Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World

Author: Alex Pentland

A 'nervous system for humanity'? John Gilbey finds a sting in the tale

A slender hardback book is sitting innocuously in a pool of sunlight on my desk. With fewer than 200 pages, of which almost half are taken up by appendices, you might not expect it to carry the seeds of social revolution - but I strongly suspect that it does.

In Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, Sandy Pentland and his research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab examine the different ways we communicate within groups. This may not seem, at first glance, to be anything startling or novel. After all, anyone who has been subjected to a management training course in the past few decades will have been instructed in the importance of body language and non-verbal communication at some level, however basic.

What is innovative about this tranche of research is the development of a set of technology-based tools to enable the automated capture of behavioural information in an intensive and robust way - providing a demonstrable degree of numerical rigour in support of their conclusions and dramatically extending what is possible in experimental terms.

The concept of honest signals is explained by Pentland as those elements of communication and display that are processed by us unconsciously - or are effectively uncontrollable, or are difficult to fake - so that they can provide an intrinsically valid stream of data with which people guide conversations, meetings and decisions. He isolates four examples of honest signalling for closer study: influence, measured as the extent to which someone modifies the pattern of speaking of another person to match their own; mimicry, or the way we copy the behaviours of another through the course of a conversation through smiles, comments and nods; activity - how interested and excited you are is apparently reflected measurably in your level of activity; and consistency - Pentland suggests that consistent levels of emphasis and timing in speech indicate mental focus in the speaker, with any inconsistency leaving us open to influence from others.

Critically, these honest signals can be read clearly - by people or gadgets - in a variety of environments where the finer-grained information of language and expression might be lost: think of discos, bars and crowded streets. Pentland views this as a connection to our remote past - when accurate communication around the campfire or in the depths of a forest was a key survival element.

Forming the core of the book is a discussion of the work carried out by Pentland's group over the past five years, showing the evolution of the research programme. Inventive data capture and analysis, using novel in-house developments and the manipulation of existing technologies, has enabled the mass observation of subjects, generating thousands of hours (330,000 hours is quoted) of data. In the narrative, the various data collection devices are referred to collectively as "sociometers".

The current version of the sociometer is a sophisticated but unobtrusive device that can be worn like an ID badge. It can tell how much time you spend talking face to face with a named person, carry out speech analysis to measure social signals and social context, recognise common activities by measuring body movement, determine where you are in the building, and talk to mobile phones and computer networks to exchange data and measure exactly where you are in relation to other people. Try doing that lot for a roomful of people using a clipboard and a stopwatch.

One slight disappointment is that the tools developed by the research team are not described in great technological detail in the book, so geeks like me have to slide over to the website for more information.

Most of the team's research papers are available in PDF format - but be warned, the website (http://hd.media.mit.edu) is one of the most garishly presented I have ever seen.

Pentland builds the story upwards from a fairly traditional discussion of group roles, and the interactions within teams, through the challenge of "reading" poker players - real and metaphorical - to the questions around how the power of the group can be most effectively harnessed. Strangely, the linear discussion in the main text becomes almost secondary to the material carried in the compendious appendices, which relate how each component of the argument was tested.

I found myself repeatedly flipping back and forth between chapter and support material - but with deepening interest rather than frustration. The appendices are, in many cases, mini-research papers with a hypothesis/method, results and discussion format forming a clever bridge between guidance for lay readers and the more formal expectations of a scientific readership.

The analysis and reporting of the sociometer data makes a persuasive case for the use of this technology in the understanding of social networks, but there is a lot more at stake here than that.

The technology offers, in Pentland's words, a chance to "enable a magnification of our social sense", to step outside our own behaviour and observe it dispassionately as a set of statistics. On a substantially larger scale, it potentially provides a set of techniques on which to base the development of a "social physics" - for which the author provides a convincing proof-of-concept analysis. Readers of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" stories will be forgiven if they feel a hint of Hari Seldon's discipline of "psycho-history" at this point.

