Book Review: "The Souls of Yellow Folk," by Wesley Yang

"He was ugly on the outside, and once you got past that you found the true ugliness on the inside."
- Wesley Yang, "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho"


Wesley Yang is not here to make you feel comfortable. He's here to find your most vulnerable places, and then, methodically, to poke you in those places. To pierce the veil of optimism that you use to get through your days. To make you think thoughts like: What if nobody really loves me? What if nobody really loves anybody? What if your failures are all your fault? What if they're not your fault at all, and society is out to get you?

Wesley Yang is here to make you sit with discomfort.

The Souls of Yellow Folk, a collection of Yang's essays, is a very Generation X work, in an age when Generation X is being rapidly eclipsed and forgotten. The voice is that of the disaffected, semi-detached loser, blaming himself for his own condition even as he watches the world grind down the people around him. It's Beck/Nirvana/Mudhoney/Soundgarden/Eminem. Really, the closest comparison I can think of is the graphic novels of Adrian Tomine.

This ironic, self-deprecating attitude extends to the book's provocative title, a play on W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk. Besides both being collections of essays, the two books aren't similar at all. Though some of Yang's essays deal with the Asian-American struggle, many don't. And even the ones that do offer little in the way of a practical program for racial advancement or emancipation. The message - ironic as always - seems to be that Asian Americans don't have "souls", or at least "soul", in the way that Black Americans do. That while Black Americans can find purpose in their long struggle for emancipation, inequality, and economic survival, Asian Americans find themselves like atomized specks adrift in a capitalist, postmodern fog - earning high incomes and long ago freed from systematic government oppression, yet denied promotions and invisible in popular culture. Free to succeed or fail as individuals, but denied the security of inclusion in a Real America that may or may not even exist.

"The Face of Seung-Hui Cho", the first essay - and one of the most powerful pieces of literature I've ever read - is nominally about the mass murderer who shot 49 people at Virginia Tech University in 2007. But really it's an autobiographical essay, about being Korean American and reacting to news of a massacre by another Korean American. Yang takes the gnawing question, which most people wouldn't even dare to ask themselves, and asks it openly: Could that have been me?

Cho was an incel killer before "incels" were even a thing - a man who blamed his sexual failures for his depression and alienation, who blamed women for his sexual failures, and who blamed society for his failure to attract women. Our usual approach to such people, whether or not they become violent, is to anathematize them - to assume that they're beyond the bounds of comprehension, like some scholars have claimed the Holocaust is. To slap labels on them - "insane", "psycho", "misogynist" - and to then drop them in a mental trashcan where we no longer have to think about what makes them tick. They're not a matter for empathy or human understanding - they're a matter for the FBI.

And for most of us, this approach makes sense. We don't need to go through life wondering what it would take - if it would even be possible - to make us, too, pick up a gun and murder dozens of innocent human beings. There's no need to spend our emotional bandwidth on that. We have better things to do.

But Wesley Yang attempts it. He goes right to the most vulnerable place, right to the horrible question: Was Seung-Hui Cho denied romantic love because he was an Asian man in a racist America? And did the shame and loneliness of that denial push him over the edge from mentally disturbed young man to mentally disturbed young murderer? If girls had been attracted to Seung-Hui Cho, would he have ended up safely recuperating in a mental hospital instead of with a bullet in his head? Would his victims be alive today?

Probably not. Almost certainly not! But we'll never quite know, will we? And it's this terrible never-quite-knowing that's at the center of many of Yang's essays. In "Paper Tigers", Yang deals with the bamboo ceiling, and the way that Asian Americans denied promotion are forced to endlessly wonder whether it was systemic racism, bad luck, or their own personalities that held them back. In "Game Theory," he profiles the protagonists of the 2000s-era pickup artist movement, and asks whether even a lifetime of practice seducing women could make any man successful finding real romantic love. In a trio of essays - "We Out Here", "Is It OK to Be White?", and "What Is White Supremacy?" - he asks whether the social justice movement's crusade to purge structural racism, well-intentioned as it is, will end up creating a set of impossible expectations for society.

