Author: Justin

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “Bankers Designed Banks to Blow Up”

Just watched a fifteen minute interview by Bloomberg of Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan). In the interview Taleb discusses the current crisis, robust systems, nationalizing the banks and the fallacy of using narratives of history to guide present-day policy/response.

Below are some quotes from NNT, which I’ve organized into like-nuggets of wisdom:

  • Looking at biology, things that survive have redundancy . . . we have spare parts, which is the exact opposite of leverage. . . . We have diversity and nothing is too big. Things fail early. . . . Banking is organized in a completely opposite way. . . . Complex systems have properties that banks don’t have. And biological systems have survived.
  • [We have an] Illusion of stability and then blow-ups are larger. Imagine if half-country was fed by one restaurant it’d be okay except one day people would starve.
  • Bad news travels immediately . . . This environment won’t tolerate the smallest mistake . . . I don’t know the system can allow for too much leverage.
  • People can invest in real things – they don’t have to invest in paper. . . .
  • What we have is a system of deposit where people buy a company, they borrow against it, and buy another company. . . . If that disappears we have less growth but it would be a more robust economic system.
  • The government is neither nationalizing the banks nor letting them break.
  • [With regard to banking,] separate the payment system from the risk taking system.
  • It looks like we have no control. The government has no control over what the banks are doing. The banks aren’t in control of what they are doing.
  • The press reports everything except the important stuff. September 18th . . . we had the run on money market funds and the government had to step in.
  • The situation is not comparable to the Great Depression. The situation is very different.
  • This crisis is not so much a Black Swan to me. It’s like saying you’ve got a pilot who doesn’t know about storms. . . . The Black Swan for me would be to emerge out unscathed and go back to normalcy.
  • We should be very careful when we make a historical analogy like the Great Depression because the world is not like it was in the Great Depression.
  • Capitalism is you let what’s breakable break fast.

Bloomberg also ran an article on the interview with Taleb, but it is spartan as far as quotes or insights from the actual interview.

From what I can tell, it seems Taleb views bank nationalization as similar to taking out plane hijackers. It’s an interesting, more palatable way to look at nationalization in that it frames the situation as one where the public will be harmed unless someone (in this case the government) steps in and takes drastic action.

Having said that, I don’t get the impression that Taleb is a proponent of long-term nationalization. NNT would prefer banking be structured similarly to a biological system where there are redundancies and fragile things “break early.” This system wouldn’t foster as much leverage and therefore would slow growth, but it would be considerably more robust.

This is more or less what I believe, as well. A free market is an organic, naturally forming system that is decentralized and redundant. It’s robust because market actions failing apart at any micro level will not break the entire system.

How do we get there from here? Good question.

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Grind Skills: Mastering the Mundane of Everyday Life

The Grind

How much time do we spend on the routine grinds of everyday life? From “Nine to Five” we’re engrossed in tasks such as navigating software, Internet research or managing email. From work, we commute home to find household chores like cooking, cleaning or laundry (or kids!). Even leisure activities like catching up on favorite websites, finding a TV show to watch or finding a book to read can have unseen, tangential time-costs. Every day we spend an immense amount of time doing mundane things that, while necessary, are not necessarily enjoyable. They all amount to our grind.

We resign to performing these little duties because they must be done. Unfortunately, the day-in and day-out repetition of our grind habitualizes our inefficiency, thereby blinding us to the way we do things. Our daily grinds waste our time and we don’t even realize it.

Learning Grind Skills

Given the above obstacles, how do we go about mastering the mundane?

One way to hack our grind is by inquiring about how others do things. Of course, this approach is problematic for the same reason we fail to see our own inefficiencies — unless they have actively worked to improve their grind, our efficient friends and coworkers usually don’t realize their own efficiencies. Everyone assumes the way they do it is the way everyone else does it even as this is often not the case.

Okay, so what can you do?

Be more aware

Simply suspecting there might be a better way to do things, you’re more likely to catch an offhand comment or pick up on someone else’s behavior. From there, you can inquire further as to what they mean and/or what they are doing.

