Category: Books

Disney Stories Give Happiness to the Poor

(p. 1B) If the arts community had been blossoming in north Omaha when Adrienne Brown-Norman was growing up there in the 1960s and ’70s, she may never have moved to California and become a senior illustrator for Disney Publishing Worldwide.
. . .
“Of course, though, I would not ever have met Floyd.”
That would be her husband, Floyd Norman, the now-legendary first African-American artist at Walt Disney Studios.
Floyd Norman, 82, began working for Disney in 1956 and was named a Disney Legend in 2007.
. . .
The Normans recently collaborated with legendary songwriter Richard Sherman (“Mary (p. 5B) Poppins”) on a picture book called “A Kiss Goodnight.”
The book tells the story of how the young Walt Disney was enchanted by fireworks and subsequently chose to send all of his Magic Kingdom guests home with a special kiss goodnight of skyrockets bursting overhead.
. . .
Walt Disney later picked Norman to join the team writing the script for “The Jungle Book.” Disney had seen Norman’s gags posted around the office and recognized a talented storyteller.
“I didn’t think I was a writer, but the old man did,” Norman said. “Then I realized that maybe I am good at this.”
Norman named “The Jungle Book” as his favorite project, because he worked alongside Disney.
. . .
“What I learned from the old man was the technique of storytelling and what made a movie work,” Norman said.
“I had an amazing opportunity to learn from the master. If you were in the room with Walt, it was for a reason. There are a lot of people who wanted to be in that room but didn’t get an invitation.”
. . .
One day at the studio the Normans recall pausing to watch the filming of “Saving Mr. Banks,” the story of Disney’s quest to acquire the rights to film “Mary Poppins.” Norman had worked on the movie and was interested in seeing Tom Hanks’ portrayal of his old boss.
“Tom Hanks rushed from his trailer in full costume to meet Floyd, shouting, ‘Where is that famous animator?’ ” Brown-Norman said. “You don’t expect a man like Tom Hanks to come running up. Then Tom wouldn’t let us leave. He wanted to know more about Walt, and if he was getting it right.”
. . .
“What I enjoy is the love of Disney that made so many people happy,” [Floyd Norman] said. “Maybe they were poor. Maybe they were in a bad home, but they tell me Disney stories gave them an escape. They gave them happiness, and that’s what I like.”

For the full story, see:

Kevin Cole. “Legendary Animator Spread Love of Disney.” Omaha World-Herald (Mon., Aug. 7, 2017): 1B & 5B.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “During Native Omaha Days, Disney’s Floyd Norman and Adrienne Brown-Norman reflect on careers.”)

The book mentioned above, co-authored by Sherman (and illustrated by the Normans), is:
Sherman, Richard, and Brittany Rubiano. A Kiss Goodnight. Glendale, CA: Disney Editions, 2017.

