→ May 30, 2018
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The Tyranny of Metrics.

A scout I’ve seen a few times already this spring on the amateur trail recommended Jerry Muller’s brief polemic The Tyranny of Metrics, a quick and enlightening read on how the business world’s obsession with measuring everything creates misaligned incentives in arenas as disparate as health care, education, foreign aid, and the military, and can lead to undesirable or even counterproductive outcomes. With the recent MLB study headed by physicist Prof. Alan Nathan that found, among other things, that players trying to optimize their launch angles hasn’t contributed to rising home run rates, the book is even somewhat applicable to baseball – although I think professional sports, especially our favorite pastime, do offer a good contrast to fields where the focus on metrics leads people to measure and reward the wrong things.

The encroachment of metrics on education is probably the best known of the examples that Muller provides in the book, which is strident in tone but measured (pun intended) in the way he supports his arguments. Any reader who has children in grade school now is familiar with the heavy use of standardized testing to measure student progress, which is then in turn used to grade teacher performance and track outcomes by schools as well, which can alter funding decisions or even lead to school takeovers and closings. Of course, I think it’s common knowledge at this point that grading teachers on the test performance of their students leads teachers to “teach to the test,” eschewing regular material, which may be important but more abstract, in favor of the specific material and question types to be found on these tests. My daughter is in a charter school in Delaware, and loses more than a week of schooldays each year to these statewide tests, which, as far as I can tell, are the primary way the state tracks charter school performance – even though charters nationwide are rife with fraud and probably require more direct observation and evaluation. That would be expensive and subjective, however, so the tests become a weak proxy for the ostensible goal in measurement, allowing the state to point and say that these charters are doing their jobs because the student test scores are above the given threshold.

The medical world isn’t immune to this encroachment, and Muller details more pernicious outcomes that result from grading physicians on seemingly sensible statistics like success or mortality rates from surgeries. If a surgeon at a busy hospital knows that any death on the operating table during a surgery s/he performs will count, so to speak, against his/her permanent record, the surgeon may choose to avoid the most difficult surgeries, whether due to the complexity of the operations or risk factors in the patients themselves, to avoid taking the hit to his/her surgical batting average. Imagine if you’re an everyday player in the majors, entering arbitration or even free agency, and get to pick the fifteen games you’re going to skip to rest over the course of the season. If your sole goal is maximizing your own statistics to thus increase your compensation, are you skipping Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer, or skipping Homer Bailey and some non-prospect spot starter?

Muller mentions sports in passing in The Tyranny of Metrics but focuses on other, more important industries to society and the economy as a whole; that’s probably a wise choice, as the increased use of metrics in sports is less apt than the other examples he chooses in his book. However, there are some areas where his premise holds true, with launch angle a good one to choose because it’s been in the news lately. Hitters at all levels are now working with coaches, both with teams and private coaches, to optimize their swings to maximize their power output. For a select few hitters, it has helped, unlocking latent power they couldn’t get to because their swings were too flat; for others, it may help reduce flyouts and popups and get some of those balls the hitter already puts in the air to fall in for hits or go over the fence. But for many hitters, this emphasis on launch angle hasn’t produced results, and there are even players in this year’s draft class who’ve hurt themselves by focusing on launch angle – knowing that teams measure it and grade players in the draft class on it – to the exclusion of other areas of their game, like just plain hitting. Mike Siani of William Penn Charter has cost himself a little money this spring for this exact reason; working with a coach this offseason to improve his launch angle, he’s performed worse for scouts this spring, becoming more pull-conscious and trying to hit for power he doesn’t naturally possess. He’s a plus runner who can field, but more of an all-fields hitter who would benefit from just putting the ball in play and letting his speed boost him on the bases. Because many teams now weigh such Trackman data as launch angle, spin rate, and extension heavily in their draft process, either boosting players who score well in those areas or excluding those who don’t, we now see coaches trying to ‘teach to the test,’ and that approach will help only a portion of the draft class while actively harming the prospects of many others.

