5.0 out of 5 stars Too costly, consider reading the reviews and Inside the Book, December 21, 2012
Over-priced at $99, this book makes one simple point: economists are the sluts of the social sciences, in the pay of the wealthy, and they have prostituted their profession in the most indecent obscene manner possible. Others have made similar points, what we really have here are two forms of crime — petty crime — economists kneeling for hand-outs — and master crime — financiers looting entire national economies just because they can — because government has no integrity, the media (once capable of investigative journalism) has no integrity, and the academy (economists and everyone else) has no integrity.
There are some excellent reviews of the book outside Amazon, I am stunned to not see any here.
William Greider's book makes the telling point that while physical assets have appreciated five times in the past couple of decades, financial derivatives appreciated seventeen times. We now know that Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Citi-Bank, Bank of America, and a whole slew of other banks are guilty of LIBOR rate fixing, global-level fraud and theft, and so on. Yet no one has gone to jail except in Iceland.
4.0 out of 5 stars Serious Economics Poorly Presented, December 14, 2012
I have no doubt that among economists this book merits all the praise it has received; I do NOT recommend it for the general reader, indeed, I do not recommend it at all unless it is assigned reading, in which case my recommendation is moot. The book is neither as radical as its title pretends, nor as detailed as I was hoping for–how, exactly, do the one billion poor spend their 99 US cents a day? I bought the book because I am thinking about how to persuade Sir Richard Branson that he should sponsor “The Virgin Truth” [one pager concept has been posted online]; go “all in” on all the Opens including Open Base Transceiver Station, Open Spectrum, Open Software, etcetera [topic of my most recent book], and give each of the five billion poor free cell phone access and free education “one cell call at a time” as conceptualized by the Earth Intelligence Network. For me, this book is a four and not light reading. All text, few charts, no lists, no comparatives, no visualization.
The authors take one really brilliant idea and then talk around it, and that is why they lose one star. The brilliant idea is that we really do need to understand at a micro level how the just under one billion extreme poor spend their 99 cents a day (the other four billion less poor live on $2 to $20 a day), and how they make their choices, choices that often reject tiny investments in prevention (chloriating their water, for example) with the result that they end of losing work and spending more on remediation after the fact. YES! I agree. They then proceed to answer, at best, 20% of the question.
The big take-away for me–I was absolutely delighted to see this smessage repeated throughout the book–was how a tiny bit of information can make a world of difference, both in the choice that an individual poor person makes, and in the eradication of corruption once detailed numbers are published about what *should* have reached each schoolhouse in any given district. In other words, and this is NOT the key point of the book, but rather my key point: without changing a single institution, without redirecting a single dollar, the simple implementation of an information transparency regime changes everything. Now THAT is a book I hope these two authors will write soon, and that book will probably join my 10% “Beyond 5 Stars.” [I read in 98 categories, just one of them fiction, access all my reviews and their Amazon pages by category at Phi Beta Iota, here are just two: Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design (206); Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class (253).
I have known Medard Gabel for close to a decade, and while disclosing that he is one of the contributors to the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network that I funded when I had money, I consider him, as the co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, and as the designer of both the digital Earth Dashboard for the UN and the digital EarthGame for all of us, to be in a class of his own. He is unique.
Medard Gabel is modest–the blurbs do not do justice to him or his work or the incredibly talented and imaginative individuals (not just youth, but mid-career professionals) that he attracts to this calling.
I have participated in two of his design labs and recommend them to one an all. Everyone enters with their own issue area (urban planning, energy, whatever) and halfway through they experience the “aha” moment (epiphany for Republicans)–everything is connected and NOTHING can be planned, programmed, budgeted, or executed without integrating everything.
As Russell Ackoff likes to say, what is good for one part of the system might be very bad for all the other parts. Comprehensive architecture and prime design–all threats, all policies, all demographics–are the future.
Other high-level books that I recommend with this one are:
Do Governments and Corporations lie, cover-up and maintain secrecy as they harm our planet and us? Joe Mangano’s new book Mad Science – The Nuclear Power Experiment clearly lays it out that they have done so for more than half a century.
This book is a page-turner, filled with useful information that many of us don’t know or have forgot. His chapter “Tiny Atoms, Big Risks” explains the various forms of nuclear energy in terms that anyone can understand, and details the harm that has come to all life on our planet as a result of nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants.
Among the many nuclear catastrophes that Mangano chronicles – from Three Mile Island, the Nevada and Marshall Island nuclear bomb tests to Chernobyl and Fukushima- is the nuclear accident at the Santa Susana site in Ventura County, close to Los Angeles, CA. Santa Susana is one of the best-kept secrets in the history of nuclear power. The Santa Susana site had 10 sodium-cooled reactors the 1959 accident spewed radioactivity, tetralin – toxic naphthalene, and other chemicals into Simi Valley, the Pacific Ocean and eastward that are still detected over a half-century later.
A near meltdown of the Fermi-1 nuclear reactor nearly destroyed Detroit in 1968. It was a sodium-cooled reactor, as were the ones at Santa Susana. Located at the western end of Lake Erie, a Fermi meltdown would have crippled or destroyed much of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River as well. As has occurred since the Chernobyl meltdown, in the southern lake areas of Belarus, fish and boats travel upstream as well as down-stream.