Throughout the book, the methodologies and the academic treatment of the subject are impressive, but there is - for me - a significant sting in the tail (or tale, for that matter). In developing the data-capture technology, the team has sensibly used standard components wherever possible. One of the team's main platforms has been a series of increasingly powerful mobile phones, with Linux operating systems and Bluetooth communications, for which it developed some interesting applications.

The software described in the text and in the supporting research papers is intriguing - Meeting Mediator, for example, uses the sociometer data to provide immediate feedback to enhance group collaboration, feedback that is presented on the screen of each phone, thus "encouraging" participation. My particular favourite, however, is the Jerk-O-Meter - yes, really. This application provides appropriate feedback via phone screen to someone whose interest in a phone call is perceived, by the system, to be waning.

Clever stuff, but this is surely appropriate only in the context of a development tool and an academic exercise. The problem I foresee is that it will be only a matter of time before big organisations decide to include such features by default in the phones used by their staff to provide them with daily (hourly?) reports on how much each person is perceived to be contributing to discussions, and how attentive they are to their phone conversations. Heck, you can see where I am going with this.

In the epilogue to his book, Pentland presents the case for using these developments in the creation of a "nervous system" for humanity, evolving into a structure that enables us "to engineer our societies and entire culture".

The author is obviously aware of the risks this could pose to privacy and individual liberty - and this book provides a timely wake-up call so that we can decide where the boundary lies between "possible" and "desirable".

For once - just once - please let us have that debate in public before the whole issue is dismissed as "inevitable".

The author

Alex (Sandy) Pentland is the Toshiba professor of media, arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Specialising in human-centred technology, he is also passionate about creating ventures to take the technology into the "real" world.

To that end, he has founded or co-founded half a dozen institutes and set up ten spin-off companies. His achievements have been recognised not only by his peers - who have cited him so often that he can now claim to be one of the top-cited computer scientists in the world - but also by the mainstream media. In 1997, Newsweek named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century. During his career, he has taught at the University of Rochester and Stanford University and has worked for two non-profit organisations.

Outliers

Author: Macolm Gladwell

Review: Tyler Cowen

The book is getting snarky reviews but if it were by an unknown, rather than by the famous Malcolm Gladwell, many people would be saying how interesting it is. The main point, in economic language, is that human talent is heterogeneous and that the talent of a particular person must mesh with the capital structure of his or her time if major success is to result. The book is best read as a supplement to Ludwig Lachmann's Capital and its Structure. The main enduring insight of both Lachmann and Gladwell is simply how much we live in a world of complementarity rather than substitutability.

Nowhere in the book does the name Dean Keith Simonton (check out the headings to these links) appear nor does the phrase "multiplicative model of human success." A lot of the content here has already been done with more rigor and empirical support and also in readable form I might add. Everyone should read Simonton, noting that his hypotheses fare better in the arts than in politics.

If you ask too much from Outliers it will fall apart. It is too easy to find contingency in the world and Gladwell doesn't begin to look for a theory of which contingencies are interesting or not. For instance arguably Ludwig van Beethoven would not have been a great composer if:

1. An extra butterfly had died two million years ago.

2. The outcome of the Thirty Years' War had been different.

3. The Germany of his time had not had fortepianos.

4. His parents had conceived their child one second earlier.

5. Haydn had not paved the way.

#3 and #5 seem more interesting than #1 and #4 but that's because some contingencies just don't help us understand the world very much. Gladwell never gives us enough theoretical structure to see why his contingencies are the relevant ones. Simply showing the contingencies in personal histories is not, taken alone, very enlightening.

Gladwell's contingency stories skid out of control. At one point it seems the main claim is that the steady accumulation of advantages is what matters, but once you ask which advantages end up "counting," the claim collapses into tautology.

There is also a "PC" undercurrent in the book of "don't write anyone off" but if everything is so contingent on so many factors, maybe writing people off isn't such a big deal. It could go either way. It depends.

Gladwell deliberately steers us away from the contingency of genetic endowment (even for a given set of parents, which sperm got through?), but if you hold everything else fixed you can assign a very high marginal product to the genetic factor if you wish, usually up to 100 percent of a person's outcome. That mental exercise is verboten but somehow it is OK to hold the genetic endowment constant and vary some other historical factor and regard that as a meaningful contingency. See the discussion of Beethoven above, especially #4 on the list.

