The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems by Van Jones

If one comes to this volume, The Green Collar Economy, looking for a discussion of macro-economic and political issues associated with a failing economy and a ravaged environment, they would not be disappointed. Excellent introductions to these issues are presented by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and by the author. However, those are not the main focus of Mr. Jones. He approaches these issues not as a politician or an academic, but as a social activist. In his own words:


"We want to build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. We want to create green pathways out of poverty and into great careers for America’s children. We want this green wave to lift all boats."

Most of the book is devoted to demonstrating that the author’s goal can be reached and to laying out the path that should be followed to get there.

He begins by delivering a thrashing to traditional environmental activism. He describes the first wave of environmentalism as one of conservation in which the rights of the native population were trampled on:


"National parks and wilderness areas were set aside for the benefit of white American tourists.....the conservationists stood up for the most vulnerable places—but not always for the most vulnerable people."

The second wave he refers to as that of regulation.


"The movement to better regulate industrial society was, in its origins, almost entirely the purview of the affluent and white. As a result it failed to see the toxic pollution that was concentrating n communities of poor and brown-skinned people, even after major environmental laws were passed. In fact, some people of color began to wonder if white polluters and white environmentalists were unconsciously collaborating."

These concerns led to the development of a parallel movement focused on environmental justice.


"Since the 1980’s the United States has had a shameful secret: its environmental movement is almost explicitly segregated by race—the mainstream environmentalists are in one camp (mostly white), and the environmental justice advocates in another (made up almost entirely of people of color)."

Mr. Jones’ hope is that the third wave, the green wave, will be focused on all the population.


"The green sector needs to break out of its elite niche and succeed on a broad scale economically. If the green economy remains a niche market, even a large one, then the excluded 80% will inevitably, and perhaps unknowingly, undo all the positive ecological impacts of the green 20%."

This argument drives the structure of the remainder of the book. He discusses how to form a coalition of interests to drive for a "Green New Deal." He points out that many initiatives are already in place demonstrating the potential for energy savings and job creation, but that only the government can scale these types of activities up to the level needed to address our problems. He also points out that it is necessary to have the business community as an active and an enthusiastic partner. "Only the business community has the requisite skills, experience, and capital to meet the needs." Jones provides a detailed and convincing game plan for the next (current) president to use in implementing a green revolution. The most compelling sections are those in which he describes the large number of jobs requiring only a minimal amount of training that can be created and pay a living wage. These were the types of jobs that allowed blue collar workers to send their children to college in the decades after WWII. Jones would like to see that dynamic reproduced here. His warning is that "positive government action is required to steer jobs and investments to areas where they are needed." It is not surprising, given his background and interests that Van Jones was appointed by the Obama administration as "Special Advisor on Green Jobs for the Council on Environmental Quality (He has since resigned that role)."

It was pleasant to encounter a treatise so positive and hopeful. The author threw out a particularly pleasing quote which he vaguely ascribed to the thinking of the native American Indians:

"We don’t inherit the earth from our parents; we borrow it from our children. The earth doesn’t belong to us; we belong to the earth."

All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America by Joel Berg

Mr. Berg served eight years in the Department of Agriculture during the Clinton administration. His most relevant role was as leader of the Community Food Security Initiative, an effort that George Bush terminated when he took office. Joel Berg is currently the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

Despite the glib title and uninspired artwork on the book cover, All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America, was a serious and well-constructed effort to describe the extent of hunger in our country, and to detail the ramifications of “food insecurity” for both those suffering from it and for society as a whole. The author tells the reader exactly where he is heading on the very first page: “...this book argues that only government has the size, scope, resources — and yes, the legitimacy — to take the lead in actually solving the problem. And make no mistake: Government can solve the problem.” The beginning of the book focuses on defining the extent of the problem of hunger, euphemistically referred to as “food insecurity” by the government. The remainder is devoted to justifying this thesis. The final section includes the author’s plan for eliminating food insecurity. Berg also includes two appendices, one providing a list of activist organizations, the other provided advice on how to be a successful activist.

There was much to learn from this work. The author provides an interesting history of hunger in the USA, implying that many of our attitudes toward the problem are derived from our British-oriented heritage. He states that the USA and Great Britain have in common very high levels of inequality, and very high levels of child poverty, more than one observes in most advanced countries. He attributes this to a form of social Darwinism which allows one to view hunger as an unavoidable fact of life rather than addressing the issue as a solvable problem. He states: “America has been tricked into thinking that these problems can’t be solved and that the best we can hope for is for private charities to make the suffering marginally less severe.” Berg provides a detailed description of the evolution of the government’s intervention in providing food for the needy. His basic conclusion is that the safety net society provides is sufficient to keep people from starving, but is not sufficient to provide security and to allow recipients to function effectively in society. A number of interesting historical tidbits are revealed along the way. For example:

• during the depression when large numbers of people were actually starving, the nation was awash in farm output, but the notion of the government buying the food and distributing it to the needy was too advanced a concept at the time, 
• the national school lunch program was developed during World War II because recruits were emerging from the depression so malnourished that they could not immediately function as soldiers, 
• a government study accused the state of Mississippi of purposely trying to starve African Americans in order to drive them out of the state.

The real key to eliminating food insecurity is to eliminate poverty. The author expends much space to what he refers to as the “poverty trap.” This was one of the best and most informative sections of the book. He points out that you cannot get out of poverty unless you are able to accumulate savings. However if you accumulate savings then you lose your eligibility for government support. Another undesirable consequence of “means testing” is that it becomes complex and time consuming to apply for assistance. So much so that many eligible people do not gain access to the support, and many of those that do, eventually lose it through bureaucratic errors. Many of the recipients of food support are employed, but in jobs that do not pay a living wage. The provision of jobs that pay enough for a person to support minimal needs without external assistance should be, and must be, one of society’s goals. The author describes how hard it is to survive on the food stamp allotment, let alone eat healthy foods. A good discussion is provided of the tie between poverty/hunger and obesity/malnutrition. Berg points out a number of less well-known tribulations of living in impoverished areas. Supermarkets with competitive prices and abundant supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables are not likely to be found where people have little money to spend. The simplest financial transactions are either unavailable or very expensive for the poor. People in impoverished areas lack the social capital that could provide a network of friends and connections and guidance on simple things like how to approach a job interview.

The author views charitable activities in the area of food distribution as a mixed blessing. While the effort is certainly well-intentioned, it often has the effect of diverting attention from what is really needed, which is a coordinated, guaranteed government anti-poverty program. He further points out that the overhead in running a charitable effort is often much higher than it would be for an equivalent government program. In fact, most of the food distributed by charities comes from the government, either directly or indirectly through tax write-offs.

In summary, the author quotes a figure of about 35 million people who experience a significant level of food insecurity in the course of a year. Of these, about 11 million suffered from hunger or very low food security for extensive periods during the year. Studies are cited which support ties between hunger and increased health care costs, reduced productivity, and diminished educational performance. All of these factors represent a cost which the country must ultimately bear for neglecting to care for its citizens. Berg estimates that an additional $24B annual increase in food purchasing power could eliminate the issue of food insecurity if it was properly distributed. In the grand scheme of things, this does not seem like a large amount of money. The costs of inaction are undoubtedly higher.

The author did a good job in presenting a complex problem and placing it in its historic and political context. His style was rather informal and heavily anecdotal, producing text that was quite easy to read. A bit of judicious editing could have produced a volume that was significantly shorter, but just as effective.

Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

The authors provide a long and detailed history of Afghanistan, its rulers, its culture, and its interactions with its neighboring entities. The story begins when recorded history begins, but the bulk of the material focuses on the continual political machinations between the British and Russian empires in the 19th and 20th centuries and the conflicts between the Soviet Union and the US/British empires that marked the 20th century. The book details the evolution of the Afghan state after the Soviet retreat including the rise to power of the Taliban, the effect of 9/11 and the subsequent US invasion, the mismanagement by the Bush administration, and finally concludes with suggestions of what incoming President Obama might do to correct the situation. Most readers will approach this volume looking for a perspective upon which to form an opinion as to the correct policy for our government in Afghanistan. To the authors’ credit, they provide that perspective, however they do it at the expense of numbing the reader’s enthusiasm with excessive detail. There is also a shrillness to the descriptions of our country’s cynical political maneuverings that has the flavor more of a political tract than straight history. In spite of its faults, the book provides, to those who manage to stay the course, valuable insights into the situation we find ourselves in today and how we got there. It is not a tale likely to instill pride in us as citizens.

The following paragraphs summarize the relevant history.

For centuries Afghanistan has been a buffer between competing empires. The central Asian countries/cultures that formed the southern boundary of the Russian/Soviet empires are religiously and ethnically closer to Afghanistan in character than to Russia. The Russians have always feared that British/US operatives would encourage trouble for them by encouraging revolt against Russian rule. Britain always feared that Russia had designs on their Indian territories in order to attain a southern sea port.

