This book changed how I think about at least one thing: book reviews. I realized there are 3 different scales I’m usually evaluating. The trouble is that I realized it because this book has quite different grades on these scales. So what you see is an average: (2 + 3 + 4)/3 = 3 ⭐️
- How well does the book support its thesis? I’d say 2/5.
- How well-written is the book? Maybe 3/5.
- How entertaining is it? Quite subjective, maybe a bit over 4/5.
I’ve recently stumbled across the basic epistemological concepts of coherence theory and correspondence theory. In my unsophisticated understanding, let’s say coherence theory(ies) states the truth of a statement is a consequence of being coherent with a propositional system. OTOH, correspondence theory would say nuh-uh, the truth of a statement depends on it actually describing reality. Well, what does this does this have to do with bubbles?
The book is divided into 3 parts: Stagnation, Acceleration, and Escape. The issue is that these parts are incongruent. The reason is that they go from trying to be coherent, correspondent, and then coherent again, with little in the way of a comprehensive thesis defense.
Part I: Stagnation
The first part sells the book to a progress-studies-esque audience. The critique of academia and science funding is par for the course. Scientific stagnation is described mostly in terms of correspondence, where observations about the state of science feed into a model for how it's stagnant. For the first 40 pages, I was very content. Statistics abounded, historical observations were plenty.The cultural critique, on the other hand, got a bit… odd. As a Diff reader, the discussion of cultural changes was surprisingly… postmodern? At least, it cited a lot of postmodern thinkers. It’s likely I’m too unsophisticated to fully grasp the concepts Jameson and Lyotard and Virilio and Baudrillard wrote about. But herein lies a recurring problem with Boom: it outsources too much. More on this later.
Philosophy and literary criticism in a book like this are fun. But after a few pages and many doses of squishy concepts being thrown at you, you realize that this book wants to make an argument for a coherent worldview, despite it starting off with a correspondent one. There’s whiplash.
By the end of Part I, you’re not sure what kind of book this is going to be. And perhaps the authors didn’t, either. They had a thesis: bubbles are kind of underrated, but only the kind that gets people to build cool stuff, not the kind that gets people to bet on vacuous vapid stuff. And there are mechanisms, which had been published on The Diff before: bubbles parallelize innovation and enable projects that, without the mutual reliance of many enthusiastic participants, would not happen. Great! Hopefully Part II gives a lot of meat for this argument. Right?
Part II: Acceleration
The second part is about half of Boom, and consists of a few well-known case studies. This was the most entertaining part of the book for me. We're back to a correspondent model of belief, for the most part. We get glimpses of the published and publicized beliefs of key players in the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, fracking ventures, and so on. Lovely, back on track.Acceleration is also where I noticed I had mixed feelings about this book. It is very fun to read footnotes about energy prospectors asking around about fire temples and worship in the Middle East because they were a likely sign of natural gas reserves. At the same time, the thesis did not feel central to most individual stories told. Part of the reason is the chapter on corporate R&D, which had many stories in quick succession. But at the same time, it felt like the authors wanted to tell and (justifiably) elevate a cool technological development story over defending their points that these were only possible as bubbles.
The bright side of this format is that H&H did highlight unique dynamics within each case study. There was Moore’s paper becoming target and prediction, there were tax level expectations driving long-term basic research funding. The Bitcoin case study is the most prototypical example, with “bubble” dynamics encoded in the protocol. Unfortunately, cases like fracking fell somewhat flat; interesting story, but not much support for the main argument that it had to be a “bubble.”
Matter of fact, what is a bubble? If anything that coordinates behavior because of shared belief is a bubble, we’re leaving the common understanding of the word behind and losing the unenlightened public along the way. And that’s more or less how the authors seem to define the phenomenon. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program were extraordinary because they could concentrate so much talent and so many resources to pursue specific objectives. At the same time, that allocation of resources and talent went largely top-down in both cases. Aren’t bubbles supposed to be emergent? The core concept of the book is wobblier than one would like. This is addressed in Chapter 10, with 5 key traits shared by the projects covered. That level of clarity would have been very helpful while reading the cases!
