I’m doing some outside reading for my American Indian Law class and the book I started with, Pekka Hamalainen’s Indigenous Continent is a real dud.

The introduction to the book is very provocative and exciting. Hamalainen promises a reformulation of the history of North America that shows how native nations dominated the continent for way longer than we give them credit for, and how they were very successful on their own terms, not just victims. In a James Scott style argument, Hamalainen presents native nations as unstatelike entities that were more egalitarian and less controlling than European states and colonial governments and how that enabled them to stay outside of European domination for a lot longer than the europeans realized. This all sounds very interesting to the casual James Scott fan who loves a good narrative of mobile “non-state” people who run around not ever being folded into agriculture based states. 

The book doesn’t have much of a payoff after this point though. It’s mostly a long and familiar narrative of wars and tribulations and the interesting anthropology of non-state people doesn’t ever really come. Not only does Ham fail to give us rich social and cultural histories of the tribes, but the political history of the contestation of the continent doesn’t seem nearly as subversive as he thinks it is. Hamalainen really hammers us with the idea that he’s inverting our expectations about relative strengths of natives and europeans from the 16th-19th centuries. But for the most part he seems to just tell well-known stories of times the Europeans were defeated in battle, or remind us of the well-known limits of colonial power. He seems to think that no one knows that the 13 colonies had a hard time projecting power over the Appalachians in the 18th century. 

One of the most telling sections of his overreaching claims is in talking about the Lakota and Comanche. He really hits on the idea that American westward expansion wasn’t preordained and that the federal government didn’t have control over the huge swaths of land that these tribes covered in the early 19th century. But were they more powerful than the American government? Were American politicians wrong in their predictions that they would subjugate them? There was a lot of morally horrifying stuff in those predictions, but were they mistaken about the balance of power?

Hamalainen makes a lot of the great power of the Comanche that the US government had to contend with for several decades in the late 18th and early 19th century. But by his own account, the whole of the Comanche nation had fewer people than the city of Philadelphia at the time, and its economic model relied on plundering farmers, especially Mexican and American colonizers. It’s true that this world wasn’t fleeting; generations passed like this. But were early 19th century Americans not basically right in predicting that westward expansion would proceed apace, and eventually the government would project enough power that it would clear most of the continent for European settlers and eventually defeat any groups that posed serious security threats? 

While Hamalainen’s assertions about the power of indigenous nations is maybe not so convincing, his moral criticism of the horrors of European treatment of native Americans is generally pretty spot on. Even for someone who knew about a lot of this history, it was pretty bracing to have it all recounted. In this too though, Hamalainen’s urge to subvert our expectations gets away from him. He’s great at showing the awful chauvinism of European outlooks that led to centuries of genocide, but he sometimes turns around and paints surprisingly sympathetic pictures of horrible native practices. Probably the strangest example of this comes in his account of the Iroquois morning wars in the late 17th century, where he seems to take at face value the spiritual accounts of why the Iroquois needed to eat so many of their prisoners of war. I don’t think moral horror at that practice is really something we need to have subverted!

All in all, this does not seem like the place to start if you’re interersted in Native American history. I just started William Hagan’s American Indians, which I understand is much more focused on American Indian policy. I’ll be interested to see if it’s any better.

I recently read this sprawling biography of Chiang Kai-Shek on a trip to Taiwan. It wasn’t exactly the book I wanted, a bit too heavy on detail and light on context. But lacking much better options, I was glad to read it.

Since I knew very little about Chiang coming into this, I can’t say much about how this biography stacks up against the rest of the literature, except to repeat what the author told me throughout. One of his main theses seems to have just been that Chiang was not an idiot, and that does feel pretty well borne out. While he probably lacked the organizational mind and emotional balance to put together a successful ruling coalition in China, he seems to have been strategically very sharp. Taylor surely cherry-picked a bit in coming up with examples of Chiang’s far sighted wisdom, but there were enough times, like US involvement in Vietnam, where the man had pretty spot on predictions of how things would unfold. You have to give pretty serious credit as a forecaster. He clearly had some big holes in his model of the world, most notably thinking the CCP would fold and that the Americans were taking instructions from the Brits in the early cold war years. Even with those mistakes, he was quite impressive.