By way of example, fresh out of school, I worked in public accounting, which required hours of work navigating spreadsheets via Microsoft Excel. I knew a few of the most common “hot keys” like those for copying/pasting, saving, printing, etc. It was only when I overheard one colleague asking another how to do a particular spreadsheet task via a keyboard progression instead of using the mouse that I realized my understanding of Excel was rudimentary. Just this incremental understanding amounted to an Excel epiphany. I soon was adding more mouse-less spreadsheet mastery to my repertoire. Within a month I was amazing co-workers, people who considered themselves Excel gurus, at how quickly I could navigate and create a spreadsheet. My improvement was akin to typing 100 words per minute instead of the age-old “hunt and peck.”

Improved awareness heightens observation, thereby increasing the likelihood of accidental learning. The trick is in being aware of how you do things currently while acknowledging their might be better ways. From there, look for clues that others are accomplishing the same thing in a different manner. Be comfortable enough to inquire further, understand their methods and experiment with them on your own.

Amplify awareness through exposure

Surround yourself with competent individuals and observe how they do things. Expose yourself to people who think and act differently than you. This process can be uncomfortable if it breaks you away from your cocooned “routine.” Rather than be uncertain or fearful, look forward to the challenge of confronting the status quo. Exposure in conjunction with awareness can dramatically increase your chance of accidentally learning a revolutionary grind skill.

Practice

Mundane mastery can result from an excessive amount of experience. There’s only so much practice I plan to have folding laundry though, so this method of learning can have limited returns. However, for the tasks that you spend an enormous amount of time on, taking the time to investigate better ways to manage that grind should be a given. Learning these tried and true skills of mastery should then become your goal.

About laziness

Sometimes we know outright (or suspect) that there are better ways to do things but are too lazy to acquire these skills. I consider myself a lazy person, but even so, I have realized that the effort I put into learning a grind skill is a front-loaded cost that has monstrous long-term benefits. Just look at typing or even more basic — reading.

So what are some grind skills, anyway?

Stay tuned as I blog about the grind skills I’ve acquired such as staying on top of the blogosphere, email management and the aforementioned mastery of keyboard shortcuts (over reliance on a mouse) as applied to general software. If you can think of any grind skills you’d like to share, please comment or contact me.

There are more efficient ways to manage routine tasks, and if we can learn these “grind skills,” we can master the mundane and and find time where none before could be found.

Grind Skills Reading

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Confirmation Bias and the Internet

The internet is vast playground where every opinion is aired, fiction can masquerade as fact, and the answers to your most bizarre questions can be just a google search away. This abundance of cheap information and ideas is overwhelmingly positive even as there are latent problems.

One problem is that the internet can encourage and reinforce bias — like confirmation bias. According to wikipedia, confirmation bias is “a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and to avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs.”

Thanks to Google, we can instantly seek out support for the most bizarre idea imaginable. If our initial search fails to turn up the results we want, we don’t give it a second thought, rather we just try out a different query and search again.

Armed with this power to search, it usually doesn’t take long to find someone or something that confirms our bias. If you happen to be a blogger or have a website, you can then reinforce your own bias by by writing on the subject and linking to the support you found!

To wit, one of the first things I did in writing this article was search for “confirmation bias” internet, which led me to a cached page and then a quote from a WaPo article titled The Year of Living Gloomily. The quote snappily nails my overarching point:

I’m sure some of these stories are true, or true enough to satisfy an editor somewhere, but there’s something else going on here: It’s what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” That’s the human tendency to seek out only facts that fit what we already know to be true while downplaying or ignoring contradictory evidence. As Mark Twain is said to have quipped, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

People have always been prone to confirmation bias, but the Internet amplifies the phenomenon since we need not look far to confirm our particular bias. It’s always a click away.

By making the search for confirmation so easy — a mere “click away” — the internet rapidly exacerbates bias.

It happens just like that.

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reading

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
It took me a shamefully long time to complete A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson — multiple months, in which I even put it down for long periods of time and read other books (For shame!).

The book is a monstrous undertaking that serves as an overview of all time (going back to the Big Bang and advancing to the present), covering all areas of science in the process.

Though an educational read, the book can drag on at times. One unexpected gem Bryson embeds in this book is in his ability to depict the discoverers and scientists as flawed, sometimes eccentric, often under-(if at all)-appreciated human beings. On one level, it is empowering to realize what amazing discoveries were made by self-taught, self-made scientists. Nowadays, it seems you have to go to school for half your life to study a subject and maybe publish a paper that is important outside the narrow niche of your own subject. This hasn’t always been the case, and Bryson illustrates that truth wonderfully.