Gladwell descends into the swamp of contingency but he is unwilling to really live in it and take it seriously or, alternatively, to find a way out.

In reality the complementarity concept is easier to work with and also more fruitful for thinking about policy implications or for that matter the implications for management or talent training. Success is fragile but foster competing cultures based on clusters of talent motivated by rivalry and emulation. Don't filter out the eccentrics or the risk takers. That's about where David Hume ended up but Gladwell never gets anywhere close.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Author: Michael Pollan

Review by DAVID KAMP

Life is confusing atop the food chain. For most animals, eating is a simple matter of biological imperative: if you're a koala, you seek out eucalyptus leaves; if you're a prairie vole, you munch on bluegrass and clover. But Homo sapiens, encumbered by a big brain and such inventions as agriculture and industry, faces a bewildering array of choices, from scrambled eggs to Chicken McNuggets, from a bowl of fresh strawberries to the petrochemically complex yellow log of sweet, spongy food product known as the Twinkie. "When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer," Michael Pollan writes in his thoughtful, engrossing new book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," "deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety."

Nowhere is this anxiety more acute, Pollan says, than in the United States. Wealth, abundance and the lack of a steadying, centuries-old food culture have conspired to make us Americans dysfunctional eaters, obsessed with getting thin while becoming ever more fat, lurching from one specious bit of dietary wisdom (margarine is better for you than butter) to another (carbs kill). Pollan diagnoses a "national eating disorder," and he aims to shed light on both its causes and some potential solutions. To this end, he embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which starts at the very beginning — in the soil from which the raw materials of his dinners will emerge — and ends with a cooked, finished meal.

These meals are, in order, a McDonald's repast consumed by Pollan with his wife and son in their car as it vrooms up a California freeway; a "Big Organic" meal of ingredients purchased at the upmarket chain Whole Foods; a beyond-organic chicken dinner whose main course and side dishes come from a wondrously self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, antibiotics or synthetic fertilizers; and a "hunter-gatherer" feast consisting almost entirely of ingredients that Pollan has shot dead or foraged himself.

Even if the author weren't a professor of journalism at Berkeley, and therefore by definition a liberal foodie intellectual, you could guess how this scheme will play out: the McDonald's meal will be found wanting in terms of nutrition and eco-sustainability; the Whole Foods meal will be decent but tainted with a whiff of corporate compromise; the Virginia farm meal will be rapturously flavorful and uplifting; and the hunter-gatherer meal will be a gutsy feast of wild boar and morels, with a side of guilt and some squirmy philosophizing on what it means to take a pig's life.

But for Pollan, the final outcome is less important than the meal's journey from the soil to the plate. His supermeticulous reporting is the book's strength — you're not likely to get a better explanation of exactly where your food comes from. In fact, the first quarter of the book is devoted to a shocking, page-turning exposé of the secret life of that most seemingly innocent and benign of American crops, corn.

The species Zea mays, for all its connotations of heartland goodness and Rodgers and Hammerstein romance ("as high as an elephant's eye"), has been turned into nothing less than an agent of evil, Pollan argues. Expanding on his articles for The New York Times Magazine, he lays out the many ways in which government policy since the Nixon era — to grow as much corn as possible, subsidized with federal money — is totally out of whack with the needs of nature and the American public.

Big agribusiness has Washington in its pocket. The reason its titans want to keep corn cheap and plentiful, Pollan explains, is that they value it, above all, as a remarkably inexpensive industrial raw material. Not only does it fatten up a beef steer more quickly than pasture does (though at a cost to ourselves and cattle, which haven't evolved to digest corn, and are therefore pre-emptively fed antibiotics to offset the stresses caused by their unnatural diet); once milled, refined and recompounded, corn can become any number of things, from ethanol for the gas tank to dozens of edible, if not nutritious, products, like the thickener in a milkshake, the hydrogenated oil in margarine, the modified cornstarch that binds the pulverized meat in a McNugget and, most disastrously, the ubiquitous sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Though it didn't reach the American market until 1980, HFCS has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the larder — in Pollan's McDonald's meal, there's HFCS not only in his 32-ounce soda, but in the ketchup and the bun of his cheeseburger — and Pollan fingers it as the prime culprit in the nation's obesity epidemic.

