The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce by Anupam Chander

I saw a caravan once, in Afghanistan. It was a little caravan: three camels and a small family. But it was enough of a caravan to invoke in my imagination the Old Silk Road. I wondered (until a French officer ordered me to leave the area) where the travelers came from and where they were headed. All I could take away was their direction of travel: East.

In the Electronic Silk Road, Anupam Chander describes digital trade routes. The new trade proceeds along electronic pathways; it is fiber and cable and not camels that transmits value across great distances. But the Electronic Silk Road Chander studies has a marked geography; place still matters. We find Silicon Valley and Bangalore and (as before) China, marking the major stops and starts along the way (Chander likes the word entrepôt).

And the poles of the Electronic Silk Road, like the Old Silk Road, have valency. Chinese goods seduced the West for centuries: spices and trade goods and the silk that gave name to the trading route. The problem for the West was China’s notorious indifference to Western goods -- the West did not produce much the Chinese wished to have. Money was only a partial solution. It could of course pay for Chinese goods, but money, even in the days of gold and silver, was effectively a future claim on the West held by China. The Old Silk Road did not fit the mercantilist design of offsetting streams of goods.

The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic by Patrick Weil

We each deploy an array of identities in forming our social selves -- we can be, say, a Methodist and also a Southerner, and black and a civil engineer and gay. And all of this and still an American. Each aspect distinguishes us; together they individuate us. No single identity -- even that of our nationality -- adequately describes who we are, how we see ourselves. In these times, we no longer see the possession of one nationality as excluding another; many have more than one nationality. We can be both French and American; one does not displace the other in the modern imagination. (A nod to the late Tom Franck here, who explored these themes, personally and in his writings on nationality.)

Yet certain identities have been viewed as inherently incompatible with the holding of the fullest form of American national identity: U.S. citizenship. At various times one could not be an anarchist or an Asian or a Nazi or a communist and become (or perhaps remain) an American. Patrick Weil examines these disabling identities in The Sovereign Citizen, a thorough history of U.S. naturalization law. His emphasis lies with denaturalization: that is, the legal reversal of the grant of U.S. citizenship to an alien. For much of the 20th century, the recourse to denaturalization expands in parallel with the stiffening of opportunities for immigration. The vulnerability to denaturalization marked the ‘second class’ nature of U.S. citizenship acquired through naturalization; the hold of U.S born citizens on their nationality was (and continues to be) more secure. Denaturalization as a broad practice then collapses: from the Warren Court onward denaturalization has become an exceptional act.

Our view of citizenship shifted during the 20th century. It began as an exclusive (if not jealous) relationship between the United States and its nationals, characterized by duty and loyalty. These understandings differ from today’s far more easygoing tolerance (if not encouragement) of multiple nationalities and distributed allegiance. Weil’s book explores and the targets and the techniques of denaturalization.

Talent Wants to be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free-Riding by Orly Lobel

Orly Lobel is not writing about love in Talent Wants to be Free, but she’s not terribly far off topic, for she writes about the suffocating attachments firms can form with their employees. The heart-sickened are told to let go -- and perhaps their beloveds will come back to them. This may be the better course, but it isn’t easy and it certainly isn’t what most of us do (with our insecurities and covetousness). Firms are jealously possessive of their key employees; this is a social fact. Lobel challenges these firms (and the responding legislatures) to consider whether they are indeed pursuing their own best interests by clinging.

Lobel usefully gathers a variety of legal doctrines and instruments into a basket she calls “human capital controls” -- and for this alone her book should be read. Human capital controls include IP and quasi-IP (trade secrets and know-how) rights, as well as a host of contractual features: non-competes, non-disclosure agreements, compensation arrangements (option grants and forfeitures) and post-termination obligations. Together, these elements bind the talented employee to her employer. The orthodox justification for these controls is that they promote firm investment in innovation, including investment in human capital -- that is, in forming the movable productivity of the employee herself. It is the workplace, and not the university, where most valuable human capital is created.

Lobel directly investigates the logic of control -- which is easily conflated with ownership. By controlling human capital, firms capture some of its produce. Creative workers create. In addition, firms withhold these assets from their competitors. According to the received view, employees are rivalrous goods. Lobel challenges this notion (though perhaps not explicitly) -- while we are not public goods, our creations often are.

Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an all-American Town by Mirta Ojito and The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

In Hunting Season, Mirta Ojito tells the horrific story of the killing of an Ecuadorian immigrant, Marcelo Lucero, in Patchogue, Long Island at the hands of a group of brutish teenagers. It is a small-town story with international reverberations. At first blush, it is an investigation of American intolerance for the other run wild. Lucero was a poor, hard-working man, searching for a better life. His attackers are themselves lost souls, largely unknown to one another prior to the evening of Lucero’s killing. Each kid seems to lack the basic human understanding that there is something wrong with beating up a man simply because he is a ‘beaner.’ Patchogue is or was a community where the blood sport of attacking random Latinos goes unremarked. It is a dreadful story Ojito presents, and Patchogue appears as a dreadful place.

So what has happened in Patchogue? What does the killing of Lucero constitute? The knife-wielding 17-year-old points to his Latina girlfriend to demonstrate his open mind. Another attacker is both Puerto Rican and black -- the kids embrace him as their friend. Our American experience with racism -- and hence hate crimes -- largely involves victims from established and permanent communities (including the native community). Nativist violence may fall into a different category. The Patchogue 7 conceded they identified and attacked Lucero because of his ethnicity -- but there seems to be more that drew Lucero into their trap. They also understood that Lucero was a foreigner -- and likely one with a shaky immigration status. Lucero’s vulnerability invites this community reprisal.

Euro Money as Euro Language

This is the first of a series of reflections on the social meaning of the Euro.

Investigations of the social character of money often feature an analogy to language. Like words, money forms intelligible signs. Money, like language, is a critical medium of social exchange. Money, like language, is constitutive of identity: the particular kind of money we use, in part, makes us who we are. And money, like language, is both stable and unstable over space and time.

The architects of the European Monetary System (EMS) anticipated that the Euro would serve as an institution around which a European consciousness could be built. The Euro (at least in its material forms) functions like the EU flag or the EU passport to construct a new identity that plays on commonplace nationalist expectations. That is, when we see flags or passports or money, we have been acculturated to expect national sponsorship. The European Union thus displaces the traditional state in presenting itself through these institutions; if not precisely declaring itself to be a state, the European Union is, at a minimum, asserting that it is like a state for various intents and purposes.

But notice the peculiarly assertive case of the Euro. The EU flag often flies alongside the traditional flags of the EU Member States. The EU passport is formally issued by the respective member states: while it prominently features “European Union” on its harmonized cover, it also bears the name of the relevant member state. The EU passport in fact overstates the EU nature of the document. A passport begs the admission of a members state’s nationals into another state’s territory; it is only secondarily evidence of nationality (and in the case of EU passports, evidence of the bearer’s status as an EU citizen). Through flags and passports, the EU and the relevant EU member state co-occupy a space in the EU citizen’s imagination that had been occupied by the state alone.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In has been a major event; it’s been well received and thoroughly discussed. The book and the debates it stimulated appropriately returned attention to the ongoing gap between success promised and achieved by women in the corporate world.

Sandberg is herself an over-the-top success story. She has held top positions at both Google and Facebook. She, at least, is a take-all winner, one who managed to burst through the glass ceiling. But she remains aware of the many women around her who fail to speak up, who make unneeded compromises and veer off track. And she’s aware as well of those women damaged by unrealizable ‘have it all’ fantasies. Her prescription (which she makes clear is not intended for all) is to “lean in” -- to remain ambitious both for one’s personal career and for establishing a more equal world.