At barely 220 pages, The Tyranny of Metrics feels like a pamphlet version of what could easily be a heavy 500-page academic tome, recounting all of the ways in which the obsession with metrics produces less than ideal results while also explaining the behavioral economics principles that underlie such behavior. If you have some of that background, or just don’t want it (understandable), then Muller’s book is perfect – a concise argument that should lead policymakers and business leaders to at least reconsider their reliance on the specific metrics they’ve chosen to measure employee performance. Using metrics may be the right strategy, but be sure they measure what you want to measure, and that they’re not skewing behavior as a result.

Next up: I’m currently reading Ray Bradbury’s short story collection I Sing the Body Electric!.

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→ May 21, 2018
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Thank You for Being Late.

Thomas Friedman’s Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations is a solid book about the fast-moving present and immediate future written by a man whose prose is firmly, almost embarrassingly stuck in the past. Friedman has obviously thought deeply about the topics in this collection of connected essays, and talked to many experts, and there are many insights here that would be useful to almost anyone in or soon to enter the American workforce, as well as to the people who are attempting to manage and regulate this fast-moving economy. It was just hard to get through the clunky writing and jokes that don’t even rise to dad level.

Friedman’s main thesis here is that the world is accelerating, and many people – I think his main audience is Americans, although it’s not limited to them – are unprepared for it. Technology has substantially increased the pace of change since the Industrial Revolution, and 100-plus years of accelerations now has the developed world changing at a rate that leads us to a point where it doesn’t even take a full generation of people to churn through more than one generation of tech. These technologies also collapse borders, threaten sovereignty of states, and increase economic inequality. Everyone reading this likely knows about the debate over automation and machine learning (please, stop calling it AI, they are not the same thing), but Friedman is arguing that we need policy makers at all levels to accept it as given and respond to it with policies that produce a populace better equipped to cope with it – and that people themselves accept that continuous learning is likely to be a part of their entire working lives.

Friedman refers to the cloud – a term I’m not 100% sure he even understands — as “the supernova,” a pointless and confusing substitution of a fabricated term for a more commonly accepted one, and then refers back to it frequently throughout the book as the source of much of this technological change. He’s certainly correct that the power of distributed computing has allowed us to solve more problems than we were ever able to solve previously, no matter how many chips you were able to cram into one box; he also gives the sense that he thinks P = NP, that this accelerating rate of growth in computing firepower will eventually be able to solve problems that, in nonmathematical terms, probably can’t be solved in a reasonable time frame. And Moore’s law, which he cites often, has changed in the last few years, as the growth in the number of transistors Intel et al can put on a chip has slowed from 18-24 months to more like 30, and with Intel projecting to hit the 10 nm transistor width this year, we’re probably butting up against the limits of particle physics.

The strongest aspects of Thank You For Being Late are Friedman’s exhortations to readers to accept that the old idea of learning one job and then doing it for 40 years is probably dead. Most jobs, even those we might once have spoken of dismissively as blue-collar or low-skilled, now require a greater knowledge of and comfort with technology. (There’s an effective CG commercial out now for University of Phoenix, where we see a mom working in a factory where all of the workers are slowly replaced by machines until one day the supervisor comes for her. She eventually pursues some sort of IT degree through the for-profit school, and the commercial ends with her walking through stacks of servers.) He lauds companies like AT&T that have already set up programs for employees to take new courses and then make it easier for those employees to identify new jobs within the company for which they qualify – or could try to qualify with further learning. He also discusses municipal and NGO efforts to build job sites that help connect people with skills with learning opportunities and employment opportunities.

There is, however, a bit of a Pollyanna vibe about Friedman, who refers to himself repeatedly as an optimist, and seems to think that more people in the American working class have the time to be able to take classes after hours – or that they have sufficient background to go get, say, a certificate in data science. I looked up some of the programs he mentions in the book; the one related to data science expected students to come in with significant knowlege of programming or scripting languages. He supports government efforts to support lifelong learning and to improve diversity in the workplace and in our communities, but doesn’t even acknowledge the potential government role in ensuring equal access to health care (essential to a functioning economy) or the mere idea of universal basic income, even if to just explain why he thinks it wouldn’t work.

And then there’s Friedman’s overuse of hackneyed quips that felt dated twenty years ago. “Attention K-Mart shoppers!” didn’t resonate with me in the 1980s, since there wasn’t a K-Mart anywhere near where I grew up; the chain has since been obliterated by competition from Wal-Mart and Target, and K-Mart operates 75% fewer stores today than it did at its peak, fewer than 500 nationwide. “This isn’t your grandpa’s X” is just lazy writing at this point; besides, if my daughter read that, she’d likely point out that her grandpa is a retired electrical engineer with two master’s degrees who already did a lot of the lifelong learning that Friedman describes.

Friedman’s writing is also dense, which I find surprising given his background as a newspaper columnist; perhaps he feels like he’s finally set free to prattle on as long as he wants, without anyone to stop him. There’s a level of detail in some parts of the story, such as his overlong descriptions of the halcyon days of the Minnesota town where he grew up, which I’m sure was very nice but probably not quite the Mayberry he describes.

There’s value in here, certainly, but I found it a grind to get through. This could have easily been a series of a dozen or so columns in the New York Times — that they wouldn’t run today because they’re too busy running columns denying climate change or explaining how so-called ‘incels’ need sex robots — rather than a 500-page book. He’s right about his core premise, though: Expect to learn throughout your working life and to see your job, whatever it is, change regularly over the course of your career.

Next up: Roddy Doyle’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

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→ April 29, 2018
→ By

Stick to baseball, 4/28/18.

My one Insider post this week looked at four pitchers who could go in the first round of this year’s draft, led by Florida RHP Carter Stewart, who was second on my latest ranking of draft prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Ancestree, a light, filler game from the designer of Blood Rage and Rising Sun, but one that I think borrows too heavily from other titles.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, and it’s a bestseller … (checks notes) in Sonoma, California. I’ll be at Washington, DC’s legendary bookstore Politics and Prose at 6 pm on July 14th to discuss & sign the book.

And now, the links…

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→ April 15, 2018
→ By

Stick to baseball, 4/15/18.

Two new posts for Insiders this week, both on draft prospects I went to see: one on Ryan Weathers, Ryan Rolison, and Ethan Hankins; another on Kentucky’s Sean Hjelle and Tristan Pompey. All five are likely first rounders, although Hankins, coming back from a shoulder issue, could end up going to Vanderbilt if teams aren’t willing to pony up.

My latest board game review for Paste covers the dice-drafting game Sagrada, which is easy to learn but has very high replay value. Players choose dice from a common set, rolled each round, to fill out their personal boards resembling stained-glass windows. I’ve also been playing a ‘pre-alpha’ release of the Terraforming Mars app on Steam, and it looks fantastic.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! Buy a zillion copies for all your Linkedin contacts. You should also sign up for my free not-quite-weekly email newsletter, which has more personal essays and links to everything I’ve written.

And now, the links…

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→ March 20, 2018
→ By

Nudge.

Richard Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics – or whatever the longer title is, it’s the one Nobel Prize people don’t seem to take all that seriously – for his work in the burgeoning field of behavioral economics, especially on what is now called “choice architecture.” Thaler’s work focuses on how the way we make decisions is affected by the way in which we are presented with choices. I mentioned one of Thaler’s findings in my most recent stick to baseball roundup – the candidate listed first on a ballot receives an average boost of 3.5% in the voting, with the benefit higher in races where all candidates are equally unknown (e.g., there’s no incumbent). You would probably like to think that voters are more rational than that, or at least just not really that irrational, but the data are clear that the order in which names are listed on ballots affects the outcomes. (It came up in that post because Iowa Republicans are trying to rig election outcomes in that state, with one possible move to list Republican candidates first on nearly every ballot in the state.)

Thaler’s first big book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, co-authored with Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein came out in 2008, and explains the effects of choice architecture while offering numerous policy prescriptions for various real-world problems where giving consumers or voters different choices, or giving them choices in a different order, or even just flipping the wording of certain questions could dramatically alter outcomes. Thaler describes this approach as “libertarian paternalism,” saying that the goal here is not to mandate or restrict choices, but to use subtle ‘nudges’ to push consumers toward decisions that are better for them and for society as a whole. The audiobook is just $4.49 as I write this.