Against this backdrop of cynicism and big bellies, Pollan finds his hero in Joel Salatin, an "alternative" farmer in Virginia who will sell his goods only to local customers. A cantankerous self-described "Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic," Farmer Joel has ingeniously marshalled the rhythms and symbioses of nature to produce a bounty of food from his hundred acres. For example, his cattle graze a plot of grass for a day or two and are then succeeded by several hundred laying hens, which not only nibble on the clipped grass but pick grubs and larvae from the cowpats, thereby spreading the manure and eliminating parasites. The chickens' bug-laden, high-protein diet results in fantastically flavorful eggs, while their excrement enriches the pasture with nitrogen, allowing it to recover in a matter of weeks for the cows to revisit.

Salatin seems to have found the secrets of sustainable agriculture. The shocker is that he doesn't want to be part of any national solution. He's an off-the-grid crank who hates the government, home-schooled his kids and declares to Pollan: "Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?" But Pollan, a nice-guy writer whose awe of Salatin is palpable, lets the farmer off lightly, saying that his provocative words "made me appreciate what a deep gulf of culture and experience separates me from Joel — and yet at the same time, what a sturdy bridge caring about food can sometimes provide."

If I have any caveats about "The Omnivore's Dilemma," it's Pollan's tendency to be too nice. He doesn't write with the propulsive rage that fueled Eric Schlosser's blockbuster "Fast Food Nation," nor does he take a firm stand on figures like the "Big Organic" pioneer Gene Kahn, an ex-hippie farmer from Washington State who decided that the only way to sustain his company, Cascadian Farm, was to sell it to General Mills. Pollan wryly notes that Kahn drives a late-model Lexus with vanity plates that say ORGANIC, but he calls Kahn "a realist, a businessman with a payroll to meet." Does this mean that Kahn is striking the right balance between mammon and the mission, or does Pollan think he's a hypocrite?

Likewise, I wish Pollan would stick his neck out and be more prescriptive about how we might realistically address our national eating disorder. We can't all go off the grid like Salatin, nor can we just wish away 200 years of industrialization. So what to do? Is the ever-growing organic-food industry already on the right path? Or is more radical action needed? Should the Department of Justice break up giant, soil-exhausting factory farms into small, self-sustaining polycultural organic farms? Perhaps it's greedy to demand more from a book already brimming with ideas, but what can I say? I'm an American, and I'm still hunting

David Kamp is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and GQ. His book about the American fine-food revolution, "The United States of Arugula," will be published in September.

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer

Author: Dean Baker
In his new book, economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact, conservatives rely on a range of “nanny state” policies that ensure the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off. It’s time for the rules to change. Sound economic policy should harness the market in ways that produce desirable social outcomes – decent wages, good jobs and affordable health care. Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America

Author: Paul Tough
AS THE gung-ho title suggests, this book is an exhausting read. I mean that in the best possible way. Paul Tough, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, gives a dense but clear account of the mighty struggle of a project known as the Harlem Children's Zone to recast America's most famous black ghetto as a locus of black success. The brainchild of Geoffrey Canada, a lean, driven man in his 50s who grew up in the South Bronx and despises the word "no," the wide-ranging project seeks to go where no program has gone before. It aspires not to be a program at all, but an entire safety net tightly woven of everything that makes communities work -- good social services, prenatal counseling, parental involvement and, most crucially, good public schools. This is the story of how Canada has sought since creating the zone in the late 1990s to assemble an entire "conveyor belt" that will deliver to every child in the 97-block area the support and services he or she needs from birth until graduation from high school. Whereupon they will go to college, of course. That's the idea.