Perhaps the defining historical moment for Afghanistan and the region was the British creation of Pakistan and the drawing of the Durand Line as a boundary between the two countries. This artificial border had the effect of placing a large fraction of a dominant Afghan ethnic group, the Pashtuns, in a Pakistan dominated by peoples with whom they had little, if any, cultural ties. The situation has been a point of contention between the countries for decades. It is precisely this border region where the Taliban and Al Qeada are operative today.

As a poor country wedged between two powerful and opposed entities, Afghanistan had to try to develop an independent and relatively progressive nation while at the same time needing assistance from these opposing parties. This, of necessity, required playing one side off against the other, or being played by one side against the other, depending on your point of view.

The critical information for US citizens to take away from this book and to use in forming opinions as to how our government should proceed in the future is the following. Beginning in the 70’s, before the soviets invaded Afghanistan, the US began supporting Moslem fundamentalists as a counter to Soviet support of leftists. At the time, Afghanistan was struggling to maintain a democratically-oriented government with moderate social values. We supported the religious fundamentalists knowing full well that their intention was to impose a religious regime that, in the words of the authors, would return Afghanistan to the Stone Age and subject the women of the country to a form of slavery. With financial support from radical Saudis and the drug trade, and military support from radical Pakistanis, their goal was to extend this Islamic rule to the neighboring countries in the Soviet Union and to Pakistan and Iran. The authors argue that we provided this support solely to induce Russia to invade Afghanistan so that they would suffer the loss of life and political upheaval that we experienced in Vietnam. This is a dreadfully cynical approach for our country to take, and, unfortunately, a very credible assessment by the authors. We, in effect, helped create the enemies we now face.

It is hard to argue with those who point out the low probability of success and the excessive costs in terms of lives and money. Clearly the last eight years have not been fruitful and the outlook is bleak. The authors do not address the arguments for an early disentanglement because they do not even consider the possibility. Their first argument in favor of continuing the struggle would be based on humanitarian or moral grounds. In other words, we are responsible for so much evil and suffering that we cannot walk away before we have at least tried to make things right. Without our support the most likely result would see the Taliban taking over the country again. Their rule has been, and would be again, a humanitarian disaster with women bearing most of the burden. The authors would further argue that an unstable or Taliban-led Afghanistan would cause political instability throughout much of Asia. A nuclear-armed Pakistan would be a much easier target for the Taliban without US pressure on the insurgents from the Afghan side of the border. Can one actually imagine the Taliban in possession of nuclear weapons? The radical Islamists are not interested only in controlling Afghanistan. Their goal is to spread unrest and revolution throughout the region. They intend to finance these revolutions via the drug trade. Much of the narcotic production feeds addiction in neighboring countries such as Iran and Russia. One can envision scenarios where armed conflict could spread to Iran, Russia and India in addition to Pakistan.

The authors certainly believe in a continuing role for the US in the region. However, their guidance for the then incoming Obama administration was rather weak in the sense that their suggestions were all rather vague and lofty rather than specific and immediate. Basically, they seemed to be saying that we do not have to do something radically different, rather we have to do things right for a change.

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin

Rubin argues that the world faces an unavoidable decline in petroleum production, which, coupled with increased demand from rapidly growing economies, will drive the price of oil ever higher and produce a situation where our economy, as currently structured, is unsustainable.

"Once the dust settles from the various crises rocking financial markets, we are looking at the same basic demand-supply imbalance that we were looking at before the recession began. That imbalance took us to nearly $150 per barrel before the recession set in. In the next cycle, the same imbalance will probably take us to $200 per barrel before another recession temporarily knocks back prices and demand."

The author has written a compelling and very readable account of what he believes we face. The first part of the book contains his arguments about declining production and our seeming inability to do anything about it. The second part of the book discusses the implications for our economy and for our lives of this coming stage of oil/energy scarcity. Rubin provides a good discussion of a number of energy related issues including transportation, agriculture and global warming. This second part of his book is actually a good bit more optimistic than the first. It is replete with suggestions for becoming more energy intelligent and energy efficient. One of his more interesting ideas is to impose a carbon tax on ourselves to minimize greenhouse gas production and then to impose a carbon tax on the goods we import. The latter move would in effect be a tariff that would fall most heavily on those countries that continue to produce the most greenhouse gases (read China). In promoting mass transit infrastructure investments he provides an interesting perspective on the role of the auto industry in ensuring that we ended up the greatest gas guzzling nation of all. The author’s chapter "Going Local" makes for interesting reading as he gives us a view of life in an energy/oil limited world. Increases in the cost of oil will increase the cost of transportation enough to curtail the current "globalization" of the economy. This will in turn generate a host of "good" and "bad’ effects on our lives. People will have to depend on their local economies more for food and manufacturing, travel at all levels will become less frequent. Countries that depend most on the global economy will have numerous fundamental problems to overcome.

However, before we plow under our lawns to make space for the gardens that will sustain us perhaps we should ask the question "Is he correct?" The author’s contention that this cycle is inevitable seems to rest on two foundations: the notion of peak oil having been reached and the belief that economic growth demands a certain quantity of energy/oil and therefore increased growth necessarily results in increased demand for oil. The author admits that he is on the wrong side of conventional wisdom with respect to his assumption of peak oil. His discussion of energy/oil usage is laden with suggestions for how greater efficiency is possible but he ends up assuming these efforts will fail, presumably because they failed in the past (at least in our country).

"While we routinely pat ourselves on the back for reducing the amount of oil we burn to produce a dollar of GDP, our economies nevertheless continue to ever more efficiently consume more and more oil, making them even more vulnerable to oil prices.

The fact that we can support a larger economy today for a given level of oil consumption than we could have thirty or forty years ago should be of limited solace to us. The same efficiency paradox that has prevented the average car owner from cutting his fuel bill or the average home owner from reducing her power bill plays the same role in the economy as a whole. Oil per unit of GDP in the US has fallen over 50% since the first OPEC oil shock, but total oil consumption has risen by 20% nevertheless.

The OPEC shocks didn’t wean us off oil. They just prompted technical change that has made us even more leveraged to the stuff. And when we can no longer expand supply, we risk living in a stagnant world economy that may no longer be able to grow. That world, which could be right around the corner, is going to feature a lot fewer drive-thrus, a lot more bicycles and, no doubt, less Atlantic salmon on our dinner plates. In short, it is going to be a whole lot smaller."

　

The real issue is one of timescale. If supply and demand for oil leads to a controlled and modest increase in price then there could be a few decades before any of the effects that Rubin warns of come into play. The more time you have the more likely it is that technology and changes in lifestyle can come to the rescue, perhaps in ways that cannot be envisaged today.

He argues that spikes in oil prices cause recessions. He implies that the current recession is a result of oil prices rising from $40 to $140 per barrel. His conclusion seems to be that as soon as the global economy recovers the price will go back up to that range again triggering another recession. What has happened thus far is that the price of oil fell to around $40 per barrel and then rose to about $70-85 and has stabilized there—so far. No one seems to be particularly worried about maintaining economic growth at this price, and the prospects for expanding oil production are much better.

Some of Rubin’s assumptions are admittedly counter to conventional wisdom and may be proven incorrect. He implies that the OPEC countries are incapable of manipulating price by increasing output; others assert that the Saudis are growing their output capacity to maintain that capability. Iraq is reputed to have undeveloped oil reserves that could be comparable to those of Saudi Arabia. The author makes no mention of that. Rubin asserts that the Gulf of Mexico will never meet expectations as a source, not because the oil is not there, but because of the difficult environment. DOE and others disagree. Rubin implies that production from oil sands will never be significant and that producers are backing out of the business. Apparently new technology now allows these companies to operate at a profit with oil as low as $60 a barrel and they have renewed their activities in this area. The output from Russian fields is described as falling. More recent data indicates it may in fact be rising.

The DOE has an entity called the Energy Information Administration which provides data and projections of energy supply and demand (www.eia.doe.gov). They have a draft report posted that predicts relatively slow growths in oil price and oil consumption out to the year 2035. This is the conventional wisdom that Rubin disparages. One should at least hear both sides of the story.

A useful and readable description of the "conventional wisdom" can be found in an article by Edward L. Morse in the journal "Foreign Affairs" (September/October 2009) "Low and Behold: Making the Most of Cheap Oil." The article discusses petroleum-related politics in general. Some of the discussion related to oil supply is reproduced here.

"Energy Intelligence, a leading market analyst, estimates that the world’s surplus oil-production capacity peaked at around 12 million barrels per day in 1985, was eliminated soon after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the United Nations embargoed oil from Iraq, and climbed back up to over five million barrels a day in mid 2002. Until about 2002, the conventional wisdom held that the world was mired in a permanent oil glut and with so much oil around investments to find and develop more of it were too risky."

"Then, in 2002-3 the overhang in production capacity evaporated rapidly and unexpectedly. Some analysts invoked the so-called peak oil theory and blamed the situation on an unprecedented acceleration in the decline of oil production caused by the gradual exhaustion of underground resources. But there are more reasonable explanations for what put pressure on oil supplies. Even those countries with plenty of oil resources suffered political impediments to production that could not easily be removed. Venezuela’s state oil company went on strike in protest against President Hugo Chavez, civil disorder over living conditions in the Niger Delta crippled Nigeria’s oil sector, Iran failed to put in place an investment regime to attract foreign capital, the United States launched a war to oust Saddam Hussein and resource nationalism in Russia and other non-OPEC countries reduced production growth."