This idea is what stuck with me the most. Degrees don’t make for original thought or observation. In conjunction with having read Gary Taubes’ Good Calories Bad Calories, I’m reminded that scientists can often get so caught up within their narrow focus that they fail to string together bigger ideas. We’d do well to remember that discovery, observation and original thinking springs from following our own interests even as we don’t know where they’ll lead and even if they are obscure and boring to most everyone else!

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Future Imperfect by David D. Friedman


Future Imperfect by David D. Friedman
Plowed through Future Imperfect by David D. Friedman during my last week in India. David Friedman is a legal scholar, economist, anarchist and cook, who happens to the be son of the late, great Milton Friedman. I’ve previously read DDF’s Machinery of Freedom and Law’s Order. I also subscribe to DDF’s blog, the blandly titled Ideas. Future Imperfect is an overview of a slew of emerging technologies that could drastically change (or already are changing) our lives. From bio-tech, cloning, nano-tech and life extension to encryption, virtual reality and even space elevators, Friedman covers a lot of ground.

It’s a fun read that is actually available for free as an ebook (by download) compliments of DDF. You’ll have to find the link though as I bought the book. I’m old school like that I guess.

A fun, exciting, and sometimes troubling read into any number of possible futures for humanity, I heartily recommend Future Imperfect. I also recommend Friedman’s other non-fiction works (Harald wasn’t my cup of tea) as they are all eye-opening, paradigm-shifting and excellent.

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The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Read The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (UHG2G) by Douglas Adams while abroad for three weeks in India.

The UHG2G is five books by Adams all follow our human protagonist Arthur Dent along his adventures with Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and other fun characters (like Wonko the Sane) as they travel around the universe in seemingly impossible improbable (I.e. via the Improbability Drive powered spaceship) ways.

The book is a science-fiction classic with a cult-like following. I remember all my nerdy peers reading it in middle school. Somehow I managed to miss it then. I’m finally catching up a full lifetime (as I was 14 then) later.

The UHG2G was a great book to take with my on vacation as its dense, humorous, adventurous and sort of about traveling. Even as absurd as the situations are within the various books in the UHG2G, Adams has a great way of storytelling that prods the imagination in wonderful ways. I have to recommend it for nothing other than its unavoidable connection to all other science-fiction and its dry, ridiculous humor.

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Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk

Just read my third Chuck Palahniuk book Rant, which is an “oral biography” of a rabies-infected, super-messiah named Buster Casey (nicknamed “Rant”) who lives in a dystopic future where people plug-in to “boost peaks” (like watching a movie for all the senses), something that reminded me of The Matrix. In this dystopia there is a cultural dichotomy of “Daytimers” and “Nighttimers” that has been established to help deal with overpopulation — both groups coexist in the same space but never together (i.e. night and day). For fun nighttimers go “party crashing” whereby they tag other party crashers cars by bumping into them. A whole culture emerges out of this game.

A repeat theme of Rant from other Palahniuk books is rebellion against the self-imposed quarantining and numbing of humanity. Like in Fight Club, there’s this sense of despair over the loss of experiencing anything real. Crashing cars into each other de-isolates us. Self-inflicting spider bites (And other nasty critter bites) makes us feel alive even as we experience the pain. “Boosted peaks,” which are akin to heightened vicarious life-experiences as “produced” by others, are fought by the protagonist Rant as he spreads rabies (he may or may not be doing this intentionally). Rabies seems to inhibit anyone from boosting peaks.

All of the themes presented in Rant seem pertinent to our modern angst-ridden times. Palahniuk is a unique writer even as his characters seem a bit too similar at times (similar in their extreme strangeness perhaps), and sometimes his writing makes me feel downright dirty. Regardless, I’ve enjoyed everything of his I’ve read thus far.

A note on the book’s style — it is written as though you are hearing the various characters talk to you about Rant, their experiences with him, Party Crashing, etc. I enjoyed this style as it had a nice pacing and it made for an interesting, if not somewhat jarbled, storyline. Overall, even at only 300 pages, there is a lot that happens (and a lot to absorb), making Rant one of those books I could easily find myself rereading one day.

I definitely recommend it. And I hear Palahniuk plans to write two more installments that deal with Buster “Rant” Casey in the next two or three years. I look forward to them.

