Feed His Head: Reason’s presidential readinglist

From the December 2000 issue

Reason’s presidential reading list

It’s far from clear just who will win the presidential election. Only this much is certain: Whoever becomes the next chief executive is going to need help—lots of it—understanding what’s going on, both with traditional public policy concerns and with other areas of activity. With that in mind, Reason asked various experts to identify a topic worthy of presidential attention and to recommend three must-read books on the issue. The only restrictions: One of the books must be a work of creative literature and one must have been written within the past decade.

Index of experts
Jodie Allen: Numbers Rackets
Joey Anuff: Stocks and Stones
Ronald Bailey: Really Long-Term Health Care
Ted Galen Carpenter: Humanitarian Non-Intervention
Tim Cavanaugh: Alt.cult Cults
Charles Paul Freund: Scandology
Joel Garreau: Techno-Upheaval
David B. Kopel: Second Amendment Ammo
Brink Lindsey: Global Views
Walter Olson: Legal Help
John J. Pitney Jr.: Leading Edge
Jonathan Rauch: Old Insights
Diane Ravitch: Looking-Glass Education
Nadine Strossen: Attaining Liberty

Numbers Rackets

By Jodie T. Allen

Charm and sensitivity may propel a man to the White House, but sooner or later a president will have to face the challenge of juggling numbers—means, percentages, and oh so much more. Stymieing one’s critics won’t be hard, because the public—office-holding and otherwise—isn’t particularly numerate. But it will take some practice. Here are some books that can help the president spin his way around the bottom line.

A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995), by John Allen Paulos, is basically a “feel good” read for any president since the author blames reporters and editors for the misleading data and statistics that routinely appear in the media. A president will realize, of course, that the media are by and large merely unwitting, if gullible, conduits for the misinformation passed on to them by politicians, businessmen, and flacks, but you may pick up useful pointers on just what sort of lies sell best.

Darrell Huff’s How to Lie With Statistics (1954) is the prototext for would-be manipulators of the public mind. The book was handily updated for 1993’s paperback edition, with all the latest tips for shifting bases, truncating graphs, citing numbers when percents are more revealing (or vice versa), and a hundred other tips for authoritative dissembling. The tricks aren’t new but they have stood the test of time.

Finally, there’s Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Not exactly a novel, this Pulitzer Prize winner is surely one of the great flights of mathematical fancy. In fact, the paperback cover proclaims the work to be “a metaphorical fugue” done “in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.” Why does a president need a fugue? Well, every leader needs a tome to keep by the bedside in case some prying reporter inquires as to his or her current reading matter. What is wanted is a book that will stand the test of time; i.e., that no normal person has ever truly finished. (A Brief History of Time and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are obvious but overworked alternatives.) It is also essential that the subject matter be such that virtually no reporter or pundit can frame an intelligent question about its contents or the lessons you have drawn from it. Books about Dean Acheson are, for example, a poor choice in this regard; stick with fugues is my advice.

Jodie T. Allen is business and technology editor of U.S. News & World Report.

Stocks and Stones

By Joey Anuff

The next president ought to understand the stock market. Why? As Willie Sutton said in a slightly different context: Because that’s where the money is.

Fred Schwed Jr.’s 1940 tome Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street is a good place to start. Schwed, who traded professionally during the stock market crash of 1929 and on through the Great Depression (and eventually became a children’s book author) can be rightfully credited with having written the funniest book about the American stock market, mostly due to his expert ability to recognize the confluence of greed, ignorance, and pants-fouling terror that drives market speculation. Our nation’s next CEO would be well-advised to familiarize himself with Schwed’s useful maxim on the psychology of market disaster: “While hundreds of thousands are being plunged into poverty only the thoughtful ask, ‘What is happening to us?’ The popular cry is ‘Who is doing this to us?’ and its satisfying sequel—‘Just let me get my hands on him!’” When Priceline. com gets delisted by the Nasdaq, staying attuned to this kind of thinking will guarantee an ’04 reelection sweep.

Another useful reference work, for both the next POTUS and anyone angling toward a position of absolute power, is former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth’s thoughtful autobiography, Crazy From the Heat (1998). Roth would be the last to claim for himself special insight into the woozy world of high finance—Van Halen’s infamous $100,000-per-minute fee for the 1982 US festival notwithstanding. But like Sun Tzu mots in the boardroom, Roth’s crotch-centric wisdom is as well-suited to the Oval Office as it is to the floor of the NYSE: “You’ve got to understand, rock ’n’ roll is a lot like God took the map of the United States and tilted it, and everybody loose and unscrewed down rolled into my business.” Substitute “the markets” for “rock ’n’ roll” (hey, everybody else has) and you end up with as good an understanding of your role as figurehead for the U.S. economy as anything you’d find scrawled on the wall of the presidential bathroom stall.