On the theme of strategic competence, Taylor pretty persuasively argued that Chiang was much more realistic about his prospects of retaking the mainland privately than he could ever admit in public, or even to other diplomats. He certainly held out some hope though, which before reading this I would have generally considered delusional. One thing reading this narrative helped me understand though is that it was not insane to posture that you were going to take back all of China from a base of operations in Taiwan. 

I’m so used to a unified China, that it’s hard to appreciate how strange that was for someone of Chiang and Mao’s generation. The Qing dynasty had been a weak state that blew up and left the country in a messy state of warlord rule and civil war for several decades straight. It had been quite hard to actually maintain power over the place. Chiang had made some good goes at it, and had really had Mao up on the ropes at times. Leaving them holed up in Yan’an for so many years. The KMT was in a worse position than the communists in the 30s, but it’s not hard to imagine being Chiang in 49 and thinking that there was a pretty good chance the communists couldn’t actual lock down control of the country because of peasant unrest, party infighting, a new world war, or whatever else. I certainly wouldn’t have bet the CCP was going to maintain its grip as well as it did. 

Reading this helped me finally appreciate how big a deal the Korean War was for China. I somehow hadn’t ever thought about how quickly it came on the heels of communist victory in China. It what an insane gamble it was for Mao to go to war with the US and it was an enormous victory for the Chinese just to hold their own on the battlefield with the US and win back the status quo. It was an incredible signal of regime strength and stability to all its rivals.

For all the interesting Chinese geopolitics, the book didn’t leave me feeling that much like I’d read a biography. I don’t know if Chiang was a boring guy, or if this just wasn’t the book to make him interesting. 

Perhaps my biggest single takeaway from the book is that I probably should have gotten a Soong Mei-Ling (aka Madame Chiang) biography instead. What a wild life that woman lead. She was born in Qing Dynasty China before the Boxer Rebellion and she died on Manhattan after 9/11. She was a devout Christian, a devoted wife, and a fierce nationalist. She went through waves of frenzied state activity and spells of depression that she’d be hospitalized for. She was the second woman ever to address a joint session of Congress (and the first Chinese national to do so). She apparently had incredible intellectual and sexual magnetism. Foreign officials often thought she was the brains behind the nationalist government and not a few fell in love (or at least passionate obsession) with her. She had remarkable influence on American elite opinion, perhaps being the single most important personal force in US China relations for decades. 

She and her siblings played ludicrously outsized roles in Chinese politics for decades. As first lady, she was almost as pivotal a player in Republican China as her husband. Her sister Ching-ling Married Sun Yat-sen, went communist, and then was a CCP figurehead for decades, nominally rising to head of state a couple times, outlasting even Mao. Their brother TV was a more tragic figure, acting as a top nationalist minister credited by many (including Chiang) with the horrible economic policies that drove the regime into the ground in the final years of the civil war. I’d love to read a great book or watch a sprawling miniseries about the three of them.

The outer limits of who the president can legally have killed for national security reasons have been really tested in a couple notable recent cases. Probably the most dramatic was the 2011 killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen in Yemen. The second most bold was probably the killing of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, an international incident that we would probably all remember a little more clearly if Covid hadn’t come so quickly on its heals.

I’m one of the many people who did not know who Soleimani was when he got killed, but having recently done a very deep dive on the history of the war on terror I have a decent appreciation of how bold a move it was to kill him. Soleimani was one of the most powerful people in Iran and in the Middle East more generally. The US killed Soleimani while he was at the Baghdad airport as part of a visit with the Iraqi government. The strike was thus against a high ranking official of a country we were not at war with, on the soil of a different country we were not at war with. The strike raises all sorts of legal questions. Did it violate US domestic laws against killing foreign government officials? Did it violate any American treaty obligations?

Before taking a national security law class I sometimes wondered how the US articulates and tests its justifications for its targeted killings. The answer is pretty unsatisfying. When the president wants to kill someone, executive branch lawyers get together to decide whether the president has the authority to kill them. If they think he does, he does it. While the executive lawyers who make these decisions surely think they are being very careful and principled, the practical reality is that they could be fired by the president and replaced by people who think more things are legal. And of course that is roughly what happens. No one is forced to change their views, but lawyers who tell the president that they think fewer things are legal than his other lawyers do, don’t last super long (see Jack Goldsmith’s memoir about his frosty ten month stint in the Bush II Office of Legal Counsel).

The really surprising thing is not just that the executive branch can hire the lawyers it wants for the results it wants (everyone does that) but that there aren’t really any checks on the executive’s legal decisions. Congress and the courts have generally acquiesced to letting national security decisions short of declarations of war be the president’s business. Congress has done this more by refusing the fight and just paying for all the security actions the president takes. Courts have explicitly articulated a reason why they won’t get into these questions. It’s called the “political question doctrine” which roughly says that courts won’t decide questions that require too much non-legal judgment. A DC trial court in 2010 ruled that the father of Anwar al-Awlaki (the citizen who would be killed later in Yemen) couldn’t ask the court to enjoin the government from killing him because the question of whether or not to have him killed was a political question and the court lacked the competence to decide it.

The political question doctrine sounds nonsensical to the person on the street who knows that courts decide super political things all the time. While there is some nuance to be given to the doctrine, the legal realist’s view of it is basically that it’s a graceful way for courts to bow out of fights they know they cannot win. Politically, the supreme court is not going to be able to tie the hands of a president during a war. If the court were to try to do so it would simply be ignored by the president. A lot of people would approve of the president’s doing so and the court would lose a ton of legitimacy. Instead, the court just keeps itself out of any questions that could get it close to that situation.

So given acquiescent courts and congress, the president lacks very meaningful legal constraints. There are still some to the extent that the president wants to be viewed as legally legitimate, which is still pretty important in american political culture. But those constraints are pretty thin. Presidents regularly bump up against the constraints of just how far out there they can be with their legal arguments before they face much backlash. 

The Soleimani is one of those cases that really pushed the envelope. The president’s office of legal counsel (OLC) released a hilariously redacted opinion on the legality of the soleimani killing that gives a flavor of just how weak the constraints on the president’s action in national security really are.

The opinion starts with the position that the Commander in Chief clause is enough alone to give the president the power to kill Soleimani. After staking out this super broad (and pretty formally implausible) claim, the memo starts going down other possible grounds of presidential authority including congress’s 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq. The OLC says this 18 year old law, passed in preparation for the attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime, has over time come to be understood as also authorizing force against terrorist threats arising from Iraq, and thus authorizes an attack on an Iranian general who leads militias in Iraq, two decades after the US invasion and about a decade after US withdrawal. This is maybe not an argument you would want to make if you actually had to bring it to court!

Even more notable than crazy broad readings of the AUMF though is the basic fact that the memo doesn’t even consider questions like “did we violate our domestic law against killing foreign government officials?” (18 U.S. Code § 1116 – Murder or manslaughter of foreign officials) or “might we have violated the UN charter by undertaking an attack in a country we are not at war with without asking permission?” These are legally pretty interesting questions, but the fact of the matter is that no american court is ever going to take up a case asking them question, so why should the OLC bother coming up with answers?

I’m in a class on foreign relations law right now, which is understandably pretty focused on the War on Terror. The professor suggested that we read the 9/11 commission report so I got that on audiobook from the library and then proceeded to fall down a rabbit hole of books on the War on Terror. I’m going to write a bit here about what I learned from the first few I’ve gone through: The 9/11 Commission Report, and The Looming Tower and The Terror Years (those last two both by Lawrence Wright). These books are mostly concerned with the history of Islamist terrorism, less so with the American response. I’m going through some of the classic books on that topic right now and hope to do a separate blog post on them.

The rough model of islamist groups in the 1980s and 1990s that I came away from the books with is that there were four kinds of players in the system. First, there were a handful of people who excelled in either communicating vision (e.g. Bin Laden and to some extent Al-Zawahiri) or organizing attacks (e.g. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and again Al-Zawahiri). These people tended to affiliate with each other to share resources or aggrandize themselves, but they all tended to be a bit megalomaniacal and have some quirks in their grand philosophies when it came down to it, so they were constantly schisming. They’d all have just been scary weird guys if they hadn’t had the second type of player: a pretty stable flow of very unhappy young men searching for meaning. The flow consisted of vaguely Sunni young men who felt really displaced and unhappy somewhere in the world and had stumbled upon religious messaging that strongly suggested they should get involved with violent groups. The religious messaging and direct encouragement of the young men came from a third kind of player, religious leaders in mosques throughout the Muslim world and Muslim diasporas who advocated joining violent causes as the highest measure of religious devotion. These players tended to appreciate the Bin-Laden and Al-Zawahiris of the world, but tended not to have any firm connections to them. It was enough for them to encourage young men to get excited about those guys and want to seek them out. Finally, the fourth kind of player, only vaguely described in the 9/11 Commission report and Wright’s books, were the people who funded terrorist leaders and the religious leaders. 

This taxonomy may well be wrong in a lot of ways, but to the extent that it maps onto reality it helps explain why the US got off to such a bad start with its model for how to approach terror after 9/11. The scale of the event made it seem like there had to be a pretty well-developed organization behind it. A well-developed organization with players from all over the place would probably need at least some state support. That Al-Qaeda had some state support is true, but mostly that support came from Sudan and Afghanistan, where very weak regimes let Bin-Laden and company hang out because they generally appreciated his islamist vision and celebrity and they thought he had money. 

Ironically, the biggest “state” problem with terrorists in the Middle East seems to have been (at least in Wright’s compelling descriptions) that a number of horrifying regimes crushed civil and religious society in brutal enough ways to generate a bunch of terrorist leaders and unhappy young men to follow them. Egypt under Nasser, Sadat, and especially Mubarak seems to have been the worst player here. The state made martyrs of visionaries like Sayyid Qutb, normalized horrifying violence to already uncompromising people like Al-Zawahiri, and generally crushed the dreams of a large population, some of whom would be open to joining violent movements as a way of finding meaning in life. 

Many of the gulf states (particularly Saudi Arabia) presented a different kind of problem. There ruling regimes had incredible oil revenues with which they could buy off some of their opponents, but some of the deepest challenges to the regimes were from conservative Muslims who both exacted huge concessions on domestic politics from the governments, but also channeled money to religious leaders that encouraged violence and to terrorist groups themselves. The regimes tended to be in a narrow balancing act, unable to crush the religious constituencies as Egypt, Syria, and Iraq had. They instead had to try to minimize the internal damage that their encouragement of violence did. Bin Laden’s relationship to the Saudi government is telling here. They knew he was a delusional loose canon, but he was a celebrity and was popular with some Saudi elites, so they couldn’t crush him. The break with Bin Laden came when an issue arose that they couldn’t compromise on. Saddam invaded Kuwait and seemed poised to capture Saudi oil wells along the border. The government accepted America’s offer to put troops on the border to deter Saddam. Bin Laden told the government that this would be a great sin and that his rag-tag group from Afghanistan could do the job instead. There was no way to split the pie, so the Kingdom had to tell Bin Laden that wasn’t happening and incur his wrath. He then left and proved to be a horrible thorn in their side, while remaining popular with a number of people in the country. 

Beyond questions of where terrorism was coming from and what the American government misunderstood about it, one of the most surprising conclusions I drew from the commission report and Wright’s books is that the US government was actually already doing a pretty good job combatting terrorism before 9/11, and probably didn’t need to change all that much about its tactics. The commission report, and Wright’s Looming Tower make clear that it was a tragic mistake for the CIA and the FBI to not share information. Fixing that mistake a year earlier might have thwarted 9/11. Even given that problem though, it’s pretty impressive how much the CIA and FBI knew about these groups and how many times they had managed to thwart them. It’s understandable that everyone spent 9/11 thinking “we need to change everything” but it really doesn’t seem like they did. 

I didn’t know how popular-level spoon feed-y this book would be, so I didn’t go in with high hopes, but I was pleasantly surprised. While It’s certainly mainly a work of popularization, it’s not cute, shallow, or afraid of saying unpopular things.