What's so striking about the story is not just Canada's determination in the face of overwhelming odds; we've read that plenty of times. Tough's book is about the magnitude of the task undertaken by one man and his staff of acolytes, but Tough is more interested in what that monumental task reveals about the rest of us. He lauds Canada's efforts to give poor black children the opportunity he deeply believes they deserve, but he also questions why society as a whole seems not to share Canada's view. One thing Tough puts in stark relief is the fact that the goal of equality in education has been replaced with exhortations for excellence, a nice way of saying that every community is on its own, including communities of poor black kids who need the most help and suffer the worst effects of isolation. Canada knows this. A former college radical, he doesn't approve of the paradigm shift away from equality and justice, but he doesn't have time to waste thinking about it, and neither do the kids. Time isn't on their side.

Time is a huge theme here. A giant hourglass starts running out from the first pages of this book, which mostly chronicles the launch of Promise Academy, the project's charter school, in 2004. As with so many ambitious undertakings in the 'hood, a palpable sense of hope and expectation is tempered by history and reality. Canada wrestles with the idea that, academically, it's already too late for a lot of the students he's pledging to help with his new school. He has to immediately begin coaching them to hit certain numbers on citywide test scores or risk losing the faith and financial interest of the more well-heeled board members. The pressure on everyone to deliver the goods -- Canada, his staff, students and parents -- is enormous.

"Whatever It Takes" subtly but vividly illustrates the Catch-22 created by a national obsession with standardized test scores, the modern measure of school quality (and, inexplicably, equality). From the day Promise Academy opens its doors, Canada and his team sink much of their considerable energy into trying to boost test scores to respectable levels, particularly at the middle school where he knows scores will be hardest to move. He turns out to be right, though the news is not all bad: the kids improve, but they don't improve fast enough. Tough shows us that this is where the much-touted business model of education simply doesn't translate to inner cities. Yet the model must be followed at Promise partly because it's a charter. Charters are quasi-businesses -- start-ups that must hit certain marks or face the possibility of being closed down. Of course, that's almost a joke in neighborhoods such as Harlem, where schools have been functioning so poorly, they should have been closed down for bad business practices years ago.

Journalistically, Tough does a nice job of balancing theories and research on race, education and poverty with the unglamorous, on-the-ground fight to make Promise Academy and the whole Harlem Children's Zone enterprise pull the neighborhood out of the gravity of its urban pathologies -- to kick into a high enough gear for residents to achieve what Canada calls "escape velocity."

Though much of "Whatever It Takes" focuses on strategy, it's the acute awareness of the overwhelmingly black staff, students and parents of just what they're up against that makes this book absorbing and frequently touching. Within that awareness are small but steady epiphanies that are the real core of Canada's work but that simply can't be measured by test scores: parents learning to regularly take their kids to museums, problems collectively solved in math class, story conclusions read aloud by second-graders.

Ultimately, it's Canada's heart and vision that make the book. He's a drillmaster but also an idealist and humanist hellbent on saving average kids, not just the exceptional ones. Tough makes it clear that Canada doesn't want to be a superhero, because that's not what the people in Harlem need: They need change. That's a much-ballyhooed idea this election year, but Canada has been intent on it for a long time. He wants to enact not heroism but "contamination" -- spreading enough good seeds to change the very soil of Harlem so that its culture becomes healthier at the roots and it grows into a place where all residents get a decent shot at the great American life. Heal the environment, Canada says, and you heal everyone in it. It's hard not to vote for that.

NYTIMES Review

When assessing the state of America’s children, people speak of the achievement gap between the middle class and the poor. But really there’s an everything gap: a health gap, a safety gap, a technology gap, a conversational gap, a “turning off the TV and going to the library” gap. Schools can help make up for some of these deficits, but they can’t make up all the difference.

This is where Geoffrey Canada comes in. Canada, if you haven’t heard of him already, is the man behind the Harlem Children’s Zone Project, a hugely ambitious effort to improve lives in a 97-block swath of New York City. Others, like Marian Wright Edelman or Wendy Kopp, have worked as tirelessly on behalf of America’s children. But the Harlem Children’s Zone, founded in 1997, is perhaps the most intensive set of youth programs of our time.

