Considering Britain's Military Drawdown After 1945

Looking into the historians' debate on British decline I was struck by the coverage of the country's military drawdown between World War II and the 1970s, when it turned from dominant power and global military superpower into a regional military actor with some residual out-of-area commitments and capabilities, but in most ways, roughly on par with other industrialized states of the same size (of which there are several in its neighborhood alone). Some parts of the story are fairly well-covered in the literature, like the development of Britain's nuclear deterrent, and some of the other aspects of the story have at least been the subject of some solid books, like Eric Grove's study of the post-war British navy, From Vanguard to Trident (reviewed here). Still, there was little about the period compared with other phases of British military history, what there was of substance usually narrowly specialist stuff, and I sought in vain for really concise, really comprehensive pieces about the whole process, or even many portions of it. (Because of its connection with the nuclear deterrent there was a fair amount on, for example, the V-bomber force; but try finding anything comparable on the post-war Fighter Command, let alone Transport Command.)

While the comparative scanty and uneven nature of the coverage of a fairly important bit of history is unfortunate, it is unsurprising given the biases of military historians that Jeremy Black described so well in his book on the subject. Ultimately I wound up forming my picture of what went on from scattered bits. And as I had previously written about the country's economy I wound up consolidating them into new writing, which it seemed worthwhile to post up at SSRN given the scarcity of detailed material.

Apart from the more military-related bits in my long "Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity" (overall, more concerned with economics than defense) I have completed four pieces:

"The Evolution of Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1979."

"The Restructuring of the British Navy, 1945-1979."

"The Evolution of the British Carrier Force, 1945-1979."

"Foundations of Semi-Superpower Status: Financing Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1971."

The first paper, "Evolution," considers the country's overall posture as it developed phase by phase between 1945 and 1979. The following two consider the British navy (the funding and manning of the forces, their mission and distribution around the world, the key changes in their technology), "Restructuring" its overall development in the 1945-1979 period, while "Carrier Force" (naturally) focuses more tightly on its carrier force during the same years. The last, "Foundations," considers how Britain's posture was resourced.

Having gone through all that, I find myself less concerned with putting together a picture of British policy in that earlier period; and for that matter, the ways the issue echoed in British culture at the time; and more interested in relating it to what we are seeing now. A half century ago Britain decided to give up the global military aspirations, deeming carriers, "east of Suez" forces and the rest unaffordable and focusing on Europe. Now Britain is exiting the EU, commissioning supercarriers, and once again, getting a base "east of Suez" (in Bahrain, where it had a base until 1971). Any thoughts about all that?

NOTE: The four pieces discussed here have since been collected, with other pieces, in the collection The Long Drawdown: British Military Retrenchment, 1945-1979, now available at Amazon and other retailers.

"Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity"

Back when I wrote the first edition of The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I included in the appendix a brief essay discussing Britain's extraordinary industrial, imperial and military predominance at its nineteenth century peak, and its subsequent passing over the following hundred years. Basically what it came down to was the spread of industrialization as other nations increasingly consolidated. One result was larger-scale industrialized states, another was states which evolved a more sophisticated form of industrialization, and still another were states which combined both features, epitomized by the United States. The balance of economic power shifted in a hurry, the balance of military power with it. Meanwhile the declining acceptability of colonial rule, and the cost of two world wars, accelerated the unraveling of Britain's empire, but that economic change was first and foremost.

Given my historical and other interests I did much more reading and thinking about the issue, unavoidably rethinking what I wrote earlier (just why did others make a bigger success of the "Second" Industrial Revolution, for example?), and writing more. Initially I intended to produce a longer, better-grounded version of the piece in my appendix, later a few short pieces, but it eventually blew up into the paper I have just published through SSRN, "Geography, Technology and Opportunity: The Rise and Decline of British Economic Power" (the second revision of which is now up). About 74,000 words long it is less an appendix than a book in itself--which I suppose offers the same explanation in the end. With (I hope) more rigor, in detail and depth (unexpectedly I found myself coping with matters raging from the comparative phosphorous content of different iron ores to waterway-territory ratios in countries around the world to the finer points of the 1965 National Plan), but nonetheless, the same essential explanation.

If nothing else, I've done a fair job of convincing myself.

