Unquenchable America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It

Author: Robert Glennon

Robert Glennon captures the irony—and tragedy—of America’s water crisis in a book that is both frightening and wickedly comical. From manufactured snow for tourists in Atlanta to trillions of gallons of water flushed down the toilet each year, Unquenchable reveals the heady extravagances and everyday inefficiencies that are sucking the nation dry.

The looming catastrophe remains hidden as government diverts supplies from one area to another to keep water flowing from the tap. But sooner rather than later, the shell game has to end. And when it does, shortages will threaten not only the environment, but every aspect of American life: we face shuttered power plants and jobless workers, decimated fi sheries and contaminated drinking water.

We can’t engineer our way out of the problem, either with traditional fixes or zany schemes to tow icebergs from Alaska. In fact, new demands for water, particularly the enormous supply needed for ethanol and energy production, will only worsen the crisis. America must make hard choices—and Glennon’s answers are fittingly provocative. He proposes market-based solutions that value water as both a commodity and a fundamental human right.

One truth runs throughout Unquenchable: only when we recognize water’s worth will we begin to conserve it.

Biographies
Robert Glennon is the Morris K. Udall Professor of Law and Public Policy in the Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. He is the author of many articles and books, including the acclaimed Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters.

How We Decide

Author: Jonah Lehrer


Ever since the ancient Greeks, we humans have prided ourselves on being capable of purely rational thought. "Over time, our rationality came to define us. It was, simply put, what made us human. There's only one problem with this assumption of human rationality: it's wrong."

With this opening salvo, Jonah Lehrer joins the growing ranks of popular science writers mining cognitive science's ever-expanding evidence underscoring the limits of reason. Since the mid-1990s, when psychologist Daniel Goleman popularized the term "emotional intelligence," it has become fashionable to point out the myriad ways in which unconscious brain mechanisms affect conscious thought. Sadly, many of these books have been long on personal agendas and self-help suggestions but short on real insights - often reducing the marvelous discoveries in the neurosciences to psychobabble.

Fortunately, Lehrer offers real substance by going short on agenda and overreaching simplifications and being long on scholarship; his book presents an excellent synthesis of how many leading mind scientists view decision making. Lehrer is blessed with a rare combination of intelligence. He is a Rhodes scholar who has worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel; he has an insatiable curiosity as to how the mind works as well as a readily apparent aversion for pat answers. He has won my approval with his closing advice: "Embrace uncertainty. Hard problems rarely have easy solutions."

The book is full of recent basic science and psychology observations that serve as steppingstones for broader understanding of how decisions arise. Take, for example, his section on dopamine neurons - those brain reward system cells that generate the sense of pleasure. Recent studies show that these neurons also act as "prediction neurons." Train a monkey to associate the sound of a bell with getting a drink of juice. Initially, these neurons will fire as soon as the monkey receives the juice. But after a few experimental trials, the neurons will fire when the monkey hears the bell, but before the juice is delivered.

On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not

Author: Robert Burton

In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen.

Bringing together cutting edge neuroscience, experimental data, and fascinating anecdotes, Robert Burton explores the inconsistent and sometimes paradoxical relationship between our thoughts and what we actually know. Provocative and groundbreaking, On Being Certain, will challenge what you know (or think you know) about the mind, knowledge, and reason.

ROBERT BURTON, M.D. graduated from Yale University and University of California at San Francisco medical school, where he also completed his neurology residency. At age 33, he was appointed chief of the Division of Neurology at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital, where he subsequently became Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences. His non-neurology writing career includes three critically acclaimed novels. He lives in Sausalito, California.

“What do we do when we recognize that a false certainty feels the same as certainty about the sky being blue? A lesser guide might get bogged down in nail-biting doubts about the limits of knowledge. Yet Burton not only makes clear the fascinating beauty of this tangled terrain, he also brings us out the other side with a clearer sense of how to navigate. It's a lovely piece of work; I'm all but certain you'll like it. “

--David Dobbs, author of Reef Madness; Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral

How the Rich are Destroying the Earth

Author: Hervé Kempf

In this frequently iconoclastic, and surprisingly humorous book, Kempf, environmental editor of Le Monde, puts together familiar themes—ecological crisis, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the threat anti-terrorism poses to democracy—to point out the elephant in the room: the fact that the income and conspicuous consumption of the “hyper-rich” need to be reduced so the world’s poorest can receive justice and the middle classes will “consume less; the planet will be better off; and, we’ll be less frustrated by what we don’t have.” Kempf references Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, arguing that Veblen’s theories—once made obsolete by the narrowing of incomes in the twentieth-century—are relevant again due to the rise of a new international aristocracy. He may infuriate right-leaning American readers allergic to discussions of class warfare, but he’s equally hard on the “wobbly” left, “pickled in the idea of progress as it was conceived in the nineteenth century.” Although the book’s message is deeply disturbing, its uniquely French style of lighthearted, even optimistic seriousness makes it a refreshing and entertaining read.

