (who had a great album without Graham Parker), Tom Robinson Band — they’re all here, and will compel you to dust off the old singles and LP’s, if you have them.

I read a fair number of showbiz memories (for reasons I know not), usually with a bit of a rock-and-roll cast, and this is one of the worst. Tom Davis was half of the Franken and Davis comedy team; I would guess that the publication of this book was delayed to come out after the Senate race in Minnesota was confirmed, because there is little here that would reflect very well on Franken, except, I suppose, that he managed to get sober. There are indications that Davis cleaned up, too, but not many. For the most part, he lived his teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, etc., on drugs and listening to the Grateful Dead. I had a hard time finding evidence that he had contributed much actual “funny” to Franken and Davis or to SNL.

I did learn hat Al Franken perfected his trick of drawing the outline of the 48 states long ago. I also found out that Jerry Garcia slept in a chair.

Aside from those tidbits, this is more or less just a list of hijinks and travel stories, punctuated with brief vignettes of the various people Davis knew. At the end of the book there’s a random list of books Davis read while writing his memoir, and an incongruous list of his top 50 movies. Also pathetic is that Davis conceives himself as some kind of thinker: “I had a conscious philosophy that celebrity, money, and power were ephemeral and were important only as they figured into the world of ideas in which I lived” (p. 178). Well, I couldn’t find an idea after 300-odd pages.

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is about a cult musician, his fans, and his legacy. Tucker Crowe recorded what fanboys seem to think is the greatest break-up album of all time, “Juliet.” Then Crowe dropped out of the music business. One of his biggest fans is a musical trainspotter in a sleepy seaside town in England. When the demos of Crowe’s great album are released as “Juliet, Naked,” the fan writes a celebratory review, motivated largely by the fact that he is one of the first to hear the CD. Then his girlfriend reviews it — and pans it — and, miraculously, the elusive Crowe begins to re-emerge from his obscurity.

All of the musical “notes” in this book are pretty much perfect, from the fake Wikipedia entries to the self-regard of the fanboy. Meanwhile, the musical Crowe is immediately recognizable as something like an early Alex Chilton; after his “retirement” from music, Hornby takes the character a little further into obscurity than most cult figures go.

Where the book is pretty weak is around the relationships. Hornby can lay down a nice streak of almost weepy sentimentality. The book practically ends in a group hug. I liked the book, but, really, the music bits are the best bits. Even a brief appearance by a couple of the last Northern Soul fanatics has more life than some of the romance material.

I’m a sucker for a good “end times” novel (see my review of World Made by Hand). This book is about three housemates in a funky Madison, Wisconsin co-op dedicated to localism (as in local foods). 30-something Hal leads the house, with the help of 20-something Karen. Meanwhile, 30-something Greta has moved in, trying to escape her alcoholic husband Will. The thing is, though, that gas prices have shot up, and there have been power outages. Part-way through the book, a lengthy power-outage kicks in that seems like it might be the permanent one. Hinted at is a general ecological decline: yield from community farms is low, chicken eggs from a farm have malformed shells. All is not right in the world.

All of these ecological aspects of the novel are soft-pedaled. In fact, no one really knows why the power has been going off. It is noted briefly that there is still a war going on, so perhaps power is expensive because of that. I would guess that Wildgen’s point is that this is the problem with people nowadays: No one really knows why our engagement with the natural world is in such decline; even those of us who try to use fewer resources and think locally, she would seem to claim, can’t really get beyond our personal issues.

Towards the end of the novel, the alcoholic Will emerges as a central character. It would seem that Wildgen is drawing a very broad parallel between society’s drunkenness on taken-for-granted resources, and Will’s grotesquely selfish boozing. (Indeed, if this is a so-so ecological novel, it’s a fine novel of alcoholism.) This makes me think that the novel is something of a parable. Having said that, the parabolic nature of the story is so light that it is hard to really care. There are some characters who have managed to escape: Hal’s father lives in a cabin in northern Wisconsin, and allows that if the power went out up there, nothing much would change. Karin has a lovely episode visiting a boutique cheese maker (chapter 9), but it doesn’t motivate her to get out of Madison. That seems to be the case for all of the characters: They’re too frail to break their own habits, and, like Will, their addiction is strangely what keeps them (barely) alive.