This approach probably mirrors my own beliefs on how governments should craft economic policies, although it doesn’t appear to be in favor with either major party right now. For example, trans fats are pretty clearly bad for your health, and if Americans consume too many trans fats, national expenditures on health care will likely rise as more Americans succumb to heart disease and possibly cancer as well. However, banning trans fats, as New York City has done, is paternalism without liberty – these jurisdictions have decided for consumers that they can’t be trusted to consume only small, safer amounts of trans fats. You can certainly have tiny amounts of trans fats without significantly altering your risk of heart disease, and you may decide for yourself that the small increase in health risk is justified by the improved flavor or texture of products containing trans fats. (For example, pie crusts made with traditional shortening have a better texture than those made with new, trans fat-free shortening. And don’t get me started on Oreos.) That’s your choice to make, even if it potentially harms your health in the long run.

Choice architecture theory says that you can deter people from consuming trans fats or reduce such consumption by how you present information to consumers at the point of purchase. Merely putting trans fat content on nutrition labels is one step – if consumers see that broken out as a separate line item, they may be less likely to purchase the product. Warning labels that trans fats are bad for your heart might also help. Some consumers will consume trans fats anyway, but that is their choice as free citizens. The policy goal is to reduce the public expenditure on health care expenses related to such consumption without infringing on individual choice. There are many such debates in the food policy world, especially when it comes to importing food products from outside the U.S. – the USDA has been trying for years to ban or curtail imports of certain cheeses made from raw milk, because of the low risk that they’ll carry dangerous pathogens, even though the fermentation process discourages the growth of such bugs. (I’m not talking about raw milk itself, which has a different risk profile, and has made a lot of people sick as it’s come back into vogue.) I’ve also run into trouble trying to get products imported from Italy like bottarga and neonata, which are completely safe, but for whatever reason run afoul of U.S. laws on bringing animal products into the country.

Thaler and Sunstein fry bigger fish than neonata in Nudge, examining how choice architecture might improve employee participation in and choices within their retirement accounts, increase participation in organ donation programs, or increase energy conservation. (The last one is almost funny: If you tell people their neighbors are better at conserving energy, then it makes those people reduce their own energy use. South Africa has been using this and similar techniques to try to reduce water consumption in drought-stricken Cape Town. Unfortunately, publicizing “Day Zero” has also hurt the city’s tourism industry.) Thaler distinguishes between Econs, the theoretical, entirely rational actors of traditional economic theory; and Humans, the very real, often irrational people who live in this universe and make inefficient or even dumb choices all the time.

Nudge is enlightening, but unlike most books in this niche, like Thinking, Fast and Slow or The Invisible Gorilla, it probably won’t help you make better choices in your own life. You can become more aware of choice architecture, and maybe you’ll overrule your status quo bias, or will look at the top or bottom shelves in the supermarket instead of what’s at eye level (hint: the retailer charges producers more to place their products at eye level), but the people Nudge is most likely to help seem like the ones least likely to read it: Elected and appointed officials. I’ve mentioned many times how disgusted I was with Arizona’s lack of any kind of energy or water conservation policies. They have more sun than almost any place in the country, but have done little to nothing to encourage solar uptake, although the state’s utility commission may have finally forced some change on the renewable energy front this week. Las Vegas actually pays residents to remove grass lawns and replace them with low-water landscaping; Arizona does nothing of the sort, and charges far too little for water given its scarcity and dwindling supply. Improving choice architecture in that state could improve its environmental policies quickly without infringing on Arizonans’ rights to leave the lights on all night.

Speaking of Thinking, Fast and Slow, its author, Daniel Kahneman, was a guest last week on NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast, and it was both entertaining and illuminating.

Next up: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. No reason.

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→ December 9, 2017
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/9/17.