Update:

My brother-in-law, Michael Van Cise, who turned me onto Rant had this to say about the book:

In Rant, Chuck Palahniuk takes the reader on a wild ride where it’s difficult to separate reality from fiction. The title character, Rant Casey, intentionally infects himself with the venom of poisonous spiders, snake venom, and the rabies virus. Because he’s a sort of hybrid being/super-human (or at least a supercarrier of disease) he can survive the toxins and disease and uses the side-effects of the disease or toxin to his advantage. Specifically, spider venom gives him sustained erections and the rabies virus takes away his ability to “boost” (an escape undergone by characters in the book via a port located at the back of their necks through which they boost transcripts of things others have recorded), which enables him to achieve the mental state necessary to travel through time. The book could be categorized as science fiction given the ports as well as the fact that urban society is divided into daytimers and nighttimers. As with Fight Club and Choke, Chuck Palahniuk introduces medical knowledge and other factual information which is stimilating, whether or not its true (and I have not tried to verify the facts, medical or historical, though I assume some are created/fictional and others are actual). If you like Fight Club, you’ll enjoy Rant. There are revelation moments in the storyline of Rant just as in Fight Club. The story builds on itself, tidbits of information being released to the reader through various characters though things are more unresolved at the end of Rant than in Fight Club.

I’ll also note that Michael mentioned liking this book best amongst the three or four (?) Palahniuk books he’s read, which include Fight Club, Diary, and Choke. I happen to agree though I will never be able to say what a virgin reading experience of Fight Club would be as, like most people, I saw the movie first.

Update 2 (Today is Feb 21): More from Michael:

I was listening to NPR (www.pba.org) this morning and heard Garrison Keillor and his “Writer’s Almanac.” Today is Chuck Palahniuk’s birthday.

First, it appears I’ve been pronouncing his name wrong. Keillor pronounced it “puh LAH nik” (rhymes with “colonic”), as opposed to how I was saying it, like PAUL- uh- nick.

Apparently Chuck’s first novel, “Little Monsters” was rejected by publishers as being too crude (imagine that!). He had the idea for fight club after being in a fight, returning to work and having people pretend like they didn’t see him.

You can find the transcript of Keillor’s bit at writersalmanac.publicradio.org. [Y]ou can listen to it by clicking here.

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Good Investments for Bad Economic Times: Investing Amidst Uncertainty

A common question I get nowadays is “What should I invest in?” My best answer to that question is probably not what you’d expect.

My default financial response to this query over the past two years has been to go long on commodities, particularly gold, silver and energy, short the stock market, particularly financials and builders, and stay out of bonds and real estate.

Despite my default advice being proven correct as the months have gone by, getting the timing right on entering and exiting these positions has been incredibly difficult, if not downright impossible. Buy and hold has brought both pleasure and pain for commodity-bulls. Equity shorts have had to endure both the unpredictability of government intervention and market reactions to said intervention. That “timing has been paramount” is just another way of saying that luck has been the determining factor in investing success. And success has meant not so much whether you’ve made a lot of money, but more in how little money you’ve lost. I take solace in treading water in an environment where a 10% or greater annual loss in this market is a job well done.

As far as financial investment advice going forward, I maintain that gold, silver and energy, and commodities generally are going to be big winners in the next few years as investors swap paper assets for real assets. This thesis is built upon the reality that debt financing by governments is exploding, which will ultimately mean higher yields on bonds and running the printing presses on the shortest-term debt around, the Federal Reserve Note — a.k.a. the dollar.

The above advice is my best guess. Use it at your own peril.

Setting that question aside, there are irrefutably good investments that you can make in bad economic times. They require setting aside more of your time than your money. Since time is the most scarce resource you can spend (And your happiness one of the most precious assets you can buy), these investments are arguably exponentially more important than your physical wealth, anyway.

Good Investments

Family

Your family is a wealth of advice, laughter, entertainment, and support (Sure they can be a PITA, but focus on the big picture!). Parents love you even when you screw up. Siblings understand you in ways others can’t. And who doesn’t have warm memories of holidays spent playing with cousins or aunts and uncles? There’s no good reason family moments should be isolated to major Judeo-Christian holidays or the occasional birthday.

Keep in regular touch with your parents. They brought you into this world: you owe them the occasional phone call. Encourage them in their endeavors and reap the benefit of mutual support.

Call up extended family and make potluck dinner plans. Play games with nephews and nieces. Chastise balding uncles. Play card games. Eat food.

Simple pleasures spent with family are hard to beat. It doesn’t take much money to share a laugh and make a memory with your family, even if at first it seems like setting something up takes some element of work. The time-investment pays off.