As Paul Tough explains in “Whatever It Takes,” Canada “believed that he could find the ideal intervention for each age of a child’s life, and then connect those interventions into an unbroken chain of support.” Its “conveyor belt” begins when expectant parents learn about safety gates and mothers of toddlers learn to turn supermarkets into learning labs. Prekindergartners were enrolled for 10 hours a day, with an intensive focus on language, including French vocabulary. Canada’s high school, middle school and two elementary schools — all charters — can’t educate all the children in the zone; those left out can still attend computer workshops, fitness classes or college prep. Canada isn’t satisfied with propelling selected children to a better life; his goal is to “contaminate”the entire culture of Harlem with aspirational values, disciplined self-improvement and the cognitive tools to do better than those who came before. That depends on offering services to as many people as possible. Employees approach teenagers with strollers and stake out Laundromats.

“Whatever It Takes” is engaged throughout, nowhere more so than in a vivid section on Baby College. Tough’s account of this parenting class illustrates the challenges Canada and his staff face. Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton have sung Canada’s praises, Barack Obama has promised to replicate the zone in 20 cities, Wall Street backers have helped boost its budget to more than $40 million a year. But superstar fans go only so far when it comes to teaching the value of time-outs to an expectant father whose discipline philosophy is based on pinching.Poor people typically don’t view their children as improvement projects the way middle-class parents do, and Tough presents the social science that shows how this can leave their children at an almost insurmountable disadvantage. Telling poor people how to raise their children is sometimes denounced as racism or “cultural imperialism,” but Canada sees attentive, careful parenting — of the type middle-class parents read about in baby books — as the first step toward overcoming poverty. As he puts it, “We want our parents to have the same information the rest of America has.”

Canada, 56, has lived the arc he would like to see his charges travel. He grew up poor, with an absent father. Through a combination of pluck, luck, strong relatives and affirmative action, Canada got himself out of the South Bronx and through elite colleges. He was rarely around for his first son, born while he was a sophomore at Bowdoin; when the second arrived, much later, he talked to him in the womb and played him Mozart.

At Baby College, “graduation” is celebrated with balloons, a processional and speeches. The other graduation Tough describes, from a middle school called Promise Academy, is bittersweet, since disappointing test scores and behavior problems have caused Canada to retreat from plans to start a high school with these rising ninth graders. Tough, an editor at The New York Times Magazine who spent five years following Canada’s project, shows the pressures facing administrators. Most of the sixth graders arrived reading at a third-grade level or worse and thinking that 53 was 15; meanwhile, backers were ready to clean house when they didn’t see big improvements in test scores after just one year.

While scores did eventually go up, Tough doesn’t give much of an idea of what the students were learning or how they were taught, beyond the test-prep they were given morning, noon and night. At a time when social service organizations struggle to show quantifiable results, it’s never clear, beyond the force of Canada’s personality, how he managed to attract so much support without the evidence funders typically demand.

Still, when it comes to an introduction to the debate about poverty and parenting in urban America, you could hardly do better than Tough’s book. The children of the uneducated and impoverished too often bear a gloomy inheritance, their futures set in stone from an early age. Within Canada’s 97 blocks, Tough finds a different kind of legacy — one shaped by parents who have learned to pay attention to their children’s developmental needs. With a support network unlike anything else in America, the children of Harlem can envision a future so many others expect as a matter of course.

The Predator State How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too

Author: James K Galbraith

This is political economy at its best, in the tradition of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, or J.K. Galbraith’s The New Industrial State. The comparators are chosen carefully, for not only is The Predator State an update, it is equally as deserving of status as a classic. The issues are carefully examined, the prose is delightful, the arguments appear unassailable, and the choir—including this reviewer and presumably most of the readers of this journal—shouts “Amen!”. But will the book be read? Can any book today capture the attention accorded to Veblen a century ago, or to Galbraith, senior, nearly fifty years ago? Still, one must applaud Jamie for trying. This is an amazing effort...

The general theses can be simply stated. First, while conservatives toyed with laissez-faire, they quickly abandoned it in all important areas of policy-making. For them, it now serves as nothing more than an enabling myth, used to hide the true nature of our world. Ironically, only the progressive still takes the call for “market solutions” seriously, and this is the major barrier to formulating sensible policy. Second, the “industrial state” has been replaced by a predator state, a coalition of relentless opponents of the very idea of a “public interest”, whose purpose is to master the state structure in order to empower a high plutocracy with nothing more than vile and rapacious goals. Finally, the “corporate republic” created by the likes of Dick Cheney is highly unstable, a formula for national failure. Progressives must wrest control from the reactionaries before it is too late for restoration of America as the world’s financial anchor, technological leader, and promoter of collective security.

Jamie thus resurrects both the extreme pessimism of Veblen’s notion of predation (by the conspicuously consuming leisure class in Veblen’s day, but by the corporate elite and Cheney’s imperial court today) as well as his only partially defined but optimistic vision of a world dominated by the engineers. As Jamie argues, his father admired Veblen but was most influenced by the New Deal, the mobilization during WWII, and the rise of the modern corporation that cooperated with government and labor to create the planned economy of the postwar period. Hence, Veblen’s opposition of the business enterprise versus the public interest was replaced by countervailing powers that compromised a largely acceptable truce. Jamie insists that his father’s analysis was correct, however, it was already becoming outdated by the early 1970s as the Bretton Woods system fell apart.

The free market reactionaries promised that some combination of monetarism, supply side economics, balanced budgets, and free trade was the solution to America’s woes. The mantra “free markets” provided an easy antidote to “planning” that was said to constrain recovery and growth. As each conservative policy was tried, however, it resulted in obvious and even spectacular failure. In truth, all economies are always and everywhere planned—for the simple reason that planning is the use of today’s resources to meet tomorrow’s needs, something that all societies must do if they are going to survive—so the only question is who is going to do the planning, and to whom are the benefits going to flow? There are still a few true believers (principled conservatives that Jamie compares to noble savages in the political wilderness), but most conservatives realized that there is no conflict between “big government” and “the market” as they abandoned the myth but usurped the “free market” label. All we are left with is the liberal who embraces the myth out of fear of being exposed as a heretic, a socialist, or a fool. Thus, the liberal pines to “make the market work better”, never challenging the view (abandoned by all but the most foolish conservatives) that government is the problem.

Economic freedom is reduced to the freedom to shop, including the freedom to buy elections, and anything that interferes is a threat. “Market” means nothing more than “nonstate”, a negation of use of policy in the public interest. Jamie provides a careful analysis of the frontline battles on many of the most important issues--Social Security, health care, inequality, immigration, security after 9-11, trade and outsourcing, and global warming—showing how “market solutions” are designed to enrich a favored oligarchy through a spoils system administered through the state’s structure. The policy “mistakes” in Iraq or New Orleans or at Bear-Stearns do not result from incompetence—indeed they only appear to be failures because we apply inappropriate measures of success. There is no common good, no public purpose, no shareholder’s interest; we are the prey and governments as well as corporations are run by and for predators. The “failures” enrich the proper beneficiaries even as they “prove” government is no solution.

There is a way out, but it is not easy. Historically, regulation and standards have required acceptance by progressive business—those firms that recognized they would lose in races to the bottom. Today, corporate and public policy alike are run by the most reactionary elements, well-paid rogues that suck capacity. Wherever one finds a sector that still operates reasonably well, one finds remnants of New Deal institutions that support, guarantee, regulate, and leverage private activities, in spheres as diverse as higher education, housing, pensions, healthcare, the military-industrial complex (and the prison-industrial complex). Naturally, even these sectors are endangered as they represent potential riches (witness subprimes, a privatization mess that Wall Street would love to repeat with Social Security). Still, Jamie is hopeful. The ideology of free markets is bankrupt, but the US is not. The path is clear: re-regulation, planning, standards (including wage controls), and coming to grips with the nation’s global responsibilities.

L. Randall Wray University of Missouri—Kansas City The reviewer is Professor of Economics, and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute.

n "The Predator State" Galbraith argues that the Reagan revolution and all that followed was essentially a fraud. What remains of it? Nothing. Who still believes in it? Outside academia: no one.

Galbraith says that Reaganism was founded on three policies: deregulation, monetarism and low taxes. He declares that the first was an artifice so that lobbyists could extract "more money from those who can afford to pay - and sometimes from those who cannot."

