March 26, 2006
Review Corner
Glenn Reynolds's "An Army of Davids" was very good. I just finished it and recommend it highly.
I am astonished at how little politics is in it. (though the section on the Martian constitution was interesting) and yet the implications of the book are deeply political. On the lines of my Elevator Talk, the story is certainly individual empowerment, even a capitalist shift to Marxist desire that "workers own the means of production." I don't remember Hayek's being mentioned by name, yet it vividly describes distributed knowledge and responsibility as taking over from top-down Keynesian enterprises.
Missing from my elevator talk is my belief that these ideas are taking form outside of politics. James Surowecki (holy cow, he writes for The New Yorker), Mary Katherine Ham's description of Craig's List founder Craig Newmark's keynote address that I blogged about and "Army of Davids" all point to an individual empowerment that is happening completely outside the realm of partisan politics. This intrigues me as a common ground that I might find with non-Republicans.
Yet I don't think it's fair to forget partisan politics, even though it does give an author an opportunity to double his or her target audience. Reynolds does address the perils of government interference in nanotech and life-extending medicine. He hopes Leon Kass (his personal bete noir) does not get the opportunity to kill research that will significantly extend human life, yet he ignores the effects that lawyers can have. The lawyers have a better excuse than the luddites (we love profit motive at threesources!), but they both retard the progress of development -- especially in Medicine.
Reynolds contends that we may reach "escape velocity" in our lifetimes, postponing death while we're still alive to enjoy it. Reynolds worries about Mr. Kass, I worry about Senator Edwards and that execrable Republican trial lawyer that got the big Vioxx settlement. He thinks death will be cured in our lifetime (an unfair paraphrase, read the whole thing [heh]) . It hit me last week that if they discovered a cure for MS tomorrow, I would not live long enough to see it. By the time the FDA studied safety and efficacy, and drug firms felt confident that the tort bar could be deflected from their profits, it is not likely I'd be around to try it out. The procedures and advances in this book will be fought by luddites and lawyers, and will take more than our lifetime to reach the market.
But that's a minor quibble in a good book: thought provoking and a great read. Definitely grab this one.