If you are young and married, investing in family presents a huge opportunity for wealth: you can have children. Having a kid (or two or three) is perhaps the most fundamental, biologically-innate way to build wealth around. A kid is an investment in your future. Though I don’t have any kids to speak of, I’ve got a nephew and enough intuition to see a good investment when I see one. Of course, having a child is one massive investment of time (And money), but it is one that enriches parents for a lifetime. My powers of observation also note that people all around the world, at all different levels of financial wealth, are able to support children, so even in bad economic times, you can still make this pivotal investment.

Friends

Similar to family, friends are bastions of wealth that merely take investments of time. These days, with social applications like Facebook, it’s even easier to stay in touch and make plans with friends — even those you haven’t seen in awhile.

As for making new friends, check out meetup.com. I’m just getting into this site myself (I’m a bit behind the curve on this one!), but Meetup is a way to use cyberspace to meet people in real space. What more, you can find folks with similar interests to yours, attend a gathering of said individuals and potentially find a kindred spirit who shares other interests.

Pet(s)

Get a cat or dog. Pets are fantastic because they typically require only a marginal investment of time and money while providing an immense amount of love, entertainment, perspective (ever watch a cat or dog lounge in the sun?) and stress-reduction. Pets can provide exercise (dog-walking) and even boost self-esteem by reminding you that this cute furry being depends on your caring for them for their survival.

Cats (my preference though I like dogs, too) are likely the more cost-efficient pet from a time and money perspective. Having a cat requires:

  • Maintaining a litter box. This is the worst part of cat-ownership. At the same time, cats instinctively know how to use a litter box and can even be trained to use the toilet. Alternatively, if you can let your cat outside, they’ll prefer pooping in nature, which will drastically reduce your litterbox duties (pun very much intended).
  • Feeding regularly. Usually you can do this once a day and be done with it as cats regulate their own eating
  • Cleaning up fur/shedding.
  • Cat-proofing your world. This mainly means stopping your cat from destroying your furniture.

As far as breed, I happen to be big siamese/tonkinese fan as they tend to be personable, people-friendly, smarter and sociable. In other words, they seem to exhibit some of the more desirable qualities typically associated with dogs. I found Zeke (pictured above, in the youtube video) via petfinder.com. He cost me a hundred bucks to “rescue.” That was about seven years ago. I’m guessing he costs about a dollar a day to take care of, and that price is well worth it for the enjoyment he brings. Just as an example, when I haven’t seen Zeke in awhile, he usually jumps up from the ground for me to catch him in my arms at which time he licks my nose with his raspy tongue (Exfoliates the skin?).

I know less about having a dog, but caring for a dog takes a good bit more work as they must be walked and taken out to “do their business.” They demand a bit more attention/companionship, too, which is why getting a dog should never be taken lightly. Dogs also provide some unique benefits that accompany the additional cost of ownership. I don’t go into dogs here because I can’t speak from experience.

Suffice to say that having a pet can be an incredibly rewarding investment.

Health

You can invest in your health right now by taking a walk outside. This will not only get your body moving but it will expose your skin to the sun, which will boost your Vitamin D production. Mind, taking a walk and getting some sunlight is only marginally going to improve your health, but health is maximized by simple things.

If you are ready to step it up, getting a solid workout in is as simple as setting aside 30 minutes and doing some bodyweight exercises. For example, maybe you should try Craig Ballantyne’s Bodyweight 300 Cardio Circuit, which requires no more equipment than a wall, floor and watch.

Even simpler, run some sprints up a hill outside. Or just do some push-ups or lunges during commercials while you watch television. Add in some social interaction for some investment-synergies by playing Ultimate Frisbee, kickball or basketball with friends and family. Alternatively, go toss a ball with your kid or walk your dog. Unlearn the notion that exercise is accomplished in a gym, for a set period of time, at certain times of the day. De-complicate your health.

As for the other key way to invest in your health, eat real food that you cook in your kitchen. It’s cheaper than going to a restaurant, better for you (you know what you put in it), reaps creative benefits and if you’re up for entertaining, you can synergize again by inviting over friends and family.

If you’re not hungry, try fasting for 24 – 30 hours. There are health benefits to fasting (More on this here). If you’ve never fasted before, I recommend it for nothing more than the experience of purposefully breaking your eating habits.