Illegal Immigration Hurts Low-Wage U.S. Workers

(p. C1) Research published a decade after the Mariel boatlift, as well as more recent analyses, concluded that the influx of Cuban migrants didn’t significantly raise unemployment or lower wages for Miamians. Immigration advocates said the episode showed that the U.S. labor market could quickly absorb migrants at little cost to American workers.
But Harvard University’s George Borjas, a Cuban-born specialist in immigration economics, reached very different conclusions. Looking at data for Miami after the boatlift, he concluded that the arrival of the Marielitos led to a large decline in wages for low-skilled local workers.
. . .
(p. C2) Dr. Borjas, who left Cuba in 1962, when he was 12 years old, has long challenged the idea that immigration has few downsides. One of his studies in the early 2000s analyzed decades of national data to conclude that immigrants generally do push down wages for native workers, particularly high-school dropouts.
One Sunday morning in 2015, while working on his book, Dr. Borjas recalls, he decided to revisit the Mariel boatlift. He focused on U.S.-born high-school dropouts and applied more sophisticated analytical methods than had been available to Dr. Card a quarter-century earlier.
Dr. Borjas found a steep decline in wages for low-skilled workers in Miami in the years after the boatlift–in the range of 10% to 30%. “Even the most cursory reexamination of some old data with some new ideas can reveal trends that radically change what we think we know,” he wrote in his initial September 2015 paper.
. . .
Dr. Borjas has spent decades swimming against the tide in his profession by focusing on immigration’s costs rather than its benefits. He said that he sees a parallel to the way many economists look at international trade. Long seen as a positive force for growth, trade is now drawing attention from some economists looking for its ill effects on factory towns. “I don’t know why the profession has this huge lag and this emphasis on the benefits from globalization in general without looking at the other side,” Dr. Borjas said.
. . .
Dr. Borjas’s research, including his recent work on Mariel, has found fans on the other side of the debate. When he testified at a Senate hearing in March 2016, then-Sen. Sessions welcomed his rebuttal to Dr. Card’s paper. “That study, I could never understand it because it goes against common sense of [the] free market: greater supply, lower costs,” Mr. Sessions said. “That’s just the way the world works.”
. . .
Dr. Borjas welcomes what he calls a more realistic approach to immigration under the Trump administration. “If you knew what the options are, who gets hurt and who wins by each of these options, you can make a much more intelligent decision rather than relying on wishful thinking,” he said. “Which is what a lot of immigration, trade debates tend to be about–that somehow this will all work out, and everybody will be happy.”

For the full commentary, see:
Ben Leubsdorf. “The Immigration Experiment.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 17, 2017): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 16, 2017, and has the title “The Great Mariel Boatlift Debate: Does Immigration Lower Wages?”)

The book by Borjas, mentioned in the passage quoted above, is:
Borjas, George J. We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

We Are Happier When We Focus on the Future

(p. 1) What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation.
. . .
A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.
. . .
(p. 6) The central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications.
When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.
. . .
Most prospection occurs at the unconscious level as the brain sifts information to generate predictions. Our systems of vision and hearing, like those of animals, would be overwhelmed if we had to process every pixel in a scene or every sound around us. Perception is manageable because the brain generates its own scene, so that the world remains stable even though your eyes move three times a second. This frees the perceptual system to heed features it didn’t predict, which is why you’re not aware of a ticking clock unless it stops.
. . .
, , , there’s precious little evidence that people . . . spend much time outside the lab thinking about their deaths or managing their terror of mortality. It’s certainly not what psychologists found in the study tracking Chicagoans’ daily thoughts. Less than 1 percent of their thoughts involved death, and even those were typically about other people’s deaths.
Homo prospectus is too pragmatic to obsess on death for the same reason that he doesn’t dwell on the past: There’s nothing he can do about it. He became Homo sapiens by learning to see and shape his future, and he is wise enough to keep looking straight ahead.

For the full commentary, see:
MARTIN E. P. SELIGMAN and JOHN TIERNEY. “We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., MAY 21, 2017): 1 & 6.
(Note: ellipses added. The word “central” in the first passage quoted from p. 6, appears in the online, but not the print, version of the article.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MAY 19, 2017.)

The Chicago studies mentioned above, are discussed in articles in a special issue on “The Science of Prospection” in the Review of General Psychology 20, no. 1 (March 2016).

The commentary quoted above, is based on the book:
Seligman, Martin E. P., Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada. Homo Prospectus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Bill of Rights Is “Gutted” by Bureaucrats’ Administrative Law

(p. A13) Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution, says Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar and winner of the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize last year for his scholarly 2014 book, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” (Spoiler alert: Yes.)
“Essentially, much of the Bill of Rights has been gutted,” he says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School. “The government can choose to proceed against you in a trial in court with constitutional processes, or it can use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law. Our fundamental procedural freedoms, which once were guarantees, have become mere options.”
​In volume and complexity, the edicts from federal agencies exceed the laws passed by Congress by orders of magnitude. “The administrative state has become the government’s predominant mode of contact with citizens,” Mr. Hamburger says. “Ultimately this is not about the politics of left or right. Unlawful government power should worry everybody.”