"In short order, the virtual disappearance of surplus oil-production capacity jolted the market. The loss of that cushion, which had seemed a fixture for decades, surprised both consumers and producers, not least Saudi Arabia, whose commitment to readily supply the world market is the basis of its political clout both within OPEC and globally. The tightness in supplies exposed the complacency or, rather, the failure of Saudi Arabia and other producers to adequately invest in exploration and the production of crude."

"By 2003-4 Saudi Arabia was concerned. It responded by raising production: from 7.5 million barrels per day in 2002 to 9.2 million barrels per day in 2003. After a dip in 2004, it produced close to 10 million barrels per day in 2008....Huge production expansions, including a new field that opened in June and can yield one million barrels a day, have raised capacity to 12.5 million barrels per day. Another one million barrels per day of potential capacity is on standby, meaning that it could be developed in 12-18 months. And because of Saudi Arabia’s efforts to increase its production capacity, OPEC’s total production capacity could exceed 37 million barrels per day in 2010. This would be a record level: five million barrels per day more than in 2002 (before the strike in Venezuela) and more than ten million barrels per day above today’s level."

"In fact, there are plenty of deep-water resources waiting to be tapped—in the Gulf of Mexico; off the coast of Brazil; in the eastern Mediterranean; in the gulf of Guinea; in the Caspian Sea; off the shores of India, China, Indonesia, and Australia; and along the shores of Arctic-bordering states (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway and Russia)—and oil companies spent increasing sums to do so.....If there was an obstacle, it was not a lack of hydrocarbon reserves—deep-water resources appear to be even more abundant than was thought a decade ago—but a lack of equipment to discover and produce them. Fewer than two dozen drilling vessels (each costing $1 billion) were available in 2000. But as contracts were put in place at the time of very high oil prices, the fleet of vessels started to expand. By 2012 there should be close to 150 such units available for finding and developing deep-water resources."

"But by mid-2009 non-OPEC output was surprisingly robust. At midyear, the International Energy Agency was projecting growth in the output of non-OPEC countries, and the Department of Energy was also projecting an increase. Russia’s output could rise by 200,000 barrels a day this year rather than falling by 600,000-700,000 barrels a day, as many had forecast at the end of last year."

"Executives at the U.S. energy company ExxonMobil and the Canadian firm Suncor Energy say that the costs of developing oil sands have dropped so much that their companies are going ahead with large projects they had postponed until now—projects that, combined, should provide 300,000 barrels per day of new output by 2012. Last year, these projects would not have been viable with the price of oil at less than $90 a barrel. Today they make sense with oil at $60 per barrel."

Morse also has some interesting comments on the demand side in future years. Not surprisingly, he is more optimistic than Rubin in anticipating reductions in demand.

"Countries with historically high demand growth, especially, have experienced unexpected and sharp drops in demand. For example, Japan’s oil appetite was growing at a sustained rate of ten percent a year before 1973, when global oil prices spiked, and South Korea’s demand growth was at double-digit levels before 1998, when the effects of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis began to be felt. Japan has never again exceeded its pre-1973 oil needs, nor South Korea its demand of pre-1998."

Morse presumably had other motives for his article, but he ends up providing an alternate and contrary take on all of Rubin’s assertions concerning near-term oil supply and long-term demand. It will be interesting to see who is more correct. Hopefully global economies will come roaring back and one will know in a year or so.

Outliers: The Story Of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell’s message is a simple one: to be successful one has to have a certain level of skill or knowledge or intelligence, and one has to be presented with opportunities of which one can take advantage. The ability and the actionable opportunities are both required.

"What is the question we always ask about the successful? We want to know what they are like—what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of lifestyles they have, or what special talents they might have been born with. And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top....In Outliers I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing.....But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot."

He illustrates with examples how factors like intelligence, race, cultural background, home environment, education, age, historical timing, and access to social capital can provide or inhibit access to these opportunities. While this list might seem obvious to a prospective reader, Gladwell points out that these factors often operate in ways that are not always apparent. His examples are always interesting, and occasionally startling.

The author introduces a few concepts that are useful in interpreting how various factors enter into determining success. The first is the concept of being "just good enough." Any endeavor will require a certain level of an attribute such as intelligence, manual dexterity, musical ability or athletic prowess. Gladwell argues, and provides data to support the notion, that this concept of a threshold is real, but once you are beyond that threshold the ability to predict a person’s success becomes less a matter of an innate attribute and more a question who is the beneficiary of opportunities to take advantage of their capabilities.

"Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play."

This leads to another of Gladwell’s concepts which he refers to as the "ten thousand hour" rule.

"’The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything,’ writes the neurologist Daniel Leviton. ‘In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again’."

These two concepts are of course related in studying how people become successful. Note that ten thousand hours is about three hours a day for ten years. This is a very large amount of time for anyone, especially a young person, to devote to a single activity.

"It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you are a young adult. You have to have parents that encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough. In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program—like a hockey all-star squad—or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours."

The most interesting parts of this book are the examples of how individuals acquire the opportunity to devote this amount of time. The people examined range from Bill Gates to the Beatles. Occasionally, Gladwell’s application of the ten thousand hour rule appears to be a bit of a stretch, but the notion that people have to be provided an exceptional opportunity and have to be able to take advantage of it comes through loud and clear.

The common theme related to success is exceptional opportunity. Gladwell provides numerous examples that are interesting and informative. Rather than summarize them in some linear sense, it is perhaps more efficacious to discuss his conclusions in the context of what they tell us about how we educate our children; or, in other words, how we provide or fail to provide children with the opportunity to succeed.

One more concept must be introduced before the issue of education is addressed. This is the notion of "accumulative advantage."

"It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention."

The first topic Gladwell discusses in his book relates to the discovery of a birth-date-related bias found in examining the rosters of Canadian youth all-star hockey teams.

".....gathered statistics on every player in the Ontario Junior Hockey League. The story was the same. More players were born in January than in any other month, and by an overwhelming margin. The second most frequent birth month? February. The third? March. Barnsley found that there were nearly five and a half times as many Ontario Junior Hockey League players born in January as were born in November. He looked at all the all-star teams of eleven-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds—the young players selected for elite traveling squads. Same story. He looked at the composition of the National Hockey League. Same story. The more he looked, the more Barnsley came to believe that what he was seeing was not a chance occurrence but an iron law of Canadian hockey: in any elite group of hockey players—the very best of the best—40 percent of the players will have been born between January and March, 30 percent between April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between October and December."

　

What is being observed here is a perfect example of accumulated advantage. The threshold for birthdates in determining which age classification a youth will play in is January 1. That means someone born in January will be competing with others born in December, nearly a year later. A year is a long time in the life of a child. The January player will tend to be bigger, stronger, better coordinated and more mature intellectually and emotionally. In other words they will tend to perform better. In sports leagues the better players tend to be selected for advanced training with better coaches and in a more competitive environment. They will also get more playing time (remember the 10,000 hour rule). These advantages tend to propagate through their playing years rather than being damped out. This phenomenon has been noted in other sports where similar age cutoffs are applied.

It is not too hard to think of another area in which a similar birth-date bias might take place. How about our education system?

"Parents with a child born at the end of the calendar year often think about holding their child back before the start of kindergarten: it is hard for a five-year-old to keep up with a child born many months earlier. But most parents, one suspects, think that whatever disadvantage a younger child faces in kindergarten eventually goes away. But it doesn’t. It’s just like hockey. The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years."

The size of this effect does not appear as large as in the sports leagues where physicality dominates, but it is clearly measurable. It does not take much of a difference in test score to effect placement in a program for the gifted. The author quotes data from fourth grade performance in math and science tests to support this case. He also quotes data that indicates that students born early in the year are more abundant in college enrollment lists than students born later in the year, clearly supporting the claim that this effect persists.

The mechanism for propagation is the same as in hockey: ability grouping in young children. There are a number of approaches to minimizing this effect. One could break students into groups with less age deviation, or we could eliminate ability grouping entirely until students are older and relative maturity differences are smaller. The author points out that Denmark delays ability grouping until the age of ten in order to avoid this issue. Unfortunately that makes it a European idea and we are forbidden to utilize those.

Gladwell makes an interesting excursion into the cultural backgrounds of our society and that of many Asian countries in order to finally say something about why Asian students do better on standardized math tests than US (and European) students.

"On international comparison tests, students from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all score roughly the same in math, around the ninety-eighth percentile. The United States, France, England, Germany, and the other Western industrialized nations cluster at somewhere between the twenty-sixth and thirty-sixth percentile. That’s a big difference."

