Sometimes Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, authors of Freakonomics and now Superfreakonomics, seem to have access to little known data that they are particularly qualified to interpret.  Other times they seem like Malcolm Gladwell-style writers who popularize interesting theories in a cheerfully superficial way.

They’re in the first mode, (I think), when they explain the shifting economic realities of prostitution, and in the second when they hold up geoengineering as the solution to climate change.

I like Levitt & Dubner in the first mode, not so sure about the second.  There was a big debate a few months ago about their climate change chapter.  Here’s some of it.  I don’t want to conclude about who’s more in the right, (I trust climate science, but not all its fervent supporters, and I’m not sure which is which here), but it seems to me that their attitude is misplaced.  “Why, the solution is obvious – we could just ..”  Geoengineering may be a nice approach, but it’s not obvious.

If Levitt & Dubner have an agenda it isn’t “climate change denial”, but a faith in cheap solutions over expensive ones, in clever individuals and companies over governments.  This is a theme throughout the book, such as in their chapter on seat belts.

What they’re really offering here is a lesson in economic insights such as “incentives matter” and “solutions have unintended consequences”, for people who didn’t know they were interested in economics.  That I like, and there’s more in their blog.

Life in general continues to suck in Deadhouse Gates, Steven Erikson’s second Malazan Book of the Fallen.  As a civilian living in or nearby the Malazan Empire, caught between forces whose ambitions leave no room for pity, you can expect torture, starvation, rape, slavery, crucifixion and death.  It has always been that way, and always will.

As a protagonist of Erikson’s novels, you can, in addition to all of the above, expect horrors on a larger and more metaphysical scale: Possession and/or being eaten alive by spirits, being made the unwitting puppet of dark gods, and various advanced forms of suffering available on the higher planes of reality you may stumble into.

Bleak, then.  Yes.  There are no particularly good sides here, just victims and perpetrators, and the story does not so much climax as let the threads converge and fade away, leaving the world better only in some abstract realpolitikal sense.  Evil, here, is not imposed by outside supernatural forces.  It springs naturally from human nature.  The supernatural merely extends this evil to a higher plane.  Even the mostly sympathetic protagonists play the game of destruction like everyone else, for their own understandable but tragic reasons.

If the bleakness doesn’t grind you down, you’ll find this a perfect novel.  Remarkably, with so many plot lines, the end is particularly good, and, since Erikson’s novels are mostly self-contained, you can read Deadhouse Gates by itself.

I wasn’t sure after Gardens of the Moon if I’d read more Steven Erikson.  Now I am.

John Campbell continues his balanced approach to Margaret Thatcher’s life in the second volume of her biography, condeming and praising her policies, accusing and defending her character, in a way that is subjective, but never partisan.

Thatcher was a conviction politician, and it’s her convictions that, to me at least, come across as her best quality: Her belief in free markets and individual freedom, her vision of an enterprising culture, where reliance on government services is an exception, not the norm.

From these convictions, she achieved at least two major practical achievements: Taming the unions, and privatizing major industries.  The British unions of thirty years ago needed taming.  They were anti-democratic blackmail operations, run by fanatics. And the state-owned industries of the time needed selling.

Campbell does a good job of capturing Thatcher’s downfall.  Her stubborn and arrogant style served her well in the early years, but it eventually made her a bad cabinet leader, who bullied her colleagues, and ended up isolated and friendless.

But neither her Tory nor her Labor successors reversed her policies. Thatcher’s electoral success shifted the centre of the political axis, forcing Labor to abandon socialism.  This has been a global trend, culminating in the fall of Communism, and if Thatcher does not deserve the full credit, at least she was one of the most visible champions of it.

As a politician she had flaws and strengths, successes and failures.  But as a symbol, a symbol of a principled approach to personal freedom, I believe she is mostly to be praised.

1997 can be seen as Mrs Thatcher’s greatest victory, which set the seal on her transformation of British politics.  She had set out, on becoming leader in 1975, to abolish socialism and twenty years later she had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.  By her repeated electoral success, by her neutering of the trade unions, by her privatisation of most of the public sector and the introduction of market forces into almost every area of national life, she – and her successor – had not only reversed the tide of increasing collectivism which had flowed from 1945 to 1979, but had rewritten the whole agenda of politics, forcing the Labour party gradually and reluctantly to accept practically the entire Thatcherite programme – at least the means, if not in its heart the ends – in order to make itself electable.  Neil Kinnock and after him John Smith took the party a long way down this road, without altogether abandoning traditional Labour values. The election of Tony Blair to succeed Smith in 1994 completed the process.  Blair was a perfectly post-Thatcherite politician: an ambitious pragmatist with a smile of dazzling sincerity, but no convictions beyond a desire to rid Labour of its outdated ideological baggage.  The rebranding of the party as ‘New Labour’ was the final acknowledgement of Mrs Thatcher’s victory. ‘We are all Thatcherites now,’ Peter Mandelson acknowledged.  She had not only banished socialism, in any serious meaning of the word, from political debate; she had effectively abolished the old Labour party.

- John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, Volume Two

The sad truth is that Mrs Thatcher, behind the hugely successful front which enabled her to dominate her generation, was a driven, insecure and rather lonely woman who lived for her work and would be lost when her astonishing career ended, as one day it eventually must.  In her early days her phenomenal energy, her single-mindedness, her inability to relax, to admit any weakness or trust anyone to do anything better than she could do it herself, were all strengths and part of the reason for her success; but the longer she went on, the more these strengths turned to weaknesses – a loss of perspective, growing self-righteousness, a tendency to believe her own myth, an inability to delegate or trust her colleagues at all, so that instead of leading a team and preparing for an eventual handover to a successor, the Government became ever more centred on herself.  There were bound to be tears in the end, and there were.

- John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, Volume Two

The padarox of Thatcherism is piquantly embodied in the history of her own family. Think back to Alfred Roberts in his Grantham grocery, the small town shopkeeper, patriot and preacher, husbanding the ratepayers’ pennies and raising his clever daughter to a life of Christian service, diligence and thrift.  Then look forward to the future Sir Mark Thatcher, an international ‘businessman’ posessed of no visible abilities, qualifications or social conscience, pursued from Britain to Texas to South Africa by lawsuits, tax investigations and a persistently unsavoury reputation.  Imagine what Alfred would have thought of Mark.  It is well known that Denis – a businessman of an older generation – took a dim view of his son’s activities. Yet for Lady Thatcher Mark could do no wrong. The world in which he acquired his mysterious fortune was the world she helped to bring to birth: the values he represents are the values she promoted. Torn between pious invocations of her sainted father and fierce protectiveness towards her playboy son, Margaret Thatcher is the link between two utterly opposed moral systems which reflect not only the ambivalence of her own personality but the story of Britain in the twentieth century: From Alfred Roberts to Mark Thatcher in three generations.

- John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, Volume Two

Having staked her political destiny on the recovery of the [Falklands], Mrs Thatcher could not subsequently admit to any doubts that they were worth it. Not noted for her sense of irony, she had no choice but to elevate the hardy but notoriously unenterprising ‘kelpers’ into models of British grit and rugged independence. She invested the homely names – Goose Green, Tumbledown, Fitzroy and Mount Kent – with the glamour of Alamein and Agincourt. Towards the end of 1982, John Nott visited the islands and gave the Cabinet on his return a graphic description of how cold, wet and dismal they were, ending ‘You must go there, Prime Minister’ – at which everybody laughed.  But Mrs Thatcher did not laugh. She wanted to see for herself where her destiny had been decided.

[..]

Mrs Thatcher reverently walked – in most unsuitable shoes – over the hallowed soggy terrain where ‘H’ Jones and other heroes had fought and died (she refused to wear wellingtons), while Denis memorably characterized the islands as ‘miles and miles of bugger all’ and sighed for a snifter in the Upland Goose. At one point, being driven over West Falkland, she spotted an abandoned ammunition box. ‘What a terrible waste!’ she exclaimed.  ‘For God’s sak, woman,’ Denis begged, ‘don’t get out and count them.’