Lean In, Sandberg writes, is not a memoir, nor a self-help book, nor a career management primer. Maybe, she admits, it’s a manifesto. So perhaps it is not unfair to look at Lean In from a scientific perspective: what is Sandberg’s understanding of how one can effect social change? Sandberg herself is a prominent vertex in a social network that famously connects Google and Facebook (the ongoing migration of high tech talent from Google to Facebook, the smaller and more cool company, is partly inspired by Sandberg’s at-the-helm example). She can and does span these communities, as well as those built around Harvard, TEDTalks, and whatever Larry Summers happens to be doing (she describes Summers as a mentor). And no doubt her connections lead elsewhere, to centers of power unrevealed in Lean In. The trick then for Sandberg is how to maximize the influence that comes with such auspicious positioning.

The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan

Forgive me for being thick: after reading Anita Raghavan’s book I had to think a moment in order to name the billionaire’s apprentice. The apprentice has to be Rajat Gupta -- himself a humble multi-millionaire -- who services the only billionaire in view: Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon hedge fund. Raghavan recalls Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice in her title to capture Gupta’s doomed adventure. But it is the sorcerer Rajaratnam, and not his apprentice, who brings Galleon crashing down; Gupta is destroyed in the process.

So what did Gupta do? The government taped a compromising phone call by Gupta to Rajaratnam where
Gupta reports the confidential discussions of the Goldman Sachs board (Gupta was then a Goldman director). Gupta was only one of Rajaratnam’s many sources, and it is not clear that his information was that useful. (Rajaratnam argued that he traded on a ‘mosaic’ of information; no one item served as the basis for his actions).

It is hard to dispute that Rajaratnam regularly traded on inside information.  But was all (or most) of Galleon’s fortune built on inside information? I asked the same question in my review of The Buy Side, a tell-all by Galleon-insider Tyler Duff. My question is scientific in spirit, not legal.

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists by Napoleon Chagnon

Napoleon Chagnon's title promises a visit to two dangerous tribes: the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists. He provides a disjointed treatment. The larger part of the book takes the form of memoir, a return by Chagnon to the people he studied over the greater part of his career. The later chapters address the academic scandal surrounding Chagnon's work - and his place within the evolving discipline. Chagnon defends himself here - but he does not 'scientifically' study his anthropologist accusers: their violence (as opposed to that of the Yanomamö) is not explained.

Chagnon made the Yanomamö famous: his monograph (subtitled "The Fierce People') was widely studied (it was a highlight of the undergraduate Cultural Anthropology course I took). And of course the Yanomamö made Chagnon famous.

Chagnon's work was always controversial. He presented the Yanomamö as among the world's few remaining "Stone Age" people, largely isolated in the regions dividing Venezuela and Brazil. From here they subsistence agriculture from ever shifting villages. The Yanomamö were hardly unaffected by encounters with the outside -- they grew plantains and other crops that had been introduced to South America and prefered modern tools (including the machete and shotgun). Chagnon depicted the Yanomamö as a violent society, characterized by treacherous killings, inter-village raids, and systematic abduction of females. The Yanomamö were not Rousseau's noble savages.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

America is built on debt. Indeed, assuming our fair share of debt can be seen as an American duty. We obtain housing, education, transport and medical services through our use of credit -- and as such we spend most of our lives deeply indebted. The root of our notion of freedom (echoed, as Graeber points out, in religious imagery) is freedom from debt -- and if this is so, then by no means is America the land of the free.

Graeber's overview of 5,000 years of debt demonstrates that debt is not a neutral social instrument. Rather debt is first and foremost an institution allowing for the exercise of power. Debt is the foundation of hierarchy and hence much social structure.

Read my full-length review of David Graeber's Debt in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind by Mark Pagel

Mark Pagel addresses the conundrum posed by variegated cultures. Culture -- what we have that monkey's don't (according to a witty formula quoted by Pagel) -- both unites us and divides us. In Wired for Culture, Pagel attempts an evolutionary account for the existence of cultures. His inquiries commence with the mad multiplicity of languages. Language is the prime instrument of cultural transmission and the strongest marker of cultural identity. Yet the intra-group facilitation of communication provided by distinct languages are foreclosed to outsiders. Our languages seal us off from one another.