Even the most advanced and industrialized societies have an agrarian heritage that colors their cultural outlook. Consider the necessities of agriculture in the US and other Western countries. There is a relatively brief growing season with a lot of effort and activity required followed by long periods of inactivity. Farmers learned that fields produce more if they are not overworked and are allowed to "rest" every few years. Now consider the mindset of nineteenth century educators as described by historian Kenneth Gold. The reformers, Gold writes:

"...strove for ways to reduce time spent studying, because long periods of respite could save the mind from injury. Hence the elimination of Saturday classes, the shortening of the school day, and the lengthening of vacation—all of which occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. Teachers were cautioned that ‘when [students] are required to study, their bodies should not be exhausted by long confinement, nor their minds bewildered by prolonged application.’ Rest also presented opportunities for strengthening cognitive and analytic skills. As one contributor to the Massachusetts Teacher suggested, ‘it is when thus relieved from the state of tension belonging to actual study that boys and girls, as well as men and women, acquire the habits of thought and reflection, and of forming their own conclusions, independently of what they are taught and the authority of others’."

Gladwell contrasts these conclusions with those that arise from the rice farming agriculture common in Asia. The legacy of that agricultural tradition is that you work on your rice paddy every day of the year, and the harder you work the more the plot produces. There is no down time.

"Cultures that believe the route to success lies in rising before dawn 360 days a year are scarcely going to give their children three straight months off in the summer. The school year in the United States is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long."

Keep in mind that Gladwell is at this point drawing conclusions about the length of the school year on the basis of math performance which may not be representative of overall "success." However, in that context, he drives the nail in deeper with this observation.

"One of the questions asked of test takers on a recent math test given to students around the world was how many of the algebra, calculus and geometry questions covered subject matter that they had previously learned in class. For Japanese twelfth graders the answer was 92 percent. That is the value of going to school 243 days a year. You have the time to learn everything that needs to be learned—and you have less time to unlearn it. For American twelfth graders the comparable figure was 54 percent. For its poorest students, America doesn’t have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem......"

Gladwell discusses data which indicate that the key to good performance in math is not so much intelligence as the willingness to stick with problems until you eventually figure them out. Putting in the time seems to be critical in learning math. Yet another interesting, and seemingly, culturally-related phenomena is quoted related to perseverance.

"There is actually a significant scientific literature measuring Asian ‘persistence.’ In a typical study Priscilla Blinco gave large groups of Japanese and American first graders a very difficult puzzle and measured how long they worked at it before they gave up. The American children lasted, on average, 9.47 minutes. The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes, roughly 40 percent longer."

　

The author hammers again on the summer vacation issue with some telling data on reading performance. Gladwell describes the tendencies for poorer parents to leave their children to their own devices during summer vacation. On the other hand, the more well-off families provide a nurturing summer environment where children are encouraged to pursue organized cultural activities, to read books on their own, and are given a sense of greater personal worth. Data is presented which indicates that both categories of students learn at essentially the same rate over the course of the school year, but during the summer the poorer kids lose some of their skills while the richer kids continue to learn.

"Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school....Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it.

Several times Gladwell returns to one point that is central to his study of success and critical to his solution for improving a child’s chance for success: the importance of family support. One way or another, successful parents tend to produce successful children. He describes a famous study by Lewis Terman a psychology professor at Stanford who identified several hundred very high IQ children and followed them through to adulthood anticipating that these elite individuals would become important people doing important things as they grew older. Terman was disappointed because his geniuses were not that different from the population as a whole in terms of accomplishments (cue in the "just good enough" concept). Some were very successful, while others were very disappointing in terms of accomplishments. Terman concluded that the major factor in differentiating between the most successful and least successful was family background. In Gladwell’s words:

"What did the [low achievers] lack? Not something expensive or hard to find; not something encoded in DNA or hardwired into the circuits of their brains. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we’d only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world. The [low achievers] were squandered talent. But they didn’t need to be."

Gladwell is an optimist and believes that the data, research, and interpretation provided in his book indicate that we should and can do more to equalize opportunity.

"To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success—the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history—with a society that provides opportunities for all."

The author ends the body of the book with a long section describing a KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) school in the Bronx. There are now a number of KIPP schools spreading across the nation. He provides this particular school as an example of what our education system can accomplish if it is properly focused. It requires both educators and students to commit to spending much more time and effort on schooling. In fact, the time commitment becomes so great that the school environment actually becomes the community environment that the author says is so greatly needed by under-privileged children.

"KIPP is a middle school. Classes are large: the fifth grade has two sections of thirty-five students each. There are no entrance exams or admission requirements. Students are chosen by lottery, with any fourth grader living in the Bronx eligible to apply. Roughly half of the students are African-American, the rest are Hispanic. Three-quarters of the children come from single-parent homes. Ninety percent qualify for ‘free or reduced lunch,’ which is to say that their families earn so little that the federal government chips in so the children can eat properly at lunchtime."

Quoting David Levin, one of the founders of the KIPP school:

"The day goes from seven twenty-five until five p.m. After five, there are homework clubs, detention, sports teams. There are kids here from seven twenty-five until seven p.m. If you take an average day, and you take out lunch and recess, our kids are spending fifty to sixty percent more time learning than the traditional public school student....Saturdays they come in nine to one. In the summer its eight to two."

Gladwell recognizes that this schedule is not for everyone. Most parents would probably think it excessive and perhaps counterproductive. On the other hand, it is similar to the work day in the rice paddies, and probably not too different from what the Japanese see with their 243 day school year. The point Gladwell makes is that this approach does not have to be right for everyone because it is intended to give those who are willing to make the "bargain" with the KIPP system a chance at success that they would not have had any other way.

"Is this a lot to ask of a child? It is. But think of things from [the child’s] perspective. She has made a bargain with her school. She will get up at five forty-five in the morning, go in on Saturdays, and do homework until eleven at night. In return, KIPP promises to take kids....who are stuck in poverty and give them a chance to get out. It will get 84 percent of them up to or above their grade level in mathematics. On the strength of that performance, 90 percent of KIPP students get scholarships to private or parochial high schools instead of having to attend their own desultory high schools in the Bronx. And on the strength of that high school experience, more than 80 percent of KIPP graduates go on to college......How could that be a bad bargain? Everything we have learned in Outliers is that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed....Nor is it simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them."

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

This is a good book to read conjunction with Gladwell’s Outliers, it touches on some of the same topics, but from a much different perspective. The author is a Professor at Caltech where he teaches students about the science and mathematics of randomness and probabilities. In spite of this Mlodinow produces a book that is only slightly less accessible than that of the more popular Gladwell. One can, if they wish, skim over the descriptions of how our knowledge of these processes evolved over the centuries and still benefit from the examples and conclusions that are presented.

While Gladwell dwells on how particular circumstances can lead to advantageous results for individuals, Mlodinow focuses on how often what we view as cause and effect is really just the result of random processes occurring in very complex systems (the lives of human beings). The two approaches are not unrelated, but they are more complementary than supplementary. Most of Mlodinow’s work looks at the distributed results of a group of essentially equal individuals, such as professional athletes, mutual fund operators, and Hollywood executives, and analyzes and illustrates the role of randomness in their success relative to their peers. By Gladwell’s logic, these people are already successful. He is more concerned with how and why these individuals attained that level of success while others did not. His parameters are things like age, gender, race, education, and wealth, not what we would normally consider random occurrences.

Hopefully it will be found interesting to collect a few of Mladinow’s observations on the effects of randomness and couple them with some of the descriptions of how the human intellect is not wired to deal effectively with random processes.

The author culminates his narrative on randomness and probabilities by describing the "normal accident theory." This is a concept that is ascribed to Yale sociologist Charles Perrow. This concept was developed after studying the Three Mile Island incident where a series of minor issues cascaded into a near disaster (compare this with Gladwell’s description of why we have aircraft accidents). In Mlodinow’s words:

"...in complex systems (among which I count our lives) we should expect that minor factors we can usually ignore will by chance sometimes cause major incidents.....Called normal accident theory, Perrow’s doctrine describes how that happens—how accidents can occur without clear causes, without those glaring errors and incompetent villains sought by corporate and government commissions. But although normal accident theory is a theory of why, inevitably, things sometimes go wrong, it could also be flipped around to explain why, inevitably, they sometimes go right. For in a complex undertaking, no matter how many times we fail, if we keep trying there is often a good chance we will eventually succeed....The normal accident theory of life shows not that the connection between actions and rewards is random but that random influences are as important as our qualities and actions."

Much of what the author discusses can be thought of and understood in terms of a simple coin tossing experiment (provided you can occasionally think in terms of coins with more than two sides). Instead of a coin with heads or tails for sides, think of one that has a "good" side and a "bad" side. So here we are tooling through life pursuing our goals as best we can while being buffeted by a number of minor but random occurrences ( a long red light that causes us to be late for a meeting for example). These perturbations can have positive or negative effects. What we know about tossing coins is that eventually the numbers of heads and tails will approach the same value. What we don’t usually consider is that while we spend our time tossing this coin there is a considerable probability that we will throw five or ten straight heads or tails. Or consider millions of people tossing coins. There will be a number of people who will experience long strings of good or bad perturbations. Thus are stars born while others are damned to lives of misery and frustration.

The author provides a number of examples where randomness seems an inevitable explanation. Many of the most interesting ones come from the worlds of art and finance. Consider the popularity of a piece of music.