Besides the big-picture fuzziness of the thesis, there were some details I could nitpick. Eckert & Mauchly were done dirty, as usual - von Neumann got all the credit for the architecture he (masterfully) described in a widely-circulated report. Xerox was awarded 5 pages as part of the chapter on corporate R&D, but in that case the bubble was… a company wanted future profits, failed to capitalize on its investment, and Microsoft and Apple benefited? The “bubble” is again squishy. At least, it wasn’t clear how “project X succeeded because of bubble dynamics A, B, & C.”
Bitcoin
A quick aside: The chapter on Bitcoin seems like a missed opportunity. The authors intentionally did not cover crypto in general, but the case study suffers because of it. It's a long-odds bet that Bitcoin will ever reach widespread adoption as a means of transacting simply because of transaction costs - see Eswar Prasad's The Future of Money for relevant commentary.The argument I wish I had seen is that Bitcoin’s dynamics could bring attention to crypto, and thus make the broader ecosystem spawn useful solutions. A bubble-like dynamic would have been necessary to get people interested at all, and once that interest reaches a tipping point, the technology is instantiated more effectively by converts. By omitting crypto outside of Bitcoin, the case becomes a lot weaker. Does Bitcoin in a vacuum parallelize innovation? It seems like so only if it’s useful on its own within its unitarian ecosystem. What future would Bitcoin alone bring closer? After each round of price increases and crashes, the number of legal transactions in Bitcoin is still ~0% of transaction volume. That does not look very exponential to me, especially when double-digits of American adults actually have bought some.
And developing countries with unstable countries aren’t mentioned either, because they don’t seem to represent The Future™️. The result is that we get a cool story about how Bitcoin has bubble dynamics embedded in its protocol, but no support for a strong argument for how that might be a good thing. In the version of the story where Bitcoin’s bubble dynamics are necessary to spark interest in/draw attention to cryptocurrencies and decentralized technologies - which is very plausible version! - there is a solid argument for bubbles = good. But the chance was missed by restricting the chapter to just Bitcoin.
Part III: Escape
For Part III, H&H are solidly back in coherence-land. Religious fervor and spiritual drives are all the rage. There's a world model here, buried within sentences like "the price-discovery process of a speculative bubble can be described in terms of the gnostic heresy of immanentizing the eschaton." (Okay, that's in a footnote (329, p. 234), they proceed to explain the terms, and it's probably the worst case of this. But still!)Chapter 9 is full of the “metaphysical depths of technological progress” (p. 251). It’s a hard one to get through. Once you do, Chapter 10 is better. Besides finally laying out what they mean with “bubble,” H&H has an amusing take on the greater pursuits of our age. My final complaint about substance is the zig-zagging between religiosity itself as a driver and a “religious devotion” to a project. Did the spiritual framing benefit the thesis much? It decreased clarity, so it should be worth the tradeoff. I don’t think it was.
Borrowed ideas, put together hastily
Have you ever had to complete a project at work or school, and thought you could save time by reusing a bunch of old work you or colleagues did? My experiences with this approach aren't optimal, especially when reusing code or text (instead of, say, a spreadsheet). I often feel I end up spending more time putting things together, tightening gaps and smoothing over rough edges, than I would if I had just worked through the core problem from scratch. If I don't spend that time, the result is a messy ensemble that lacks cohesion.Boom is like this, except with higher production and entertainment value. It outsources too much, meaning: there are too many citations for its own good. Too many sections rely on a patchwork of ideas from different philosophers and writers which succeed only at showing how well-read the authors are. I already knew this! It’s part of why I love reading The Diff. But these hasty patchworks don’t work as well as simple first-principles writing would have. I understand attribution is important, but the authors could have alluded more and quoted less. It would have done wonders for clarity and cohesion!
Parting thoughts
Byrne's framework for the utility of bubbles has been elucidating to me, particularly as I got my first job in an organization that depended on dynamics as described. There were 10 things we needed working so that our 1 thing had any chance of succeeding, but that fragility limited the willingness of the other 9 would-be participants. A bubble would have been extremely helpful!As the rating at the start of this review indicated, the book is entertaining for a generally curious person. I did enjoy reading about Girard’s ideas, however superficially they may have been treated. It’s a fun volume with an identity crisis. It’s not great literature, but it imparts a useful way of thinking.
This review is also on Goodreads.