Kurt Johnson

I just finished Philip Short’s book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare.  I bought the book because I wanted to learn something about Cambodian history and culture before we visited and this appeared to be the best balance of my goals and reviewer opinions on Amazon.  For my purposes it ended up being too wordy and filled with minutiae about specific interactions between party members, but there were some interesting points of general interest:

Page 25 discusses historical cultural relations with the Vietnamese which eventually precipitated a purge by the Khmer Rouges:

Vietnam was the Cambodian bogeyman…They seemed to be everything the Khmers were not; a disciplined, vigorous, virile people, whose relentless, centuries-long southward migration had swallowed up Kampuchea Krom, or Lower Cambodia, in the area  of what would become South Vietnam, and now threatened a creeping takeover of Cambodia itself, aided and abetted by the French authorities, who encouraged large-scale Vietnamese immigration to staff the lower echelons of the colonial civil service and furnish the skilled manual labor which the Cambodians were judged incapable of providing.  The result was more than mere racial antipathy.  It was a massive national inferiority complex, which took refuge in dreams of ancient grandeur.  At a personal level, Khmers and Vietnamese might befriend each other…But the cultural fracture between the two peoples - between Confucianism and Theravada Buddhism, between the Chinese world and the Indian - was one of mutual incomprehension and distrust, which periodically exploded into racial massacres and pogroms.

Page 43 hints at French colonial policy:

Under the protectorate, the French had so neglected higher education in Cambodia that in the late 1940s, fewer than a hundred students a year left secondary school with the requisite qualifications [for a university scholarship]…This was especially true in the technical fields where even the humblest posts were filled by Vietnamese because of the lack of trained Cambodians…Although the numbers were rising, fewer than 250 Cambodians had been trained abroad since the beginning of the century [almost 50 years], including those sent by their families without government support.

Page 295 discusses backward bending labor supply curves:

Even Khieu Samphan estimated that on average Khmer peasants worked only six months of the year, and sometimes much less.  Theravada Buddhism has never placed much value on the acquisition and consumption of wealth.  Sihanouk has recounted the experience of an American aid expert in the 1950s who convinced a group of villagers to use chemical fertilizer, promising that it would enable them to double rice production.  ‘Sure enough, at harvest time, the yield was doubled.  Everyone was delighted…[but] when the official came back the following year he was horrified to find that each peasant had cultivated only half his land.  “Why” said the peasants, “cultivate the entire area when you can get just as much by cultivating half?”  Fifty years later, a Khmer businessman, seeking a regular supply of palm sugar for sweetmeat manufacture encountered exactly the same problem.  Once the peasant farmers he employed had earned enough for the year they stopped work, and neither blandishments nor the promise of more money could make them start again.  “From their point of view it was logical”, he acknowledged.  “Once they had paid their family’s expenses – seed for the next planting; fertilizer; clothes; offerings to the monks; school fees for the children – what would they spend it on?  There was nothing more they wanted.”…To Pol it was a roadblock obstructing his ambition to make Cambodia prosperous and strong…the Khmers Rouges had deliberately adopted policies of extremism to move “the inert peasant mass.

To be fair I read a similar characterization of the Vietnamese in The Last Valley except in that case it was used to explain how the Vietnamese could muster hundreds of thousands of rebel fighters since their primary jobs (growing rice) only took about 3 months per year, leaving them lots of free time.  There seems to be a "Vietnam is to Cambodia/Lao as China is to Vietnam" theme in the history I'm reading.

 The last part of the book (see page 420) is interesting; Vietnam eventually invaded Cambodia and the US subsequently elected to support the Khmer Rouges (in the midst of their governance killing something like 20% of everyone in Cambodia) because it was a way to punish the Soviets via the Vietnamese – very much the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” school of foreign affairs.

I recently rediscovered that Amazon lists used books on the same page as new ones.  I don't know how this ever slipped off my radar, but buying a used book is a really smart thing to do:

• Usually 50%-95% cheaper than a new copy
• Saves resources by recycling a book rather than making you a new one
• Encourages people who are done with books to pass them on to others who really value that book rather than just letting it sit around unused or gifting it to somebody who doesn't really care about it (but will take it because it's free).  In other words, your books will generally get better utilization if you find a buyer for them instead of just giving them away

So I haven't bothered to sell my old books yet (not worth the time to package/ship them) but I will try to buy used whenever possible.

I just finished the magnificant book Hard Landing; it's a gripping history of the North American airline business through 1996.  The book tells stories about individual CEOs in an engaging way (lots of author interviews) and gives a non-technical account of the evolution of airline strategy over time.  Having read it once quickly to see where all of the characters end up I'll probably re-read parts of the book selectively to make sure I understand what went on.