"For their study they recruited 14,341 participants who were asked to listen to, rate, and if they desired, download 48 songs by bands they had not heard of. Some of the participants were allowed to view data on the popularity of each song—that is on how many participants had downloaded it. These participants were divided into eight separate "worlds" and could only see the data on downloads of people in their own world...each world evolved independently. If the deterministic view of the world were true the same songs should have dominated in the eight worlds....But the researchers found exactly the opposite: the popularity of individual songs varied widely among the different worlds....In this experiment, as one song or another by chance got an early edge in downloads, its seeming popularity influenced future shoppers (Tipping Point?). It is a phenomenon well known in the movie industry: movie goers will report liking a movie more when they hear beforehand how good it is."

The deterministic view would have you believe that "experts" study the buying habits and preferences of customers and predict what will be the next hit or best seller. That is, they study the past and try to replicate it. Mlodinow takes great joy in pointing out:

"John Grisham’s manuscript for A Time to Kill was rejected by twenty-six publishers; his second manuscript for The Firm drew interest from publishers only after a bootleg copy circulating in Hollywood drew a $600,000 offer for the movie rights. Dr. Seuss’s first children’s book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, was rejected by twenty-seven publishers. And J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter manuscript was rejected by nine."

Sometimes you have to flip that coin many times before you get a desired result. And then there is this quote from a Hollywood executive.

"If I had said yes to all the projects I turned down and no to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same."

The statistics of small numbers is especially relevant to the movie industry. The author devotes some space to delineating histories of the success, the lack thereof, and sometimes both success and failure of various film studio executives to support the following statement.

"That means that if each of 10 Hollywood executives tosses 10 coins, although each has an equal chance of being the winner or the loser, in the end there will be winners and losers. In this example, the chances are 2 out of 3 that at least one of the executives will score 8 or more heads or tails."

The unlucky will soon be unemployed while the lucky are lavishly rewarded with money and accolades. If they are really smart they will move on to another position before their luck changes, presumably to a higher position where they can dispose of the poor souls who are visited with a run of bad luck.

Mlodinow also lobs a few randomness examples at the financial industry. He considers the performance of 800 mutual funds over a five year period. He plots the performance of each fund relative to the mean in ascending order so that entry 800 is the highest performer, and the first is the lowest. A smooth curve is obtained by plotting these points with the first 400 being negative and the second 400 being positive. A knowledgeable investor might come up with numerous reasons why any given fund performed as well or as poorly as it did. An amateur investor would certainly have a hard time selecting any fund out of the bottom 400. Mlodinow then plots the performance of these funds against the median for the succeeding five year period, but he maintains each fund at the same location on the axis that they had earned initially. If past performance is a predictor of future performance, or if the performance is a result solely of the acumen of each fund’s manager one would expect a roughly similar curve to appear. Instead, any correlation between past and current performance disappears and one is left with what the author describes as random noise.

"People systematically fail to see the role of chance in the success of ventures and in the success of the equity fund manager....And we unreasonably believe that the mistakes of the past must be consequences of ignorance or incompetence and could have been remedied by further study and improved insight. That’s why, for example, in spring 2007, when the stock of Merrill Lynch was trading around $95 a share, its CEO E. Stanley O’Neal could be celebrated as the risk-taking genius responsible, and in the fall of 2007, after the credit market collapsed, derided as the risk-taking cowboy responsible—and promptly fired. We afford automatic respect to superstar business moguls, politicians, and actors and to anyone flying around in a private jet, as if their accomplishments must reflect unique qualities not shared by those forced to eat commercial-airline food. And we place too much confidence in the overly precise predictions of people—political pundits, financial experts, business consultants—who claim a track record demonstrating expertise."

Mlodinow’s point is that the world is a complicated place and not easily understood even in retrospect. Extrapolating to the future is extremely difficult, even extremely unlikely perhaps. There are undoubtedly people who have an exceptional grasp of a particular situation and can be more accurate than the average person, but how does one decide who that person is if, generally, results are consistent with randomness. Mlodinow’s advice:

"It is more reliable to judge people by analyzing their abilities than by glancing at the scoreboard. Or as Bernoulli put it, ‘One should not appraise human action on the basis of its results’."

Trusting that someone who was correct one, two or three times will be correct the next time may not be a defendable strategy.

The author discuses the difficulties people have dealing with situations where random variables are in play.

"We often employ intuitive processes when we make assessments and choices in uncertain situations. Those processes no doubt carried an evolutionary advantage when we had to decide whether a saber-toothed tiger was smiling because it was fat and happy or because it was famished and saw us as its next meal. But the modern world has a different balance, and today those intuitive processes come with drawbacks. When we use our habitual ways of thinking to deal with today’s tigers, we can be led to decisions that are less than optimal or even incongruous.....The greatest challenge in understanding the role of randomness in life is that although the basic principles of randomness arise from everyday logic, many of the consequences that follow from those principles prove counterintuitive....The mechanisms by which people analyze situations involving chance are an intricate product of evolutionary factors, brain structure, personal experience, knowledge, and emotion. In fact, the human response to uncertainty is so complex that sometimes different structures within the brain come to different conclusions and apparently fight it out to determine which one will dominate."

Mlodinow lists three types of situations where people get in trouble. Two of these are evolution driven, the third is a result of either not understanding the situation or not understanding how probabilities work, or both.

Naive Realism

The author describes "naive realism" as the belief that things are what they seem. He provides an interesting example from the life of a scientist named Daniel Kahneman. At the time Kahneman was a psychology professor. He was given the task of lecturing a class of flight instructors on the latest knowledge related to behavior modification and how it might be applied to flight training. Studies with animals had taught him that positive reinforcement was the best way to produce results. The flight instructors all protested that their experience contradicted this claim. They had concluded that if you yell at someone for performing poorly they will likely do better the next time while complimenting them for a good performance usually means they will generally do worse the next time. Kahneman pondered over this at length and eventually came up with an explanation that changed his career path and he eventually ended up with a Nobel Prize in economics for his studies on how and why people make the decisions they do.

"The student pilots all had a certain personal ability to fly fighter planes. Raising their skill level involved many factors and required extensive practice, so although their skill was slowly improving through flight training, the change wouldn’t be noticeable from one maneuver to the next. Any especially good or especially poor performance was thus mostly a matter of luck. So if a pilot made an exceptionally good landing—one far above his normal level of performance—then the odds would be good that he would perform closer to his norm—that is, worse—the next day. And if the instructor had praised him, it would appear that the praise had done no good. But if a pilot made an exceptionally bad landing—running the plane off the runway and into a vat of corn chowder in the base cafeteria—then the odds would be good that the next day he would perform closer to his norm—that is, better. And if his instructor had a habit of screaming ‘you clumsy ape’ when a student performed poorly, it would appear that his criticism did some good. In this way an apparent pattern would emerge.....the instructors in Kahneman’s had concluded from such experiences that their screaming was a powerful educational tool. In reality it made no difference at all."

There is a related issue that complicates our reasoning and leads us to deduce false patterns. Mlodinow refers to this as the "availability bias." This bias leads to emphasizing excessively memories that are most vivid and accessible in our past and deducing patterns that in fact do not exist.

"How probable is it that of the five lines at the grocery-store checkout you will choose the one that takes the longest. Unless you’ve been cursed by a practitioner of the black arts, the answer is around 1 in 5. So why, when you look back, do you get the feeling that you have a supernatural knack for choosing the longest line? Because you have more important things to focus on when things go right, but it makes an impression when the lady in front of you with a single item in her cart decides to argue about why her chicken is priced at $1.50 a pound when she is certain the sign at the meat counter said $1.49."

Need For Certainty

People seem to be wired to search for some organization or pattern in their observations even if the events are completely random. There is presumably some evolutionary advantage to this approach, but it can now lead to incorrect conclusions. Mlodinow dwells on how we come to view both successful and unsuccessful people and how we feel a need to explain success or failure as resulting from superior attributes or critical defects.

"Obviously it can be a mistake to assign brilliance in proportion to wealth. We cannot see a person’s potential, only his or her results, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person."

It is not surprising to be told that we tend to assume that successful people have some innate qualities that justify and explain their success. What is surprising, and somewhat troubling, is that studies show that we will employ the same approach to people who would be described as failures. In their case we feel a need to justify their fate by assuming what befell them was due to some fault of their own. In viewing a homeless person we will tend to assume that person has some defect that put him in that situation.

"On an emotional level many people resist the idea that random influences are important even if, on an intellectual level, they understand that they are. If people underestimate the role of chance in the careers of moguls, do they also downplay its role in the lives of the least successful? In the 1960s that question inspired the social psychologist Melvin Lerner to look into society’s negative attitudes toward the poor. Realizing that ‘few people would engage in extended activity if they believed that there were a random connection between what they did and the rewards they received,’ Lerner concluded that ‘for the sake of their own sanity,’ people overestimate the degree to which ability can be inferred from success."

Lerner conducted controlled experiments in which a group of people observed one of their members undergo what appeared to be a painful electrical shock whenever the person failed at a learning exercise. The person was a plant who acted out the role but this was unknown to the remaining observers.