Books and Knowledge

Reading a book is a cheap way to live vicariously, acquire knowledge on the cheap and amass immense quantities of accretive, intangible wealth. Gleaning just one good idea, paradigm or perspective from a book makes the hours it takes to find it worthwhile. Why is this? Because useful ideas are transferable and can be combined with other ideas to create even more useful ideas, theories, paradigms, etc. Ideas (and knowledge) compound your wealth in ways you can’t predict.

For just two books that may bring you some comfort during turbulent times, I highly recommend:

If nothing else reading allows you to reap the rewards of someone else’s hard work and research — even if you’re just reading a blog.

Summary

The above suggestions are just a few ways to make valuable, high-return investments in uncertain economic times. At the risk of presenting advice that may be obvious, I focus on the elements of life I can control, which happen to be the elements of life that I’d deem most fulfilling. I have little control over the economic or political environment. I can scarcely predict what will happen today, much less can I predict tomorrow or the coming months and years. I encounter immense uncertainty, a stochasticity of life, that I can either lament or embrace. By investing in wealth that is more intangible than financial, I am better able to manage the uncertainty of these troubling economic times, and no matter what happens to the stock market or our economy, I’m assured to live a rich, fulfilling life.

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Ants

(CNN) A picture is worth a few hundred thousand people.

Comparing the mass of humanity (as observed from space) at Obama’s inauguration to ants might be interpreted as criticism or distaste for our new President. That isn’t the case — I have no love for any President or politician (and any reader of autodogmatic.com knows my distaste for democracy).

Rather this is just inescapable observation. So many people flocking around a central hub to ring in the new ruler — it is plain bug-like. As for interpretation, I see it as a manifestation of the self-domestication of human beings, tragic. Restoring individuality — freedom — to man (finding a more favorable equilibrium between human nature and modern existence) isn’t something that can be accomplished easily, if at all. I don’t know many who even desire such a freedom, which makes me sad.

Individuals seem lost in the shuffle of our modern age: are human beings more like ants than lions? I’m afraid that may be the case. If I’m right, the consequences could be disastrous.

Update 1/23/09: Patri Friedman compared two pictures of mobs and got a bit of flack for it (one picture was from Nazi Germany). I get it. His point wasn’t to compare Obama to Hitler, but to point out the following:

So to me, the massive crowd at Tuesday’s inauguration represents part of the dark side of human nature. (as do lots of other things in life). The desire to worship and subsume one’s will to a leader, who is elevated about the mobs, who is perceived as superhuman and special and wonderful, and who will fix all our problems. To me, that is the opposite of the messy reality of complex systems, spontaneous order, individual preferences, and distributed systems that is life.

Emphasis mine. I couldn’t agree more, and I sense there’s a correlation between strong feelings of individualism and distaste for monstrous crowds. Mobs are the anti-individual even as they are nothing more than the sum of the individuals present. How do you keep sacred the indivisible parts — a mother, father, child — when all you see is a mass (?mess?) of humanity? What is lost in the mob?

A lot.

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Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
Just finished Starship Troopers, which I was first introduced to a number of years ago by the movie of the same name. Suffice to say that the movie is quite different from the book; however, I don’t think having seen the movie detracts from the book — probably because the book is much more cerebral than the battle-focused movie.

This was my third Heinlein read. My favorite thus far is still The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I’m sure I’ll still be reading more of his stuff.

One aspect of ST that I enjoyed was the picture of a world where government is controlled by individuals who are selected for via a grueling process of elimination. I’ve often remarked that the only individuals who’d make good politicians are those who did not want to be politicians. Said differently, anyone who desires to be a politician, wishing to control others, is the very sort of person I do not want to be a politician!

Heinlein solves this problem by creating a society that only allows the military to vote. In this society, those who make it into the military are all volunteers and are held to incredibly high standards where it appears the slightest mistake can be punished by flogging or even death.

It’s an interesting solution — one worthy of some thought. It’s also seemingly at odds with libertarian ideals (which are put forth subtly in TMIAHM). However, Heinlein’s solution is provocative.

Other ideas in ST include the nature of man and the nature of morality. Having recently read Speaker for the Dead, it’s challenging to conceptualize right/wrong with regards to race when there are multiple races throughout the universe. Is it “us” (humanity) or “them” (some other alien race)?

For such a short book (about 275 pages), Starship Troopers packs a lot of punch. I recommend reading it.