Other highlights:

• Flashbacks/nostalgia for extremely powerful companies that have disappeared from public consciousness (Braniff, Pan Am, Eastern, People Express, etc.)
• Portraits of leading CEOs with lots of anecdotes about how intense/driven some of them are (apparently when TI/Braniff asked for injunctions from regulators to keep his airline from starting up Herb Kelleher clenched his teeth so hard he cracked 4 molars)
• Characterizations of the politics and organizational dynamics at the top of these companies
• Insight into the regulatory process that is so critical to the airline business
• Marketing insights including price discrimination, product placement on travel agent screens/systems, customer segmentation, rebates, etc.

The book was written in 1996; it seemed pretty recent to me until I realized that in 1996 most people hadn't heard of the internet and the revolutionary development of the online reservations business hadn't taken off.  Having said that anybody who has a passing interest in the history of the airline business should pick up the book. 

In an earlier post I recommended How We Know What Isn’t So - the best summary I can think of is to call it analogous to a study of optical illusions; instead of cataloging visual tricks the book details tons of ways the human mind warps objective data into incorrect conclusions. Below I’ve captured some of the tidbits I enjoyed - there are dozens or hundreds of these concept+vignettes in the book, definitely enough to recommend reading the whole thing.

On how managers perceive motivation by reprimand vs. motivation by encouragement:.

Rewards are most likely to be given following another person’s extraordinarily good performance. However, regression guarantees that on average such extraordinary performances will be followed by deterioration. The reward will thus appear ineffective or counterproductive. In contrast, because bad performances tend to be followed by improvement, any punishment meted out after a disappointing performance will appear to have been beneficial…Regression effects teach us specious lessons about the relative effectiveness of reward and punishment.

In other words, managers/teachers can be forgiven for thinking that criticism is more effective than praise for mean-regressing performance metrics.

On the tendency to seek confirmatory information:

When trying to assess whether a belief is valid, people tend to seek out information that would potentially confirm the belief over information that might disconfirm it…To illustrate this tendency, consider an experiment in which participants were given a set of four cards, each of which has a letter or number on the side facing up - A, B, 2, and 3. The participants were told that each card had a letter on one side and a number on the other [opposite side] and they were asked to determine, by judiciously turning over the proper cards, whether “all cards with a vowel on one side have an even number on the other.”

Stop for a few seconds and answer this problem yourself before reading the solution.

The common response was to turn over the “A” and “2″ cards. These cards were presumably chosen because of their potential to provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis. However, turning over the “2″ card was uninformative because it could only confirm the hypothesis (a vowel on the other side would confirm it and a consonant would be irrelevant to it). The “3″ card was rarely turned over, on the other hand, even though it was potentially at least as informative as any other because of its potential to invalidate the hypothesis in one quick step.

This experiment is particularly informative because it makes it abundantly clear that the tendency to seek out information consistent with a hypothesis need not stem from any desire for the hypothesis to be true. The people in this experiment surely did not care whether [the hypothesis was true].

Although I don’t remember an easy quote to sum it up, I connected this idea to ways that I can conduct interviews and discovery; there’s often a bias towards asking questions that should be answered positively, neglecting good opportunities to ask questions where an affirmative answer sends up red flags.

On the association between black clothing and perceived aggressiveness:

This negative association leads to several interesting results in the domain of professional sports…We showed groups of trained referees one of two videotapes of the same aggressive play in a football scrimmage, one with the aggressive team wearing white and one with it wearing black. The referees who saw the black-uniformed version rated the play as much more aggressive and more deserving of a penalty than those who saw the white-uniformed version. The referees “saw” what this common negative association led them to expect to see. As a result of this bias it is not surprising to learn that teams that wear black uniforms in these two sports have been penalized significantly more than average during the last two decades*

*M.G. Frank & T. Gilovich (1988) The dark side of self and social perception: Black uniforms and aggression in professional sports. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

On how we pre-emptively make excuses for performance (ineffectively, he adds):

By drawing attention to those elements that inhibit performance, the self-handicapper tries to induce the other person to discount a potential failure. Under such trying circumstances, it is implied, anyone would have failed. And things are even better if we succeed: logically, the other person should augment his or her impressions of our ability. Anyone capable of overcoming such obstacles must be gifted indeed.

There are really two classes of self-handicapping strategies, real and feigned. “Real” self-handicapping involves placing visible obstacles to success in one’s own path. The obstacles make one less likely to succeed but they provide a ready excuse for failure. The student who neglects to study before an exam or the aspiring actor who drinks before an audition are good examples.