For Insiders, I had four pieces this week (and may have another before the day is out). I wrote about what Shohei Ohtani’s deal with the Angels means for them and the AL West, Seattle’s trade for Dee Gordon, the signings earlier this week of Kevin Maitan, Mike Minor, and Miles Mikolas, and deals involving Welington Castillo, Aledmys Diaz, and Brad Boxberger. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Ars Technica, I looked at the upcoming virtual reality adaptation of the board game Catan.

If you missed them here on the dish, my annual cookbook recommendations, gift guide for cooks, and top 100 board game rankings are all up.

Also, here’s your weekly reminder to buy my book Smart Baseball for everyone on your holiday list.

And now, the links…

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→ November 25, 2017
→ By

Stick to baseball, 11/25/17.

The biggest piece I wrote this week was actually right here, the tenth annual ranking of my top 100 boardgames, including a list (at the bottom) of my favorite titles for two players. And you’ll see in the comments there are still plenty of good games out there I haven’t played.

For Insiders, I broke down MLB’s penalties for Atlanta, looking at the players set free and the impact of the league’s actions for the long term, and also looked at how the top few free agents might end up overpaid this offseason. My next scheduled piece will cover Shohei Otani and will run December 2nd, the day he hits the market for real, assuming there isn’t another roadblock between now and then.

No Klawchat this week on account of the holiday.

Buy Smart Baseball for all your loved ones this holiday season! It makes a great gift. By which I mean it’s great for me when you give it as a gift.

And now, the links…

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→ September 1, 2017
→ By

Evicted.

I have two new Insider posts on the Verlander trade and the Justin Upton trade.

Princeton sociology professor and ethnographer Matthew Desmond won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a stunning work of first-person research that examines a major socioeconomic problem from the ground level, rather than the top-down, data-driven approach I expected from a book in his genre. Desmond spent several months living among the inner-city underclass in several neighborhoods in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009, shadowing tenants and landlords, witnessing evictions and forced moves, accompanying residents to rehab, AA meetings, even to court, recording what amounted to over 5000 pages of transcribed notes and conversations, to produce this devastating and utterly human portrait of people who simply do not exist to the house-secure classes.

Desmond’s aim here is clear: eviction is more than just a temporary loss of shelter, but a massive disruption to the economic and psychological well-being of entire families, a process that can lead to job loss, substance abuse, and crime, and a scarlet letter on a person’s record that can make it harder to obtain future housing and employment. The vulnerable class of the working or semi-working poor are victimized repeatedly by a system that takes the majority of their income, often over 75% of it, to cover rent for substandard housing, then punishes them if they fall behind and are evicted in a process that overwhelmingly favors the landlords. Tenants are often afraid to assert their rights, if they have any, or to report building code or maintenance violations for fear of retaliation. Once evicted, families may end up having to pay exorbitant fees to place their limited possessions in storage, with no access to their things, until the almost inevitable time when they can’t afford the monthly cost and lose what little they had.

Desmond accompanies several single residents and entire families on their journey through multiple evictions and the Lodge, a homeless shelter readers will know all too well before the book is complete. The access these people gave him is remarkable, as he captures their words at some of their most vulnerable and depressed moments, often witnessing their stuff being carted out to the curb in trash bags by Eagle Movers, who apparently maintain a truck (or two?) just for the purpose of serving landlords who are evicting residents. He also relates a firsthand account of housing discrimination – and explains in an afterword how the Fair Housing Authority did nothing with his formal complaint. (And that was under a Democratic administration; I doubt it’s any better today.) He also spends significant time with two slumlords – although he refuses to refer to either as such – to give their perspective, usually in their own words, even explaining how one, Sherrena, was “proud” of her landlord status and her collection of properties, even though Desmond makes it very clear that she is a nightmare landlord whose failure to maintain safe conditions in her buildings should probably have landed her in court.

By spending so much time with poor residents, Desmond also makes it clear what critical needs are not addressed when most of someone’s income – often income from disability payments – goes to cover the rent. Going without food, or without enough food, is an obvious outcome. But such tenants often have no heat or hot water, or sometimes can’t cover the gas or electric bills. Medical care is often entirely out of the question. Buying a new pair of shoes for a child, a mundane event for even middle-class families, is an enormous achievement. One of the few success stories in the book, Scott, a former nurse who lost everything when he became addicted to painkillers, has to borrow from his parents to cover the cost to get into a rehab program and begin taking methadone. Many other people Desmond follows don’t have even that bare safety net of a parent or relative to help cover a payment – or, in the case of one single mother, her safety net repeatedly refuses to help.

Desmond saves his prescriptions and recommendations for the epilogue, choosing instead to let the individual narratives tell the reader the overarching story of a system that traps these American untouchables in a cycle of poverty from which it is very difficult to escape. It’s easy to say, as so many politicians like to do, that the solution to poverty is to make poor adults go to work. That facile, elitist answer ignores the realities of work for the underclass: Available jobs barely pay enough to cover the rent, evictions and other related actions (police are often involved, with Milwaukee employing sheriffs specifically for this purpose) can count against someone on a job application, and missing time to try to find new living space can cost such a person his/her job. Affordable – or “affordable” – housing is often located far from work, with poor public transit options in many or most cities. We get repeated examples of people evicted because of the actions of someone else. One woman is evicted because the police were called to her apartment by a neighbor because her partner was beating her. Another loses what sounds like a perfect apartment because her young son got in a fight and her babysitter asked neighbors if they had any weed. And landlords get away with this because tenants don’t fight back, enforcement of what few rights they have is scarce, and there’s a line of people waiting to get into every apartment the evicted vacate.

In that epilogue, Desmond offers ideas and potential solutions, including universal housing vouchers that can be used anywhere, without discrimination, the way that recipients use food stamps. He speaks of reasonable housing as a fundamental human right, which is how western European governments and societies view it, arguing that “the pursuit of happiness” is impossible without adequate shelter. Desmond also pushes solutions that are, at best, antithetical to the capitalist underpinnings of our society, including broader rent control, without sufficient consideration of the economic consequences of such policies (rent control programs can stifle construction and push landlords to convert rental properties to non-rental ones). He seems to advocate for more public housing, but doesn’t discuss how we can expand the housing stock without repeating the problems of previous housing projects, many of which became unsafe and were razed within 20 years of their construction. His proposed solutions should spark discussion of how to solve the American housing crisis – or, at least, a discussion that there is a housing crisis at all – but seem like they will trade current problems for new ones rather than creating comprehensive solutions that at least consider how the market will react to major policy shifts. That’s a minor issue in a remarkable work that is dedicated more to exposing these problems to the wider audience, to bringing people in distress out of the shadows and into the public consciousness, because without that there won’t even be a conversation about how best to help them in an economy that still places a high value on the rights of private property owners.

I listened to the audio version of Evicted, which is narrated by actor Dion Graham, whose voice will be familiar to fans of The Wire. Graham does a masterful job of bringing the various characters to life with just subtle changes in tone – and treats these people, who are largely less educated and less articulate than, say, Graham himself is, with respect. It would be easy to caricature these underprivileged tenants, but Graham’s renditions infuse them with the quiet dignity they deserve, so that the listener may feel sorrow or pity for them, but not scorn.

Next up: Thomas Stribling’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Store. I’m about 60 pages in, and while the story is moving along, the casual racism in the writing – Stribling was from Alabama, set the novel in Florence, and has it taking place shortly after the Civil War – is appalling.

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→ August 15, 2017
→ By

The Blue Sweater.

Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of a non-profit called Acumen, which funds and encourages poverty-reduction efforts that work like business endeavors rather than aid dumps. Foreign aid itself is, in general, not very useful, and often nothing more than a way to prop up corrupt third-world regimes; the U.S. is slated to send out $42 billion in foreign aid in FY2017, but there’s little to no information on how well it works – something like an ROI, for eample. Novogratz has spent over three decades working in the developing world, including substantial time in Rwanda both before and after that country’s civil war and genocide, and her 2009 memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, chronicles some of her work – but also has an unfortunate tendency to show her inability to escape her own privilege when describing the people she’s met and places where she’s worked.