Empire, Spies and the Twentieth Century

Studying international relations certain subjects come up again and again and again. Even when one approaches such things as the rise and fall of great powers, hegemony and hegemonic cycles, systemic wars, industrialization and deindustrialization on a principally theoretical level, Britain, its rise and subsequent decline as an economic, military and imperial powers comes up again and again and again--and does so that much more when one takes an interest in concrete history, when one considers the situation of the recent or present or future United States in which so many have seen so many parallels.

Dealing with the spy fiction genre and its history, the same theme is almost inescapable. Much as we may think of spy fiction as a Cold War genre, the truth is that it was already well into middle age when the Cold War took center stage in international life, the thread that has really run through it from its beginning to the present the passing of the British Empire that already by 1900 saw its peak behind it. Anxiety that that empire would pass, bitterness that it seemed to be passing or actually was passing, denial about what was happening, and criticism of all these attitudes, are already there at the very beginning, in such founding works as Erskine Childers' celebrated The Riddle of the Sands and William Le Queux's contemporaneous but much less celebrated Secrets of the Foreign Office. ("The name is Drew, Duckworth Drew.")

As both of these have been major interests for me for decades, thinking about one matter naturally leads back to my thinking about the other, one reason why when writing about the James Bond films and books I spent a certain amount discussing the actual history of the period--more than most such writers, I think. When I published The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I actually included a thirteen page essay devoted to just such historical background in the appendix (and included it again when the second edition of the book came out back in 2015). You can check it out here, reposted on this blog.

Review: The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture, by Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies

In The Italian Navy in World War II James Sadkovich argues that the common view of the Mediterranean theater and Italian arms in it is deeply distorted by American and British prejudices of the time (particularly a racist disdain for Italians), as well as the prejudices of the German officers who had a surprisingly large impact onthe formation of that image. In the Myth of the Eastern Front Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies make a comparable case with regard to the conduct of World War II in Eastern Europe--that American prejudice, and the post-war influence of the German generals--have had such distorting influence, even more consequential for the understanding of the war, and with greater effect.

Sadkovich argues (as many have before and since) that had the Germans lent Italy a small proportion of their resources to pursue the "Mediterranean strategy" properly, events in this region could have been decisive. However, it would have been decisive because of what it meant for the Nazi-Soviet conflict, to which the book by Smelser and Davies speaks directly, a conflict that in our own history rather than some counterfactual actually was decisive for the war and all that could or did come from it. And the distortion to which they point has, in their view, also had more profound implications for the way the war as a whole is viewed. Rather than contemptuous dismissal of Benito Mussolini's armed forces, and the prejudices into which this plays, Smelser and Davies argue that this tendency has led to a whitewashing of Axis crimes, and even a cult of the World War II German army in the United States itself comparable to the "lost cause" mythology of the Confederacy.

Smelser and Davies, more interested in cultural history than military history per se, do not attempt to offer a corrected reconstruction of World War II in the East the way Sadkovich does (persuasively) with the war's course in the Mediterranean, but rather the history of how that war has been understood. They begin at the beginning, with an account of the brief and now forgotten "love affair" American public opinion had with the Soviet Union, a virtual selling of the Soviet Union on Main Street, laid out at length and in detail to show how different the situation was before the Cold War put an end to it.

That post-war conflict quickly led to the plans for a thoroughly de-Nazified, demilitarized Germany being set aside in favor of Germany's conservative Establishment, implicated as it was in Nazism's crimes, being rehabilitated and put in charge of a West Germany not only under non-Communist rule but contributing substantially to the industrial base and military might of the Western alliance. Which, naturally, meant taking a softer line.

This was further encouraged by the turn to German generals for insight into the Soviet armed forces and their capabilities, the Germans having fought them for four years. Naturally there was a more forgiving attitude toward the record of particular German figures (clemency for many and all of whom were to be right-wing cause celebres, with Joseph McCarthy championing war criminal Joachim Peiper, for example), and plenty of opportunity for the German generals to tell their side of the story--particularly the very senior Franz Halder, Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian of World War II fame. Halder oversaw the production of a vast amount of military history and analysis by German officers for study by U.S. forces, while the latter two penned widely read memoirs that were just the leading edge of a barrage of memoir, history and fiction presenting their side's account.

These accounts, fiction and nonfiction, took a variety of courses. Some not only excused but justified the war--stressing the evils of Communism from which Nazi Germany was supposedly defending the West; the welcome of German forces as liberators by ethnic minorities and others in the Soviet Union; or even arguing that Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike that saved the West from conquest by Stalin. Amid all this they treated as marginal or incidental the issues of aggression, atrocity, genocide, not only slighting the reality that these were the motive for Barbarossa, but distancing the German armed forces from them--depicting the soldiers as innocent patriots doing their duty by their country, utterly unaware of the crimes that others committed, and horrified at or opposed to them when they found out about them, with higher officers emphasizing their conflicts with a fanatical, interfering Hitler. Others delinked the experience of individual soldiers from the larger political context altogether--the reader encouraged to not think about those troublesome matters and instead admire the courage, professionalism, dutifulness to country displayed by men who were often presented as family-oriented, religious (in the term's most positive sense), humane. Whether the larger cause was held to be valiant, or merely the individuals who fought in it, they also contended that German forces were defeated by bad weather, by the sheer overwhelming numbers of the enemy, by the enemy's "subhuman" indifference to life and decency, by American Lend-Lease, or by the meddling in operational decisions by Hitler, rather than genuinely "military" failures on the part of the virtually superheroic German soldiers and their commanders, or any military skill on the part of their Soviet opponent (not unlike the "lost cause" view of the Civil War, which attributes Northern victory solely to numbers and industrial weight).

Smelser and Davies also devote a considerable portion of the book to showing why a significant swath of American opinion was open to such a view. American occupation troops in Europe, they note, were rather more inclined to identify with German civilians, or even former German soldiers, than with the inmates of Displaced Persons camps (or the Soviets, from whom they were increasingly isolated)--and if this had its effect on George Patton, the effect was still greater on cohorts of new draftees coming in after the fighting was over. All this reflected and fed into widespread prejudices that the Cold War each exacerbated--racial as well as ideological (the anti-Slav feeling that was often bound up with anti-Semitism and anti-Asian feeling, and all of which interacted with militant anti-Communism), all as the earlier, sympathetic attention to the Soviet experience virtually vanished from memory, and with which much of the pro-Nazi writing (or simple apologism) was all too consistent. In subsequent years the extent to which German historiography, official and popular, colored American perceptions was, in time, to be taken for granted, unnoticed--making the more distinctly German view more acceptable.

The result is that the "German" view of the war in the United States was far from limited to people espousing blatanly Neo-Nazi opinions, but has substantially colored the general understanding of the war, and found wide enough currency to produce a surprisingly sizable, widespread coterie of American "romancers" of the Nazi-era German armed forces and their war in the east. Avid consumers of books and magazines devoted to the theme, many of them participate in wargaming and even public recreations of Eastern Front battles, in which they find pleasure in personally playing the roles of Wehrmacht soldiers they regard as exemplars of military and other virtues.

Reflecting on this book's argument I recalled my own reading of World War II historiography, and many of the works they cited prominently--the works by Trevor Dupuy and Martin Van Creveld and Basil Liddell Hart, particularly The German Generals Speak--and had to concede that the notion of a cult of the German army coloring the historiography is not so far-fetched. Reflecting on Hart's interviews with the surviving German generals and subsequent commentary in The German Generals, I now find myself thinking of Hart as not merely respectful to his subjects, but taking them totally at their word--the more so given his uncritically reusing in copy-and-paste fashion much of what they had to say in that book in his later Defence of the West (in which he was, notably, very hard on Winston Churchill). Still, that Smelser and Davies say relatively little about the facts of the war that contradict the "cult" image leaves a reader forming their impressions from this book with little basis for judging just how much such assessments diverge from the reality.

Reflecting on the treatment of World War II in popular culture, it struck me that they could actually have said much more of evidences of such a cult. Detailed as the authors' attention is to some of the relevant aspects of pop culture, they virtually ignore others that seem far more conspicuous--for example, the vast body of alternate history fiction, which years before Smelser and Davies published, already led to a massive, noteworthy study (Gavriel Rosenfeld's The World Hitler Never Made). Instead his discussion of "What if" material is limited to two counterfactual histories, by R.H.S. Stolfi and Samuel Newlands. Similarly there is no reference to other science fiction novels like John Ringo and Tom Kratman's Watch on the Rhine, or for that matter mainstream fiction like George Robert Elford's The Devil's Guard, which certainly seem germane to such a discussion.

Still, if the book's coverage of the subjects could have been more comprehensive, what it does cover it treats in detail, and is more than ample to make the point--and leave me convinced (as I was, after reading Sadkovich) that what we all think we know about a very large part of the war (the biggest part of it) may need to be rethought. It leaves me convinced, too, that much more may remain to be said about this most seemingly exhausted of subjects.

Clive Ponting's 1940 and its Critics

It seems a common criticism of Clive Ponting's 1940: Myth and Reality that he repeats facts that everyone knows. (Even Angus Calder, whom I would have expected to be more sympathetic, also makes it in his own Myth of the Blitz, a book which has its virtues but which also surprised and disappointed me in forcefully coming out for the myth that, as he himself owns, he once sought to debunk.)

This strikes me as a matter of picking a fight where there is none, since Ponting makes no claims about bringing new facts to light. It also strikes me as unintentional confirmation of Ponting's making a well-founded case. And that it is commonplace gives the impression that people are straining to find support for a negativity coming from other places. (Calder, alas, is a literary critic doing history, and one not wholly unaffected by the fashions of his day, as he shows when in Blitz he cites "death of the author"-flogging postructuralist Roland Barthes, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the book came down on the side not of a reading of the facts, but of myth over fact. Groan.) Often they are pushing a blatant political agenda. (After all, his becoming a public figure as a Falklands War whistleblower did not exactly endear him to many opinionmakers; while then and now debunkers of myth like 1940 can only expect the hostility and contempt of the orthodox.)

Yet, that he is up against such prejudices is proof of how necessary his book has been--and perhaps, even more necessary now as the myth he criticized fills our movie screens once more, shaping the views of credulous moviegoers who get what little history they have from such content and nowhere else.

Review: 1940: Myth and Reality, by Clive Ponting

Reading Clive Ponting's World War II history Armageddon it seemed to me that its value lay not in its bringing new facts to light, but rather in his attentiveness to those facts that do not fit in with the conventional wisdom; in his gathering them together and recognizing that they add up to a quite different picture from the one we normally get--less romantic and less comfortable for many, but where Ponting succeeds, also more nuanced and truthful.

So does it go with his more tightly focused study, 1940: Myth and Reality. The conventional wisdom among Britons (and I suppose, the English-speaking world generally) regarding that fateful year is that, following the final demise of the appeasement-minded and incompetent Chamberlain government, a united Britain, brilliantly led, tough, resolute, singlehandedly holding off the Nazi juggernaut at its seeming peak, and in so doing saving the world.

The image Ponting presents is instead of a Britain that was a shell of its former self in economic terms--its industry too puny and obsolescent after many decades not just of American and German expansion but its own slipping competitiveness to support its war needs, its once fantastic financial might depleted (by failures in other areas, by world war, by Depression). It was also badly overstretched militarily, even before the war. Meanwhile the half-hearted and incompetent leadership did not end with the replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill in the Prime Ministership, let alone the broader elite, which had rather more sympathy for the extreme right-wing government they were facing than is usually admitted, while Winston Churchill's oratory, another myth in itself, fell far short of bringing together a country deeply divided and in some quarters deeply alienated (class mattered, mattered greatly), and contact with the terror of the Luftwaffe (the fight against which was in ways very badly mismanaged) produced defeatism as well as defiance. A far cry from the legend, it was a far narrower thing than people would like to remember, in any event Britain quickly ceased to be able to rely on its own resources (already dependent on imports from, among other places, Germany, for its rearmament in the late '30s, and on the edge of insolvency by 1941, after which only American support let it continue), and it fell to the combined industrial and military might of the United States and the Soviets to not just finish the job, but do most of it in the four and a half long years that followed the end of 1940, as Britain went from great power to client state.

Ponting's argument adds up to a satisfactorily comprehensive, alternate image of 1940, satisfactorily grounded in the indisputable facts of the situation--as I am now even more convinced after grappling with a good deal more of the history in trying to explain Britain's rise and decline as a great power myself.1 And while by the time I came to the book I had already encountered not just the bulk of the facts but most of what he had to say about them, his fluency in his subject, and in conveying it, made it far and away the most striking summing up of what they mean, while being highly accessible. Meanwhile, with the myth of 1940 he tackles perhaps stronger than ever (not only in the fashion for politically convenient historical revisionism, but the way the neverending stream of movies selling the myth has recently overflooded its banks, with Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour and the rest), his debunking of misconceptions that are not only wrong but dangerous remains at least as relevant now as it was when Ponting first published it.

1. This was the subject of my recent paper "Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity," which you can read over at SSRN.

Review: Armored Champion: The Top Tanks of World War II, by Steven J. Zaloga

Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2016, pp. 336.

Armored Champion is Steven J. Zaloga's recent assessment of the "best" tanks of World War II, or more precisely, the 1918-1945 period (since the interwar era gets pretty fair coverage). Still, the volume affords much more than a mere "best of" list. Zaloga opens the book with an extraordinary overview of the key characteristics of tanks from the standpoint of conference in the period with which he is concerned, between 1918 and 1945--the properties that make for the combination of firepower, protection and mobility. He discusses not just the importance of the caliber of a gun, for example, but its length of barrel, the merits and demerits of various kinds of ammunition (with regard not only to individual performance in specific situations, but availability), steel penetration at given ranges, and fire control systems; not just the millimeter thickness of a piece of armor plate, but discussion of its sloping and hardening, and the distribution of such plate around the tank; not just the horsepower ratings of engines, and top road speeds, but details of power trains and suspension systems. He also looks beyond all these to such less noted but still essential matters as communications and layout.

Proceeding beyond the assessment of individual vehicles in the narrow sense he also affords the reader a fair grounding in the realities of tank combat (engagement ranges in different terrain, on the proportion of hits scored to shots fired, on where those hits strike the tank, on the odds of their doing damage); and the ways in which the assessment varies by level (what may seem best to an individual tanker not necessarily so from the standpoint of a whole army forced to compromise between quantity and quality). All of this is supported with numerous concrete examples, diagrams and statistical tables. He gets into the ways in which single tank designs have been inconsistent--the excellent T-34 suffering from qualitative problems amid the chaos of the early, disastrous phase of the Soviet-German war before the tank factories got their house in order, raised their productivity and upgraded the product. And all the way through he is mindful of the way the state of the art continuously changed, the "world-beater" of 1939 hopeless on the battlefield by the war's end.

Impressive as Zaloga's broader discussion is, he carries over the same meticulousness into the period-by-period and theater-by-theater assessments that comprise the bulk of the book, not only in the level and variety of detailing in his discussion of different tanks, but the disparity between the tanker's view and the commander's view according to the swiftly evolving state of the art. Admittedly the coverage of the really fine points of the subject is not equal throughout, some tanks getting deeper coverage than others (with the T-34 an obvious and very understandable example given its lengthy and critical role). Still, let me put it this way: if someone were planning to design a World War II-themed strategy game, and they needed to work out formulas for calculating the results of engagements among different kinds of armored forces, this book would offer an excellent start. Yet, precisely because of his comprehensive yet extremely accessible explanation of so many of the basics, the book is not just a useful resource for those interested in the minutiae of the subject, but an excellent introduction to the subject of tank warfare generally.

Writing on the Post-1945 History of the Royal Navy: A Few Thoughts

Originally posted on RARITANIA on March 8, 2016.

Looking into the subject of British military history, one is quickly struck by how little of it is devoted to the post-1945 period, and this clearly applies to the British Navy. There are books about particular episodes--for instance, quite an outpouring of works on the Falklands War. There are also quite a few studies of smaller subjects, especially in the academic, think tank-type specialist literature, like the development of Britain's sea-based nuclear deterrent.

However, more comprehensive treatments are scarce. In contrast with the norm for other subjects, where authors tend to get more precise and prolific the closer they get to our own time, general histories of British naval power (as with Paul Kennedy's generally excellent The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery) tend to cover the post-war period in just a few broad strokes. And books specifically attempting a comprehensive treatment of the Royal Navy's evolution in this time--its transition from a superpower-level force to something more expected of a mid-sized West European country--are downright rare in contrast with those about the age of sail, the Victorian era, the world wars.

Of course, a familiarity with the biases of the field--such as Jeremy Black has noted--affords one explanation. As he noted, the tendency among historians has been to concentrate on the premier forces, and the biggest and best-known wars.

After 1945, the Royal Navy ceased to be the world's premier force, a distant second to the United States Navy, and then a third to the Soviet Navy--with the two other navies not only larger, more lavishly equipped and more active in world affairs, but setting the pace of technological and tactical developments. And of course, even in writing about those two navies, there has been nothing to compare with the global conflagration of 1939-1945.

Instead there is the Royal Navy enduring round after round of defense reviews and budget cuts and endless retrenchment driven by economic weakness and the declining legitimacy of imperial and martial ideals at home and abroad, while being outsized and outclassed by a growing number of foreign forces; and in the meantime carrying on with innumerable operations of smaller scale and consequence, short on the more conventionally "dramatic" and "exciting" actions (like surface actions), and these apt to be on the fringes of larger events (as in the Yangtze incident), in support of another, leading actor (as in Korea) or even ending in frustration (as in Suez).

Black noted, too, that historians tend to favor operational history and biography--and one might add to this that, dry as many find history, a romanticized view of war and a nationalistic sensibility can and does affect what historians choose to write about. With nothing here quite comparable to a Trafalgar, or even a Cape Matapan; and still less the figure of a Nelson, or even a Jackie Fisher; this leaves it an even less attractive subject. Indeed, the tale of the dismantling of Britain's world power status, with all its controversies and frustrations and humiliations (epitomized by the Suez affair, by Harold Wilson's having to eat his words about Britain being a world power and influence or nothing in the wake of the pound's devaluation), still relatively fresh in the memory, is far less appealing from such a standpoint than the empire's rise--cause for lament rather than triumphalism (out of which Correlli Barnett has made a career).

Additionally, in contrast with earlier periods, like the early twentieth century when the prospect and actuality of war with Germany dominated British strategic thinking, a study of the Royal Navy in the post-war era lacks a convenient center, leaving it all the more diffuse. Decolonization meant numerous separate conflicts, interacting with each other and with the Cold War--with a discussion of these made all the harder by how, for much the same reasons given above, many of the smaller conflicts that need to be taken into account have been only slightly covered. (Despite the salience of the subject given today's politics, how much time has English-language historiography given the war in Aden?)

However, whatever one makes of the cause, the neglect is unfortunate. Whatever else one may say, the Royal Navy was not just the world's second or third-largest navy for the second half of the twentieth century (and West Europe's largest), but globally active in a period that saw the "closing shop" of the biggest colonial empire in history, and the Cold War. The legacies of these actions and events, from the South Atlantic to South Asia, remain very much with us, and just as they are part of the Royal Navy's history, so are they part of its history. Additionally, the story of that navy's accommodation to Britain's reduced circumstances is well worth considering in itself, as precedent and parallel to other developments (for instance, the contraction and recovery of the Russian navy after the Cold War, so much in the news now).

Naturally, while recently giving so much attention to the larger picture of post-war Britain while completing my recent writing on James Bond (whom you will remember is a British naval officer), I had recourse to what has been written. And the most satisfying book on this subject I have encountered so far has been Eric Grove's Vanguard to Trident, reviewed here.

Review: Rigor Mortis, by Richard Harris

Originally posted on RARITANIA on May 24, 2018.

Contemporary fiction is prone to beat us over the head with overdrawn pictures of elite prowess, not least in regard to its depiction of workers in scientific and technological fields. Just as the billionaire is invariably brilliant and hyperarticulate (what a far cry from real life!), the scientist is always superhumanly lucid and meticulous.

Just how superhuman the depictions are, how removed from the human reality they are, is made all too clear by Richard Harris' recent book, Rigor Mortis. The field of medicine, Harris argues, has seen much smoke and no fire in the endless announcement of imminent breakthroughs that somehow never materialize. Where computer science has "Moore's Law," describing the geometric growth and cheapening of computing power, medical science has the reverse--"Eroom's Law," in which progress toward treatments and cures has slowed in equally dramatic fashion in a textbook case of futurehype, even as we remain in a very early phase of the battle against disease. (Harris informs us that of some 7,000 known diseases, only 500 have treatments, and the treatments of many of those "offer just marginal benefits" (3).)

Harris gives us to understand that this is a function of the publication of enormous volumes of intriguing experimental results that, somehow, other scientists are incapable of reproducing--a "crisis of reproducibility" suggestive of the field drowning in low-quality research. Just how bad is it? To take a significant example, John Ioannidis' survey of tens of thousands of papers on genomics reporting genetic links to particular diseases--98.8 percent of those results irreproducible, forcing one to conclude that they are false positives (132).

This problem is, partially, a matter of the maddening complexity of biological systems--the sheer difficulty of controlling for single variables in the way we are all taught in the third grade science is supposed to do. As Harris' ancedotes demonstrate the slightest difference in the choice of experimental apparatus, or lab procedure, can skew the results. (Not only is the gender of the mouse in question relevant, but so is that of the scientist who picked them up, given the stress reactions of mice to male rather than female handlers.)

However, the roots of "Eroom's Law" run a good deal deeper than that. It is partly a matter of educational failures--of medical researchers not getting a proper grounding in the deeper intellectual foundations of science (the scientific epistemology, sheer old-fashioned logic), or the use of statistics. Moreover, rather than lab work being a matter of standardized best practice, it remains a matter of individual craft, acquired by way of apprenticeship. All of this makes the design of experiments and the interpretation of their results sloppier, in ways ranging from inadequate sample sizes to the failure to properly "blind" studies, opening the door to the influence of the results by researchers' biases--with such problems afflicting perhaps three-quarters of the studies examined by the Global Biological Standards Institute.

It is also a matter of institutional failings that worsen the problem. There is the scarcity of genuine, academic research positions, and even for those who can land research positions, funding for the actual research work. (Colleges don't pay for it. "Get a grant, serf!"--to quote recent Nobel laureate Jeffrey Hall--is the prevailing attitude.) One result is the intensification of the competition not just for positions (let alone tenure and promotion) but for grant money far beyond what is good for the field. Scientists might spend half their time writing grant applications--a devotion of time, thought and energy that would be far better utilized in the actual research. The difficulty of raising suitable sums also encourages the cutting of corners to stay within one's budget--among the results of which scientists have not always taken the trouble to properly check their cell lines (an epic of scientific blundering in itself), and become overly reliant on the pool of underemployed, ill-paid "postdocs" left by the scarcity of research positions as cheap but inexperienced scientific labor. Additionally, with the premium on being first rather than on doing it right; on the Next Big Thing; there is a tendency to rush to conclusions, and play those up. (One study found that the use of superlatives like "unprecedented" in the opening sections of scientific papers shot up a staggering 15,000 percent between 1974 and 2014 (191).) Mixed in with all this is an increasing temptation to fudge, if not fabricate and falsify (187), about which no one can be complacent.

Of course, the great virtue of the scientific method is that it has a mechanism for self-correction built in--but the current situation undermines the mechanisms by which this happens. The failure to reproduce experiments does not easily register within the field's collective consciousness. One reason is that journal publishers (a multi-billion dollar business), and unavoidably career-minded scientists, are encouraged by all these circumstances to attend to the next thing (they hope, that Next Big Thing) rather than revisit old work. The journals' editors are uninterested in the repetition of experiments to check old findings, especially when they have negative results. They also make the retraction of invalidated findings difficult (journals charging thousands of dollars for this), while by the time it happens, a good deal of damage might have been done, the work cited hundreds of times already by other researchers in other papers--building on that flawed foundation. Besides, the intensified career pressures exacerbate the resistance to admitting prior research failures, or calling out those of others (who might be in a position to pass judgment on one's next grant proposal). Accordingly, even though it seems that much or most of what is out there ought to be retracted, this happens with just 0.02 percent of papers in a given year. (It might be noted, too, that pharmaceutical manufacturers have "whittled away their own research departments," leaving them without alternatives to the troubled academic system as a source of leads (227).)

The cult of specializaton also feeds into this, by reducing the chance for outside views, fresh thinking and greater perspective. And the problem is not relieved but worsened by the revolutionary changes in scientific tools--the weakness in statistical analysis taking its toll as medical research becomes more quantitative, and increasingly deals with "Big Data" like everything else.

All that said, Harris is optimistic--arguing that the problem is at least better publicized than it was before, and that reformers are taking steps to correct the problem. There is a broader development of "meta-research" (such as that conducted by the aforementioned Ioannidis), examining the difficulties of research itself and searching for solutions to it, and limited but real efforts to create standards where none existed before.