"At first, as expected, most of the observers reported being extremely upset by their peer’s unjust suffering. But as the experiment continued, their sympathy for the victim began to erode. Eventually the observers, powerless to help, instead began to denigrate the victim. The more the victim suffered, the lower their opinion of her became. As Lerner had predicted, the observers had a need to understand the situation in terms of cause and effect....We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in society who come out on the bottom."

Misunderstanding And Malfeasance

There are several relatively minor and harmless mistakes people make when faced with random processes. The most familiar is the "gambler’s fallacy." The standard example involves someone playing a slot machine and losing steadily. The assumption is often made that after so many losing attempts the odds are building up in favor of winning. In fact, the odds of winning in the future are exactly what they were when the person sat down in the first place. Another tendency is for people to put too much belief in things learned from small numbers of events. In sports there is often a seven game series to determine the best team. If the two teams are equally capable then they have an equal chance of winning. If one team is in fact better and more likely to win a given game:

"...there is a sizeable chance that the inferior team will be crowned champion. For instance if one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could be expected to beat its opponent, on average, 2 out of each 3 times they meet, the inferior team will still win a 7-game series about once every 5 matchups."

The choice of seven games is more one of practicality than an attempt to attain a statistically significant result.

The more interesting examples are those where statistics are misused and the consequences are significant. Consider this case of doctors trying to interpret statistical results of mammograms.

"For instance, in studies in Germany and the United States, researchers asked physicians to estimate the probability that an asymptomatic woman between the ages of 40 and 50 who has a positive mammogram actually has cancer if 7 percent of mammograms show cancer when there is none. In addition, the doctors were told that the actual incidence was about 0.8 percent and the false negative rate about 10 percent. Putting that all together one can use Bayes methods to determine that a positive mammogram is due to cancer in only about 9 percent of cases. In the German group, however, one-third of the physicians concluded that the probability was about 90 percent, and the median estimate was 70 percent. In the American group, 95 out of 100 physicians estimated the probability to be around 75 percent."

This example is interesting and frightening in many ways. If out of a 1000 women in a high-risk age group, 8 will have cancer and 70 will be told they might have cancer when there is none, is it any wonder that physicians are beginning to question the efficacy of frequent mammograms in lower risk groups? And how many of these 70 women were told they had a 75% chance of having breast cancer instead of a 9% chance? We already knew they had lethal penmanship skills, but given their inability to comprehend simple arithmetic, how comforting is it to consider how much trust we put in these doctors?

Mlodinow’s examples from the legal profession are even more troubling because they arise not so much from incompetence as from an attempt to deceive. He refers to what he calls the "prosecutor’s fallacy" because statistics are often used to mislead jurors in legal cases. The first example concerns DNA testing.

"DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s (DNA) matching that of the crime sample is less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With these odds one could hardly blame the jury for thinking, throw away the key."

The author then describes the case of a jury that was so impressed with these statistics that they convicted a man for a crime even though he had eleven witnesses who placed him in another state at the time of the crime. He served 4 years (out of 3100 years) before a follow-up test indicated that the first test was in error. Was this a case of a 1 in 1 billion occurrence or a case of the jury being misled by a convenient misapplication of statistics?

"But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors......Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability we find a much different answer.....that is, the odds are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data that courts often do not allow attorneys to present!"

Finally there is a most famous misapplication of probabilities and statistics from the O. J. Simpson trial.

"The renowned attorney and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz also successfully used the prosecutor’s fallacy—to help defend O.J. Simpson in his trial for the murder of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a male companion.....The prosecution made a decision to focus the opening of their case on O.J.’s propensity toward violence against Nicole....As they put it ‘a slap is a prelude to homicide.’ The defense attorneys used this strategy as a launchpad for their accusations of duplicity, arguing that the prosecution had spent two weeks trying to mislead the jury and that the evidence that O.J. had battered Nicole on previous occasions meant nothing. Here is Dershowitz’s reasoning: 4 million women are battered annually by husbands and boyfriends in the United States, yet in 1992, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, a total of 1,432, or 1 in 2,500 were killed by their husbands or boyfriends. Therefore, the defense retorted, few men who slap or beat their domestic partners go on to murder them. True? Yes. Convincing? Yes. Relevant? No. The relevant number is not the probability that a man who batters his wife will go on to kill her (1 in 2,500), but rather the probability that a battered wife who was murdered was murdered by her abuser. According to the Uniform Crime Reports for the United States and Its Possessions in 1993, the probability that Dershowitz (or the prosecution) should have reported was this one: of all the battered women murdered in the United States in 1993, some 90 percent were killed by their abuser. That statistic was not mentioned at the trial....Dershowitz may have felt justified in misleading the jury because in his words ‘the courtroom oath—"to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" —is applicable only to witnesses. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges don’t take this oath.....indeed it is fair to say that the American justice system is built on a foundation of not telling the whole truth’."

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

This is one of the most informative, stimulating and relevant books that you will encounter. It provides us with a thorough history of the religious and cultural evolution of what might be called the "Muslim world" from the time of the prophet Mohammed to the present day. The author provides sufficient detail to grasp the complexity of this history without deadening the senses. His writing style is clear and easy to follow, and the occasional flashes of humor add to the enjoyment. The story he tells fills in many gaps in our knowledge of Islam and its history but, perhaps, the author’s most important contribution is to stop the narrative at various points and remind us that at that time the state of the world looked quite different depending on whether it was seen through Muslim eyes or Western eyes. This combination of increased knowledge and improved understanding should allow the reader to produce better informed opinions on topics ranging from freedom of religion to the war in Afghanistan. Some of the particularly interesting topics discussed by the author are presented below.

The Success of Islam as a Religion

Islam began in the seventh century with one man in the Arabian Peninsula who claimed he was God’s messenger. Within 100 years it had overwhelmed the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires and its religious and political reach extended from Spain, across northern Africa, throughout the Middle East and into western Asia. What was it about Islam that made it so successful? According to the author it was a combination of a number of factors.

It of course starts with Mohammed, his character, and his message. Mohammed established what are called the five pillars of Islam. All one had to do to become a Muslim was to attest that there is only one God and Mohammed is his messenger, perform a certain prayer ritual five times each day, give a certain fraction of one’s wealth to the poor each year, fast from dawn to dusk during the month of Ramadan each year, make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, if possible.

The author points out that, at least on the face of it, this is more a prescription for how to live your life rather than a complicated or demanding belief system. The goal of these requirements was to provide a more perfect community of believers. Islam was a path to a better social system. This concept of society must have been attractive to the peoples who encountered it, easing the acceptance of the new religion.

The military successes seem to have benefited from a convergence of factors. The Muslims had on their side the fervor of recent converts, the lure of plunder from conquered lands, and surprisingly adept military leaders. The timing of the Islamic emergence was also favorable. It came at a time when the surrounding empires were in decline. The Muslims were surprised by their military success. It inspired in them even greater religious fervor for surely it proved that God was on their side. They even formulated a justification for the militant spread of Islam.

"...the idea that the world was divided into the mutually exclusive realms of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, ‘the realm of peace’ and ‘the realm of war.’ This schema depicted Islam as an oasis of brotherhood and peace surrounded by a universe of chaos and hatred. Anything one did to expand Dar al-Islam constituted action in the cause of peace, even fighting and bloodshed, because it shrank the realm of war."

Surely a major factor in the successful spread of Islam was the wisdom and relative benevolence with which they ruled the conquered peoples.

"Omar’s treatment of Jerusalem set the pattern for elations between Muslims and the people they conquered. Christians found that under Muslim rule they would be subject to a special poll tax called the jizya. That was the bad news. The good news: the jizya would generally be less than the taxes they had been paying to their Byzantine overlords—who did interfere with their religious practices.....The idea of lower taxes and greater religious freedom struck Christians as a pretty good deal, and so Muslims faced little or no local resistance in former Byzantine territory. In fact, Jews and Christians sometimes joined them in fighting the Byzantines."

"Conquest led the surge but conquest was kept separate from conversion. There was no ‘conversion by the sword.’ Muslims insisted on holding political power but not on their subjects being Muslims."

This description may come as a surprise to those used to hearing the current shouts of "death to the infidels." The history of Islam is complex and one needs a book such as this to lead one from these beginnings to the state of the Islamic world today.

Islam and Fundamentalism

One must understand the origins and the history of the Muslim peoples in order to appreciate the tendency towards what we would call fundamentalism: an unswerving dependence on revelation to determine all aspects of a believer’s life. Consider the path of Christianity. Christ was on the public scene for a few years and never had a large following. His sayings are transmitted to our times through translations from multiple languages by authors of unknown identity with unknowable accuracy. The Catholic branch of Christianity resolves uncertainty by allowing the Pope to provide the appropriate interpretation of Christ’s intentions, thereby avoiding the threat posed by ambiguity. The Protestant branch has bifurcated. One path views the Christian Bible as a generally correct guide to what they should believe and how they should live their lives, but it is viewed as a vehicle subject to interpretation. Only the Fundamentalist Protestant path tends toward a view of the Bible as the literal truth, an attitude that is much in the same spirit as the Muslim community and its acceptance of the Qur’an.