- John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, Volume Two: The Iron Lady

The heroes in Stephen Hunter’s novels are sort of redneck Jason Bourne’s. Master killers at the bottom of the hierarchy who are screwed over by the higher-ups, and get even by changing the game from a game of politics to a game of close, personal violence.

Hunter’s best known novels (and his one movie) are about Bob Lee Swagger, an Arkansas sniper who unravels conspiracies with the help of his sniper rifle.  When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  Bob Lee Swagger has a sniper rifle, and three hundred kills in Vietnam, and solves his problems accordingly.

Hot Springs is Hunter’s first novel about Earl Swagger, Bob Lee’s father, who comes home from World War II to help root out the gangster scum from a lawless town.  His military experience comes in handy.  As always in Hunter’s novels, the battles aren’t just people shooting at each other, they’re battles.  Hunter puts great thought into his shootouts.  It’s one area where his novels excel.

And you just have to love the names.  The anti-hero of Dirty White Boys, a Bob Lee Swagger gone to the dark side, is called Lamar Pye.  Bob Lee Swagger, Earl and Lamar.  Aren’t these names fantastic?

I don’t know if Stephen Hunter is the best that macho thrillers have to offer.  I don’t read enough of them to say.  But when I do want to read one, he’s the author I pick up.

There’s always hope.  That’s the message a young ideologue might take from John Campbell’s Margaret Thatcher, Volume One.  If you have ability and convictions, and if you’re willing to play the game of consensus politics for about three decades, and if you’re lucky, and if you know how to use that luck, then you can actually make a difference.

I suspect most people who enter politics want to become the Thatcher of their party.  Someone who plays ball with the political establishment while they must, but are able to keep their actual convictions intact, locked away until the day when they’re the one in charge.  In most cases those convictions are eventually watered out, corrupted or thwarted.  Thatcher used hers to reshape the political landscape.

Campbell doesn’t particularly like Thatcher’s convictions, which were gut-level rather than intellectual.  What he does admire is her total dedication to her profession.  Like other woman pioneers she had to work harder than men to be acknowledged, but the hard work paid off with an unmatched command of the tedious details of politics.  It was obligatory during Thatcher’s early years in Parliament for other M.P.’s to refer condescendingly to her “charm”.  Later .. not so much.

Volume One ends with Thatcher on the steps of Number 10 Downing Street, quoting Francis of Assisi. Campbell points out that the prayer she quoted was not quite as uncharacteristically humble as many took it to be:

Where there is error, may we bring truth.

Where there is doubt, may we bring faith.

The work the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center did in the 1970′s is legendary.  That means that some of the stories about it aren’t true.  It’s true that they either invented or contributed significantly to the technologies that would later become part of the PC revolution: The laser printer, the visual user interface, desktop publishing, local networks, object-oriented programming and video animation.

And it’s true that Xerox failed to use these inventions to launch the PC market, as companies like Apple, IBM and Microsoft would eventually do.  But Michael Hiltzik writes in Dealers of Lightning that it’s not true that Xerox never made any money of PARC.  The laser printer became hugely profitable.  It just took a while to convince management that it was worth launching.

Xerox PARC lived apart from Xerox proper, separated by both geographical distance and cultural distance.  PARC had the smartest and most far-seeing people in the field of computing.  Xerox had a cautious corporate culture, and a vague sense that maybe it ought to invest some of its profits into computer research.

It wasn’t a good match.  But it’s too simple to say that if Xerox hadn’t fumbled, the unborn PC market would have been theirs for the taking.  Success in computing is difficult, and often short-lived.  Apple and Microsoft both got started with ideas from Xerox, but the fact that these companies are still relevant today, 30 years later, is because they’re still making great stuff – and because they’ve been very lucky. Xerox wasn’t.  They just had some damn fine ideas.