I’m a sucker for a good rock and roll memoir, and picked up Juliana Hatfield’s when I first saw that it was available. Hatfield was the lead singer and bass player of the Blake Babies, and went on to a decent solo career (for the history and discographies, see Wikipedia and allmusic). She has a wonderful sense for melody, and the good sense to pick great producers who can beef up her guitars and voice to balance out her sound. She spent time at Berklee and knows her musical onions.

The book is a mixture of nearly present-day tour diary and reflection on past days, alternating chapters (more on less) on these two topics. The tour is a multi-city trip of her most recent band-effort, Some Girls. In both parts, everything that is concrete and detailed is funny or thought-provoking or memorable. You hear about the creeps who want more than her autograph, the jerks who have interviewed her unfairly, the bad hotels and good hotels (I want to go to the Congress Hotel in Tucson based on her brief assessment here), the friends and lovers (?) she sees only on the road. Good stuff. There is a great story of the first meeting of the Blake Babies. She is trenchant on the difficulties managing personalities on a tour. And she’s honest about the money.

Picture: Christian Kock

There is also a lot about her personal weaknesses and artistic efforts: This was tougher for me. She is hopelessly shy and self-doubting, but at the same time driven at the core to make music. But there was maybe too much of this. When she does go into detail on her emotional ups-and-downs — for instance, on her trouble with food — she gets interesting again. But, really, I’m on already on her side emotionally because her music is great.

One thing for sure: If you’re in a band and thinking about a tour, or about making a career of music . . . This is one to read, because it’s a tough road.

This short book is packed with sensible observations from the real experiences of a CEO who started a company (Comcate) with a raw idea, raised money, and built the company up enough to have real customers, real employees, revenues, and, I hope, profits (though this last detail is either not confessed or buried in the story and I missed it). The product was a hosted app allowing small towns to manage their “customer” feedback on-line; each town was billed $10K to $30K / year (p. 151). The product eventually morphed into a “code enforcement” package (p. 154) which became their real money-maker. The story is supposed to be more provocative than the usual CEO/start-up story because the protagonist in this one is . . . 15 years old. I actually didn’t find the youth of the CEO to be as amazing as other readers have. The culture of business now permeates teenage life in a way it didn’t when I was Casnocha’s age: Parents are more open about their own businesses, and are more eager to mentor their kids in entrepreneurship. So let me say a few things about how the book might serve a wannabe-CEO or business-founder as a vade mecum.

Because the author is young, he has to get a lot right to be credible. So Casnocha trained himself at finding the right resources, the right examples, and the right books to serve as guides. He knows some things that a lot of business owners don’t learn right away: He knows that his business is all about customers with real problems (p. 21); he rightly disdains utter slavishness to the customer (citing Henry Ford, p. 22), in favor of judicious listening; he determines the price of his product from its cost (p. 24). I could go on and on. Some of his formulations were fresh for me:

“How critical are these problems?” I asked. Some problems only require “vitamins”–that is, a product that’s “nice to have.” Some issues require “antibiotics,” which means they’re mission-critical problems. Most profitable businesses solve mission-critical problems, or the “must-haves.” I learned customer service is not mission-critical for organizations (whereas financial, payroll, and purchasing systems, for example, all are). My product, then, would be a vitamin. At the time I did not fully understand the challenge of trying to sell a vitamin, instead of an antibiotic. This is probably because I personally had no real “needs.” Like most other kids, I had wants, but I didn’t think about needs. Food, shelter, clothes were all taken care of by my parents. I didn’t view the world through a lens of improvement, a perspective all great entrepreneurs carry. (pp. 23-24)

There are a lot of people who want to found businesses who also have never experienced true need.

As I mentioned at the start of the review, eventually Comcate latched on to providing software for “code enforcement,” and he makes a number of astute comments about the difference between “good revenue” and “bad revenue.” Basically, if it scales and can be automated, it’s good. If not, it’s bad. This is hard-won advice, and Casnocha presents the contrast in a couple of pages. (pp. 154-155). A lot of start-ups never figure this out.