Blattman’s main contribution in the book is basically to popularize the James Fearon “rationalist explanations of war” paper with a few tweaks. It’s totally a worthwhile project, because people often act like you can’t explain war, or that the only explanations are things like “they’re crazy,” “there’s some sort of resource crisis,” or “they’ve always wanted to fight.” Which all suck as explanations for war since those are true descriptions of way more things that don’t turn into wars than things that do. 

Blattman’s personal list includes five real reasons that conflicts turn into wars, they are as follows:

 1. Unchecked interests. By this he just means principle agent problems. Blattman does a great job illustrating the ways these can manifest, but the basic idea is pretty simple and is already a common feature of folk explanations of war. Everyone knows that leaders are more likely to fight the more insulated from the costs they are. Blattman cites careful studies of how legislators are more likely to vote for war if their children aren’t draft age. That’s probably not a statistic anyone needed convincing of!

2. Intangible incentives. By this he just means that sometimes people want to fight! Obviously this explanation isn’t really in tension with your average folk explanation of war, so it doesn’t really feel like it’s forcing us to reconceptualize war in any way. Blattman keeps telling the reader to test the claims they hear about war against his five explanations, but this one is kind of a hole that any folk-explanation can fit through! There’s some good anthropology in his discussion here, so it’s not like this section of the book is a sloppy error term, but it did make me wish the book was a little clearer and more systematic on which folk explanations are good and which aren’t!

3. Uncertainty: It is a sad strategic reality that there are conflicts where there is asymmetric information between opponents with no credible means of communicating so the dominant strategy is to occasionally call each other’s bluffs and actually fight. This is one of the most interesting fundamental strategic insights that should change how people think about war. It’s easy to understand, but no one naturally starts there. It’s probably the case that our bias toward clean narratives in our thinking has a hard time accommodating random strategies. Blattman’s coverage of Saddam’s strategy of bluffing about WMDs as one of the causes of the Iraq War is fantastic here. It’s well written, illustrates the point, and is also probably really useful to the average educated American who only knows very silly folk explanations of that war!

4. Commitment problems: the bargaining range between rivals might be spread out over time, but there might not be good enough ways for either side to commit to future payments to make a bargain work at the beginning of the time frame. As Blattman mentions, this explanation of war has been well known, at least in its popular form, since at least Thucydides. I hadn’t thought about the idea in a while though and didn’t realize that it’s basically just a finance problem. It’s just a question of whether your credit is good. The same thing that helps a government commit not to default on their infrastructure loans can help them avoid wars. Not so comforting though if you think about how hard it is for governments not to default on their loans.

5. Misperceptions: by this he just means that human judgement is constrained and a lot of strategic judgments suck. As with explanation 2, this feels a little bit like cheating because it lets back in so many of the naive explanations of war that we had kicked out in the name of science! (I’m definitely giving him too hard a time though. The book is pretty nuanced for the most part.)

Beyond all this interesting basic “causes of war” stuff the book is full of a bunch of insights into popular myths about war, successful anti-violence strategies, and reflections on the importance of passion and humility in dealing with wicked problems like violence. It is very much worth a read!

Tyler Cowen wrote an interesting blog post about the new right a couple weeks ago. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then and have tried to write up some ideas about it, but everything kept getting too long and messy, so I’m just going to recommend the post and make a few comments.

Tyler’s post probably feels like a bit of a hot take because it isn’t primarily about religion, nation, the state, or whatever else one might expect a New Right post to start with; instead he frames the new right as a fundamentally about the distrust of elites. I think that’s a useful framework because like Tyler, I find Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public thesis pretty plausible. Gurri thinks that the internet made it suddenly easier for anyone to see the elite’s flaws and so elite/institutional trust plummeted.

Gurri thinks this basically explains the craziness of politics in the last 10 years. Distrustful people get into ironic, nihilistic, social movements with no real vision of the future. These movements can’t really bind with current institutions in healthy ways because current institutions are full of elites, so these people don’t trust them. Anyone who tries to build something becomes too close to some elites in the process, so they lose status among the distrustful people. There’s really only room for gadflies at the top. There are tons of highly subscribed podcasts and blogs saying really out there stuff, but no viable new parties.

