Book Review: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024). Jonathan Haidt.

In the course of my recent reading on the topics of the attention economy, and the effects of our society’s overload of attention-disrupting modern  technologies such as smartphones and social media, I have noticed repeated references to Jonathan’s Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation as an important contribution to the conversation.

After reading it, I understand why people keep citing this book and the author’s insights into the problems we are facing as a result of social media and the rise of the attention economy. It’s an exhaustive and impressive look at a huge problem we now face, one that perhaps wasn’t even that apparent to many of us until now.

The problem that Haidt sets out to first demonstrate and then explain is the disastrous effect on the mental health of the children of Gen Z, especially as pre-teens and early adolescents, from the almost overnight adoption of smartphones and social media apps in the period from 2008 (when the Apple iPhone was first released) until the present.

What Haidt claims is that we (as a society) have been unintentionally running a vast social and psychological experiment on the Gen Z cohort of kids, an experiment which has resulted in a verifiable epidemic of mental illness among these children. The main symptoms are increased depression and anxiety in our young people, the first humans to grow up in the age of smartphones and social media apps.

He calls this experiment “the Great Rewiring”. Many people have already drawn connections between social media, the internet, the attention economy and a variety of obvious related negative consequences to our social and political life. What’s new and unique here is that Haidt recognized and focused on a specific subset of this larger set of contemporary societal problems. His topic is why smartphones and social media are having a particularly devastating impact on our children.

The book is divided into four sections. In the first section, the author draws on extensive and detailed medical and social science research, especially longitudinal studies of children’s mental health in the U.S. and abroad, to prove clearly that pre-teen and teen mental health has deteriorated massively during the early years of the smartphone age, and to prove the correlation with the onset of social media apps on smartphones. 

In the second section, he talks about the nature of childhood, what its social and psychological needs and phases are under both healthy and thwarted developmental conditions, and how and why our society as a whole is not giving children what they need to grow into healthy and happy adults.

In the third section, Haidt shows in great detail the harms that flowed from what he calls switching to “phone-based childhoods”, and the rapid switch we made to that new type of childhood in the era of 2008 to 2020 or so.

An important distinction he highlights is the difference between the “embodied” childhoods that children have always had, where their experiences and learning are naturally centered in their own bodies and their “in-person” relationship to the physical world, versus the “disembodied” phone-based childhood of today, where their minds and attention are engaged for most of the day with the virtual world, while their bodies remain  inactive.

He also explores four crucial and specific areas of harm to children’s psychological and emotional development that have resulted from the phone-based childhood: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction. In doing so, he provides many studies and statistics to show how smartphones and social media use by  children specifically cause these developmental disruptions.  

In the fourth part of the book, the author examines some of the challenges of trying to undo the damage we’ve done, and how we might reverse the social behavior, laws and assumptions that have led to much of the harm that has resulted from ubiquitous smartphone and social media use by children.

This book is rich in analysis and insights into child development, and how changing social and technological conditions have impacted how children grow and learn, both for better and for worse. For example, he presents a surprising picture of how boys and girls (in general) have both been negatively impacted by the changing conditions of childhood in the online age, but (again, in general) in different ways.

As he describes and demonstrates, because girls tend to be more drawn toward socializing with their peers, to show more desire for group membership, and to have a stronger drive for social relationships and in-group status during puberty than boys do, social media apps on smartphones have tended to play the dominant role in girls’ "phone-based childhoods", and the most psychologically destructive one.

The constant need to curate personal brands, focus on making oneself look beautiful and sexy, say the right things in posts to win approval from a faceless crowd of possible critics, contend with online trolling and predators, and try to keep up with the impossible beauty and fashion standards of online influencers, are some of the examples of the exhausting and demoralizing process of being a young girl on social media that Haidt describes.  

For boys, though, Haidt suggests their more individual focused drive toward outwardly directed action and activity in puberty, rather than on socializing and in-group status, has tended to lead them much more toward heavy involvement in online gaming and pornography. Those online activities by boys actually showed up earlier, in the 1990s, before the age of social media, and have tended to increase many boys’ social isolation.

These two online activities harm boys in different ways. Gaming encourages hyper-aggressive and anti-social behavior, and social isolation. Porn has led boys to learn to resort to the “friction-free” and risk-free viewing of an infinite supply and variety of porn as a way to cope with their budding sexual urges and fears, rather than spending the time and taking the emotional risk of learning how to actually interact with potential romantic and sexual partners in the real world. This can leave them ill-equipped for developing healthy relationships, which in turn often leads to depression, anger and misogynistic behavior.

Of course, these are only sex-based tendencies, not absolutes. Boys use social media too, and girls play online games and sometimes view porn. The types of problems and dysfunctions caused by the different online options readily available on smartphones apply to both sexes. Still, the generalizations are reflected in data from studies of teen online behavior, and are useful for understanding the different relative risks and problems for each sex. The main point is that the adverse effects of a “phone-based childhood”, such as lower self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, loneliness, and feelings of worthlessness and pointlessness are likely to harm both girls and boys.

But there is another main thread (and causative factor) running through The Anxious Generation in parallel with the author’s focus on the disruptions caused by social media and smartphones. Haidt contends that the evolution of television as a mass media, along with cable news and the internet, have led to overly protective parenting practices and social norms that are increasingly at odds with what children need (and have always needed) to grow up to become strong, emotionally healthy and resilient adults.

He argues that our mass media and social media have created a pervasive fear for parents about the risks to children from child abduction, pedophilia, sex trafficking and all the other perils of the world, fears that he contends are out of proportion to the actual risk. This constant media-driven amplification of our fears about children’s safety has led to parents becoming increasingly unwilling to allow children the level of freedom they need to explore, to take risks, and to spend enough time alone and with their peers figuring things out for themselves, as has been customary throughout human history.

He invites older readers in particular to remember how we grew up, and the amount of freedom we had to roam our neighborhoods, to make mistakes and occasionally get a little hurt, to play alone and with friends by ourselves, and to organize our own activities and entertainment unsupervised by adults from an early age. He then contrasts that with today’s world of helicopter parenting, play dates under constant watchful parental eyes and guidance, and youth sports organized and run by parents rather than the kids.

This crucial concept, which he credits to his friend and collaborator Lenore Skenazy and her influential book Free-Range Kids (2009), asserts that the current super-protective practices and social norms around what children can and can’t do only began to develop in the 1980s and 1990s, but have now reached a point of restrictiveness on children’s free play and exploration which is extreme compared to the rest of human history, and detrimental to normal child development.

Haidt then makes the further connection that these recent changes in parenting norms and exaggerated fears about child safety roughly coincided with the arrival of smartphones and social media use by this same generation of children (basically Gen Z), who now aren’t allowed to play and roam on their own as older generations were. With these ahistorical new limits placed on their play time and opportunities for play in the physical world, these kids have been pushed even more toward the “disembodied” smartphone and online apps that further undermine their self-confidence and resilience. This  has increased their feelings of isolation and pointlessness, and accelerated the crisis of anxiety and depression they are now experiencing as a cohort.

Some people might want to dismiss all this as just the latest “moral panic” about new technologies and social change. I don’t believe that’s an accurate conclusion. Haidt makes many helpful and insightful observations, offers valid contrasts and comparisons, and makes helpful  recommendations throughout, all based on the body of mental health studies and longitudinal data he cites.

This is a long and dense book, with a large list of footnotes and references. I’ll admit that it wasn’t always the easiest read, but it was one of the more impactful and influential books I’ve come upon lately. And he does also offer solutions. In the end, if you could skip to his conclusions, they would be along the following lines.

First, kids should not have smartphones or social media accounts until they’re sixteen. Their brains and psyches are simply not yet prepared to withstand the psychological and physiological manipulation engineered into social media apps.

Second, students should not have access to smartphones in school. They’ll learn a lot more without them, but also will be happier spending the time at school with their friends, learning to navigate social life in person, and developing the skills and self-confidence to be functional people in the real world.

Third, parents, teachers and leaders should use collective action to change social norms, and to avoid having to try to devise individual or one-family solutions to the hard problems of how to support children’s free play opportunities and rights, as well as control their smartphone, internet and social media use. Haidt provides good examples of tactics that have worked for groups of people who have begun to move the needle on some of these problems, by working together with other parents and educators in their social circles and communities.

Finally, let kids play and explore the world more from an early stage in their lives, without as much constant close adult supervision. Let them take some risks. Of course, parents have to make informed and appropriate adult decisions about how much risk and freedom is okay for their child at each stage of development, but they should resist the idea that children need to be under constant parental control and supervision every minute.

The Anxious Generation is an outstanding work exploring the distressed state of childhood and children’s mental health today. It probes the causes and unique challenges faced by parents, educators and policy makers in the age of mass media, the internet, the smartphone, and most especially the social media apps that are engineered to capture,  retain and exploit the attention of immature young minds. Even after my long synopsis here, there’s a great deal more to be learned and considered from reading this book. Very highly recommended.

One incidental note: Jonathan Haidt is an active writer on Substack, where he continues to provide useful ideas and updated information on the topics covered in this book.

Book Review: The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (2025). Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately on the topic of AI (Artificial Intelligence). AI is naturally interesting to me as a former IT and tech person, but also because its apparent rapid development, economic and employment impacts and its social policy implications are so much in the news at the moment. I have two or three more new books on this topic on my library list and bookshelf at the moment, but today I want to discuss one I’ve already read.

The book is entitled The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. Dr. Bender is a professor of Linguistics, and affiliate faculty in Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Washington, who often consults with domestic and international organizations on understanding "AI" technologies. Dr. Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, and a lecturer at the School of Information at UC Berkeley.

This book is a dense, thorough critique of the entire field of "AI", coming at it from many different levels and angles. It discusses the financial and political motivations of AI’s main proponents, its foundation in intellectual property theft, and the essential fraudulence of the hype that what has been created in these software products is "intelligence". It compares the hype around AI to other tech bubbles of the past, and discusses both the need and some methods for resisting the inclusion of AI features in many of our common computer and internet applications.

The book explores many of the adverse effects on society that can be expected from further implementations of AI in many arenas, including job automation and job loss, misplaced legitimization of discriminatory social policies, climate change impacts from massive data center requirements, destructive effects on many types of careers and human creative endeavors, and many more.

I mentioned in another review recently that I have some skepticism and doubt about the current clamor over AI and all the things it can do. This book clarifies and supports my uneasiness over much of what the public has been hearing lately about AI from the wealthy tech moguls who are promoting it.

One interesting dynamic the authors describe is the way the tech leaders seem to fall into two opposing camps about the promise and perils of AI. There are the “boomers” (or accelerationists), who claim that AI will deliver untold wealth, intellectual capacity and scientific benefits to humanity in the very near future, which is why we must do whatever it takes to develop it quickly. And then there are the “doomers”, who make much of their belief that AI will soon reach the “Singularity”, where the machines will outstrip humanity’s ability to  reason, and may then consign us all to the dustbin of history, as in the Terminator films.

What the authors note about these two camps is that they both tend to be largely made up of people who are within the small circles of rich high-tech corporate leadership. In fact, the two conflicting views of AI’s risk/reward profiles are often present in the same people.

In one breath, they argue that they need to go all-in quickly on investing in and developing AI as fast as possible, for all the positive benefits they foresee. Then they turn around and say that they are the only ones who can be trusted to protect us from the potential disastrous AI outcomes they fear. Sam Altman and Elon Musk are prime examples of this sort of warring visions within one person, with their self-serving rationalizations for going ahead and doing whatever they want to do, despite all the dire risks to humanity they’ve predicted.

Both the book authors are active in the research fields of AI, and are not blind to the enormous potential economic and social benefits that may result from AI developments. At the same time, they see right through the breathless claims of the AI proponents, which is that AGI – Artificial General Intelligence, or machines that can think as humans do – is just around the corner.

They point out that this claim about impending AGI has been made repeatedly for over fifty years, and they share some of the history of that. But as they explain, the technical approach behind current generative AI (like ChatGPT), based on large language models and neural networks, is still basically a parlor trick, seemingly displaying magical “intelligence” that is in fact produced by an inanimate but sophisticated prediction engine.

AI doesn’t think, and it doesn’t feel, according to the authors, and they contend that with current models and approaches, it’s not likely to do so anytime soon. What generative AI does do is leverage existing human intelligence, creativity, art and information stored as data to seemingly “create” new text and images, based on content taken without compensation from the many people  who originally created it.

This is not intelligence, say the authors – it is merely theft and repurposing on a colossal scale. And it is theft that allows those who own and control the vast computing resources needed for AI tools to function, to profit and extract great value from the fruits of human creativity and labor they’ve stolen from others, and used to train their AI models. 

One of the most telling points the authors make is that an unacknowledged but very high priority of the AI moguls seems to be to use these smart machines to eliminate costly humans from the workforce. Everyone knows by now that AI is a potential threat to many existing jobs, especially in the white collar service industries, but that’s not something the AI hype merchants want to emphasize. Or so I assumed, until on a recent trip to San Francisco I saw billboards advertising a new AI product with the slogan “Never hire a human again”. Perhaps in the current political moment, these tech leaders no longer even feel they need to hide their desire to take away peoples' livelihoods for the sake of their bottom lines. 

After thoroughly pulling back the veil on all the hype, the lies and flawed reasoning behind the “AI con”, the authors lay out some reasonable if limited ideas for how to resist the AI juggernaut. For example, they suggest not using AI agents to query for information when a simple web search would give comparable results.