For the full interview, see:

John Tierney, interviewer. “The Tyranny of the Administrative State.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 10, 2017): A13.
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date June 9, 2017.)

The book by Hamburger mentioned in the passage quoted above, is:
Hamburger, Philip. Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Human Species Is Highly Adaptable to Climate Variation

(p. A15) In “Evolution’s Bite,” paleoanthropologist Peter S. Ungar follows the stories encapsulated in our enamel-coated anatomy.
Mr. Ungar’s story isn’t so much about teeth themselves as about the sweeping tale of human evolution as seen through the mouth.
. . .
Unpredictability in climate and resources, Mr. Ungar emphasizes, has made us a species adapted to variation. Drawing from the work of researchers like Elisabeth Vrba and Rick Potts, he underscores how environmental shifts influence our evolution just as they have for other animals. The invention of culture did not somehow free us from nature. Our existence and continuing evolution are still influenced by shifts in climate and their effects. Humans didn’t become locked into just one narrow mode of life but rather became a flexible species as comfortable above the Arctic Circle as on the equator. “Climate change,” he writes, “drove human evolution, in large part by swapping out food options available on the biospheric buffet.”
This new story–that humans became adapted to the variability of the world rather than any one set of conditions–hasn’t had time to become pop-culture canon just yet. Images of Man the Hunter stepping out onto the savanna in search of big game still dominate. “The story used to be simpler,” Mr. Ungar writes, when it seemed that “the spreading savanna coaxed our ancestors down from the trees, and the challenges it brought made them human.” All the same, the mounting swell of research doesn’t show a slow and steady transition from a chilly Ice Age world to the warmer one we know today. Instead, Mr. Ungar points out, temperatures dipped and spiked in a haphazard pattern prior to our influence on the climate, having an overall trajectory that we can detect now but that probably would have seemed simply chaotic to the people and creatures living through it.

For the full review, see:
Brian Switek. “BOOKSHELF; Chewing Over History.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 31, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 30, 2017, and the title “BOOKSHELF; Chewing Over Humanity’s History.”)

The book under review, is:
Ungar, Peter S. Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Deregulation Can Stimulate Dynamism and Economic Growth

(p. A15) Various estimates suggest that had U.S. productivity growth not slowed, GDP would be about $3 trillion higher than it is today.
. . .
Many economists contend that properly counting free digital services from companies like Google and Facebook would substantially boost productivity and GDP growth. One of the highest estimates, calculated by economists Austan Goolsbee and Peter Klenow, stands at $800 billion. That’s a big number, but not big enough to fill a $3 trillion hole.
. . .
In his 2016 book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon contends that the current economy fails to measure up to the great inventions of the past, and that innovation today is more incremental than transformative. He has argued vigorously that the transformative effects of technologies like electric lighting, indoor plumbing, elevators, autos, air travel and television are unlikely to be repeated. Technological innovation, he argues, will not be sufficiently robust to counter the headwinds of slowing population growth, rising inequality and exploding sovereign debt.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has resurrected Alvin Hansen’s 1938 theory of secular stagnation. Morgan Stanley economist Ruchir Sharma has argued that a 2% economy is the new normal. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has repeatedly said that the growing share of social benefits and entitlements in GDP crowds out national savings and reduces investments required to boost productivity growth.
The growth dividends from disruptive technology often require time before they are widely diffused and used. To Mr. Gordon’s point, economic historians respond that the Industrial Revolution did not improve British living standards for almost a century. Likewise the productivity boost spurred by the transformative innovations of the early 20th century took decades to kick in.
In the short term, as companies try to develop online capabilities while maintaining a physical presence, some costs are duplicated.
. . .
It’s possible that economic dynamism and entrepreneurship are no longer driving the U.S. economy. Startups are being created at a slower pace. From 1996 to 2007 the ratio of new firms to the total number of firms oscillated between 9.6 and 11.2. Today it has dropped to 7.8. Existing firms do innovate and contribute to improved productivity, but the declining share of young firms suggests a less dynamic economy.
Concurrently, the most recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm that churn in the U.S. labor market remains weak across industries, regions and age groups. People are simply not moving or changing jobs for better alternatives.
. . .
The real debate is about policies that favor productivity and GDP growth. Predicting future innovation is hazardous, but deregulation and streamlined licensing requirements will facilitate job mobility. Tax reform that encourages and rewards investment should stimulate capital investment.
. . .
These necessary policy changes provide options for improving productivity and GDP growth. Waiting for the data debate to resolve itself gets us nowhere.