I still find this story plausible, but some smart people think it’s pretty under-supported by the empirical record. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t do a very good job of explaining “wokeness,” which so far hasn’t built a lot of institutions, but certainly has a lot of very earnest devotees, not just cynical snearers. Tyler is among the people that thinks “wokeness” has mostly peaked, so explaining it might not be as important. I’m more persuaded by the side that thinks it’s probably here to stay (though who knows exactly what it is or what it will turn into). So the Revolt of the Public thesis might not be the first cut I’m making about politics in a couple years. We’ll see!

I’ve been thinking about violence in America a fair amount in the last few years and it’s something that I want to think about a little more systematically in the year ahead. To that end, I want to start familiarizing myself with the basic ways of carving up the study of violence. The first things I want to get my arms around a bit more are the differences between group and individual violence. 

The typology of violence as either group or individual is not necessarily clean. Groups can fight with both groups and individuals and individuals can do the same. There are also presumably vague or mixed cases of individual and group violence (imagine bothers fighting in opposing armies in a civil war and meeting up and fighting each other partly because of the war and partly because of individual grievances). There are a lot of cases that are fully group affairs or fully individualized though. Gang members shooting rival gang members they have never met is clearly group violence. Spousal murders are typically individualized. 

The reason that I want to think more about the typology of individual vs group violence more is because they seem like different phenomena in some fundamental ways, yet we often lump them together. The most notable way we do this is by comparing violence across countries, counting up all the people killed into a single murder rate. I don’t know how murder breaks down at a nation wide level in the US, but I suspect there are large amounts of both individual and group violence. In a city like Chicago, I would assume that most murders are part of group conflicts (though the victims might often be bystanders). Nation-wide I am not sure that would be that case. You certainly hear folk statistics like “most people that are killed are killed by a family member.” If that is true, it seems like most murders would be cases of individual violence. 

If you ask questions about group and individual violence separately, you probably carve nature a little more closely to its joints. Individual and group violence are probably correlated with a lot of the same things, but maybe not in the same ways. I would assume that access to weapons and the likelihood of prosecution are two factors that change how likely people are to engage in violence individually, or in a group, but maybe those effects are of different magnitudes!. Beyond these obvious factors there are a whole bunch of other social and cultural realities that might cut in different ways, or matter to one kind of violence but not the other (is it possible that religiosity has more of an effect on individual rather than group violence? I have no idea, but I could imagine that being the case!).

A couple of books that I look forward to reading soon are Chris Blattman’s Why We Fight, which I understand is mostly a reflection on group violence, specifically the strategic realities of groups, and Violent Land by David Cartwright, which I understand is a discussion on single male populations as contributing factors to both group and individualized violence in America. 

I recently listened to two of Alex Kotlowitz’s famous Chicago books, There Are No Children Here and An American Summer. The books came out about a generation apart and tell parts of the tragic story of Chicago’s poverty and violence. There Are No Children Here follows a family living in the Henry Horner Homes on the near west side in the late 80s, and An American Summer tells a number of stories of people touched by shootings in the city in the summer of 2013. 

There Are No Children Here was a hit when it came out, and it spawned a TV movie starring Oprah. It was part of a national conversation in the 1990s about just how bad midcentury housing projects had gotten in cities like Chicago. The book doesn’t seem to have a great reputation on the left. People tend to deride it as a piece of poverty porn with a white savior element (Kotlowitz gave the proceeds from the book to the two brothers he covered most closely and also paid for them to go to private schools). There’s also a common narrative today that Clinton era democrats were co-opted by “the neoliberal vision” and gave up on the Great Society welfare programs rather than rebuilding them. People often seem to place There Are No Children Here in the corpus of influential defeatist literature that convinced liberals that the programs were past saving.

None of those criticisms really seem fair. The book is a pretty sensitive portrait of a family going through a set of hardships that the reading public around them would do well to think about. Kotlowitz’s insertion of himself into the lives of the family seems like the kind of thing that probably does make someone feel good about themselves, but also seems like proportionate reciprocity for being allowed to put people’s lives on display. As for the Great Society betrayal narrative, I’d personally have been fine with criticisms of those programs, but it’s pretty inaccurate claim that Kotlowitz directly gave any. In the moments when he did mention policy he tended to simply say that the Chicago government was corrupt and inept. Otherwise he held the pro-Great Society line that Reagan had wrongly pulled funds from a lot of programs. There’s not a whiff of Charles Murray to him. Whatever bad picture of the Great Society the audience drew from this book was from inferences the drew from the facts of one family’s life, not from any editorializing from the author.

The book’s main weaknesses are perhaps in the neighborhood of “poverty porn” concerns, but they’re really just stylistic. The book does feel a little too full of “banal yet poignant” moments. The emotional tone is maybe a little too dialed in for passion the whole time. But that’s a pretty small concern. It’s not a story that could be told very dispassionately. It is really sad and awful. There are a lot of dead kids. There are a lot of people addicted to drugs. There are a lot of horrible police encounters. The point of the book is to show people those things.

Sadly, all these things show up again in An American Summer, which reads as a very strong, but incredibly depressing kind of sequel to There are No Children here. The book came out about 20 years after There Are No Children Here and it makes it clear that there was no happy ending in between. There are still a lot of murdered kids, drug addiction, and horrible police encounters in Chicago. To my ear, An American Summer hits even harder than There Are No Children Here. Some of that is just because it’s closer to the present and more relatable to someone my age. But the book also tends more toward the social scientist’s collection of ethnographies than the journalist’s passionate story of one set of characters. The book is both more focused (violence rather than poverty/violence/hardship generally) and covers a wider range of experiences (about a dozen separate families rather than one) than There are No Children Here.

One of the most interesting scenes in An American Summer is an afternoon Kotlowitz spends with the former gang leader Jimmy Lee, one of the towering figures in There are no children here. Jimmy Lee had been the head of the Conservative Vice Lords in the Henry Horner Homes in the 1980s. In the earlier book Kotlowitz explained a bit of how the gang ran their part of the housing projects and how Jimmy Lee was finally caught and prosecuted, but by the time An American Summer was in the works a generation Later, Jimmy Lee was back out and had gone straight. In their meeting Jimmy and Kotlowitz look back on how violence changed in the intervening two decades.

Like many people, Jimmy Lee thinks that things are somehow much worse in the 2010s than they were in the 80s and 90s. Kotlowitz points out that murder rates were actually higher then, and suggests that maybe the fact that so much of the violence was packed away in high rises made it easier to ignore. Jimmy Lee suggests, as many do, that killings since the 1990s have been more chaotic, since the gangs are smaller and less organized, their leaders having been caught and imprisoned in government attempts to take down gangs from the top. Perhaps things in the 80s and 90s were at least better targeted, with fewer bystanders getting killed. Kotlowitz points out that it’s not clear that this is even true. It could of course simply be that Jimmy Lee has just stopped feeling that violence is normal. Whatever the reality, the scene captures just how hard it is to make sense of the enduring patterns of violence in Chicago, even for the people who you might expect to understand them best.

One of the most depressing parts of An American Summer is that right alongside the persistence of gang violence is the persistence of wrongful police violence. That’s brought home by the very disturbing coverage of Calvin Cross’s 2011 killing by the CPD. Cross was killed by Chicago cops coming out from an unmarked car during a random street stop. The police claimed that Cross had fried a gun at them, but failed to recover a gun and failed to show any gunpowder on Cross’s hands. A gun was found near the scene, but it was inoperable. The city settled a civil complaint about the killing for $2 million, and it looked a couple times as if criminal charges might be brought, but ultimately none were. The case got some news coverage, but was largely overshadowed by coverage of Laquan McDonald’s killing and Jason Van Dyke’s murder trial. The comparison of the cases, with the Cross case seeming significantly more egregious, raises the question of whether police shootings are better monitored by the public now given the significant upswing in concern in the last eight or so years, or whether there’s just a kind of random function for what the public notices and cares about. That’s genuinely hard to know! 

Either way, horrible perceptions of police, to whatever extent they are justified, are certainly part of the horrible cluster of problems that keeps murder clearance miserably low in Chicago. This is another part of the awful puzzle of persistent violence that Kotlowitz covers well. Even honest, diligent detectives working on killings where witnesses can identify a shooter will often go without an arrest because people fear retribution killings, which are quite common. Kotlowitz does a depressingly good job of showing how stable this equilibrium is, since it is so hard for anyone to do anything about it on their own.

Kotlowitz closes out the book with a recap of a report by UChicago’s Urban Lab’s from the summer of 2016 admitting that that summer’s particularly high rates of violence were hard to explain, and leaves the audience to sit with the reality that violence really is both an incredibly important and incredibly difficult problem to think about solving. I highly recommend the book to anyone concerned about violence in Chicago, or any other American City. It pairs especially well with Patrick Sharkey’s more statistically-driven and less policy-humble Uneasy Peace. 

My last blog post ended on a crypto-skeptical note, so this post will be a bit more optimistic about the chances of blockchain stuff becoming a big deal.

The hype these days about crypto stuff seems much more to be about Ethereum and Ethereum-type things (smart contracts, DeFi, NFTs, etc). Ethereum is a big distributed ledger like Bitcoin, but rather than just transferring tokens, you can do a lot of different kinds of transactions. You can sell trade for the currency that’s native the the chain, ETH, but you can transfer other tokens that have jpegs or some other data in them (e.g. bored ape NFTs). You can also run conditional transactions that are triggered by a piece of code that says something did or did not happen. For instance, people can bet on the super bowl by having a piece of code that scrapes websites to find out who won and automatically transfers tokens (ETH, JPEGs, whatever) based on what it determines to have happened. The system by which you determine what happened off chain for the purposes of on chain agreements is called an oracle. The complicated programs that do different transfers based on different things happening are called smart contracts. 

Right now ETH has value simply because enough people will trade it for off-chain currencies, and there’s a market for some of these jpeg tokens (the apes and stuff) because it’s a status item within some communities. With a platform like ethereum though, as soon as there’s something of value on the chain you can, in principle, recreate a lot of traditional financial products. You can write programs to trade based on the value of off-chain assets, as long as you have good enough oracles.  You can write programs that give people claims on things that should track the price of the dollar, or of Apple stock, or whatever else. You can write programs that behave like credit default swaps, giving different people payouts based on things that happened with credit default swaps off chain. You can multiply these examples to include basically anything that traditional financial institutions buy and sell. These assets wouldn’t literally be the same as the assets from traditional financial institutions, but they could behave enough like them that it would not really matter. People call this DeFi, or decentralized finance. There isn’t much happening there yet, but that could change pretty easily!

If DeFi gets big, it is going to pose a very weird set of problems for governments. Governments in rich countries have all sorts of rules about what you have to do if you’re going to do banking stuff, like sell credit default swaps or give loans. But what will these governments do if people start buying and selling credit default swaps from each other using an ethereum program? The smart contract could basically be running on its own. There would be people guiding it (all the people who staked and voted to maintain the program) but that might be a huge and diffuse group of people. They could live anywhere in the world, and most of them might not be very involved. Will the government try to go after these people to punish them for not being in compliance with bank regulations? That sounds incredibly difficult, basically pointless, and optically terrible. But what else can they do? Just throw in the towel? What if really bad actors start using the platforms? My professor points out that there isn’t going to be a way to stop ISIS from doing sophisticated finance. How do states react to that?

There has already been one test case of this stuff with the ethereum program Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash is a program that launders money; apparently North Korean state hackers use it a lot. The thing is up and running and has global use, so there’s no clear way to stop it. The US Tresasury department’s response has just been to say that it’s illegal to use it. This will seem appropriate to most people, but it’s not exactly a long term strategy, or a strategy that’s going to be useful in most cases. Making it illegal to use tornado cash might slow Tornado Cash down a bit, but it doesn’t stop it. More importantly for thinking about future regulations, the next thing the government wants to sanction might not look as deserving of a ban. Making it illegal to use the money laundering tool that the North Koreans use probably seems fine to the median voter. But what about saying its illegal to use some super user-friendly, reliable, and cheap small loan program that pops up in a few years? That might not be such a popular move!

It’s very hard for me to think about where this all goes because my technical, financial, and legal competence is so low, but I could easily see it being a very big deal! I’m excited to learn more about it.