The authors suggest this for several reasons: first, because widespread refusal to use new AI products might slow investment and further development in them; second, because these AI agents have vastly greater environmental and climate change overhead associated with using them compared to a simple web search; and third, because the AI answers might be made up, and don’t tend to provide their sources, or any attribution for how they arrived at their conclusions.

With a web search, you know where the information is coming from, and can draw your own conclusions about its validity, reliability and truthfulness. You also might discover some unexpected but valuable information farther down the page of search results. With an AI agent search, you have to just take it on faith that the AI didn’t make it up, but which it often does (popularly known as “hallucinating”, although the authors reject that term for its implicit hint of actual machine cognition).

Of course, as the authors are aware, resisting the hype and the promotional campaigns being waged for AI by the leaders of our largest tech companies will be difficult. And there is a need not to throw out all AI and advanced computing innovations that might truly be beneficial to humanity, although how lay people are supposed to distinguish between what is worthwhile and what is wasteful or dangerous among the many new AI products being released is hard to know.

The ultimate message the authors seem to hope readers will take away from their in-depth presentation is that if we’re going to have AI technologies at all, they need to be limited, regulated and well-controlled, and in the service of humanity’s greater good and noblest aspirations, not the science fiction-based fantasies and greed of a small group of wealthy tech entrepreneurs.

That all makes sense to me. Highly recommended.  

Book Review: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism. Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025).

Several years ago, I read and reviewed an excellent book from 2016 about Silicon Valley and particularly Facebook called Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine  by Antonio Garcia Martinez. It was a memoir by a former Wall Street trader who moved to California around 2010, and jumped into the high tech investment world. In addition to many interesting and appalling stories of the people and bad behavior he encountered along the way, Martinez’s story stood out for its clear presentation of how the electronic markets in personal data for advertising work at places like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram, and what it’s like to work in those high-tech corporate environments. 

With Sarah Wynn-Williams' splendid new tell-all memoir about life in the upper ranks of Facebook’s leadership, Careless People, we now have an even more gripping, often shocking but highly readable insider’s account of the people who have built and now control the world’s most powerful social media company, and the lawless and corrupt practices that have made Facebook and Meta the destructive forces they have become in modern society. Some of these outrages have already been investigated and publicized in the news media, but Wynn-Williams’ story takes it to a whole new level of factual detail and disillusioning personal experience.

 

The author’s origin story is an unusual one. The childhood survivor of a near-fatal shark attack in her native New Zealand, she grew up to become an idealistic young lawyer and diplomat who discovered Facebook around 2009. She was immediately enthralled by the possibilities the social media app presented for promoting open communications between people and communities, resisting authoritarian regimes (as seemed to be happening during the “Arab Spring” at that time), and generally being a new and important force for social good in the world.

 

With that hopeful and idealistic perspective, she spent more than a year trying to find an “in” at the relatively new Facebook company, so she could pitch her idea for a job she wanted to do there: director of global public policy. At first, she made little progress, because the top management hadn’t even considered the idea that Facebook had the potential to run into many kinds of legal conflict, complex policy issues and resistance from political leaders in countries around the world. But eventually, through sheer persistence, she was able to talk herself into the job she had invented, and began to work regularly with Facebook’s top leadership, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and others. 

 

As she describes it, Wynn-Williams began filled with hopes for herself and her new career, imagining a useful role at Facebook where she could use her training and experience in international law and diplomacy to help make the company and its products a force for positive change around the world. With these goals in mind, she began encouraging Mark Zuckerberg to start trying to make personal connections with important global leaders, in order to create favorable conditions for promoting Facebook’s apps and the company in countries around the world.

 

She brought her diplomatic skills and experience to bear, trying to set up meetings, handle protocol, and prep the boss for what should be discussed in those meetings with world leaders and other CEOs. It turned out that wasn’t so easy, since Zuckerberg at this early stage was uncomfortable meeting new people, hated politics, didn’t think he needed to know anything or be prepared for these meetings in advance, and basically wanted someone else to deal with it all. Nevertheless, Wynn-Williams kept trying.

 

She also became part of the circle of young women staffers around Sheryl Sandberg. She soon found herself  recruited along with other female staff to do non-company work promoting Sandberg’s book Lean In, helping to manage all the attendant glory and publicity Sandberg received as a supposed feminist success story, the powerful professional woman and visionary corporate leader who could balance work and family, and “have it all”. But the author soon realized that Sheryl could “have it all” mainly because of her stupendous wealth, her paid full-time childcare staff, and her ability at work to compel others to do things for her, without regard for the toll that might take on her assistants, or the appropriateness of having Facebook pay for these personal services for her.

