RLASKEY: words

Just finished $20 Per Gallon by Christopher Steiner.  This is a book that I wish were a bit more popular; though it may have missed the mark into the American consciousness since the price of gasoline since dipped again between it’s construction and its release.

Steiner is not the best writer out there; yet I can certainly relate to his approach and appreciate his perspective.  He’s an engineer, and he’s fascinated with what good will come of the world once we start to drip away our American addiction to oil.  $20 Per Gallon is set into chapters with sequential consequences from increments of the price of gasoline: $4 introduction, followed by a $6 chapter, etc.

Obviously, then, the book is largely speculation.  We don’t have a world where gas costs $20 a gallon in America, and so it’s a silly attempt to figure out what exactly is going to happen at that point in time.  If you’re looking for hard data or absolute proof, then these pages may not satisfy you; but I’d then argue that the same goal was silly at the start.  With that said, Steiner has thought out a whole lot of consequences stemming from massive increases in the cost of fuel: food production, transportation, globalization, and a variety of other topics are dissected and plotted out in the eventual patterns which we most likely will see.

What I like most about the book is the amount of positivity that the author sees for our future.  It is rather easy to see doom in the face of increased consumer cost of just about anything; though in terms of energy, the base component of how we live our lives, a higher ticket price does not mean we will waste away.

On the contrary, Steiner argues largely that we will adapt quite well, and that we will just have to structure ourselves differently than we have in the past forty or fifty years.  Cheap oil has allowed us to be lazy; it’s allowed our food to go to shit; it’s tied us inescapably to cars, in countless numbers, and it’s also allowed us to move our economy away from the borders of the country, taking away our jobs and investments in the same movement.

It may help that I see certain parts of science-fiction in this book.  A big part of what moves us forward as a society is some kind of conflation of what is now fiction and what can be reality in our future.  Steiner seems to understand this, and my only hope is that there are enough people out there who see such signs as opportunities rather than omens of doom.

I don’t have all that many problems with Malcom Gladwell.  As I wrote about Blink, he is a very good writer, and his style is incredibly accessible.

The first third of Outliers was rather exciting.  I’m not so much a fan of hockey, though I do work in computers; and in the computing world, when you’re born certainly can have a big influence on whether you’re behind or ahead of the curve.  Gladwell goes through both youth hockey leagues and innovators in computing to find what it is that sets certain people apart from the crowd.  For hockey players, being born near a cutoff date is most important.  For computing, being born early enough to predate the tech booms and having ample access to programming workstations before anyone else allowed Bill Gates and others to spearhead their own computing revolutions.  The law of 10,000 hours is likewise very intriguing; I won’t give any more of it away, since you can most likely find more information on Google or Wikipedia.

Where Outliers takes a wrong turn, in my opinion, is when Gladwell moves on from hockey and computers and starts to analyze cultural differences and sociological differences.  There is a short sentence or two which marks the beginning of this analysis,whereby Gladwell tersely notes that it can potentially be dangerous to speak in terms of cultural generalities, and that this kind of thinking can easily turn towards racism and stereotyping.  He does not come back to this point, as though a few words are enough to stem the tides of how popular opinion will look upon these words.

The reality is that it just isn’t realistic to talk for pages on end about what makes people from the South violent; or why Asians have trouble asserting themselves, all under the guise that no one is going to use these studies, framed as scientific fact, for less than noble purposes.  In a certain context some of his analysis would be OK: framed with great caution and repeated understanding that generalities about culture do not necessarily describe the people who fall into these categories, we may be able to get away without more bad stereotypes or distaste of the other.  In a mass market book, however, without adequate framing, I feel that it’s a wrong step to jump into such a discussion.  Perhaps in the future we can deal with these kinds of issues in a more conscious manner, though sweeping racism under the rug as a theoretical detail is not what I consider to be responsible.