Human adaptability to the widest range of niches offers only a partial explanation for the multitude of cultures. New Guinea sports more than 800 different languages within a very small territory -- here mutual unintelligibility seems to be the point. Language operates both to permit and prevent understanding; both these characteristics are necessary. The value of a closed system of communication has long been recognized. Tradesmen, criminals and academics use argot to separate themselves and to keep secrets.

Pagel makes an evolutionary case for the multiplicity of languages; language serves as an identifier of group membership. This is culture's darker role: defining group boundaries. Pagel sees language and other cultural institutions functioning to set limits for altruism. Humans are social -- but only to a degree. We are a species that engages in magnificent cooperation -- yet are capable of inflicting harm on a scale not found in any other species.

Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets by Annelise Riles

I was entranced by the prospect of reading Annelise Riles' Collateral Knowledge, given my eclectic (some would say scattershot) interests. Riles delivers a sophisticated and insightful anthropological treatment of the management of various legal questions facing Japanese banks entering OTC swap transactions. Global finance, ethnography, tasty legal theory: what fun!

And yes, Riles pulls it off. She promises an "ant's-eye view" of these stories, consistent with traditional ethnographic method. While the original intended targets of her observation were Japanese bank regulators, she later realizes the 'back-office' personnel (including the lawyers overseeing the documentation of the transactions) were as central in the process of the law-making.

Riles examines two crucial points of tension in the swap practices of Japanese banks. The first is the utilization (under Japanese law) of the institution of collateral: the posting of property to secure repayment of a debt. The book's title, Collateral Knowledge, plays on this and other meanings of "collateral." All commercial lawyers understand how collateral should work: it should freely pass the pledged assets into the hands of the favored creditor in the event of a debtor's default. And so the mission of a bank lawyer (in this case, one dealing with a Japanese bank) is to assure his principals that these functional expectations are met. This is hardly a simple matter where (in an example given by Riles) the swap is between a Japanese bank and a UK bank, posted to their respective Cayman Island subsidiaries and involving Chinese and Singaporean currencies. The swap raises peculiar difficulties, as neither party knows ex ante whether it will be a net creditor or net debtor of the other -- and so both may need to post, maintain and adjust collateral supporting the transaction. The standard industry forms, drafted by British and American lawyers and routinely used by the Japanese banks, are "literally nonsensical" to the Japanese, according to Riles.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf by John Coates

What a fun book this is! The Hour Between Dog and Wolf by John Coates mixes pop finance with pop science, sketching some surprising links between them. I will trust Coates to get the science right (he provides citations). His investigation of financial markets is largely anecdotal and so speculative, but all the same it yields tantalizing suggestions.

Coates is a former derivatives trader -- which gives him authority to describe the subjective experiences of winning and losing at a trading desk. He (somehow) becomes hooked on neuroscience research; he describes himself sneaking away from his Wall Street desk to mix with scientists at Rockefeller University. The book seeks to bring these two worlds together. Coates immerses himself in the activation of hormones: testosterone, cortisol and the like. It is these chemical agents that produce the profound effects on the humors of financial traders, and hence overall market behavior.

Coates attacks the mind/body dichotomy: a financial market trader reacts more like an athlete than an analyst in responding to the stimula communication through his screen. Coates employs emerging understandings of mind/body feedbacks to track the play of traders. The traders can react before they 'see', rely on 'gut feelings' and engage in mano-a-mano combats from which they emerge winners or losers. These are quintessentially physical experiences. The markets themselves may then be understood as projections of this human biology.

Trading in financial markets, like war, is a young man's game. It draws on physical resources and reaction times, and a constitutional inability to fully appreciate surrounding dangers. But young soldiers require leaders with a different set of biological characteristics for larger scale success.
Coates develops a human biology account for market cycles. Biofeedback loops reinforce confidence in those traders experiencing winning streaks -- and most traders win in rising markets. The narcotic effect accompanying success then goads these traders to risk again and again, with ever greater stakes. The manic exuberance (a real physical effect produced by past successes) pushes speculators beyond 'rational' limits. Perspective is lost by nearly all at the top of a bubble.