 

What makes Wynn-Williams’ story so compelling are the harrowing daily personal experiences and interactions she describes, and the insights she has on what she had to do to try to survive and succeed in this toxic work environment. She describes a work culture where having children and families is something to be essentially hidden from supervisors, where insane work hours and demands on personal time are normal expectations of employees by upper management. She recounts going through several pregnancies during her time at Facebook, one with calamitous damage to her health, and reveals how her bosses still expected her to be working from home or going on foreign trips, even during her maternity leave and an extended period of physical recovery.

 

The author also gives chilling descriptions of ongoing sexual harassment, both from her male boss Joel Kaplan and from Sheryl Sandberg, who Wynn-Williams claims tried to force her to go to bed with Sandberg during a long international flight on a private jet. Wynn-Williams describes many of the things she did at work for years to try to stay out of trouble and under the radar of top leadership, while also trying to report and resist wrongdoing, whether it was about sexual harassment, or her repeated objections to the business’s policies and practices when they appeared to be immoral, corrupt, illegal or just plain stupid.

 

The author confirms Mark Zuckerberg’s widely reported rage at having Facebook blamed by the press for Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 upset victory. Zuckerberg apparently felt Facebook was being unjustly accused and defamed, at least until his own managers explained to him all the powerful software and data tools for voter manipulation they had used on Trump’s behalf. He then ended up testifying in Congress, and with the support of his staff, lied about and obfuscated the company’s extensive consulting work for the Trump campaign, and its powerful effects, according to Wynn-Williams.

 

Later in the book, Wynn-Williams also delves into details of Facebook’s attempts to win its way into the Chinese market, which became one of Zuckerberg’s top priorities in his relentless quest for more customers. According to her account, the Facebook leadership appeared untroubled by what it concluded was the need to collaborate with China’s authoritarian government in providing spying capabilities against its own population, if that would advance the company’s interests. The author claims they were also perfectly willing to lie to the U.S. government about the extent of their cooperation with the Xi regime, and lie to the Xi regime about their covert attempts to penetrate the market without meeting the Chinese government’s legal requirements. She provides numerous examples to back up these claims.

 

Another shocking reveal was the fact that marketing teams at Facebook had developed advertising decks to promote their abilities to target 13-17 year old girls with signs of emotional distress (as contained in their posts) for advertising that would take advantage of the psychologically vulnerable state of those girls. Of course, when Facebook was caught out on this, and hauled before Congress to explain, the company’s leadership lied, and denied they had those capabilities. But they did, and they were promoting and selling those capabilities to customers, who wanted to advertise products like weight loss aids and beauty products to under-age girls in crisis.

 

Ultimately, after most of a decade in the upper echelons of the Facebook hierarchy, the author’s attempts to encourage Facebook to do the right things in different situations, whether in the realm of international law and policy, or in dealing with employee harassment by top leaders, ended with her being fired. None of the leaders responsible for all these problems apologized to her, or acknowledged any wrongdoing. They just got rid of her, which is of course what they are still hoping to do now, by suggesting the author is just a disgruntled fired employee with emotional problems and a “sour grapes” grudge against the company. 

 

I saw a news report that Facebook’s and Meta’s leadership really did not want this book to be published, and it’s obvious why not after reading it. It’s potentially a devastating blow to the Facebook and Meta brands, not to mention the reputations of people like Zuckerberg and Sandberg. But I’m convinced that Wynn-Williams is telling the truth about this crew of “careless people”. She paints a very believable and by-now familiar picture of the toxic high-tech corporate culture they’ve created, and shows how their vast wealth, unchecked ambition and lack of any moral compass or empathy for others on a routine basis has led them to launch these destructive social media applications out into the world, with little concern for their adverse effects on individuals or society.

 

I know there has been enough negative press and analysis about Facebook and Meta in the past few years that many people might not want to hear any more about it. But this book is essential for really understanding the extent of the cynicism, greed and corruption at the heart of Meta and its leadership, and the negative effects that has had on the politics of our time, our attention and our social lives.

 

It’s also a riveting read, and a compelling personal story of survival and endurance in the face of adversity, disillusionment and loss. Very highly recommended.   

Book Review: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022). Chris Miller.

I was intrigued this morning to read an article about a growing problem in the latest iterations of new generative AI products. This problem has been recognized and widely discussed for the last several years, but apparently in many cases, it’s not being solved as the AI software and systems become more sophisticated and complex. Apparently it’s getting worse, much worse. That problem is “hallucination”, the tendency of AI systems to make up “facts” in response to queries. 

 

When I read news like that, it tends to support a gut feeling of mine that the current hype about AI and how it’s going to change everything for the better is at the very least overblown, and perhaps completely wrong, a sci-fi fantasy from our tech leaders’ childhoods that in reality could become a dystopian, dangerous nightmare, rather than a wondrous achievement for humanity. But that’s a larger topic for another time.

 

In the meantime, our current computer systems, our phones, the internet and all the electronic information technologies of our era have become indispensable resources for every aspect of our lives, at work and at play. Through the accumulated scientific knowledge and engineering of the recent past, these things all exist, and most of us take them for granted. We don’t tend to think about them that much, but perhaps we should.

 

Most of us probably don’t think about how critical computer automation has become to our survival, as more and more of our societal life support systems, our roads, our airspace, our banking system, our hospitals, our communications and so many other parts of modern society are put under computer control. Very few of us actually know much about how these things came to be, how they work, or what it takes to keep turning out the steadily more powerful automation products we all use and rely upon.

 

This is why Chris Miller’s book Chip War is the essential book for understanding many aspects of our current situation. It starts at the beginning, telling the history of the invention of the transistor, soon followed by the development of the integrated circuit (known as a “chip”), a small electronic component onto which many transistors can be printed using a highly refined photo imaging process. He also provides a clear description for the lay reader on how these inventions function, and why they are essential to the creation of computers and the internet.

 

From that necessary introduction, he then tells a much longer and more complicated story about how the initial inventions were steadily improved and disseminated around the world over the past half-century. He focuses on important individuals at each stage of development, and how certain companies and countries competed to dominate different aspects of both ongoing creation of better chip designs, and the actual production of the chips based on the designs.

 

As someone with a long history in IT and computers myself, I knew some of what was in this riveting and important book, but I learned so much more, and it was fascinating.

 

Miller talks about the different approaches taken by important countries over the decades to try to gain access to the newest and best designs and products coming out of the U.S.A. For example, he traces how the Soviet Union and then Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse tried to simply steal the latest technology from the West, both the designs and often the chips themselves. As he explains, this has kept Russia consistently a decade behind the United States and Europe in the types and quality of chips it could produce or consume in mass.

 

In China, however, they took a different route. While trying to build up their own research and development capabilities, the Chinese focused on creating advanced manufacturing for some types of chips, especially memory chips, as well as building factories to create integrated products like circuit boards, and consumer products like PCs, laptops, and smartphones. It wasn’t that they didn’t also steal the latest Western technology whenever they could, but they did vastly more than Russia to also develop their own advanced research and manufacturing capabilities. As a result, they own or dominate some important segments of the global chip manufacturing and high-tech product market.

 

In the United States, where the technology was invented, the top companies dominated most or all aspects of creating the latest, most advanced chips for several decades. But over time, some of the premier companies were out-competed by a few companies in other countries, and merged or went out of business.

 

The United States, particularly with companies like Intel and AMD,  still retains dominance in the development of the new designs for the latest generations of chips, but several other countries now have companies in that race. In the meantime, the United States, and almost all other countries, have ceded control over the production of the most vital chips – the CPUs, or Central Processing Units that control the operations of all computers – to a single country, Taiwan, and to a single company there that has been willing to make the huge investments in equipment and facilities required to be able to produce the current and near-future generations of processor chips.

 

The story of how that happened, how the United States and its premier chip companies lost the ability to manufacture its most vital computing components after designing them is just one fascinating tale from this exhaustive history of the chip industry. And it is an absolutely vital story to know and understand, in order to better comprehend some major political issues we now face.

 

For example, knowing that Taiwan is the world’s sole source for producing the latest and best CPU chips explains why the question of China’s desire to take back control of Taiwan, and the West’s need to prevent that has become such a perennially vital national security issue for the United States. Being aware of this situation also explains why all recent American administrations have wanted to bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S.A., with only limited success.

 

Chip War is filled with these sorts of “how did we not know this?” stories and background. It also drives home as few other things I’ve read, how absolutely dependent we have become on computer chips, on the same level of importance as the oil and energy resources that drive our economy. It’s also a very enlightening history of the brilliant people, the companies and countries that have created and improved these magical little devices that are now embedded in so much of the smart environment in which we now live. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Abundance (2025). Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson.

I have long been an admirer of Ezra Klein, his writing and his New York Times podcast The Ezra Klein Show. In my opinion, he is one of the most influential public intellectuals in American life today, because of his deep and wide knowledge of politics and public policy, his unflagging curiosity about life and the way the world works, and his excellence as an interviewer of other important thinkers, whether he agrees with their opinions or not.

What demonstrates to me his importance as a thought leader is the number of times his writings and podcasts have introduced important and original new ideas that have overcome initial pushback and skepticism to eventually be widely recognized as true and important insights, at least by the liberal-minded part of the population.