In one of my personal favorites, "Inside the Box", Yang recounts the dawn of technology-assisted sex culture - ubiquitous porn, dating apps, and all the rest - and recalls wondering whether they would kill romance, and whether romance was always a lie. He takes this further in "On Reading the Sex Diaries", where he dissects the anxieties of promiscuous tech-addicted New Yorkers who desperately hope for romance even as they distract themselves with intrigue.

The exception to the theme of discomfort might be Yang's profiles of famous individuals; several of the essays are portraits of people like chef Eddie Huang, technologist Aaron Swartz, and political scientist Francis Fukuyama. These aren't bad pieces - Yang's impressive command of the English language means that nothing he writes is bad, and there is a lingering tone of uncertainty over the value of even the most successful people's achievements. But the detached, journalistic approach of these profiles somewhat breaks the mood of the rest of the book.

Reviews of The Souls of Yellow Folk have ranged from the insightful to the airily dismissive. Some of the reviews seem a bit like "Reviewer 3" - academic slang for a scholar who complains that your research paper doesn't happen to be the one he would have written. Viet Thanh Nguyen, writing in the New York Times, expresses disappointment that Yang didn't turn his anxiety about anti-Asian racism into a call for organized political struggle. But organized political struggle just isn't what Yang is about. He belongs to a different literary tradition - one that sighs and broods and stares out a window instead of shouting and marching in the street. Call me crazy if I think our society needs both kinds of writers.

An insightful piece in Slate by Sophia Nguyen, however, hits closer to home. Near the end of her review, she notes that women are conspicuously absent from Yang's essays - the profiles, the protagonists, and the villains are all men (with the exception of Amy Chua, who gets a brief profile!). There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course - if you want to write about men, you can write about men. Men are people, men are interesting.

But I'm not satisfied. For a writer who took on the monumental, soul-crushing task of empathizing with a mass murderer, it can't be that hard to empathize with a woman or three. I want to know what Yang thinks it's like to be the women his male protagonists dream of finding romance with and winning validation from. I want to know if he thinks the bamboo ceiling feels different when there's a glass ceiling as well. I want to see him profile at least one famous woman.

But there will be time for that. I have a feeling Wesley Yang is just getting started. In the meantime, pick up a copy of The Souls of Yellow Folk, and enjoy being uncomfortable.

Book Review: "Stubborn Attachments", by Tyler Cowen

Tyler was good enough to give me a review copy of his new book, "Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals", so here is my review!

This is a philosophy book. It tries to answer the question of what a society's priorities should be. That's interesting, because Tyler is usually a very circumspect guy who doesn't like to come out and make strong value statements. So it's cool that he's finally telling the world, in no uncertain terms, what he thinks society should be all about!

There are two things about the way Tyler approaches philosophy that I really like. First, he's very informal, and doesn't bother to painstakingly define terms or refer to things other philosophers have said. That would probably annoy some people in the academic philosophy field, but it makes the book extremely readable even for a layperson. 

Second, he doesn't try to set out an absolute, formalistic, fully internally consistent system of ethical principles - instead, he embraces an eclectic, often conflicting set of principles. This is refreshing, since rigid systems always prove fragile to intuitive counterexamples. Too much of ethical philosophy seems to consist of people finding intuitive counterexamples to rigid systems of principles, forcing advocates of those principles to redefine them in a way that wouldn't invite those counterexamples. As a sort of a Humean, I kind of believe that people's ethical systems are all just derived from moral intuition, and aren't really internally consistent, and never will be, and thus shouldn't have to be. It's therefore refreshing to see Tyler embrace a sort of eclecticism, where he draws at will on several different principles. This sort of philosophizing has very little formal discipline to it - it's basically just saying "Here's what I think is good". But so what? That's basically what we always end up doing anyway.

Anyway, OK, on to the actual ideas in the book. Basically, the book is an argument that long-term growth is the most important thing a society should strive for. The reason is that future people are just as important as present people, and the future is extremely long, so there are lots of future people. Thus, making sure we keep growth going is the most important thing we can do, morally speaking.

