 Booked out They say that everyone has a book inside them. The pseudonymous blogger Gwern Branwen says that, in most cases, that’s where it should stay. That’s not because the books would be dreadful — although no doubt that would often be true — but because writing a book means not writing other things. “For many writers,” says Gwern, “the opportunity cost & risk mean that writing a book is about the last thing they should do.” He names several great internet writers whose output collapsed after signing a book deal: Tim Urban of Wait But Why fell from writing a dozen or so long, impactful posts a year to just one or two for the seven years it took to finish his book. The trouble is that book-writing is “sacred and unquestionable, the ultimate achievement for Western intellectuals,” Gwern says, and many people want to have written one, rather than there being a specific book they want to write. “We should not put book-writing up on a pedestal, but acknowledge it is often a bad idea and that good writers should not be guilt-tripped into writing a book.” He has no plans to write one, but “should a book come out of me despite my best efforts, I will take off and nuke it from orbit.” Flushed away In 1980, nearly 5 million children died of diarrhoeal diseases. Today, that figure is about 500,000, despite the world’s population being nearly double what it was. That’s partly because of improvements in sanitation, and in medicines — but partly it’s because a lot more people drink slightly salty water, the science writer Matt Reynolds notes in Asterisk: Oral rehydration solution, ORS, a simple mix of water, sugar, and some salts. In 1832, a Scottish physician noticed that giving a cholera patient saline injections prolonged their life, but the discovery never gained traction. It wasn’t for another century that scientists returned to the idea in a meaningful way, and not until the 1970s that it was put into widespread global use. “If cholera had continued to afflict wealthy Western nations in the late 19th century,” notes Reynolds, “then work on intravenous rehydration may not have languished for so many decades.” Since its introduction, ORS is estimated to have saved 70 million lives, mostly children. Building up problems Britain was, for a century and more, the world’s richest country. As recently as the 1950s it remained the richest in Europe. But since then, while the US, France, Germany, and elsewhere have seen their economies zoom ahead, Britain has stagnated. That’s particularly true in the last two decades: Wages have remained flat or even dropped since 2008, and productivity has stalled. If the country had just maintained the same growth since then which it had managed from 1979, the average family would be 25% richer. The urbanist writers Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman wrote an essay, Foundations, looking at what caused Britain’s relative decline. Brexit may have played a part, but “the most important economic fact about modern Britain” is that “it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.” One planning proposal to build one tunnel under the Thames cost almost $400 million to produce — just the document, not the tunnel, which doesn’t yet exist. “That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.” Britain “banned the investment in housing, transport and energy that it most vitally needs [and] denied its economy the foundations it needs to grow on.” |