In Why We’re Polarized (2020), Klein did a deep dive into the data about social divisions in American society, finding both new and surprising explanations for our political and social polarization, and identifying forces and effects (particularly in our media environments) that are further destabilizing our democratic political systems.

Then in early 2024, he shocked the Democratic Party and many of its supporters with his column in the New York Times advocating that Joe Biden should not run for re-election, based on Biden’s age and age-related inability to run a dynamic, effective campaign despite a good record of success in office. This bold and perilous opinion on Klein’s part was met with intense hostility and opposition from within the party apparatus, only to be eventually accepted and embraced by the party and the electorate after Biden’s disastrous debate performance.

In his latest book, Abundance, a collaboration with co-author Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic and also a podcast host, Klein and Thompson build a conceptual framework for understanding why the Democratic Party and the left in general have lost the support of much of the population they have been trying so hard to help.

The principal problem they identify is the extent to which Democratic-led state and local governments have failed to provide the abundance they’ve promised, particularly in blue states like those on the West Coast. They provide a litany of examples of good promises unfulfilled, like the multi-decade high speed rail project in California, and the homelessness crisis and lack of affordable housing in major urban areas long governed by Democrats.

The primary reason they identify for this ongoing failure, despite the best of intentions, is the inability to build public infrastructure quickly and at a reasonable cost, such as  rapid mass transit, highways, more urban housing, clean energy projects and the like.

Klein and Thompson make the argument that Democrats and progressives should develop an exciting and positive vision of an abundant future, where our national wealth and high technology is used to build the kinds of cities, social amenities and clean environment people want to live in.

But the authors also suggest that Democratic leaders need to come to terms with the underlying reasons for their failures, such as NIMBYism, and the well-meaning over-regulation of public construction projects, which give the more affluent individuals and groups in communities the ability to endlessly delay and drive up the cost of projects they would rather not have in their own back yards.

In this argument, they are echoing an analysis I read recently in another new book, Why Nothing Works (2025) by Marc J. Dunkelman, which provides a longer-term historical account of how progressivism has always harbored two countervailing objectives that tend to create problems when out of balance. One of progressivism’s objectives has been to encourage strong government that can do good things for the people effectively, and prevent local obstructionism and corruption, but at the same time, it has also sought to protect the rights of individuals and communities against too-strong governments and corporations. These two objectives are in constant contention with each other within progressive thought.   

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson develop a similar argument, suggesting that Democrats over the past few decades have put in place so many administrative obstacles to getting things done, for the purpose of protecting the environment and the interests of their many minority and special interest constituencies, that the kind of grand achievements we used to be able to do as a society, like building the interstate highway system or sending men to the moon, can’t possibly be done rapidly or for an affordable price anymore.

The authors point out that the result is not only that fewer people vote for these Democratic governments and candidates, but in many places, people actually vote with their feet, moving to states where less liberal Republican administrations can provide cheaper housing, mass transit, highways and other desirable infrastructure and services because of the lesser constraints on governmental power and overreach.

If any of this (like the call for fewer regulations) sounds like an argument from the right, it isn’t. Klein and Thompson explicitly direct their arguments internally toward the left, in the hope of influencing liberals and progressives to see the value of diagnosing and fixing their own failures to build as a way of winning back votes and much of the popular support they have lost.

They also strongly contrast their abundance approach, the idea that creating social wealth and benefits creates a more just, fair and prosperous society, to the Trumpist “scarcity” style of politics, which constantly hammers away at the idea that there isn’t enough of anything, and whatever wealth there is, someone else is trying to take it away from you.

Abundance is not the last word on how Democrats and liberals need to reinvent the party, or fix all their problems. There is much here to debate, to consider and investigate further. But there is little doubt that Klein (with Thompson) has again written a groundbreaking, provocative book that is launching another movement or tendency on the left (“abundance” theory) that will become an important influence in liberal thought in the near future. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I (2023). Douglas Brunt.

During the past year, I've read a number of excellent books that seemed to resonate as part of the backstory to some of the most urgent issues of our time. I will be reviewing several of them over the next few weeks, but this book seemed to be an intriguing place to start exploring some of these missing threads from which our contemporary world has been woven.

Everyone has heard of Diesel engines, the rugged machines that power much of our transportation across the globe, from ships, to trains, to trucks, cars and airplanes, as well as giant electrical generators and many other industrial and military applications. But far fewer of us know the story of the invention of the Diesel engine, or what was so significant about it as opposed to the other internal combustion engine designs of the modern era. 