Mohammed was a known religious figure for about 20 years. As the messenger from God he defined Islam as a religion. However, he was also a political and social leader.

"Once Mohammed became the leader of Medina, people came to him for guidance and judgments about every sort of life question, big or little: how to discipline children...how to wash one’s hands...what to consider fair in a contract...what should be done with a thief...the list goes on. Questions that in many other communities would be decided by a phalanx of separate specialists, such as judges, legislators, political leaders, doctors, teachers, generals, and others, were all in the Prophet’s bailiwick here."

Mohammed preached that not only was he God’s messenger, he was God’s last messenger. There would be no further revelations. When Mohammed died, his successors had to decide what to do. They had become used to depending on the word of the Prophet on all matters. It was decided that it was necessary to continue along that path.

"Unlike older religions—such as Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even Christianity—Muslims began to collect, memorize, recite, and preserve their history as soon as it happened, and they didn’t just preserve it but embedded each anecdote in a nest of sources, naming witnesses to each event and listing all persons who transmitted the account down through time to the one who first wrote it down, references that function like the chain of custody validating a piece of evidence in a court case."

Given that Mohammed is God’s messenger and that his preaching and sayings are assumed to be documented, one is left with little wiggle room. Islam is inherently a religion of fundamentalism. All questions are to be referenced to a pronouncement of the Prophet. That, of course, becomes harder to do as the world evolves and new circumstances appear. The next step was to attempt to decide what the Prophet would have decided by looking for analogous situations to apply, but that becomes more uncertain and subject to interpretation. The result is that one ends up with factions that passionately believe they are following the revealed truth but arriving at different conclusions. The situation becomes explosive when one factors in a decision by Mohammed’s immediate successor.

"But Abu Bakr responded to the crisis by declaring secession to be treason. The Prophet had said ‘No compulsion in religion,’ and Abu Bakr did not deny that principle. People were free to accept or reject Islam as they pleased; but once they were in, he asserted, they were in for good. In response to a political crisis, Abu Bakr established a religious principle that haunts Islam to this day—the equation of apostasy with treason."

This provides some explanation for why Sunnis and Shiites get along better with Christians and Jews than with each other.

To understand how this relatively benign religion developed the radical strains that bedevil the world today requires some knowledge of Muslim history. This the author provides. To make a long story short, the Muslim world suffered two major classes of catastrophe. The first might be referred to as invasions by barbarians. The first wave consisted of Turks moving down from their ancestral homelands (the central Asian steppes north of Iran and Afghanistan).

"Rude Turks came trickling south in ever growing numbers: tough warriors, newly converted to Islam and brutal in their simplistic fanaticism. Accustomed to plunder as a way of life, they ruined cities and laid waste to crops. The highways grew unsafe, small-time banditry became rife, trade declined, poverty spread. Turkish mamluks fought bitterly with Turkish nomads—it was Turks in power everywhere."

The actions of the ruling Turks would help induce the next wave of assaults.

"At this time the Muslim world knew as little of Western Europe as Europeans later knew about the African interior. To Muslims, everything between Byzantium and Andalusia was a more or less primeval forest inhabited by men so primitive that they still ate pig flesh. When Muslims said ‘Christians,’ they meant the Byzantine church or the various smaller churches operating in Muslim controlled territory. They knew that an advanced civilization had once flourished further west: a person could still make out traces of it in Italy and parts of the Mediterranean coast, which Muslims regularly raided; but it had crumbled during the Time of Ignorance, before Islam entered the world, and was now little more than a memory."

"Then the Seljuk Turks wrested control of Palestine away from the tolerant Fatimids and the indolent Abbasids. As new converts, these Turks tended towards zealotry. They weren’t zealous about sobriety, modesty, charity, and the like, but they ceded second place to none when it came to expressing chauvinistic disdain toward followers of other religions, especially those from faraway and more primitive lands...Christian pilgrims began to find themselves treated rather shabbily in the Holy Lands. It wasn’t that they were beaten, tortured or killed—nothing like that. It was more that they were subjected to constant little humiliations and harassments designed to make them feel second-class."

Reports of such treatment made their way back west and contributed to the notion of a crusade to regain control of the Holy Lands. The result was about 200 years of sporadic, but bloody battles that further disturbed the Muslim regions and pushed them yet further from their goal of the ideal society.

"Some modern-day Islamic radicals (and a smattering of Western pundits) describe the crusades as a great clash of civilizations foreshadowing the troubles of today. They trace the roots of modern Muslim rage to that era and those events. But reports from the Arab side don’t show Muslims of the time thinking this way, at least at the start. No one seemed to cast the wars as an epic struggle between Islam and Christendom—that was the story line the Crusaders saw. Instead of a clash between two civilizations, Muslims saw simply a calamity falling upon...civilization. For when they looked at the Franj (crusaders), they saw no evidence of civilization."

Eventually the crusades petered out and a far worse tragedy befell the Muslim world. This time the invaders were the Mongols coming from the east under the leadership of Genghis Khan.

"Then he marched on Khorasan and Persia, and here the Mongols attempted genocide. No other word really seems appropriate.....When the Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi wrote a description of western Iran, northern Afghanistan, and the republics north of the Oxus River a few years before the Mongol invasion, he described a fertile, flourishing province. A few years after the invasion, it was a desert. It still is."

This sequence of disasters provoked a theological crisis in the Muslim world.

"The crisis was rooted in the fact that Muslim theologians and scholars, and indeed Muslims in general, had long felt that Islam’s military successes proved its revelations true. Well, if victory meant revelations were true, what did defeat mean?....Another major Muslim historian speculated that the coming of the Mongols portended the end of the world. According to yet another, the Mongol victories showed that God had abandoned Muslims."

It was at this point that the first hints of what we would today identify as "radical Islamic fundamentalism" began to emerge. The thoughts taking root were that these tragedies did not indicate any failure in their religion, but in their practice of the religion. The defeats could be blamed on the Muslims themselves for having drifted away from the practice of "true Islam." The meaning of the word "jihad" also began to acquire a new meaning. The author said the word is most directly translated with the meaning of "struggle," and in the early days of Islam it was associated with the struggle of the religion to survive and spread. Now the word was beginning to be used to include armed struggle against enemies of Islam, a category that included non-Muslims, heretics, apostates and schismatics. According to Ansary, this world-view did not take hold initially but never died away either. It was left to ferment across several hundred more years of Muslim humiliation.

The second catastrophe that befell the Muslim world was the economic and technical domination by the Western nations that yet continues. The invasion in this case was not military but economic. The invaders were merchants, flush with money, looking to buy and sell things. This influx of cash into the relatively simple and, by Western standards, backward economies of the Muslim nations caused severe dislocations to which the local citizens were not able to effectively respond. The net result was that the individual regions became beholden to that Western wealth, and subservient to those who controlled it. The exact path to subservience, or colonization, was different in different regions. The author’s description of the effect on India is representative.

"Around 1600, three gigantic national versions of that first corporation were created in Europe: they were the British, the Dutch, and the French ‘East India Companies.’... Each was chartered by its national government, and in each case the government in question gave its company a national monopoly on doing business with the Islamic east. The actual entities jockeying for advantage in Persia, India, and Southeast Asia, then, were these corporations."

"In Bengal, where the British elbowed out all other Europeans, the East India Company pretty much destroyed the Bengali crafts industry, but hardly noticed itself doing so. It was simply buying up lots of raw material at very good prices. People found more profit in selling raw material to the British than in using those materials to make their own goods. As the native economy went bust, indigenous Bengalis became ever more dependent on the British and finally subservient to them....The East India Company enshrined itself as the Bengali government’s ‘advisors’ nothing more. For the sake of efficiency, the company decided to go ahead and collect taxes on behalf of the Moghul government. And again, for efficiency’s sake, they decided to go ahead and spend the money themselves, directly, locally: what was the point of sending it to the capital and having it come back again? Oh, and henceforth the company’s private army would take care of security and maintain law and order. But the company insisted that it was not now governing Bengal: it was just providing needed services for a fee."

The effects of this invasion (colonization) were more subtle than those produced by the Mongols but just as severe and deadly in the long run.

"In practice, this meant the (powerless) "government" was responsible for solving all problems while the (powerful) company was entitled to reap all benefits but disavowed any responsibility for the welfare of the people; after all, it was not the government. Rapacious company officials bled Bengal dry, but those who complained were referred to ‘the government.’ The plundering of the province resulted in a famine that killed about a third of the population in just two years—we’re talking about an estimated 10 million people here."

The entire Muslim world was invaded/colonized in similar fashion. It was generally not until after World War II that this hold was broken. The Muslim world was then left to reform itself along boundaries drawn by the Western governments. This is itself an interesting story, but the point of this discussion was to demonstrate how the groundwork had been laid for a surge in radical Muslim fundamentalism.