For the full commentary, see:
Brian Switek. “The Great Productivity Slowdown; It began long before the financial crisis, and it has worsened markedly in the past six years.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., May 5, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 4, 2017.)

The Goolsbee and Klenow article mentioned above, is:
Goolsbee, Austan, and Peter J. Klenow. “Valuing Consumer Products by the Time Spent Using Them: An Application to the Internet.” American Economic Review 96, no. 2 (May 2006): 108-13.

Socialized Medicine Seeks to Ensure “No One Does Anything New or Interesting”

(p. A15) Heart surgeons are among the superstars of the medical profession, possessing finely tuned skills and a combination of detachment and sheer guts that enables them to carve open fellow human beings and hold the most vital human organ in their hands. In “Open Heart,” British cardiac surgeon Stephen Westaby shares often astonishing stories of his own operating-room experiences, illuminating the science and art of his specialty through the patients whose lives he has saved and, in some cases, lost.
. . .
One theme in “Open Heart” is Dr. Westaby’s frustration with Britain’s National Health Service, which, he says, values saving money over saving lives. He grows frustrated as he tries to get the reluctant government-run payer to cover the costs of advanced interventions. There are other problems too: Dire situations often get worse, he says, because of treatment delays and poor attention to best practices, like administering clot-busting drugs after a heart attack. Medical directors, he says, seem intent on ensuring that “no one does anything new or interesting.”

For the full review, see:
Laura Landro. “BOOKSHELF; Priming the Pump; One procedure involved implanting a turbine heart-pumping device and screwing a titanium plug, Frankenstein-like, into the skull.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 14, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 13, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Westaby, Stephen. Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Geoengineering for the Timid

(p. A15) In 2012, a man named Russ George, working with the Haida people of British Columbia, tried an experiment. From the back of a rusty fishing vessel he spread 120 tons of iron-rich dust on the surface of the North Pacific Ocean. The result was a bloom of plankton, visible by satellite–and a quadrupling of the salmon catch along the coast of the Northeast Pacific. This may or may not have been a coincidence, but it was the intended result.
. . .
Far from being thanked, Mr. George was pilloried for failing to get permission for this rogue “geoengineering” gesture. A second experiment by German scientists in the Antarctic Ocean was stopped by the German government under pressure from environmentalists. A United Nations treaty–the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution–was changed to forbid “any activity undertaken by humans with the principal intention of stimulating primary productivity in the oceans.” This seems a strangely defeatist prohibition, given that a more productive ocean would not only feed more people (and whales) but also sequester more carbon dioxide from the air, through photosynthesis by plankton, potentially providing a self-financing way to prevent possible future climate change.
. . .
. . . Mr. Biello is a writer from Scientific American and is impeccably sympathetic to the environmental movement. The result is a book that explores an intriguing topic but lacks a hard edge or even a clear message.
. . .
Just in the choice of stories to tell, though, the book leans toward the notion that the solution to our environmental challenges will come from technology, and in that sense it is most welcome. Technical fixes are anathema to many environmentalists, but it has been obvious for some time now that innovation and adaptation are the way we will reverse or cope with pollution, habitat loss and climate change. By contrast, a retreat to some golden age of simpler lives more dependent on organic and natural resources is neither possible nor likely to be good for nature: Seven billion people going back to nature would leave nature in a parlous state. The way we will save the planet is by high-tech invention and prosperity, not low-tech simplification and asceticism.

For the full review, see:
Matt Ridley. “BOOKSHELF; Ruling Over Our Dominion; We are living in the Anthropocene: an era when human beings have changed the planet in ways that will be obvious in the geological record.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Nov. 17, 2016): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 16, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Biello, David. The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age. New York: Scribner, 2016.

“Unfettered Science, If We Have the Courage to Let It Unfold”

(p. 26) “How to Tame a Fox” sets out to answer a simple-seeming question: What makes a dog a dog? Put another way, how did an animal that started out as a bloodthirsty predator become one that now wants nothing more than a nice belly rub and the chance to gaze adoringly at a member of another species? In the late 1950s, a Russian scientist named Dmitri Belyaev decided to address this puzzle by taking the unheard-of tack of replicating the domestication process in real time. He and his colleagues took silver foxes, widely bred in vast Siberian farms for their luxurious pelts, and made them into friendly house pets. It was a deceptively simple process: Take the puppies from only the friendliest foxes, breed them and repeat. Lyudmila Trut, the current lead researcher of the silver fox experiment, who began work as Belyaev’s intern, along with Lee Alan Dugatkin, an American scientist and writer at the University of Louisville, documents their monumental effort in this sparkling new book.
Belyaev died in 1985, but the experiment is still ongoing, with 56 generations of foxes bred to date — a far cry from the snarling creatures that used to snap at the hands of their caretakers when the research began. The new foxes run toward people, jump on the bed and nuzzle one another as well as their human caretakers. Such a behavioral transformation was to some degree expected, since they were bred from the tamest members of their groups. Perhaps more intriguing, they also look more doglike, with floppy ears, wagging tails and piebald fur.
. . .
The book, . . . , is not only about dogs, or foxes, or even science under siege from political interests. . . . It may serve — particularly now — as a parable of the lessons that can emerge from unfettered science, if we have the courage to let it unfold.

For the full review, see:
MARLENE ZUK. “Fox and Friends.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., MAY 7, 2017): 26.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 5, 2017, and has the title “How Do You Make a Fox Your Friend? Fast-Forward Evolution.”)

The book under review, is:
Dugatkin, Lee Alan, and Lyudmila Trut. How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

“The Data Run Counter to Your Anecdotes”

(p. A13) “Shattered,” by campaign reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, narrates the petty bickering, foolish reasoning and sheer arrogance of a campaign that was never the sure thing that its leader and top staffers assumed. The authors, in a mostly successful attempt to get their sources to talk candidly, promised them that they wouldn’t be identified.
. . .
The juicy quotes would mean more if they were on the record, but mostly it works: You can’t pinpoint the identity of any one “top aide” or “close Hillary ally,” but the authors’ language leads you to believe they include the most senior Clinton advisers–Mr. Podesta, longtime Clinton confidante Huma Abedin, campaign manager Robby Mook, speechwriter Dan Schwerin, policy adviser Jake Sullivan –and probably the candidate herself.
. . .
Successful politicians must have a tacit sense of what voters want to hear and how they might be persuaded. Mrs. Clinton–in stark contrast to her husband–was never interested in that component of campaigning. You got the feeling she didn’t like people all that much.
Mr. Mook’s scientific “model” of how the campaign should run emphasized demographics, constituents’ voting histories, regional electoral patterns, and so on. When staffers objected to his directives, the authors record, the response was always the same: “The data,” as Mr. Mook at one point put it to former President Bill Clinton, “run counter to your anecdotes.”

For the full review, see:
Barton Swaim. “BOOKSHELF; Hillary the Unready.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., April 18, 2017): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 17, 2017, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; How Hillary Lost the White House.”)

The book under review, is:
Allen, Jonathan, and Amie Parnes. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. New York: Crown, 2017.