5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling Narrative–Could the Book Tour Spark a Revolution?, September 11, 2012
EDIT of 12 Sep 2012: I spent the night thinking about this book. Directly below [and now also loaded as a graphic to this Amazon page] are a graphic showing the preconditions of revolution in the USA, and the short paper on revolution from which the graphic was drawn Here's the deal: ample preconditions exist for a public overthrow of the two-party tyranny, but a precipitant (such as the fruit seller in Tunisia) has not occurred. Even though 18 veterans commit suicide day after day after day, this is hushed up. Occupy blew it–they should have occupied the home offices of every Senator and Representative and demanded the one thing Congress could deliver that would energize the public: the Electoral Reform Act of 2012. This book by Hendrick Smith, and the book tour, could be a first step toward mobilizing a complacent public. [search for phrases below to get right to them]. Don't miss all three graphics above with the cover.
Graphic: Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today
1992 MCU Thinking About Revolution
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I received this book as a gift today (I am unemployed and can no longer afford to buy books very often), and a most welcome gift it was. The author's earlier books were in my library, now resting peacefully at George Mason University, and I was quite interested in seeing what he makes of the mess we are in.
The book is a solid five. I would have liked to see a great deal more outrage, a lot more calling of a spade a spade (abject corruption on the part of all concerned), but that is me. The author has created a very compelling narrative that manages to avoid offending anyone in particular, and I can only feel inadequate in admiration for his balance. If I were to re-write this book, most readers over 40 would be dead of a heart attack by chapter four. On second thought, not killing the reader with truth may have its own special merits!
2.0 out of 5 stars Mind-Numbing Waste of Time and Money,September 2, 2012
I am *stunned* that any Comptroller General would sign off on this. In my 33 year government career this is the densest most meaningless compilation of words (no pictures, no figures, no timelines, no lists) of gobbly-goop I have ever seen (of course there are a great many such products from other government agencies I have not seen). If I were the Comptroller General, not only would I not sign off on this, I would consider permanent exile for the entire team responsible for this. It fails to enlighten or communicate — it is more like a “cover your ass” document.
In theory, this book is about independence of audits and the professional management of audits. In fact, this is strung together text, all of it making sense in isolation, and none of it useful to actually doing a real audit meaningful to We the People. This is a classic example of doing the wrong thing righter (Russell Ackoff).
The more I read into this the sadder I got. I have known for a long time that GAO, CBO, and CRS are creatures of a very corrupt Congress, and that Congress actually reserves the right to tell them what their assumptions (code for outcomes) will be, but until I read this I did not realize how disconnected the whole process is. Now I have to emphasize that I value actual GAO reports and I would never consider doing an internal executive audit without consulting both GAO and OMB (which does not do management, but you can at least try to find someone who's heard of the concept). What this book does is give me pause — if this is the GAO “foundation work” if causes me to wonder what else about GAO is so corrupt (in the holistic not making sense of the word).
This book is available free online at the GAO website. I bought it because it never occurred to me that GAO would produce something from the Stone Age, and for serious thinking, I have to have it in writing in front of me subject to annotation and hand-eye-brain coordination.
Here is the larger bottom line:
a) Congress authorizes and appropriates money based on corruption, personal, financial, and ideological — as long as Congress is getting its standard 5% kick-back, they will authorize and appropriate anything, from the bridge to nowhere to a stealth fighter that does not work as advertised, is unaffordable, and coated in toxins that kill the pilots stupid enough to fly something the USAF swears is safe.
b) GAO is only authorized to audit for compliance with the original corrupt authorization and appropriation. They are not authorized to blow the whistle on insane, unaffordable expenditures.
c) Within the Executive, taking NSA as a classic example, the focus is on keeping money moving and growing the pie because that is how the Executive creates more and more flag and senior executive positions, and that is how those flags and senior executives “pay forward” the reverse bribes that will get them follow-on careers with the contractors that will build any insane unafforable and generally inoperable (SAIC and Trailblazer come to mind) “capability” that Congress has authorized and appropriated.
d) When NSA is inspected from within the Executive, the focus is NOT on the why, on the cost, on the “fit” with any given strategy or other related programs, but on the allocation authority and whether NSA is spending the money as directed, never mind whether it works or not. This is one reason why I believe that both Inspectors General and Operational Test & Evaluation should be part of the Intelligence Directorate of any given Cabinet office, just as I believe that education, intelligence, and research must be asuthorized, appropriated, allocated, constructed, and evaluated as a whole.
It is with a grimace that I prepare to donate this book to the Oakton VA library. It is a perfect example of corrupt perfection. Argh.
Robert David Steele
INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability
5.0 out of 5 stars Helpful to Most, Can Be Summed Up as Integrity & Clear Feedback Loops,August 17, 2012
There is no question but that this book is a major contribution to the current dialog, such as it is. As someone who reads a great deal, I have finally come to the same conclusion as Will Durant, Buckminster Fuller, and Russell Ackoff:
INTEGRITY is the one word that matters. If organizations, including political organizations, have INTEGRITY, the nation prospers. If they do not, poverty prevails. INTEGRITY is about much more than personal “honor.” It is about being able to see the whole, connect the dots, achieve rapid constant open feed-back loops among all elements of the complex system, and so on.
Nations fail when education is reserved for the elite, and the elite lose their INTEGRITY. When the burden becomes too great and the masses rebel, they can either re-create the corrupt system they are bringing down, or they can branch toward a system of systems where INTEGRITY prevails.