The Muslim theological response to all this history was either to demand that Muslims must "shut out Western influence and restore Islam to its pristine, original form," or to demand that Islam be modified or reinterpreted to allow Muslims to better engage in the modern world. The latter approach became the effective winner in the sense that most countries ended up with governments intent on bringing their people to a state where they could compete with the Western countries. The fundamentalist strain persisted, however, and continued to gain adherents.

Wahhabism is the most familiar of the radical fundamentalist movements. It originated with Abdul Wahhab, an Arabian, born around 1703. He preached religious revival through restoration of Islam in its original state.

"...the local ruler Mohammed ibn Saud welcomed him warmly. Ibn Saud was a minor tribal chieftain with very big ambitions: to ‘unite’ the Arabian Peninsula. By ‘unite,’ of course, he meant ‘conquer.’ In the single-minded preacher Abdul Wahhab he saw just the ally he needed; Wahhab saw the same when he looked at ibn Saud. The two men made a pact. The chieftain agreed to recognize Wahhab as the top religious authority of the Muslim community and do all he could to implement his vision; the preacher, for his part, agreed to recognize ibn Saud as the political head of the Muslim community, its amir, and to instruct his followers to fight for him....The pact produced fruit. Over the next few decades, these two men ‘united’ all the bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi-Wahhabi rule."

This tie between the Saudi family and this extreme fundamentalism continued. In fact, the definition of Wahhabism today owes as much to Saudi implementation as to Wahhab’s preaching. The prime change to Islamic theology, according to Wahhabism, is the specification of jihad, the struggle to defeat the enemies of Islam, as a fundamental obligation of a Muslim.

"And who were the enemies of Islam?...According to Wahhab’s doctrines those who did not believe in Islam were, of course, potential enemies but not the most crucial offenders. If they agreed to live peacefully under Muslim rule, they could be tolerated. The enemies of real concern were slackards, apostates, hypocrites, and innovators."

Thus, what was originally a tolerant religion had, in this manifestation, morphed into an intolerant and potentially violent form. The tie to the Saudi family continues to this day. Saudi Arabia is the font for Wahhabism. It has allowed the country’s immense oil income to be used to support the spread of this form of Islam. A millennium of defeat and humiliation helps produce enough converts to make it a force in the world today.

This book leaves one optimistic about the eventual reciprocal accommodation of Western and Islamic-dominated governments. However, the followers of Wahhabism may not reside in a universe where such accommodation is possible. For example, if the Taliban in Afghanistan are truly Wahhabists, then they have to look around and see that Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan must be the next to go.

The Role of Women in Islamic Societies

The author points out that the role of women provides the most striking example of incompatibility between the societies of the Islamic world and that of the West. He revisits this issue several times as Islam evolves. It would appear that the practice of restricting women’s rights and role in society developed gradually over time and is more a result of cultural and traditional imperatives rather than religious edict. In the time of Mohammed the Arabian culture did not accord women the same rights as men, but they were allowed to participate broadly in society, including running businesses, participating in religious discussions and even going to war. Education was compulsory for both boys and girls. The early religious leaders did dictate that men and women should be separated during prayer in order to avoid sexual distractions. One could foresee this attitude evolving into an ever more restricted role for women. In addition, the Muslims encountered societies in which it was popular for wealthy men to keep their women hidden from view as a mark of their prestige. This practice apparently was gradually adopted by Islamic men for much the same reason.

Ansary seems to view this issue as an unfortunate idiosyncrasy of Islam rather than a tragedy of epic proportions.

"Well meaning folk on both sides believe that no human beings should be oppressed. This is not to deny that women suffer grievously from oppressive laws in many Muslim countries. It is only to say that the principle on which Muslims stand is not the "right" to oppress women. Rather, what the Muslim world has reified over the course of history is the idea that society should be divided into a men’s and a women’s realm and that the point of connection between the two should be in the private arena, so that sexuality can be eliminated as a factor in the public life of the community."

The author quotes a fellow named Ghazali, who is described as an influential early Muslim scholar, in order to indicate what these separate "realms" came to mean. A woman should

　

"remain in the inner sanctum of her house and tend to her spinning; she should not enter or exit excessively; she should speak infrequently with her neighbors and visit them only when the situation requires it; she should safeguard her husband in his absence and in his presence; she should seek his pleasure in all affairs...She should not leave his home without his permission: if she goes out with his permission, she should conceal herself in worn out clothes....being careful that no stranger hear her voice or recognize her personally....She should.....be ready at all times for (her husband) to enjoy her whenever he wishes."

This does not look like a sincere attempt to manage sexuality in society. This appears more like male chauvinism gone berserk. The two realms described are those of master and slave. The whole notion that "separate but equal" can be made to work is inconsistent with everything we learn from history. A recent news broadcast pointed out that the major cause of death for women between the ages of 19 and 44, world wide, was violence inflicted by men. This, of course, includes civil wars, genocides, and other catastrophes. However, this report also pointed out that violence against women is endemic in some societies and stated that 80% of women in Afghanistan are victims of domestic violence. The source for this claim was not given but, knowing how prevalent domestic violence is in open societies where women are allowed to display their bruises and broken bones, one would have to be a little suspicious of men who want to hide their women from view.

Islam: Science and Scholarship

It is not news that the renaissance era in Europe was nurtured by a reacquaintence with the classic works of Greece and Rome that had been lost to Europeans but salvaged and preserved by the Muslims. Nor is it news that while Europe was going through its dark age, Muslim scholars were making great advances in learning and science. What was surprising was that the author seems to imply that this spurt of learning and research was really theological in nature, and was thus ultimately constrained in what was capable of being learned.

"Muslims were the first intellectuals ever in a position to make direct comparisons between, say Greek and Indian mathematics, or Greek and Indian medicine, or Persian and Chinese cosmologies, or the metaphysics of various cultures. They set to work exploring how these ancient ideas fit in with each other and with the Islamic revelations, how spirituality related to reason, and how heaven and earth could be drawn into a single schema that explained the entire universe."

The author provides two reasons why this quest for knowledge eventually expired. The first is the fundamental conflict between a society based entirely on revelation and unbiased scientific inquiry. The second is the havoc caused by the several catastrophes visited upon Muslim lands.

Islam, Jews and Israel

Ansary provides needed background on this age-old interaction.

"Both the Arabs and Jews were Semitic and traced their descent to Abraham (and through him to Adam). The Arabs saw themselves as the line descended from Abraham’s son Ishmael and his second wife, Hagar. The stories commonly associated with the Old Testament—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his ark, Joseph and Egypt, Moses and the pharaoh, and the rest of them—were part of Arab tradition too. Although most of the Arabs were pagan polytheists at this point (the time of Mohammed) and the Jews had remained resolutely monotheistic, the two groups were more or less indistinguishable in terms of culture and lifestyle: the Jews of this era spoke Arabic, and their tribal structure resembled that of the Arabs."

"Mohammed considered himself a descendent of Abraham and knew all about Abraham’s uncompromising monotheism. Indeed, Mohammed didn’t think he was preaching something new; he believed he was renewing what Abraham (and countless other prophets) had said...."

Throughout the history presented here there is little indication that Jews and Muslims would have difficulty living side-by-side. That began to change in the 20^{th century when world-wide political turmoil was at its peak and the Jews began to seriously consider the possibility of reestablishing a homeland in Palestine.}

"The new European immigrants did not seize land by force; they bought the land they settled; but they bought it mostly from absentee landlords, so they ended up living among landless peasants who felt doubly dispossessed by the aliens crowding in among them. What happened just before and during World War II in Palestine resembled what happened earlier in Algeria when French immigrants bought up much of the land and planted a parallel economy there, rendering the original inhabitants irrelevant. By 1945 the Jewish population of Palestine almost equaled the Arab population. If one were to translate that influx of newcomers to the American context, it would be as if 150 million refugees flooded in within a decade. How could that not lead to turmoil?"

"In the context of the European narrative, the Jews were victims. In the context of the Arab narrative, they were colonizers with much the same attitudes toward the indigenous population as their fellow Europeans.....Arabs who saw the Zionist project as European colonialism in thin disguise were not inventing a fantasy out of whole cloth: Zionists saw the project that way too, or at least represented it as such to the imperialist powers whose support they needed....The seminal Zionist Theodor Herzl wrote that a Jewish state in Palestine would ‘form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.’ In 1914, Chaim Weitzman wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian stating that if a Jewish settlement could be established in Palestine ‘we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there....They could develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.’"

The detailed history of what followed is complex and not actually the subject of the author. His interests are in conveying how all this played out in the Muslim psyche.

"Most Arabs had no stake in the actual issue: the birth of Israel would not strip an Iraqi farmer of his land or keep some Moroccan shopkeeper from prospering in his business—yet most Arabs and indeed most Muslims could wax passionate about who got Palestine. Why? Because the emergence of Israel had emblematic meaning for them. It meant that Arabs (and Muslims generally) had no power, that imperialists could take any part of their territory, and that no one outside the Muslim world would side with them against a patent injustice. The existence of Israel signified European dominance over Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, and over the people of Asia and Africa generally. That’s how it looked from almost any point between the Indus and Istanbul."

This book introduced many historical and cultural topics that would be interesting to pursue further. So many books, so little time!