 

Despite having reached a stage in life where I know quite a bit about history, this fascinating story about a crucial modern technology was almost a complete surprise to me. It begins with an account of the formative years of the inventor, Rudolph Diesel, starting with his impoverished childhood in France, Germany and England in the late nineteenth century, during which he managed to obtain an excellent engineering education despite his family’s poverty,  because of his prodigious and obvious mechanical genius. 

 

The author also introduces us along the way to John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, and traces Rockefeller’s drive to create monopolistic control over the miraculous new energy source of the twentieth century: oil. This profile was also very enlightening, in showing us how Rockefeller sought to steer new industrial and popular energy technologies inexorably toward those that used his petroleum products as fuel, even as other possible sources of energy were being discovered and tried at the same time.

For example, Rockefeller first pushed to replace whale oil for city lighting with kerosene, a refined oil product, only to have kerosene’s future in the lighting market rapidly eclipsed by Edison’s electric light bulbs and the creation of early electrical power grids. With the market for kerosene lighting collapsing almost as quickly as it had opened, Rockefeller then became determined to see that all powered means of transportation should use the newly-invented internal combustion engine, which required highly refined petroleum products like kerosene and gasoline to function.   

Diesel’s remarkable engine design came into being at the exact same time the internal combustion engine was being invented. What was different about Diesel’s engine, though, was that rather than relying on the inherently combustible and explosive nature of gasoline, his engine used mechanical pressure on the fuel to create the heat needed to make the fuel combust. 

 

This meant that a diesel engine could run on many different types of inert, safer and more stable fuels, as it still can today, including fuels that could be created without needing to have oil wells or refineries. It could run on many types of vegetable oils, for example, like the bio-diesel fuels of our era made from corn or used cooking oil. And once Diesel had the engine fully designed, and the problems worked out, these engines proved to be simple and utterly reliable.

 

Rudolph Diesel apparently was driven from an early age to develop this engine for two reasons: first, to massively improve the efficiency of an engine’s use of fuel, compared to the pitiful 2% efficiency of the coal-burning steam engines of the nineteenth century. Second, Diesel wanted to provide endless and accessible “clean” power for the betterment of mankind, in contrast to the smoky miasma produced by coal engines. He appears to have been very much an idealist in that sense.

 

Nevertheless, when his engine invention took off on the world stage, he became a very wealthy man, one of the richest and most important men of the age. His story of brilliant invention, and then growing wealthy and famous on the basis of his world-changing new technology, is familiar. It's very much like the stories of the tech titans of our own era. But as with some of the more well-meaning tech entrepreneurs of our age, at a certain point Diesel could not avoid politics, nor business and engineering competition, at a time when the world’s major power technologies of the twentieth century were being invented. 

 

Brunt then explores a number of the important cross-currents Diesel had to navigate throughout his career. Diesel had to compete with the invention and rapid development of the internal combustion engine, and its backing by Rockefeller, who was determined to prevent any power plant type becoming dominant in the world market that did not require his oil. 

 

Diesel also had to keep innovating and improving his engines, managing his licenses and patents in many countries, and solving problems created by foreign engineers as they tried to implement his designs. And eventually, he had to come to terms with the fact that political leaders in numerous countries – especially Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany – were intent on using his marvelous engine design to power war machines, like submarines  and battleships, uses of which he morally disapproved. 

 

This is all fascinating history in its own right, but there is an added twist Brunt unveils toward the end of the story. It turns out that Rudolph Diesel disappeared, at the height of his fame and fortune, just before World War I began, apparently by falling or jumping overboard off a channel ferry on a night trip from France to Britain.

 

You can imagine the public fascination and uproar a mysterious and improbable disappearance like that would set off today if it happened to one of our major tech celebrities, particularly if the stories in the news kept changing and becoming less believable as the days went by. But the mystery was never solved. Brunt does a nice job laying out the threads of the mystery, reviewing the various theories that came and went, and then coming up with a startling but very plausible answer of his own as to what really happened to Rudolph Diesel.

 

This is an excellent piece of historical writing about an essential figure in the development of the modern world, whose remarkable story, and fame and fortune, somehow vanished from popular memory with the passing of time, and with his own mysterious disappearance. He may be gone, and mostly forgotten, but his remarkable invention still powers much of our world, even if in the end most diesel engines are powered by one of the oil-based fuel products Rockefeller and his heirs owned and controlled, and not one of the other non-petroleum fuels Diesel preferred.

 

Reading this book gave me new perspectives on the history of the engine technologies and fuels that power our world, and how those decisions were first made. It also reconfirmed the extent to which Big Oil, since its inception just as today, has been hyper-focused on pushing our society and its technology choices in ways that favor their profits and their political and economic control above all other factors. I didn’t know this particular part of that backstory, and I’m glad I do now. Highly recommended.