The book works as part memoir – Novogratz has lived an incredible life, not least of which is the incredible story of the titular sweater, which she gave away to a donation outlet while in high school only to find a boy wearing the sweater ten years later in Rwanda – and part plea for a more sensible, rational approach to helping alleviate poverty. Novogratz details projects in multiple countries, from creating jobs for women in central Africa to developing mosquito nets that don’t lose effectiveness to expanding access to cataract surgery in India, where a small upfront investment coupled with some expertise led to a substantial return, particularly in economic growth for people who had no opportunities beyond subsistence farming and in improving health and sanitation conditions. (If you’re poor, and you’re not healthy or don’t have access to clean water, you’re much more likely to stay poor, since you can’t work if you’re sick and then can’t pay for the care to get well.)

Her individual anecdotes tend to be pretty compelling, in part because Novogratz has worked in some areas that were either desperately poor or were caught up in conflicts. One of Novogratz’ close colleagues in Rwanda was killed, perhaps assassinated, for pushing women’s rights, and another, mentioned above, ended up a leader in the genocide. She runs into surprising interference from women in Africa who resent her presence – that local men will listen to her, a white woman from the west, but not to local women, even if they boast some western education. Getting money isn’t a problem per se; it’s getting it from donors who are willing to think small, who’ll accept modest goals that people on the ground can achieve, rather than lofty goals (let’s end hunger! Let’s cure AIDS!) that are unattainable. It’s the idea behind sites like GlobalGiving, where the projects are small but the objectives clear and reasonable.

Novogratz speaks of her work in these countries with two voices, one of which tends to undermine the other. When speaking about the actual plans and execution, she sounds like a businessperson, keeping others accountable, asking questions that an investor in a startup might ask, and ensuring that money is going to where it will do some lasting good. But when she starts to talk about the locals in Rwanda, Pakistan, Brazil, and elsewhere, or to describe the places themselves, she sounds like a tourist. Everyone is beautiful, every color is radiant, everyone is so nice, even the ones who turn out to be corrupt or, in one case, associated with the genocide (and later imprisoned for her role). There’s a strain in travel literature where the white westerner fetishizes the natives of developing countries, and that’s on display here. I can’t doubt Novogratz’ sincerity, and it sounds like she’s tough on locals who come in for microloans with half-formed plans, but she appears to have met a long string of perfect and handsome people while traveling the world. The stories themselves are interesting, and I salute the sacrifices she’s made to live this life and try to improve the world, but The Blue Sweater doesn’t do enough to convince the reader that this is the right way to help the world’s poor.

Next up: I’m still several books behind in reviews, but I’m currently reading Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave is Forgiven.

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→ May 13, 2017
→ By

Stick to baseball, 5/13/17.

My one Insider post this week was my first ‘mock’ draft for 2017, although it’s really too early for that sort of exercise. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Smart Baseball is out now in the U.S. and Canada; you can order it here or get it at any local bookstore. We are working on getting an ebook version out in some international markets, but I can’t promise anything there yet.

I have two signings/talks this week, for which I’m very excited (and a little anxious, to be honest). The first is in Decatur, Georgia (Atlanta area), at the Georgia Center for the Book on Tuesday at 7 pm, and the AJC was kind enough to lead their book events page with a note about my appearance. The second is in Minneapolis at Moon Palace Books on Thursday at 6:30 pm. I hope to meet many of you at these events, both of which are free to attend.

I’ve been asked by many of you about organizing other events. If a bookstore reaches out to Harper Collins to invite me, and I can work it into my schedule, I’m certainly open to doing more. I do have further events scheduled for Toronto, Miami (July 8th), and Berkeley (July 19th), plus am hoping to do signings at GenCon and PAX Unplugged later this year.

I spoke with SUNY-Oswego Professor of Digital Media Brian Moritz about the book, analytics in sports, and being a writer. I joined The Young Turks’ video show to discuss the book and media resistance to advanced stats. I also spoke with ESPN Radio in Dallas, with ESPN 1530 in Cincinnati, and with SI Now about the book & Mike Mussina’s Hall of Fame case.

And now, the links…

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