On the technology side of the story, Casnocha had a pretty tough time. He always went for the cheap solution, hiring a weak engineer for the first version, and had security and uptime issues (pp. 102-103). Here we have exactly the experience of the non-techie CEO of a web-based business: A missing player in the early game for Casnocha was a good CTO; when he got one, the CTO almost quit: “The technology folks . . . believed the business folks . . . didn’t grasp the nature of the technology. They believed we made too many unrealistic demands regarding what product functionality could be developed and at what cost. The business folks thought the engineers were unnecessarily vague in their time line and cost estimates (’It’s done when it’s done’ always justifiably infuriates managers who need to stick to a budget)” (p. 138). (Clearly both sides here are screwed up when the CTO says “it’s done when it’s done”; perhaps true, but the opposite of diplomatic in a startup.) Reading between the lines, I would have to say, as well, that seeing the CTO as a non-manager is highly problematic in a web-based product. I.e., the CTO should be more of a peer and less of an underling. Casnocha knows some of this, and says: “Technology start-ups take note: when a programmer isn’t on the founding team, it is difficult to find engineers who are both high-quality and affordable” (p. 139). But I think the problem is much deeper, and implicitly you have to read Casnocha as acknowledging that is was a mistake not to have such a founding CTO, because it affects all aspects of the business, not just hiring. In any case, Casnocha must be a good listener, because rather than accept the resignation of his CTO, he got everyone talking again, and made concesssions (p. 140), i.e., reorganized work to fit the engineering mindset.

There are many other good bits; as a teaser I’ll mention the thoughts of a 15-yr. old who wonders why his new COO would haggle over a few extra days of vacation . . . It will be interesting to hear how Casnocha will read his own book in twenty-five years.

Start-Up CTO Bookshelf

Each grade is on a 100-scale; 75 is a C, 85 a B, 95 an A, 100 and A+.

My Start-Up Life:

Book category: Start-up stories

Impact: 80
Utility: 80
Authority: 85
Good story: 87
Reference: 75
Writing: 87
Humor: 85 (intentional, nut unintentional . . .)
Nudge: 75

Start-Up CTO Score: 82

We are coming up on the 10th anniversary of the publication of Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving the Web, so it seems appropriate to reflect on it about ten years later. Re-reading it now, it is striking how utopian it is. Berners-Lee ended the book on an incredibly hopeful note, talking about how the Web models the real-life web of human relationships, and there is a lot of stuff about how the Web will be about everything, and will be the vehicle for human/computer augmentation. It may be hard for you to remember it, if you read the book when it came out, but it finishes with reflections on faith, as Berners-Lee talks about his personal discovery of Unitarian Universalism which in his view “match[ed . . .] the objective I had I in creating the Web” (207). He saw Unitarianism and his practices for the Web allowing for “decentralized systems to develop” emphasizing the value of individuals and the common good (208).

I wonder what Berners-Lee thinks now? In the last chapters of Weaving the Web, we hear of many technologies sponsored by the W3C that, while they are everywhere, have hardly become dominant. Most images on the web are still GIF or JPG (not PNG), SVG is not available on all browsers (IE requires a plugin), PICS doesn’t seem to be in use, and P3P was a bust. The semantic web is still a project of the universities and startups (though perhaps it is about to explode, through simplified analogues such as microformats). Compared to the explosion of activity in the years covered by the book (1989-1999), 1999 to the present has represented a refinement of the standards created before 1999. Perhaps the most significant triumph of the W3C has been the emergence of a mostly standard DOM on most browsers, and the advent of XML as the most important data-exchange standard; while its low point has been SOAP and a disdain for REST.

And it would seem to me that the idea that the Web emphasizes the value of the individual and the common good is contested on all sides.

Still, the book has significant high points and sections that deserve re-reading today. Throughout the book, there is a critical drumbeat around the failure of browsers to provide an easy means to edit an arbitrary page, which is still a huge gap. In Berners-Lee’s view, the whole point of the Web client was to provide for both reading and creating content. Nowadays, content creation has largely been relegated to hosted apps, and those apps rarely respect nicely the idea of the URI, which Berners-Lee considered the most important standard element of the Web, ahead of HTTP and HTML (p. 36). (The idea that the Internet should balance production and consumption of content was everywhere in the late 90s — you also saw it in Negroponte’s Being Digital [1995], where he strongly advocated having the same bandwidth upstream and downstream to facilitate home video production and transmission.)