Monetarism (the tactic used, successfully, by the Federal Reserve in the 1980s to nip inflation) he depicts as a tool to kill off labor unions and elevate the power of Wall Street. And low taxes failed to achieve their supposed purpose - encouraging saving. They were merely a sop to the wealthy.

The author, whose prose is reminiscent of that of his famous father, John Kenneth Galbraith, is as wickedly biting as he is over the top. He writes, "It is fair to say that there will never again be any U.S. government for which a truly principled conservative might work." Fair to say? How about biased, vengeful and short-sighted to say?

I have a sneaky feeling Galbraith would take those fighting words as a compliment. He admits this is a "personal" work, since the conservative tide "devalued my Keynesian education, obstructed my career and deprived me and my few comrades on Capitol Hill of purchase on the levers of power." He mourns the assault on his father's legacy. (Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning monetarist most responsible for toppling Galbraith from a revered place in the economist's pantheon, is likened to George Wallace.)

Touching as his filial devotion is, Galbraith seems to believe we are still living in an economic ecosystem dominated by industrial behemoths - which is to say, the world described in the elder Galbraith's 1967 masterpiece, "The New Industrial State." When he observes of CEOs, citing Veblen, that their "wives and servants are therefore fed and decorated to reflect the stature of their masters," he is dialing back to the 1950s, or maybe to the '20s.

Still, the gusto with which he repeatedly challenges tired conventions is refreshing. Did inflation really go up in the '70s because the Fed printed too much money - or as Galbraith says, did big companies, big unions and OPEC simply have too much pricing power? Does too much employment really lead to inflation, as conservatives tell us - or is the very notion absurd? And if low taxes haven't promoted savings, Galbraith asks, why not raise them?

Galbraith delights in tweaking conservatives, but some of his surest arrows are aimed at liberals, whom he charges with cowering in a "protective crouch." As a Keynesian, Galbraith does honor to deficit spending; he harpoons liberals for adopting the ideal of balanced budgets just when the right has abandoned it. Budget balancers are "not merely parroting conservatives," he says; "they are parroting dead conservatives." And he debunks the liberal approach to trade protection, which is often to insist that developing nations agree to reforms in their home economies. "You cannot impose a wage standard on China or Vietnam," Galbraith points out. But you can do it at home.

Aiming, he says, "to free up the liberal mind," he fearlessly endorses long since abandoned, and now generally discredited, liberal policies, from price controls to state planning. "You want higher wages?" he asks. "Raise them. You want more and better jobs? Create them."

There is much in this book that strikes me as wrong. Most CEOs are neither "functionaries" nor are they "idle." It is not true that the market never ferrets out scandal; Enron was spotted by hedge funds and undone by short-sellers. Hurricane Katrina exposed a failure not of markets but of government. And contrary to Galbraith, economic freedom as interpreted by market proponents is more than just "the freedom to shop."

He writes so well, you have to pinch yourself to remember that, yes, the free market has produced robust growth and central planning has usually failed. Galbraith acknowledges that the United States has mostly enjoyed prosperity in recent years; his glib explanation is that hold-over New Deal institutions (government mortgage agencies, subsidized health care, student loans) have come to the rescue of misguided conservative policies. In other words, if it works, it's the residue of Franklin Roosevelt and Galbraith's dad; if it fails, it's the market's fault. That seemed preposterous when I first read it; but in the wake of the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when all of Wall Street could be headed for a bailout, one wonders.

Galbraith admits neither ambiguity nor doubt; indeed, his prose is absolutist in proportion to the extent to which his assertions are unprovable. For Galbraith, the market as its apostles describe it does not really exist. It is a "vaporous" idea, a "cosmic and ethereal space," a "negation," a "nonstate." Finally, it is "another god that failed." This is brilliant rhetoric. It is not brilliant economics, but give him his due: He has raised trenchant questions about a system in crisis.

What remains of the Reagan revolution? Galbraith asks. Nothing, he answers.

Roger Lowenstein is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine. His latest book is "While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis."