I read Anthony Everitt’s Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome on Sunday. It’s a pretty conventional biography of Hadrian. Overall, I’d say it’s about the same quality as his work on Augustus (Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor). But, that’ s not saying much I’m afraid. In the end, there’s no substitute for Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars.

Recently, I’ve been reading An Introduction to General Systems Thinking (Silver Anniversary Edition). It’s a fascinating book, with insights on almost every page. Here’s the author’s thoughts on the problems of interpreting observations:

Whenever we observe a state that is both conspicuous and improbable, we are faced with a quandary. Do we believe our observation or do we invoke some special hypothesis?
…
Conservatism is introduced into the scientific investigation by the very assumption that observations must be consistent with present theories. An observation is more likely to be discarded as “erroneous” if it is out of consonance with theory. … The complete substitution of theory for observation is, of course, not scientific. Even worse is going through the motions of observing, but discarding as “spurious” every observation that does not fit theory.
…
This, then, is the problem. Raw, detailed observation of the world is just too rich a diet for science. No two situations are exactly alike unless we make them so. Every license plate we see is a miracle
…
“A statue is a situation which can be recognized if it occurs again.” But no state will ever occur again if we don’t lump many states into one “state.” Thus, in order to learn at all, we must forego some potential discrimination of states, some possibility of learning everything.
…
Science does not, and cannot, deal with miracles. Science deals only with repetitive events. Each science has to have characteristic ways of lumping the states of the systems it observes, in order to generate repetition. How does it lump? Not in arbitrary ways, but in ways determined by its past experience — ways that “work” for that science. Gradually, as the science matures, the “brain” is traded for the “eye,” until it becomes almost impossible to break a scientific paradigm (a traditional way of lumping) with mere empirical observations.

Now, if the issues outlined in the above quote are a problem for the hard sciences, they are a disaster in fuzzier disciplines like history, economics, and politics. They also have implications for business. Most of the time, you will find, that there is no widespread agreement among your co-workers on the state you are facing. And, if you all do agree, it’s probably just that your viewpoints are not really independent, not that you are all correct.

By temperament, I am a conservative. By conservative, I mean that I believe that society and institutions are difficult to change successfully, and that, in general, things are better left alone. Having said that, I do believe that radical reform is much more likely to be successful than incremental. To my mind, the chances of fixing a fundamentally, broken system by making a series of small changes is low. Now, I find myself in the happy situation of having my prejudice in favor of drastic reform confirmed by a scholarly study. In a study of the effects of the civil reforms imposed across Europe by the French Revolutionary armies, four economists have found that in those areas where the most drastic changes were made from past practice, the greatest economic growth subsequently occurred. You can find a good summary of the study at The Economist’s View in a post titled The Consequences of External Reform: Lessons from the French Revolution.

The Painter of Battles: A Novel. Perez-Reverte’s latest and darkest of novels.

Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich A collection of four essays dealing with the events around the fall of Berlin and the death of Hitler.

In the Bunker with Hitler: 23 July 1944-29 April 1945. Despite being an eyewitness account, adds almost nothing to our knowledge of the last days of Hitler.

The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. Great book on how a company’s success colors the analysis of it’s strengths and weaknesses.

Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton. Classic book on how logistics controls military success and failure.

The Road to War: The Origins of World War II. Series of essays that, country by country, describes the path to war. Very good chapters on France and England.

The following was written in the 1930s:

“The general shape of this universal delusion [that is, credit] may be indicated by three of its familiar features.. First, the idea that the panacea for debt is credit.. The burden of Europe’s private debt to this country now is greater than the burden of her war debt; and the war debt, with arrears of interest, is greater than it was the day the peace was signed.. Debt was the economic terror of the world when the war ended. How to pay it was the colossal problem. Yet you will hardly find a nation, state, city, town or region that has not multiplied its debt since the war. The aggregate of this increase is prodigious, and a very high proportion of it represents recourse to credit to avoid payment of debt.

“Second, a social and political doctrine, now widely accepted, beginning with the premise that people are entitled to certain betterments of life. If they cannot immediately afford them.. nevertheless people are entitled to them, and credit must provide them.. Result: Probably one half of all government, national and civic, in the area of western civilization is either bankrupt or in acute distress from having over-borrowed according to this doctrine.. Now as credit fails and the standards of living tend to fall from the planes on which credit for a while sustained them, there is political dismay.. When [people] have been living on credit beyond their means the debt overtakes them. If they tax themselves to pay it, that means going back a little. If they repudiate their debt, that is the end of their credit. In this dilemma the ideal solution, so recommended even to the creditor, is more credit, more debt.

“Third, the argument that prosperity is a product of credit, whereas from the beginning of economic thought it had been supposed that prosperity was from the increase and exchange of wealth, and credit was its product.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A picture from a time much longer ago than I care to remember:

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Definitive account of the Nazi economy.

Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II (Blue Jacket Bks). Convincingly argues that Stalin was planning an offensive against Germany timed for late 1941.

Chamberlain and the Lost Peace. About as good a case as can be made defending Chamberlain’s foreign policy.

Hitler and Appeasement: The British Attempt to Prevent the Second World War. Good assessment of the politics of appeasement in the 1930s.

The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana. Overly nostalgic, but biting attack on what new labor has wrought.

Hitler’s Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted. Argues that Hitler could have won the war in the East by concentrating on Moscow. Neglects logistics and ultimately unconvincing.

There’s actually a thread that connects all these, and I’ll write a longer post on the subject later.

Only a fool would say that there are not substantive differences between Barack Obama and John McCain. Yet, in the end, these differences are irrelevant to the fate of the United States. Once an empire begins to decline; reversal is almost impossible. This is particularly true, when financial engineering has replaced real achievement. When a nation reaches that point, then there are few real sources of wealth available to it. As Kevin Phillips has pointed out:

On the edge of decline the Spanish had gloried in their New World gold and silver; the Dutch, in their investment income and lending to princes and czarinas; and the British, in their banks, brokers, and global financial network. In none of these situations, however, could financial services succeed in upholding the national preeminence that had been earlier built by explorers, conquistadores, maritime skills, innovative science and engineering, the first railroads, electrical dynamos, and great iron and steel works. Invariably, power and greatness passed to new explorers, innovators and industrialists.

Each of those declining empires had skilled statesmen who appreciated the true situation of their countries and tried to restore its preeminence. In every case they failed, because the power of existing political factions to defend their own interests was too great. Consider that Spain was far richer and more powerful than the U.S. in the 16th Century. And yet, it fell very swiftly. If the Count-Duke of Olivares couldn’t save Spain, who would bet that John McCain or Barack Obama can save the United States?

Green Manalishi is my favorite Judas Priest song. It’s actually a cover of a Fleetwood Mac song that they originally recorded on Hell Bent For Leather. Here’s a video of the song from the 1986 tour which I saw in the Worcester Centrum. I still have the shirt.

In December 1930, about a year after the great crash of 1929, John Maynard Keynes wrote:

“The world has been slow to realize that we are living this year in the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history. But now that the man in the street has become aware of what is happening, he, not knowing the why and wherefore, is as full today of what may prove excessive fears as, previously, when the trouble was first coming on, he was lacking in what would have been a reasonable anxiety. He beings to doubt the future. Is he now awakening from a pleasant dream to face the darkness of facts? Or dropping off into a nightmare which will pass away?”

We are in a similar situation now.