Importantly, Tyler makes sure to include sustainability in this calculation. Growth in technology doesn't matter much if the planet is unlivable. This point is inserted as a caveat, and deserves more attention throughout the book than Tyler gave it; he should have talked a bit more about environmental policy. But it's good that he put that qualification in there.

Tyler's moral reasoning appeals to me; I strongly agree that we should care more about future generations. 

But the problem with this idea is that it doesn't lead to a lot of actionable policy ideas. Tyler seems to think that laissez-faire economic policies are often pro-growth. But this is usually only true in the slang sense; most economists would say that cutting taxes or cutting harmful regulations raises efficiency, but not steady-state growth. It seems unlikely that a change in the top marginal tax rate from 40% to 25%, say, would compound over the centuries into living standards that are hundreds of times higher. In a typical Econ 101 setup or Ramsey growth model, the tax cut would simply bump up GDP a bit, and then growth would continue as before.

The big exception to this is Romer-type endogenous growth. If a slightly higher GDP results in a slightly higher research expenditure, which discovers a slightly higher number of new ideas, which leads to a slightly higher GDP, etc. etc., then the long-term benefits of anything that raises GDP today are absolutely enormous. 

But how much do we really believe that model? Did the Industrial Revolution - the greatest explosion of human living standards ever observed - start in Britain and the Netherlands because GDP was a bit higher there, which allowed the economy to support a higher number of researchers? Maybe, but I think even Paul Romer would be incredibly skeptical about that historical story. Instead, there were probably some institutional or contingent factors at work. 

Which brings us to my main problem with Tyler's big thesis - what are the actionable ideas here? Tyler mentions the problem of uncertainty - the fact that we don't really know what will lead to sustainably higher growth - but IMHO ultimately doesn't deal with it to my satisfaction.

The Industrial Revolution was the biggest sustained growth success story in the history of the human race. But now imagine you're an administrator in Ming Dynasty China in the 1400s. What policies do you recommend in order to make China industrialize? Even with the benefit of centuries of hindsight, the answer is not obvious at all. You can dig up coal, build factories, etc., but plenty of countries tried this approach with disappointing results. Even now, we don't know what combination of factors allowed Britain to succeed (accidentally!) at industrialization when other countries' later, deliberate attempts failed.

And if we don't know the magic growth-shifting policies in hindsight, how likely are we to know them ahead of time? 

This goes double for sustainability. The Industrial Revolution was amazing, but there's still some chance - small, in my opinion, but real - that the whole thing will cause the death of the planet's environment and make it permanently uninhabitable for the human race. If so, we might eventually wake up and realize that we would have been better off staying as subsistence farmers, trapped by the Malthusian ceiling, for many thousands of years, instead of enjoying a few centuries of doomed affluence. (Note again: I think this is unlikely, but it's hard to rule out). 

Anyway, the big weakness of growth-above-all-else-ism is that we mostly don't know what policies are likely to produce the kind of sustained, self-compounding, super-long-term growth that Tyler rightly declares we should prize. And given the risk that what we think are pro-sustained-growth policies might ultimately retard the rate of super-long-term self-compounding growth, this risk acts as a sort of discount rate - a reason not to completely sacrifice our present on behalf of our future, because we don't really know whether we're sacrificing our present to destroy our future. (In many economic models of intertemporal choice, risk aversion and time preference aren't separable, so this is just a hand-wavey version of that.)

BUT, that said, I do think there are a couple things that we can focus on that are more likely than not to result in super-long-term sustainable growth improvements. These two things are scientific progress and technology that enhances environmental sustainability. 

The more ideas humanity knows, the higher the probability that the increase in our choice set gives us access to things that raise super-long-term sustainable growth. So, science. 

And the more tools we have to reduce our use of finite resources, the higher the probability that our choice set includes futures where we don't destroy ourselves by destroying our environment. So, sustainability tech.

Thus, "Stubborn Attachments" reads to me more like a manifesto for basic research and green technology than a manifesto for laissez-faire economics or any of the other things that commentators call "growth policy". If we want to leave a much better world for our infinite future generations - and to maximize the infinitude of those generations - basic research and green technology are our best bet.