Other fascinating areas where Berners-Lee is prescient regard “code” and net neutraility. He agonizes over the tension between human-made laws and the protocols of code (pp. 123-124) — it is almost as though he is writing the brief for Lawrence Lessig’s later work on the real-world primacy of “code” in dictating how things (really) work in society. Regarding net neutrality, Berners-Lee is an absolutist, and provides the core reasons for preventing companies from making certain types of content privileged on their public networks (p. 130).

The last thing I would want to say about the experience of re-reading this book is that the core structure of the web is still pretty basic compared to the visions of hypertext from the 1960s and 1970s. Anyone who has read Ted Nelson knows that he was onto something when he advocated micro-payments as a part of the core infrastructure of hypertext systems. We still don’t have decent micro-payments. Another gap is around transclusions: links are great, but transclusion remains a hack. But the book answers the question as to why the web is so basic in its protocols: It’s because the process of introducing these standards was inherently political, and the raw standards were about the most anyone was willing to adopt.

This is Dean Wareham’s story of his experience as the lead singer and principal songwriter of two of indie rock’s greatest bands, Galaxie 500 and Luna. It’s a memoir told in historical sequence, and seems to pretty honest (for a lead singer/songwriter . . .) about the joys and miseries of collaboration in music. If you have even passing interest in either of those two bands, you must read this book. If you’re interested in indie rock from the 80s and 90s, you’ll enjoy it as well; he relates provocative stories about Damon and Naomi (the rhythm section, and much more, for Galaxie 500 and beyond), the producers Kramer and Tony Visconti, the scenester Terry Tolkin, and many others. It’s also a good read if you’ve wanted proof of intelligence out there in rock world. It’s well written, and frequently droll. Wareham has a nice stylistic tic of deflating a phony with the final sentence in a paragraph:

Neil Hagerty of Pussy Galore was hanging around during our sound check. I’m not sure what he was doing at CBGB at five in the afternoon, but he seemed to be out of it on smack. His eyes were pinned and he stood by the side of the stage, scratching his legs and telling about the suede pants that he had picked up on the street for $5. Admittedly, that is a very good price for suede pants. (p. 58)

For each band there is a narrative arc from inception though self-discovery and self-knowledge, down to acrimony, depression, and boredom. A parallel story is how it has become increasingly hard since the 80s to stick out from the crowd even if your band is great, and to make any decent money — Wareham tells this story with frequent acknowledgement that with the advent of digital music downloads, you just can’t get the big advances anymore. And by “big advance,” we mean: Big enough to live without constant touring. There are incidental comments along the way about the awful economics of rock nowadays: For instance, clubs will ask for a cut of t-shirt sales (see pp. 290-291) . . . Now that’s sick and greedy. There are loads of stories here about hotels and clubs all over the world, drugs, people lost all along the way: I’ve read a lot of rock books and Wareham’s story of the routinization of road pleasures is perhaps the best. Wareham is good, too, about recovering details that were doubtless hugely significant in their moments: E.g., the relative merits of a Dodge Dart vs. a Datsun B-210.

A fair amount of the book is devoted to mentions of the decline of his marriage and his affair with Britta Phillips, a latter-day bass player for Luna; now, after Luna, Wareham is half of Dean and Britta. I won’t spend much time on that here, but the emotional story is a bit thin for a memoir. Balancing this thinness, though, are copious quotes from the songs. So when you’re wondering whether Wareham felt much about anything or anyone, it is worth pondering the lyrics he quotes near these scenes (which Wareham discusses on p. 259). Or, perhaps obviously, the true emotional story is about the “family romance” of being in a band: Wareham represents the two other band members in Galaxie 500 as acting like his parents (and thus making him yearn for a certain kind of freedom from them), and later acknowleges that break-up, and that of Luna, as a kind of divorce.

There’s also some rock wisdom in these pages:

Good drummers tend to come from the suburbs. They have a distinct advantage–garages, basements, extra rooms–all things that are in short supply in New York City. (p. 119)

Towards the end:

You can generally add a star to the review if you announce that the band is breaking up. (p. 283)

I read this fine book on a plane to Arizona without access to my tunes; but the narrative is so compelling that I could hear them in my mind as I read.