What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism and the Modern Chinese Consumer by Tom Doctoroff

In this unabashedly pop business book, Tom Doctoroff, head of the J. Walter Thompson advertising firm in China, tells us What Chinese Want. Yet the implicit question is complex: what do the Chinese want for themselves? For their children? For China? And to answer the question coherently involves considerable psychological framework. Doctoroff is an ad guy -- so the question that lies squarely within his expertise might be: what does the Chinese consumer want to consume? And this question he begins to answer. He is less certain -- and less convincing -- when applying the insights he draws from Chinese consumption habits to the more mysterious nature of Chinese culture, politics and foreign policy.

I suppose we can learn something meaningful about the Chinese from studying their patterns of material consumption -- even using the tools of an advertising executive. In some sense, Doctoroff's inquiry is an exercise in applied cultural anthropology -- though his ends are more instrumental than scientific. So which firms are doing well in China -- and what do their successful adaptations suggest?

Starbucks, Doctoroff tells us, has configured larger stores in China which serve as group meeting places. The Chinese consumer would not pay the equivalent for $4.00 for a cup of coffee for private consumption (this may reveal the inherent cross-elasticity of Starbucks coffee and ubiquitous hot tea). The consumer will do so, however, when observed by others; the Starbucks customer's extravagant expenditure for a latte is justified by a gain in social standing. And so by facilitating the prospect of mutual observation -- by providing large, welcoming meeting spaces -- Starbucks sells coffee in China.

The Starbucks example typifies a more general tendency Doctoroff observes: a uniquely Chinese form of conspicuous consumption. Luxury goods are avidly purchased by Chinese consumers -- from Starbucks coffee to Cartier watches -- if their consumption is observable. But when consumption is hidden -- in the home for example -- the Chinese eschew unneeded expense, preferring cheaper products that are weakly branded and of domestic origin. Doctoroff would likely predict tough going in China for an importer of high thread-count sheets.

So the Chinese are, says Doctoroff, and so they will remain. For one of the keys to Doctoroff's presentation of the Chinese is his sense of their sense of timelessness. The Chinese remain the way they are; new experiences, through consumerism, exposure to technology and increased contact with the outside, will not change them.

Doctoroff has lived in a China for many years. Indeed, he tells us of moving into a picturesque and resolutely Chinese neighborhood in Shanghai -- admirably, he does live in post-colonial isolation. And so, no doubt, there is a significant stock of observation behind his construction of Chinese character. But I remain suspicious of Doctoroff's generalizations. Perhaps this is precisely what an advertising professional is tasked to accomplish -- form generalizations that can serve to inform marketing plans. Yet there is little distance between broad cultural generalizations and misleading stereotypes. I wonder whether this book will embarrass Doctoroff's grandchildren 50 years from now.

Doctoroff teaches us that the Chinese have a notion of 'face' that may not be offended. That they are intrinsically pragmatic. That order is the paramount value. That the Chinese are ambitious in a perversely contained way. That their sense of cyclical history leads them to be fatalistic, yet assured of China's return to glory.

Chinese society is built from the foundation of the family, and not from the individual, Doctoroff observes. As such, it is the social that is essential. Larger and larger social units are built outward from the family -- extending from clan to all China -- with attenuating yet meaningful identification and allegiance. The state, however, is distrusted. The Party's legitimacy depends on a fragile bargain -- its continued exercise of power depends on the maintenance of order and rising material conditions.

Doctoroff argues that the Chinese are afflicted with a weak civil society. This leads to a general insecurity. The Chinese are uncertain about preserving what wealth they may acquire, they fear dependency (beyond the family) and they are haunted by possible breakdown of social order. Doctoroff sources Chinese defensiveness to these anxieties. And he includes, as a characteristic manifestation of Chinese defensiveness, its reactive national alarms to challenges to its sovereign territory. Doctoroff's 'foreign policy' prescriptions are fairly simple. China is not to be feared, as it is not aggressive. But neither is China to be threatened, for it will defend itself.

Doctoroff may be right about all this, but if so, it may be his intuition that correctly guides him and not his deep knowledge of Chinese consumerism.

What Chinese Want is longlisted for the 2012 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.