THE NUMBERS GAME The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life

Author: Michael Blastland, Andrew Dilnot

"Americans are assaulted by numbers, whether it's the latest political poll or most recent clinical study on caffeine. But what do these numbers really mean and are they communicating a categorical truth? Blastland and Dilnot, from the BBC radio show More or Less, embark on a monumental task of interpreting numerical data and showing how its misinterpretation often leads to misinformation. 'It is one thing to measure,' they write, 'quite another to wrench the numbers to a false conclusion.' The authors take a close look at statistics that are accepted at face value — many stemming from scientific or medical discoveries. They examine everything from the link between alcohol and breast cancer risk to baseball batting averages to fascinating assessments of the manipulation of data by politicians when they talk taxes or the cautionary tale of a U.K. educational measurement program designed much like No Child Left Behind. Blastland and Dilnot apply their famously cheeky approach to the analysis of how people are duped, frightened or falsely encouraged by data."

Books on Walmart

 The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy
Author: Charles Fishman


Sam Walton: Made in America
Author: Sam Walton

How Walmart Is Destroying America (And the World): And What You Can Do about It 
Author: Bill Quinn

The Case Against Walmart
Author: Al Norman


Walmart: The high cost of low price (DVD)
Director: Robert Greenwald


Frontline: Is Wal-Mart Good for America? (DVD)
Director: Hedrick Smith

The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company 
Author: Don Soderquist
 
The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business
Author: Nelson Lichenstein

The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making

Author: Scott Plous

Scott Plous focuses on the social aspects of decision making and includes everyday examples from medicine, law, business, education, and nuclear arms control, among other areas. Intended for non-specialists, this book highlights experimental findings rather than psychological theory and presents information in descriptive prose rather than through mathematics.

In a "Reader Survey" preceding the first chapter, readers are asked to answer questions that are taken from studies discussed later in the book. This brief (and entertaining) exercise allows readers to compare their answers with the responses people gave in the original studies and to better understand their own processes of choosing.

Plous explores the building blocks of judgment and decision making and contrasts historical models of decision making with recent models that take into account various biases in judgment. In addition, he examines judgments made by and about groups and discusses common traps in judgment and decision making.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb


Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired to deceive us. "Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature." Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh. We're still doing it.

Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex thing we don't--and, most importantly, can't--know. The truth is that we have no idea why stock markets go up or down on any given day, and whatever reason we give is sure to be grossly simplified, if not flat out wrong.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb first made this argument in Fooled by Randomness, an engaging look at the history and reasons for our predilection for self-deception when it comes to statistics. Now, in The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, he focuses on that most dismal of sciences, predicting the future. Forecasting is not just at the heart of Wall Street, but it’s something each of us does every time we make an insurance payment or strap on a seat belt.

The problem, Nassim explains, is that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat (diligently trying to follow the path of the "millionaire next door," when unrepeatable chance is a better explanation). Instead, the really important events are rare and unpredictable. He calls them Black Swans, which is a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, "all swans are white" had long been used as the standard example of a scientific truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia.

Nassim argues that most of the really big events in our world are rare and unpredictable, and thus trying to extract generalizable stories to explain them may be emotionally satisfying, but it's practically useless. September 11th is one such example, and stock market crashes are another. Or, as he puts it, "History does not crawl, it jumps." Our assumptions grow out of the bell-curve predictability of what he calls "Mediocristan," while our world is really shaped by the wild powerlaw swings of "Extremistan."

In full disclosure, I'm a long admirer of Taleb's work and a few of my comments on drafts found their way into the book. I, too, look at the world through the powerlaw lens, and I too find that it reveals how many of our assumptions are wrong. But Taleb takes this to a new level with a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature.