English

Most of the mainline reviews of Robert McCrum’s Globish – of which there have been so many so fast that I am in awe of his publicity people -- are missing what is fundamentally wrong with the book. Herewith one linguist’s take on this peculiar book, within which all evaluators seem to perceive a certain fuzziness, but few are catching that it is based on an outright error of reasoning and analysis – as well as an infelicitous volume of downright flubs.
McCrum starts with the well-known fact that English is now the world’s de facto universal language. Some months ago I spent a week in Papua New Guinea (long story), and found myself for the first time in a situation where English was genuinely of no use beyond hotel counters and university folk. The fact that I could have my first experience of this kind as a relatively well-travelled person of 44, and only in as distant and isolated a location as New Guinea, is graphic indication that the old days are gone. Berlitz books used to stage dialogues where Mr. Smith has to order food in German if he goes to Berlin – that’s now antique; the hotel clerk often speaks English better than Mr. Smith nowawdays. English is everywhere – or, closer to it every year.
But McCrum is taken with a notion that there is something about English itself that has gotten it to this point. He knows on a certain level that this is a delicate proposition, and early on, poses the question “Is this revolution a creature of globalization, or does global capitalism owe some of its energy and resilience to global English in all its manifestations?”
He only means this as a rhetorical sort of “question,” though, because deep down he likes the idea that English is somehow inherently handy, fundamentally “universal” as he puts it here and there. That is, McCrum is not just describing the English takeover – he wants to celebrate his native tongue. He gives it away with this money quote, oddly contradictory but serving as a gateway to the body of the discussion: “Language, it cannot be stressed too strongly, is intrinsically neutral, but it is no contradiction to claim that English – by virtue of its origins and history – is unique.”
But is it? In a way that made it particularly likely to spread? How is English “unique” such that when it was a cluster of divergent dialects we now term Middle English, spoken by a mere few million on a wet little island 800 years ago, we could have picked it out as ripe for becoming the new Latin? This is the argument that McCrum wants to make, but the fuzziness aside, he lacks the scope of data to seriously evaluate the point he’s making.
Never mind overall that a considerable proportion of the text is breezy recapitulation of English and American history with brief asides about implications for the development of English (or not – we get a good three pages on the Magna Carta when it was written in Latin). Reviewers are not making clear enough to readers that over half of Globish is not really about language at all. Globish reminds us that Henry V died of dysentery, but does not get to things such as whether or not the Founding Fathers talked like Masterpiece Theatre characters (hint: they didn’t, really).
And never mind the endless misinterpretations and downright solecisms. The Anglo-Saxons had “an oral culture, favoring understatement and wit” – I was unaware that understatement and wit were more likely among illiterates, such that literate cultures are more given to boisterous humor and slapstick. Or, apparently in Old English it was hard to convey “subtle ideas without the use of cumbersome and elaborate German-style portmanteaus like frumwoerc (= creation), from fruma, beginning, and weorc, work.” Oh – clumsy barbarisms in German like Weltanschauung, Dasein and Schadenfreude?
I’m afraid, also, that the Great Vowel Shift was not caused by increasing literacy (“Ah, finally some time to sit down with a good book ... hm, it’s time to start shaking up these damn vowels”), and most people acquainted with the mountainous literature on the Shift would be loathe to dismiss the oeuvre as “hocus pocus” as McCrum does. I have no idea what McCrum means in saying that Old English’s “irregular prepositional structures became standardized,” and last time I checked, Cornish was not Gaelic. The book is shot through with this kind of thing -- God knows how many false factoids it is spreading through the reading public.
But the central problem is that McCrum’s sense that English is somehow uniquely “direct” and “universal” and therefore well-suited to bestride the world is false. In two ways.
First of all, to the extent that McCrum is taking this from English being light on conjugation suffixes (in the present, just little third-person singular -s) and not having gender (no el sombrero for hat but la luna for moon as in Spanish), you can’t claim that this makes it easier for a language to be universal without looking at the fate of other languages. Russian started as a homely, unwritten Slavic dialect, but is currently spoken by 280 million people, speaking a vast array of indigenous languages natively. Yet Russian is murderously complex – three genders, verbs of pitiless complexity, assorted sounds that are tough to produce, squishy word order, unpredictable accent on words, and on and on. (Of those who have reviewed the book in big venues, I am aware of only TNR’s own Isaac Chotiner as touching on a comparison like the Russian one in his New Yorker review.)
Russians, too, are given to chauvinistic claims about their “great and mighty Russian language,” in which case one could posit that the complexity of the language makes it “mighty” as well as maximally clear. This would make, in the end, about as much sense as claiming that English has gotten around because it’s relatively easy to learn. Both English and Russian have spread the way they have because they were the languages that happened to be spoken by powers that happened to acquire vast amounts of territory.
There is a discussion to be had as to why England (plus America) and Russia have had such lasting influence – but the reasons are about sociohistory and geography, not conjugation. We know this because if there were any meaningful linguistic argument, England and Russia would neatly cancel one another out. Arabs, too, might be perplexed to hear that a language has to be easy – “direct,” as McCrum often has it – to be a vehicle of empire. As anyone who has tried to master it will attest, Arabic is a tough one for foreigners. Yet the region is unrecorded that scoffed “We shall not use this Arabic tongue, as it be too difficult on the tongue to serve as a language of conquest!”
Then McCrum errs in a second way. He misses that to the extent that geopolitical dominance and linguistic structure can be correlated, it’s in that the dominance causes the grammatical simplification, not the other way around. This was even part of English’s history – when Scandinavian Vikings occupied England starting in the eighth century, they produced Old English in a stripped-down fashion just as many of us have produced French and Spanish in classrooms. There were so many of the Vikings that kids heard as much English of this kind as “real” Old English, and in a culture with little schooling or media, this “funny” English became the only English.
McCrum knows this – but misses that it upends his paradigm. The Vikings didn’t pick up English because it was enticingly “universal” – they made it easier by picking it up. To the extent that McCrum may suppose that it was this that kicked off English’s “accessible” phase, we return to Arabic and Russian – universal in their ways despite being un-Vikinged. Sanskrit, Cree, Tagalog and other complex languages also seem to have gotten around – the whole construct McCrum builds just doesn’t work.
Meanwhile, the world over, languages are on the easy side because they happen to have been imposed on a lot of adult foreigners. The lingua franca in Papua New Guinea, for example, is Indonesian, which delights the learner in having no gender, no conjugation, and no Chinese-type tones. I was getting around after about 48 hours as a result, surely sounding pretty goofy but getting stuff done regardless – something you just can’t pull off in two days in Finnish or Greek. But that ease is no accident – Indonesian has been imposed on speakers of hundreds of languages of the Malay Archipelago for over two millennia. That kind of thing sands a language down. Anyone who today said that Indonesian is spoken by 165 million because of its “universal” and “direct” structure would have the cart before the horse in a major and obvious way. As does McCrum. You can even imagine a book on Indonesian taking this tack about Indonesian being destined to spread – which would sound, to Western ears, quaintly boastful and parochial. We would immediately suspect that it was the spread that made Indonesian so handy. There’s no difference with English.
Why does all of this matter? Because Globish reinforces some questionable ways of thinking about language. I’m not going to say “dangerous” for drama’s sake – just questionable. Inaccurate, frankly – in a way that ends up clotting up discussions about other things.
One is that a language represents a way of thinking, that to speak a certain language is to have your thoughts channeled in certain directions. People adore this idea – you know, such as that the Hopi language has no tense marking and reflects their cyclical sense of time, as promulgated by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. I have watched audiences audibly purr when a linguist suggests that something about the way speakers of an indigenous language put their words together suggests something about Their Way Of Thinking, such as one case where we were to suppose that a Native American group were especially fond of slurping and sucking on things!).
The problem is that this view of language just doesn’t go through. Whorf, for the record, was a fire inspector by day and apparently knew Hopi about as well as I know Indonesian, as Hopi has plenty of time expressions. There are plenty of people who insist that the Language is Thought idea is valid, but few have engaged the counterarguments, usefully summarized by Steven Pinker (I, too, have pitched in in this vein).
To be sure, there is solid work being done today by well-informed people showing subtle thought patterns determined by language. People whose language marks table as feminine are more likely to imagine a cartoon table as talking with a high voice than English speakers are (that one is from Lera Boroditzky at Stanford). But this is neither “culture” nor a “world view.” Any Spaniard we met who was going around thinking of tables as chicks, plain and simple, would be someone we’d cross the street to avoid running into.
There is some of this kind of thing in McCrum rhapsodizing about how English’s “transactions urge us ceaselessly to engage our imaginations, and express them, on a global scale.” I can’t say that I have ever felt my language that way. And I am quite sure I’d be reluctant to tell a speaker of, say, Turkish that his language encourages him to use his imagination less than mine does.
And what can potentially follow from this exaltification of English on the basis of accidents of its history is a sense that its consumption of the world’s smaller languages is somehow appropriate. Sure, McCrum understands the dangers and sorrows of how many of the world’s languages are dying at the hands of a few big ones, especially English. But from his text, a reader can come away with a sense that the language I am writing in is, in all of its “accessibility,” “universality,” and “directness,” not to mention its stimulation of the imagination, somehow foreordained to replace all of the less vivid, frustratingly indirect “idioms” hanging around out there.
To wit, there is, despite McCrum surely not intending this, a discomfittingly Darwinian cast to Globish. It reminds me often of old-timey books purporting to be about the Languages of the World in which “language” really means Europe, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and maybe Persian, Turkish and Hindi, with everything else – i.e. the other 6000 languages of the world – depicted as distant diorama figurines. If you really take in the awesome variety among the world’s languages – ones with only three verbs, ones with almost two hundred sounds, ones with only eight, ones where one word covers what we need a sentence for, ones where the basic word order is object-verb-subject, ones where there really are more exceptions than rules, ones with a hundred genders, and so on – then the idea that there is anything especially anything about little English becomes as hopeless as rhapsodizing over the aptness and universality of a squirrel. It may get around, but it’s just one thing out of many.
Between the fostering of the myth that a language can make a people imaginative, the encouragement of a sense that English is a “realer” language than others, and the endless booboos, Globish is inaccurately covered where the implication is that it is a legitimate argument shakily rendered. It is as authoritative an argument as a book I could write on how squid are the world’s coolest animals. It is, despite innocent intentions, a jolly misfire – and for reasons far beyond mere ones of form.

HUBRIS

The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris” (Harper; $27.99) belongs to the literature of humbling—a fact that Peter Beinart readily admits on its first page, where he describes a lunch of martinis and political gossip in New York with an elderly Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In the runup to the invasion of Iraq, Beinart, the wunderkind editor of The New Republic, had fastened on wings of superb confidence and taken to air and print in order to champion the coming war. By 2006, when he sat down with Schlesinger, Beinart had concluded that it had been a tragic mistake. Over lunch, Schlesinger suddenly asks, “Why did your generation support this war?” Beinart tries to answer with a dose of self-mockery and bland generalization. “Then [Schlesinger] spilled his martini, and for the first time looked frail. Waiters swarmed; I was off the hook. We never spoke again. Less than a year later, he died. But as one often does after flubbing a pregnant moment, I kept going over the scene in my mind, trying to formulate an answer worthy of the question and the questioner, something that convinced him I wasn’t a fool.”

The voice recounting this nicely observed scene isn’t the callow and insistent one of Beinart’s first book, “The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again,” which was published around the time of his lunch with Schlesinger. “The Good Fight,” with its hopeful title and dubious subtitle, appeared while the author was still falling out of the sky and struggling to regain altitude. A political manifesto based on a sketchy reading of Cold War anti-totalitarianism, the book assumed definitive positions, even as they crumbled on the page. The war had delivered a hard blow to Beinart’s thinking, but he hadn’t yet fully absorbed it.
For his second, and much better, book, Beinart turns to look back at the past hundred years of U.S. foreign policy in the baleful light of recent events. “The Icarus Syndrome” finds the ground littered with Peter Beinarts, lying amid the remnants of large ideas and unearned confidence. This is a study of three needless wars, all exemplifying a peculiarly American type of grandiosity: Woodrow Wilson’s decision to lead the country into the First World War, ending in the collapse of his vision for a postwar international order based on the abolition of force; Vietnam, where the doctrine of containment was stretched beyond the breaking point; and Iraq, where the pursuit of American global hegemony went to die. Each of these disasters was based on an oversimplifying ism—Progressivism, liberal anti-Communism, and neoconservativism—and each is characterized by its own causal myopia, which Beinart (who retains a fondness for categorical labels) calls, respectively, the hubris of reason, the hubris of toughness, and the hubris of dominance.
By now, these three episodes have been pretty thoroughly tilled, and Beinart—a prodigious reader with a knack for the right quote—relies heavily on the primary historical research of others, making (and claiming to make) no big original discoveries. You might not have known that, in the nineteen-twenties, many American leaders regarded France as a greater threat to world peace than Germany; or that John F. Kennedy once told a friend over drinks that the Vietnamese “are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point”; or that Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s first Ambassador to the United Nations, was such an ultra-realist that she insisted on trouncing the young children of a friend during a game of Sorry! But a reading of Margaret MacMillan’s “Paris 1919,” Ronald Steel’s “Walter Lippmann and the American Century,” David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest,” and James Mann’s “The Rise of the Vulcans” would already have given you a decent grounding in Beinart’s material.
“The Icarus Syndrome” is useful not for what it uncovers but for the patterns it finds in familiar events. Beinart is alert to the circular turns of the historical wheel (with a nod to Schlesingers senior and junior): “cycles of success leading to hubris leading to tragedy, leading, perhaps, to wisdom.” Since American life in the twentieth century was a nearly unbroken ascent to greater wealth and power, American leaders had to keep relearning the lesson of limits. Wilson and the Progressives came to power during a long and prosperous peace, passed legislation that brought a moral order to the brute forces of industrialism and machine politics, believed that international relations could be similarly rationalized, plunged into the European inferno of the First World War, and saw their dream of a League of Nations crushed by the more hardheaded Georges Clemenceau, in Paris, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, in Washington. The bitter peace of Versailles shaped the experience of the next generation—Franklin Roosevelt’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s. Having attained a more tragic and clear-sighted view of world affairs than the Progressives, these leaders established a more durable postwar order. But the years of ozio following the Second World War led the next generation—John F. Kennedy’s—to fear softness, crave challenges, and see every Cold War flareup as an ultimate test of will. The result was Vietnam. The wheel turned again; the limits of American power became all too evident, and none other than Ronald Reagan learned to live within them—getting a low-cost, morale-boosting win in Grenada that became a Clint Eastwood movie (“When looking tough was risk-free, Reagan played the part for all it was worth,” Beinart writes), then helping to negotiate the peaceful end of the Soviet Union. The fall of Communism led to more prosperity, renewed self-confidence, rising impatience among the sons to try out their wings—until George W. Bush, like Wilson, began to believe that American arms could usher in world freedom.
In Beinart’s account, those who get into trouble are comfortable, overweaning ideologues in love with a single big idea, largely ignorant of the world, and goaded by a case of “generational envy”—the politicians and intellectuals who “took ideas that had proved successful in certain, limited circumstances and expanded them into grand doctrines, applicable always and everywhere.” The book’s epigraph, from William Graham Sumner, is practically a renunciation of the kind of big-picture thinking that has marked Beinart’s career: “If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject.” Thus, the philosopher John Dewey dreamed that progressive reforms in education and economics could be transferred by means of a world war to the greater perfection of humanity. The bitterness of 1919 killed his faith in war, but not in reason and human perfectibility: Dewey became a pacifist, and when Hitler began to devour the world abstract doctrine led Dewey astray again—he urged Roosevelt to stay out of the war. The cautious and limited version of containment pioneered by George F. Kennan became, in the minds of younger, less worldly thinkers like Walt Rostow and—for a time—Arthur Schlesinger, a summons to global action. Reagan’s rhetorical call for an end to the Soviet Empire prompted second-generation neoconservatives, such as Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Elliott Abrams, to imagine that democracy could be delivered to the whole world by F-22s.
Wisdom belongs to older, battle-tested leaders: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and—most surprising—Reagan, whom Beinart sees as the perfect antidote to the distorting effects of anti-Communism: “The cold war ended, and Soviet communism collapsed, not because Reagan made America more frightening but because he made it less so; not because he learned the lessons of Munich but because he unlearned them, and helped the American people unlearn them, without surrendering their pride.” Among intellectuals, Beinart reveres those who got knocked to the ground young and learned to scale back their ideas to fit the size of American interests and capacities: the disillusioned Progressive Walter Lippmann, who lost his youthful idealism at Versailles, became the country’s leading newspaper columnist and, toward the end of his life, courageously denounced the war in Vietnam to Lyndon Johnson’s face; the disenchanted Cold Warrior George Kennan, who allowed his 1947 Foreign Affairs article on containment to be used by his colleagues in the Truman Administration as a rationale for worldwide struggle against Communism, then spent the rest of his career trying to correct them; the chastened Reaganite Francis Fukuyama, who, in 1989, audaciously pronounced history to be over, only to watch some of his colleagues later turn the idea into a philosophical justification for preëmptive war.
So Beinart has come to admire historical figures who might once have stood as correctives to his own facile brilliance—who have a deep knowledge of specific countries, a healthy respect for other people’s nationalism, a skepticism toward claims of disinterested morality in the conduct of foreign policy, and an aversion to war except as a last resort. Kennan once set out to write a biography of Chekhov; as Beinart dryly observes, “Bush sent a man to run Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, who had never before been posted to the Arab world. To grasp the intellectual chasm between American foreign policy toward the U.S.S.R. in 1946 and American foreign policy toward Iraq in 2003, one need only try to envision Bremer writing a biography of an Iraqi writer, or, for that matter, being able to name one.”

“The Icarus Syndrome” is history with an argumentative purpose. Beinart still thinks in the schematic frameworks of the editorial writer, and at times seems to have learned the lesson of useful disenchantment too well. In Beinart’s new-found realism, Wilson’s antagonist, Henry Cabot Lodge, becomes a default wise man, a believer in “realistic internationalism” (as close as Beinart comes to proposing a post-hubris ism), because Lodge recognized the fatal flaw in the League of Nations without wanting America to retreat into isolation. To raise Lodge (for whom the Versailles Treaty wasn’t punitive enough) above Wilson undervalues the importance of Wilson’s vision, and of aspirational ideas generally in international affairs. They can crash and burn, but go on to have a powerful afterlife. The generation that followed Wilson and succeeded where he failed was more Wilsonian than Beinart’s account allows. Roosevelt and his successors adapted Wilson’s legacy to their own postwar world, substituting the armed standoff of the United Nations and NATO for the visionary but doomed League of Nations; but they were not practitioners of Realpolitik who paid lip service to democratic ideals in order to trick the public into pursuing the national interest. As David Fromkin writes, in “In the Time of the Americans,” “FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and their contemporaries turned back three attempts to overthrow the European balance of power: two by Germany, and one by Russia. But that is not what they said they were doing and may not even have been what they thought they were doing. They claimed that democracy was defeating fascism and communism.” They may have been too fond of a “Wilsonian faith that world opinion would force other governments to walk a straight line,” Fromkin notes. “But the point is: that is the way they talked—and thought.”

Beinart’s portrait of Reagan as a “dove in hawk’s feathers” is misleading, too. Reagan kept U.S. troops out of a major war, but his proxy wars in Central America, Angola, and Afghanistan got hundreds of thousands of non-Americans killed. Perhaps because his subject is American folly, the fate of people in other countries tends to drop out of Beinart’s story. The C.I.A.-engineered overthrow of Iran’s President Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953, saddled Iranians with two consecutive dictatorships, but Beinart mentions this only in passing, as an example of how Eisenhower was able to carry on containment without another Korea: “Few Americans got killed.” With U.S. body counts a leading indicator of hubris, Beinart portrays Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon, after two hundred and forty-one marines were killed in a truck bombing in 1983, as a sign of “political brilliance” that helped his poll numbers—not as a catalyst for the spread of suicide terrorism through the Middle East. Strangest of all, Beinart completely omits the Afghan jihad, which, apart from its consequences for Afghans in the nineteen-nineties, fairly quickly ceased to be cost-free, even for Americans. After September 11, 2001, the Reagan doctrine suddenly appeared to be, like so many of its predecessors, just another reckless instrument for securing American interests and values.
“To some degree, foreign policy is all about deciding in which direction you’d rather be wrong,” Beinart wisely observes. He is at his most illuminating when he lingers on forgotten episodes that reveal how difficult it is to understand the implications of any event at any given moment—the extent to which everyone is a prisoner of past failure or past success. President George H. W. Bush’s invasion of Panama, in December of 1989, now seems hardly more consequential than Reagan’s splendid little war in Grenada. But, as Beinart reminds us, Panama became a dress rehearsal for the ideological battle over Iraq, and a key transition from the hubris of toughness to the hubris of dominance.
By 1988, America’s Panamanian client Manuel Noriega, who was on the C.I.A.’s payroll, stood revealed as a major figure in the international drug trade, and, at home, a brutal thug. Elliott Abrams, a mid-level Reagan official, began to push for Noriega to be overthrown; all it would take was a democratic government in exile and a small American force, which was certain to be welcomed in Panama as liberators. Admiral William Crowe, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was skeptical, and he thought Abrams a naïve fool who didn’t know the meaning of war because he’d skipped out on serving in Vietnam. This familiar military-civilian divide was compounded by a generational disagreement within the ranks of neoconservatives. Like others of his generation, Beinart observes, Abrams was convinced that democracy could swiftly be established in former autocracies, as had been the case in Chile and South Korea. But older neocons, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, still carried the “toughness” mind-set of the Cold War: stick by your friends, however unsavory, because evil can only be contained, not vanquished. Reagan was rhetorically closer to Abrams, but his aversion to high-risk ventures led him to side with Kirkpatrick and Crowe. In an unlikely turn, it was Reagan’s successor, the foreign-policy realist George H. W. Bush, who, in December, 1989, sent twenty-odd thousand troops—who were, in fact, greeted as liberators—to overthrow Noriega and install a democratically elected President.
More than the Gulf War the following year, the surprisingly easy success in Panama set the terms for the use of American force in the post-Cold War period. Dick Cheney, the Defense Secretary during the invasion of Panama, later called it “good practice,” “a trial run”—though he failed to draw any lessons from the widespread looting that came after the fall of Noriega. Many Americans began to expect wars to be short and painless, sweeping away bad regimes and leaving behind better ones. For neoconservatives like Abrams, Beinart writes, the meaning was clear: “Fukuyama had said history was on democracy’s side; now America was learning that through war it could speed history up.” Although Beinart was and still is a supporter of the “humanitarian interventions” of the nineteen-nineties, his account of Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo puts the emphasis not on what was achieved but on what was portended: the demise of multilateralism, overreliance on technological superiority, conflation of war with the advance of human rights, naïve optimism about war itself that uncannily repeated the illusions of Progressives of an earlier era. No war is all one thing or another, and unintended consequences are among its iron laws. Stopping genocide in Bosnia—which was supported and opposed by liberals and conservatives alike—was a crucial, though very belated, achievement of the Clinton Presidency. It also relaxed both Clinton’s and the country’s inhibitions about future wars.

As for the man whose blunt question prompted Beinart to write “The Icarus Syndrome,” Arthur Schlesinger occupies a somewhat ambiguous role here, which complicates the apparently straightforward warnings contained in Beinart’s three case studies. Schlesinger started his career as an early candidate for the hubris of toughness. In 1949, he published a Cold War manifesto titled “The Vital Center,” which, in its contempt for liberal soft-headedness, influenced “The Good Fight.” In 1958, he published an essay in Esquire called “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” arguing that the Eisenhower years had afflicted American men with conformity and ease—what they needed was a more virile politics. (Schlesinger was getting ready to join the Camelot team.) In a few years, a more virile politics sent large numbers of American military advisers to South Vietnam, with ground forces soon to follow. Schlesinger turned against the war in the mid-sixties, and, as Beinart points out, in every use of military force thereafter he saw the making of another Vietnam. Schlesinger warned of terrible consequences before the first Gulf War, counselled against intervening in Bosnia by invoking the spectre of a quagmire, and viewed the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 as a Vietnam-like exercise in futility. None of these concerns were entirely misplaced, but, taken together, they would have handed Kuwait to Saddam Hussein, multicultural Bosnia to Serb fascists, and Afghanistan to the medieval Muslim rulers who had given Osama bin Laden a home. The hubris of youthful toughness yielded to the hubris of knowing better. Schlesinger, like Dewey, took the meaning of one huge tragedy as an answer to all subsequent questions. One of Beinart’s targets is the limited usefulness of historical analogies. In American foreign-policy circles, there are basically two: Munich and Vietnam, appeasement or quagmire. Both are regularly invoked by pundits and polemicists. We need more analogies, or none at all.

Beinart’s fundamental message is to avoid hubris and cultivate wisdom, which, like all maxims, seems obvious but turns out to be difficult in the extreme. None of his characters, not even the ones he most admires, had an unblemished record: F.D.R. was keen on the First World War from the start; Truman overextended containment for domestic political purposes; Kennan thought that Bosnia was irrelevant. The best guide, it appears, is good judgment based on hard experience: it’s probably better to have done things than to have dreamed of doing things; it’s also necessary to understand each new problem not as a repetition of old ones but on its own terms. In his introduction, Beinart outlines a number of the early-warning signs that a spell of myopia is about to deliver a catastrophe: doctrinaire mental habits, belief in preordained success, contempt for the counsel of allies, pervasive fear of threats, refusal to prioritize enemies. Americans have been especially vulnerable to irrational surges in national faith, because of an improbable combination: they’ve acquired the supreme strength of an imperial power without relinquishing their original claim—whether from God or the Declaration of Independence—to speak for freedom-seeking people everywhere. As a consequence, Americans like to imagine that they are acting without self-interest. It’s tough to get them to do anything overseas, including going to war, without telling them that something higher is at stake. This national character has, on balance, brought great benefits to the rest of the world. Beinart’s incontrovertible theme is that it has also brought great tragedies.
His conclusion calls for a “jubilant undertaker, someone like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who can bury the hubris of the past while convincing Americans that they are witnessing a wedding, not a funeral.” In other words, don’t challenge “the beautiful lie” that Americans can do anything—but for now let’s keep it small. Barack Obama needs to find “symbolic balm for America’s wounded pride”: dress down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chávez from time to time; pull some dictatorships into global trade bodies and try to persuade others to sign human-rights declarations; “leaven patriotic criticism with patriotic affirmation.” These are the not very satisfying improvisations of a writer who has spent the past few years sifting through the wreckage of recent history for valuable glints. If they sound less like a foreign-policy doctrine than like an occupational therapist trying to buoy the spirits of a patient recovering from a terrible accident, that is surely Peter Beinart’s point. ♦

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/06/28/100628crbo_books_packer?printable=true#ixzz0sEO3g98Y

Director Thomas P Campbell on the balcony of his New York office earlier this month

There is a decidedly frisky feel to a recent series of advertisements promoting the scholarly joys of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictures taken by visitors show friends posing hammily in front of the museum’s exhibits: a young man plays air guitar next to some exotic lutes, an amorous couple lock lips before a Rodin sculpture. The most irreverent of all shows three grinning children in a gallery of Egyptian mummies, with a friend satirically swathed in toilet paper. “It’s time we Met” proclaims the poster, cheesily. It’s a happy scene, with a subtext: the austere museum known throughout the world for its academic rigour and its peerless collections is these days not above slumming it in the marketing jungle with a larky pun or two.

In his handsome office overlooking the city skyline, Thomas P Campbell, the museum’s British director, 18 months into the most prestigious job in world culture, extends the joke, talking faux-ominously of the “security issues” that allowed the children to execute their prank.

But there is a serious issue at play. Museums are having to reinvent themselves in the 21st century as they compete with the dizzying variety of audio-visual stimuli on offer. As a portentous New York Times commentary put it on the announcement of Campbell’s surprise appointment nearly two years ago: “In a culture of American Idol and Damien Hirst, the Met can no longer rely on the singularity of its objects to justify its existence.”

Campbell, a slight, softly-spoken man, bridles slightly when I read him that remark – “What does that mean?” – before taking issue with it. “I think I’d almost claim the opposite. I’d say that in a world of mass-marketing and disposable digital imagery, the Met repository of some 2m objects spanning 5,000 years is ever more important as a place of reflection, as a place where you can get a bit of space to look at things that were hard-won, the product of art.

“Whether it’s the product of artisans working in age-old traditions, or great geniuses breaking new ground, I think you get a broader perspective here, that is ever more important in the modern world.”

These are the kind of reassuring words that persuaded the Met’s trustees to put their faith in Campbell, a curator at the museum since 1995, to succeed the charismatic Philippe de Montebello in September 2008. Then 46, the Englishman was by no means the favourite for the post, with which the British Museum’s director Neil MacGregor had been linked.

The Temple of Dendur in the Met’s Sackler Wing

But Campbell’s unflappable, scholarly air convinced them to keep the job in-house. Montebello, who retired after 31 years in the post, said it was the right choice. “He is the most modern of us all,” he said, referring to the museum’s distinguished roster of directors. “We’ve had a Romanist, a medievalist, but he goes up through the baroque.” Such was Montebello’s reputation for grandiloquence that it is hard to know whether this was a joke.

In any case, Campbell has his sights set beyond the baroque. The Met is even beginning to plug into the crowd-pleasing circus that is the contemporary art world, with a forthcoming exhibition on John Baldessari that would have been a more obvious fit at the Museum of Modern Art or the Guggenheim. Campbell feels the Met has had a “bad rap” in terms of engaging with late modern and contemporary art, which has always been part of its programming. The difference now is “the recognition that there is a sizeable audience [for it] and we can, here at the Met, put it in the context of our encyclopaedic collections of art history, which is a very different experience from seeing it only in its own context”.

That engagement with contemporary art is part of what he describes as a “fundamental shift” in the presentation of the Met’s displays, helping to make them more accessible. “We assume a great deal of knowledge in our audience; I’m conscious that we need to do more for our general visitors.

“We assume people know who Rembrandt is, for example. We have wonderful, thoughtful labels next to each Rembrandt painting, but there’s no overview of who he was and, frankly, considering our international audience, I doubt whether many of them do know who [he] was, or the significance of a particular period room, in a broader context.

“What I’m trying to do is to get the museum rethinking the visitor experience from the moment that people arrive at the museum: the signage they encounter, the bits of paper they pick up, all the way through to the way we deliver information in the galleries. And obviously that’s an enormous task. We’ve got a million square feet of gallery space and tens of thousands of objects on display, so nothing’s going to change overnight.”

Campbell was born and raised in Cambridge, read English at Oxford University, and studied at Christie’s before receiving his doctorate – on the art and culture of Henry VIII’s court – from the Courtauld Institute. The relative obscurity of his area of expertise, tapestries, also inspired his crowning moment so far at the Met, an exhibition of renaissance tapestries in 2002 that managed the rare achievement of attracting both glowing scholarly reviews and thousands of enraptured visitors.

That double whammy evidently left an impression, as did the words of an Italian teacher at Christie’s who once asked him to describe a Titian bacchanal and, after Campbell had groped for a succession of scholarly terms, admonished him with an explosion of plain speaking: “It is a drunken orgy and they are all having sex!”

“Academia at its best embraces and speaks to a broad audience,” says Campbell when I ask him of the incident’s lesson.

He identifies two movements that are changing the workings of museums: “The new art history that has shifted from the focus on connoisseurship and the priestly blessings of the top scholars to greater socio-political contextualisation; and the trend, coming out of Britain, for museums not just to speak to an elite upper-middle class. I think the London museums have really led the way in that.”

It can’t have escaped his notice, I say, that his appointment was announced the week before the Lehman Brothers collapse. “It has been difficult,” he says with understatement. “This time a year ago, our endowment dropped by at least 25 per cent and all of our revenue streams went soft. I was in my first months in the job. My biggest task was essentially taking 10 per cent out of operating budget, which did involve a contraction of staff and reducing expenditures right across the board.”

That must have been a depressing thing to do, I say, to come to a job like this and dive straight into spending cuts?

“It was challenging. Obviously I’d rather be spending money than saving it. I was just thankful that it was me doing it because at least after 14 years in the museum I had a fair understanding of the institution. It wasn’t easy but I think we managed to achieve what we had to do in a way that was elegant, and not damaging to the institution.”

So is the Met still able to acquire great new works? “There are parts of our endowment that are exclusively for acquisitions, so yes. Of course the irony of the recession is that a number of objects are coming on the market that might not otherwise have done so. The first acquisition meeting over which I presided, in January 2009, we were able to buy this extraordinarily rare, fabulously whimsical piece of renaissance sculpture. The end of that month, Keith Christiansen, our then-curator of European paintings, practically bounced the door off, Seinfeld-like, with excitement: a great Venetian masterpiece had come up.”

I ask Campbell if the Met is interested in becoming a world brand. “The Met was founded to be an international museum here in New York. I’m not interested in putting down bricks and mortar in Abu Dhabi. That said, we are a very out-facing institution.” He flags next year’s reopening of the Islamic galleries – reconfigured in geographical rather than religious terms – as a watershed. “It’s unfortunate that they have been off display for the past six or seven years. I hope they will help break down any prejudices in people’s minds.”

Does Campbell have a dream exhibition that he wants to put on? He hesitates, then talks in general terms of breaking the “inward-looking” culture that afflicts some of the museum’s departments. “I’m sorry, that is not a very good answer,” he says. I understand, I say, these things take years to plan. “Yes they do, and I spend a lot of time in this office working on administration and finance. It’s an endless succession of meetings.”

That doesn’t sound like fun.

“It’s all part of it, because if that part didn’t work then the art part wouldn’t work, so I see it as integrated. There’s nothing more exciting than having one of the curators come in with a potential acquisition, or taking you down to the galleries to see a new discovery, or talking with them about future plans and projects. I’m just so privileged to work with this great faculty of scholars.”

Lunch with the FT: Chad Hurley


By Richard Waters





Passing from the midday California sunshine into the gloomy cavern of the Dutch Goose burger bar in Menlo Park, it’s easy to miss Chad Hurley at first. It’s not just a question of getting used to the light. Tall and lank-haired, wearing jeans and an untucked grey shirt, the 34-year-old lurking by the pool table blends right in. Standing beneath a screen showing the latest World Cup game, he gives a small self-conscious wave to draw attention to himself – not the sort of gesture you might expect from one of the fathers of YouTube, and Silicon Valley’s version of a rock star.



But the Dutch Goose offers a touch of blue collar in the midst of almost unimaginable wealth. And, though Menlo Park, wedged into the peninsula below San Francisco, is home to the investment bankers and venture capitalists who supply the cash that keep the wheels of US technological innovation turning, ostentation is out in these parts.



So I am not that surprised when the man who last year offered single-handedly to bankroll a new US team for Formula One suggests meeting at a place which, from the outside, looks like a concrete bunker. Hurley, a cross-country runner at school, still has the all-American male taste for sports – football and fast cars in particular – with the difference that his personal wealth means that he can indulge these tastes in a way that others can only dream of. The Dutch Goose is also, he explains, a favourite with his seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter.



We make our way to the counter to order: a cheeseburger and french fries for Hurley, a Polish sausage (no fries) and a couple of sodas – and then look round for somewhere to sit. For a moment it seems as though we’re going to have to share one of the long bare wood tables with other diners. Then we spot a cubicle in a back corner that is almost entirely closed off from the room, as if staged for the purpose. Names scratched into the brown paintwork make it feel like a well-worn bus shelter. A dark shade with a bare bulb is hanging low.



Lunch in Silicon Valley can follow a familiar formula, in which an entrepreneur will sketch out a version of the future in which his technology will have assumed some central significance. But when Hurley tries to express his vision, it’s almost as if he is trying on an unfamiliar set of clothes. Co-founder of the world’s third-most visited website (after Google and Facebook), he knows they should fit him but he’s not entirely comfortable in them.



Launched just five years ago, YouTube dominates internet video. Its dancing babies, amateur lip-synchs and other home-made videos and film clips have seeped into the consciousness of a generation. Yet when Hurley talks about this achievement, his language is curiously muted.



“We wanted to create a platform for every­one, a level playing field. We wanted to democratise the video experience,” he says. Or, more opaquely, “My vision for the future is, it’s all video, no matter where it’s consumed.” His voice sounds flat – certainly not un-genuine but lacking the messianic fervour exhibited by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook or Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, as they talk about their creations.



But as we wait for our order Hurley begins to warm up. He is most engaged, almost passionate, describing the technical and design choices that went into YouTube – a site he and his friends Steve Chan and Jawed Karim created for themselves, not for the world at large.



Web design is what has made Hurley’s fortune, and accounts for his somewhat unusual status in the Valley. Engineers, typically, hold sway here, along with a class of MBA-wielding business managers who are generally looked down on, though most are too polite to mention that in public. Designers, with the rule-proving exception of Jonathan Ive at Apple, and marketing experts cling to the fringes.



Hurley is familiar with walking the fine line between design and science. As a child growing up in the small town of Birdsboro in Pennsylvania, he explains, he developed an early feel for both. “As long as I can remember I was drawing, or trying to create something,” he says, describing how at high school he moved easily between design and electronics classes. “I was one of those kids who took apart their toys to see how they work, just to see what they were made up of.”



Given the numbers of equally sharp people who have not enjoyed similar big breaks in Silicon Valley, it’s tempting to see anyone who has made it as lucky. It is harder, though, to account for repeat success. Hurley was hired straight out of college – Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he studied computer science before switching track to major in fine art – as the 10th employee of a California-based online payments start-up called PayPal. He was, he says, the first recruit not known personally to the founders. Recruiting a full-time designer to create a logo and work on its website was also a rare choice for an internet company at such an early stage. Barely three years later, PayPal had been sold to eBay for $1.5bn and Hurley was out, with money in the bank and time on his hands.



It could also be ascribed to luck that his first personal attempt at a start-up turned out to be an even more dizzying – and speedy – success. YouTube was acquired for $1.65bn by Google just 18 months after its launch, with Hurley and Chen kept on to run it jointly as a semi-autonomous division of Google. (Karim went on to pursue a post-graduate degree in computer science.)



Chen has since moved on to other work within Google. Hurley, still officially at the helm of YouTube, which continues to operate semi-independently from its own offices in San Bruno, 25 miles from the Googleplex, has been joined by Salar Kamangar, a Google executive who has assumed much of the management responsibility for YouTube. Kamangar is “someone I had been recruiting for a long time to come on board”, Hurley says pointedly, adding: “He helps to deal with a lot of politics for me, he goes down to [Google HQ] and straightens things out.”



It is not, however, talk of his work at YouTube that prompts Hurley’s greatest animation. Before starting YouTube, he reveals, he worked on designs for wallets and other leather goods, and that interest has since expanded to clothing and taken the form of a company, Hlaska, with three stores and a website.



“There’s something very satisfying about creating a tactile product,” he enthuses as he shows off the Hlaska shirt he’s wearing, hinting that the company could one day take up more of his life: “It’s a little product that’s keeping me busy – maybe more in the future.”



He is similarly hopeful about other business ventures beyond the internet. Though football, in particular the Philadelphia Eagles, who he has supported since childhood, holds the strongest draw (“I’m an NFL guy”), Hurley says his hunt for personal involvement has taken him into fields where the commercial potential is still less developed.



Last year’s bid to create a US team for Formula One unravelled after sponsors failed to materialise; the car Hurley had dreamt of could not be built. However, says Hurley, part of F1’s appeal to him is the sport’s lack of a following in the US. The venture, the brainchild of Ken Anderson, a US motor sports engineer, and Peter Windsor, a former sports journalist, had something that grabbed Hurley by the gut: the risk – and potential rewards – of a start-up. “I love fast cars,” he adds slightly unnecessarily. When I ask if his own car – a Mercedes SL – goes fast, he smiles wryly: “It can do.”



“I was willing to bet on a horse, but they didn’t even have a horse,” he muses. When I ask about speculation that he is seeking a partnership with Ferrari to bring a Formula One team to the US he does nothing to dampen the speculation, instead going out of his way to praise Ferrari’s role in the history of motor sports. “They’d be great to work with but I don’t know when that would be, whether it will even be an option on the table,” he says.



Though we have been talking for almost an hour, we have not been served with our order and neither of us – whether through tact or absorption in the discussion – has mentioned the fact. When, finally, I hear my name being called out to collect our food, I suspect I may have missed the call several times already. And, on the way to the counter to pick up our order, I worry about whether it’s been sitting under a heat lamp all this time. But, if that’s the case, the experience doesn’t seem visibly to have harmed our burger and sausage – which I carry back to the table.



After the long wait, the food comes as a relief. My bun filled with sweet and spicy polish sausage with mustard quickly overwhelms the tastebuds. It’s the kind of food to down fast, even if you haven’t waited this long. Hurley’s cheeseburger disappears without comment.



The bar’s videogames – a short row of retro arcade-style machines in a back corner – are, continues Hurley, a particular attraction for his children. It is, I say, a relief in the home of the techno-elite to hear that kids are brought up much as they are anywhere. There is no overly sophisticated parental control in the Hurley household: it’s just a case of letting them get on with it. “We don’t try to lock them up – one day they’re going to have to grow up and act on their own.”



This generation of children, says Hurley, will not be like those who grew up with the internet and “kind of got caught out”, exposing too much of their personal lives online. And parents, too, have also learnt enough about the technology to keep half an eye on their children’s behaviour. It sounds like the same pragmatic, hope-for-the-best attitude of parents the world over.



Given the impact of YouTube on the world’s youth, I ask about what sort of use Hurley’s own children might make of the site – have they, for instance, posted any videos of their own? It’s a question that elicits an uncharacteristically immediate and visceral response.



“It’s the thing about privacy,” he says, recoiling. “There are public things and private things, there are things in life you need to choose to be private. It was a decision very early on for me.” Though he quickly moves on to what sounds like a company line about how he and his co-founders decided not to post personal videos “so the discussion could be about the community, and what the community’s sharing”, there is no disguising the strength of his reaction.



Sensing from Hurley’s body language that the lunch is coming to an end, I ask him whether he thinks YouTube was sold too soon. Given everything that has happened since the sale to Google – including the emergence of Facebook, and the seemingly inexorable rise of internet valuations – isn’t it possible that he could have been owner of a company worth $20bn or more?



He takes the question without missing a beat: it’s clearly an answer he’s rehearsed many times. Taking the money that was on the table at the time and ensuring YouTube’s future under Google’s protective wing was the right thing both for investors and “the community”, he says. With both traditional media and internet companies wary of its rise, YouTube was vulnerable. “No one was really our friend – both sides were trash-talking us, what we are, what we were doing,” he says. “We knew if we’d gone out there and raised a large amount of money [to stay independent] it would have just put a bigger target on our back.”



Hurley’s praise for and admiration of Google seem genuine but it’s hard not to see his position within the company as something of an uncomfortable compromise. I remind him of a conversation we had four years ago, shortly before Google came knocking, when he and Chen argued that “pre-rolls” – advertisements shown before video clips can play – turn users away and were the last thing they would resort to. Pre-rolls are, however, now a key part of Google’s strategy for YouTube as it attempts to bring to an end its years of losses. “It’s a necessary evil,” Hurley concedes, adding that there are plans for other ways of making money from the site that will eventually give more control back to users again.



So is he at Google for the long haul? “It depends,” is the decidedly non-committal answer. “I’ve definitely stayed a lot longer than I would ever have expected, and probably a lot longer than anyone else would have expected.”



The young internet veteran says he carries a sketchbook around with him to jot down ideas, and talks wistfully of creating something new again. “I have ideas in my head I’d love to work on in the future,” he says. “It’s about creating, and having fun, and helping people.” As an ambition it might sound rather Miss-Worldish but the motivation is clearly from the heart.



Richard Waters is west coast editor of the FT



..................................................



Dutch Goose



3567 Alameda, Menlo Park, California, US



Cheeseburger $6.04



Polish sausage $5.54



Fries $2.60



Soda x 2 $3.66



Total (including service) $21



..................................................



Why Lady Gaga has become YouTube’s loss leader



Lady Gaga stretches across a white throne. Her gold dress is pulled up revealingly, exposing the top of an inner thigh. And, as the camera zooms slowly in on her chopped bleached hair and freaky sunglasses, a message flashes up across the bottom of the video: “Apply today for £100 credit and start trading on thousands of markets.”



The appearance of an advertisement at the foot of “Bad Romance”, the music video that, with 200m plays, tops YouTube’s all-time “most watched” list, speaks volumes about how the site has been changing – and how hard Google is trying to make it pay its way.



YouTube first wormed into the public consciousness thanks to a combination of cute home movies and viral clips from TV shows. Images that bubbled up into the popular consciousness, they became the instant memes of a restless online generation.



Making money from the filtered dross of the web, however, has not been easy. Last year the Wall Street analyst Spencer Wang of Credit Suisse turned heads with a note estimating that Google could lose nearly $500m in 2009 due to the heavy cost of streaming video over the web and a paucity of advertising.



Professionally made videos that advertisers are willing to place their messages next to have been hard to come by compared to user-generated content. One of YouTube’s responses to this problem has become the talk of the music industry. While the company itself won’t comment on business relationships, it is widely rumoured to be paying record companies per thousand views for the right to post videos such as those by Lady Gaga, as part of a massive loss leader intended to woo viewers and media companies alike.



And, this week, the company won an important legal judgment that could help it draw in more professional content and pull it out of the red. In 2007 the media giant Viacom filed suit against YouTube for $1bn, claiming the website turned a blind eye to the uploading of unauthorised clips of Viacom shows.



But the complaint was thrown out by Judge Louis Stanton who noted in passing that YouTube was free to place advertising against these clips. “A good day for YouTube ... a good day for the internet!” a jubilant Hurley told his followers on Twitter.





Chad Hurley is guest speaker at the Royal College of Art’s Innovation Night Lecture, sponsored by the Rumi Foundation on Tuesday June 29 in London. For the chance to win a pair of tickets, send an e-mail with your full name, address and telephone number to aine.duffy@rca.ac.uk before June 28.

The word "slick" did not come to mind as Tony Hayward, the embattled chief executive of BP, foundered in a sea of congressional questioning this week. Never in the face of righteous political indignation did expertise look so unconvincing and so unworthy of its status. But in many respects Mr. Hayward and BP were simply unlucky: They were caught out by an event they didn't think would happen and then compounded the problem by sounding clueless when asked to explain what went wrong or how they would fix it.

Excerpt From 'Wrong'

By David H. Freedman
Little, Brown, 295 pages, $25.99

Click to read an excerpt.

As David H. Freedman notes in "Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them," such cluelessness is all too common in our expert-mediated world. Look at all those economists who failed to predict the great crash of 2008 or the rating agencies whose metrics melted into mere wishful thinking. Realtors, who are supposed to know more than you or I about the housing market, predicted housing prices would trend up for 2008. Experts, schmexperts.
We are, as Mr. Freedman puts it, living in an age of "punctuated wrongness," usually misled, occasionally enlightened. His goal is a broad account of this phenomenon, how it takes shape through specific problems in measurement, how it spreads through the general idiocy of crowds, and how we might identify and avoid it. Bravo!
What emerges from this infernal journey is that there are few incentives in research to acknowledge that error is to be expected and not something to be scorned or obscured. As Robert Boyle, one of the founding fathers of modern science, recognized, experimental error is part of the slow advance toward any scientific truth; you can't have trial without error.
But the current market creates the wrong kinds of incentives for doing good research or admitting failure. Novel ideas and findings are rewarded with grants and publication, which lead to academic prestige and career advancement. Researchers have a vested interest in overstating their findings because certainty is more likely than equivocation to achieve all of the above. Thus the probability increases of producing findings that are false. As the medical mathematician John Ioannidis tells Mr. Freedman: "The facts suggest that for many, if not the majority of fields, the majority of published studies are likely to be wrong."
The problem is that the media tend to validate these findings before they have been properly interpreted, qualified, tested, and either refuted or replicated by other experts. And once a lousy study gets public validation— think of Andrew Wakefield's claim about autism and vaccination—it can prove almost impossible to invalidate.
So far so good, but convention dictates asking what "Wrong" gets wrong. Consider a warning about the unreliability of "surrogate markers"— proxy measurements in the identification and treatment of disease, such as blood-sugar levels for diabetes. Mr. Freedman cites as evidence a 2007 meta-analysis (a synthesis, in this case, of 42 separate studies) that claimed the diabetes drug Avandia caused a 43% increase in heart attacks.

Illustration by Matt Dorfman

The study sparked panic among diabetics, fury among congressional critics of the Food and Drug Administration, and an inevitable assault on "Big Pharma" in the media. Lost in the din were complaints from biostatisticians and endocrinologists that the study did not call surrogate markers into question, as Mr. Freedman claims, and did not even prove an increased risk of heart attack. This finding was produced by including one study where the drug was contra-indicated for the subjects; take out the study and the 43% disappears.
What, I think, saves Mr. Freedman in this case (and probably others) is his sourcing and his candor. He turns to the right kind of experts to articulate general principles—biostatisticians, for example, who can see deeper than the average scientist into the way the data are gathered, analyzed and screwed up. And in an admirable and disarming appendix titled "Is This Book Wrong?" he notes: "To say that you don't have to worry about my falling for expertise traps because I'm a journalist would be like a mugger offering the reassurance that he's no car thief."
He admits that double-checking his manuscript led to frequent correction and qualification until time ran out and he had to deliver the book to the publisher. He plans on taking one example of being corrected and framing it on his wall so that he can show it to his kids as a cautionary note of the kind his scientist father once showed him.
What makes "Wrong" so right—it being as good as any general account of the fragility of what we take as expert knowledge—is that it raises the right questions. What it doesn't do is try to answer them by articulating a deeper account of what can make knowledge reliable. But this, really, is a matter for scientists, doctors and others to take up: If they cannot formulate robust arguments from their research data—arguments that truly entertain the possibility of being wrong—then they are going to keep inflicting on us error dressed up as insight.
The importance of an open market for research plays a central role in Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves." Mr. Ridley argues that humans have achieved astounding prosperity because ideas "began to meet and mate," collectivizing ingenuity and speeding up progress much like natural selection. The exchange of ideas, he writes, "is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution."

Excerpt From 'The Rational Optimist'

By Matt Ridley
Harper, 438 pages, $26.99

Click to read an excerpt.

Mr. Ridley proceeds to interrogate history through the evolution of ideas, contrasting, for instance, the economic fortunes of those societies that developed property rights from the bottom up with those that didn't. It is not accidental, he says, that Botswana's indigenous tradition of individual ownership (along with a lucky escape from depredatory colonialism) has helped it to do much better than many of its neighbors in Africa. Rather than deplore the state of Africa as irredeemable, shouldn't we instead encourage the spread of such rights?
Driven by an intelligence that seems to have mated profitably with a wide array of ideas—an intelligence that previously earned him a doctorate in zoology from Oxford and the American editorship of The Economist magazine—Mr. Ridley shows a commitment to rational optimism that will no doubt appall some people as a thought crime against the world's parlous state.
I suspect that if you are the kind of person who is agonizing over when to tell your children that their lives will be cut short by global warming, you will be chilled when Mr. Ridley points out that all the scenarios gamed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that your grandkids will become significantly better off. If you believe that we need more regulation to protect us from the dangers of the world, you will likely scoff at his arguments that the world might be safer with less regulation. And if you revere Bill McKibben or any of the other tribunes of "fashionable pessimism," you'll probably bridle at Mr. Ridley's swift dismissal of their prophecies of the "end of nature" or the "coming anarchy."
What's interesting is the way both "The Rational Optimist" and "Wrong" converge on the idea of openness as fundamental to progress. For Mr. Ridley, the market for ideas needs to be as open as possible in order to breed ingenuity from collaboration; for Mr. Freedman, this market needs to be doggedly open about its errors as a positive step toward reliability. It is only by observing these two principles that an immediate fix and a long-term solution to the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico will be found.
But is it rational to believe that this sort of openness will expand and prevail? Probably not. I suppose that's precisely what makes both of these books so invigorating.

The Keynesian Dead End

Spending our way to prosperity is going out of style.

Today's G-20 meeting has been advertised as a showdown between the U.S. and Europe over more spending "stimulus," and so it is. But the larger story is the end of the neo-Keynesian economic moment, and perhaps the start of a healthier policy turn.

For going on three years, the developed world's economic policy has been dominated by the revival of the old idea that vast amounts of public spending could prevent deflation, cure a recession, and ignite a new era of government-led prosperity. It hasn't turned out that way.

Now the political and fiscal bills are coming due even as the U.S. and European economies are merely muddling along. The Europeans have had enough and want to swear off the sauce, while the Obama Administration wants to keep running a bar tab. So this would seem to be a good time to examine recent policy history and assess the results.

***

Like many bad ideas, the current Keynesian revival began under George W. Bush. Larry Summers, then a private economist, told Congress that a "timely, targeted and temporary" spending program of $150 billion was urgently needed to boost consumer "demand." Democrats who had retaken Congress adopted the idea—they love an excuse to spend—and the politically tapped-out Mr. Bush went along with $168 billion in spending and one-time tax rebates.

The cash did produce a statistical blip in GDP growth in mid-2008, but it didn't stop the financial panic and second phase of recession. So enter Stimulus II, with Mr. Summers again leading the intellectual charge, this time as President Obama's adviser and this time suggesting upwards of $500 billion. When Congress was done two months later, in February 2009, the amount was $862 billion. A pair of White House economists famously promised that this spending would keep the unemployment rate below 8%.

View Full Image

Associated Press

President Barack Obama's top economic adviser Larry Summers

Seventeen months later, and despite historically easy monetary policy for that entire period, the jobless rate is still 9.7%. Yesterday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis once again reduced the GDP estimate for first quarter growth, this time to 2.7%, while economic indicators in the second quarter have been mediocre. As the nearby table shows, this is a far cry from the snappy recovery that typically follows a steep recession, most recently in 1983-84 after the Reagan tax cuts.

The response at the White House and among Congressional leaders has been . . . Stimulus III. While talking about the need for "fiscal discipline" some time in the future, President Obama wants more spending today to again boost "demand." Thirty months after Mr. Summers won his first victory, we are back at the same policy stand.

The difference this time is that the Keynesian political consensus is cracking up. In Europe, the bond vigilantes have pulled the credit cards of Greece, Portugal and Spain, with Britain and Italy in their sights. Policy makers are now making a 180-degree turn from their own stimulus blowouts to cut spending and raise taxes. The austerity budget offered this month by the new British government is typical of Europe's new consensus.

To put it another way, Germany's Angela Merkel has won the bet she made in early 2009 by keeping her country's stimulus far more modest. We suspect Mr. Obama will find a political stonewall this weekend in Toronto when he pleads with his fellow leaders to join him again for a spending spree.

Meanwhile, in Congress, even many Democrats are revolting against Stimulus III. The original White House package of jobless benefits and aid to the states had to be watered down several times, and the latest version failed again in the Senate late this week. (See below.) Mr. Obama is having his credit card pulled too—not by the bond markets, but by a voting public that sees the troubles in Europe and is telling pollsters that it doesn't want a Grecian bath.

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The larger lesson here is about policy. The original sin—and it was nearly global—was to revive the Keynesian economic model that had last cracked up in the 1970s, while forgetting the lessons of the long prosperity from 1982 through 2007. The Reagan and Clinton-Gingrich booms were fostered by a policy environment for most of that era of lower taxes, spending restraint and sound money. The spending restraint began to end in the late 1990s, sound money vanished earlier this decade, and now Democrats are promising a series of enormous tax increases.

Notice that we aren't saying that spending restraint alone is a miracle economic cure. The spending cuts now in fashion in Europe are essential, but cuts by themselves won't balance annual deficits reaching 10% of GDP. That requires new revenues from faster growth, and there's a danger that the tax increases now sweeping Europe will dampen growth further.

President Obama's tragic mistake was to blow out the U.S. federal balance sheet on spending that has produced little bang for the buck. The fantastical Keynesian notion (the "multiplier") that $1 of spending produces $1.50 in growth was long ago demolished by Harvard's Robert Barro, among others. That $1 in spending has to come from somewhere, which means in taxes or borrowing from productive parts of the private economy. Given that so much of the U.S. stimulus went for transfer payments such as Medicaid and unemployment insurance, the "multiplier" has almost certainly been negative.

With the economy in recession in 2008 and 2009, we argued that some stimulus was justified and an increase in the deficit was understandable and inevitable. However, we also argued that permanent tax cuts aimed at marginal individual and corporate tax rates would have done far more to revive animal spirits, and in our view would have led to a far more robust recovery.

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What the world has now reached instead is a Keynesian dead end. We are told to let Congress continue to spend and borrow until the precise moment when Mr. Summers and Mark Zandi and the other architects of our current policy say it is time to raise taxes to reduce the huge deficits and debt that their spending has produced. Meanwhile, individuals and businesses are supposed to be unaffected by the prospect of future tax increases, higher interest rates, and more government control over nearly every area of the economy. Even the CEOs of the Business Roundtable now see the damage this is doing.

A better economic policy will have to await a new Congress, which we hope at a minimum can prevent punishing tax increases. But for now the good news is that voters and markets are telling politicians to stop doing what hasn't worked.