“Feigned” self-handicapping, on the other hand, is…simply making excuses for possible bad performance, either before or after the fact. Although it is certainly employed in all walks of life, this strategy is probably most common in areas such as sports and (undergraduate) academics in which outcomes are often unambiguous and performance can be precisely quantified….Indeed there is a term, “sneaky bookers”, which refers to students who study only in the strictest privacy so that they can pretend to devote minimal effort to their courses.

For a more sobering take on what might motivate some sneaky bookers, see this paper:

Our empirical analysis of ‘acting white’ uncovers a rich set of new facts. In contrast to the previous literature (Cook and Ludwig 1997), Figure 1A demonstrates that there are large racial differences in the relationship between popularity and academic achievement. Among whites, higher grades yield higher popularity. For Blacks, higher achievement is associated with modestly higher popularity until a grade point average of 3.5, when the slope turns negative. A black student with a 4.0 has, on average, 1.5 fewer same-race friends than a white student with a 4.0. Among Hispanics, there is little change in popularity from a grade point average of 1 through 2.5. After 2.5, the gradient turns sharply negative. A Hispanic student with a 4.0 grade point average is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and has 3 fewer friends than a typical white student with a 4.0 grade point average.

I doubt I’ll be diligent enough to post comments on all of the reading lately, but I can at least offer a quick recap.

The Last Valley - Excellent
“How the French lost their colony in Vietnam 1920-1955″
It’s simultaneously fantastic in many dimensions - war story, insight into pre-colonial and colonial Vietnam, context for the US war there, insight into French military organizations in the 1950s (with high levels of mercenary and colonial participation from non-French), etc. I read it once quickly and started to re-read and mark up specific things to quote….but before I finished I lent it to Susanne’s grandfater. He grew up in Hanoi and moved South after the partioning of North and South in 1955 to start working with the new South Vietnamese government. I’m anxiously awaiting his reactions and added context to the topics in the book.

Freakonomics - Very good
“200 page NY Times Magazine-ish piece on economics”
A dedicated post is coming. Short version - it’s interesting stuff but the book only takes a couple of hours to digest, which makes it expensive entertainment at $25. It ended up whetting my appetite on some of the topics so the real value for me may be the footnotes and bibliography so that I can go back and read some of the primary sources. Also see the Freakonomics blog & web site

How We Know What Isn’t So - Interesting.
“Like a book of optical illusions using data instead of optics”
Similar to themes Against the Gods and Fooled by Randomness but presented as pure academic Psychology rather than as an aspect of financial risk management. I’ll try to post a couple of particularly interesting ideas when I get my copy back.

Thinking Strategically - Excellent if you’re interested in game theory but afraid of Greek notation.
“Game theory for MBAs”
The book is written at an “MBA” level; deeper than a magazine article but avoiding the rigorous mathematical treatments that a bona fide student would have to slog through. The book is full of brain-bending examples that defy intuitive solutions; as with learning mathematics the reader probably won’t get much out of the reading unless they pause every few pages to work through the examples and train their mind to fit real-world situations into the framework the author’s are describing.

Quest for Consciousness - Fair to good
“Describing a physiological framework for studying consciousness”
Koch and Crick start with a discussion of what defines consciousness, then dive into how to design experiments to study it and recap existing literature on test results. My trouble with the book is that I don’t feel it was written for me, and I’m not really sure who the audience should be. My best guess is that people with an existing knowledge and interest in neuroanatomy or perceptual physiology.

Global Crises, Global Solutions - Fair.
“Read it online instead”
The Copenhagen consensus lined up a few dozen experts to write papers on how to solve the world’s top ten problems for development - infectuous disease, climate change, civil war, etc. There are points and counterpoints, but one comment I’ve read from several of the authors is that there was a bit of confusion about the direction of the papers; somewhere in the middle of the process the authors were told to frame their proposals as a budget priority exercise and make analyses in cost-benefit terms; i.e., where are the investment opportunities for this crisis? This course change leads to some strained reasoning in some of the papers….I think they’re good, and worth reading, but most of the information in the books has probably made it to online forums and I’d just read about it there instead.

Schweser’s study guide to the 2005 CFA level II exam
“Somebody shoot me before Level III”
I’ve got too many distractions to study effectively for Level II right now; the test is 3 weeks away and I haven’t even opened about 40% of the condensed review (let alone read any of the primary readings or taken a practice test). So the next few weekends are going to suck.

I’ve started a new book on Vietnamese history. I’m only 100 pages into it but the style and content of the writing is excellent. I’m not extremely interested in the details of Dien Bien Phu but the author is doing a wonderful job of describing the pre-battle history of Vietnam including cultural issues, national geography, weather, etc. - these are the details that are more interesting to me.

If anybody wants to read this and discuss I’d love to start a mini-book-club.

The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam

The Economist Review - also named an Economist “Book of the Year” for 2004