I can only judge Harris' book as an outsider to this world. Still, his case strikes me as a formidable one, lucidly argued, and amply supported by scholarly as well as journalistic research. The bigger problem of low productivity in this area of research is undeniable, and Harris is quite persuasive in his pointing to the factors that are leading to that crisis of reproducibility. Moreover, for all that he presents his argument in a highly accessible fashion--the most general knowledge of biology and academic research sufficient to follow it along.

Still, one could argue that if he points to the problems, the full story is even larger than the one he tells. While Harris does not actually claim anything of the kind, his book can still lead one to think that the only problem is a broken academic research system, when arguably there are a whole host of others--from the more intrinsically difficult nature of the problems on which scientists are now working (admittedly, he does acknowledge the Big Data issue), to the ways in which the patent system frustrates the creation of potentially helpful new drugs. Moreover, where this particular problem is concerned, the book's stress on the scientist in the lab can seem to slight the other factors in the situation. After all, just why is it that scientific education has been weakened in the ways he says? Might the lack of grounding in epistemology and logic that helps lead to those flawed experimental designs not say something else--about the disdain for humanities like philosophy in contemporary culture? For that matter, why is medical research so starved for funding? And might all this be a problem not merely within this field, but across the sciences?

Anyone looking for answers to these parts of a larger story would have to look elsewhere to round it out--while in doing so it would quickly become apparent that not just the problem of maximizing the return on our massive investment in medical research, but the solution to it, is also larger, depending very much on what non-scientists do. Nevertheless, this very worthwhile book deserves a great deal of credit for its account of a key element of the problem.

Review: Listen, Liberal, by Thomas Frank

Originally published on RARITANIA on May 21, 2018.

Thomas Frank's latest book, Listen, Liberal, revisits his longstanding theme of the decline of New Deal liberalism and its implications for the country. However, where previously he concentrated on the rise of "market populism" (One Market Under God), the use of the culture wars as an instrument of right-wing economic policies (What's the Matter with Kansas?), the undermining of the public sector as an effective actor from Reagan on (The Wrecking Crew) and the manner in which, counterintuitively, the right rather than the left made capital out of the very financial crisis that made neoliberal economics appear bankrupt as never before (Pity the Billionaire), here he sets his sights on precisely those whose duty it was to bear liberalism's standard, the Democratic Party. In particular he recounts the turn of the Democratic Party, post-'60s, traced all the way down through the years of Clinton, Bush, Obama to the election of 2016 (when the book first hit print).

According to Frank's history, the party decided circa 1970 that New Dealish, working class politics were passé amid the affluence of the postwar boom, reeling from the working class voters it identified with Archie Bunker and inclined to a countercultural embrace of "cool" urban professionals. By way of figures like Frederick Dutton, the Democratic Leadership Council and the "Atari" Democrats, it allowed itself to be transformed into a party of yuppies who, despite reality being far from the perfect meritocracy that Michael Young once tried to imagine, displayed the worst of the thinking portrayed in that too often overlooked dystopia, epitomized by the self-satisfied meanness of Larry Summers, publicly attributing rising inequality simply to people being "treated closer to the way that they're supposed to be treated"—the withering middle class, the harder-pressed working class, the growing ranks of poor deserving their fates.

As might be expected, Frank's book has its fair share of humor and insight. The book's latter portion is especially strong, eviscerating such buzzwords as "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" (he's not the only one sick of these words thrown about so much and so meaninglessly), and such pieties as micro-finance. More daring still is the book's critique of "woke" neoliberalism (seen in Chapter 11, which has been made available for free on the book's promotional website).

Still, if there is much right with Listen, Liberal, as a larger history the book is not without its weaknesses, alas, not minor ones. Perhaps as a result of Frank's treating the narrative after the '60s, and what precedes it as essentially prologue, his book takes the New Deal—a matter of the extraordinary circumstances of Great Depression, World War, Cold War and post-war boom pushing the center leftward, and that to only a limited degree—as the norm rather than the exception for the Democratic Party. Frank does offer in his opening chapter a forceful and wide-ranging critique of American liberalism's exaltation of expert, technocrat, professional since the Gilded Age, and the elitism and other flaws that have accompanied that exaltation. However, the turn of the liberals from their brief Depression-era flirtation with Marx to psychology, and personal, psychological explanations for large social problems; their hostility to the discussion of power, social class and social alternatives; their haste to declare the Social Question solved, the business cycle tamed and the ills of capitalism cured once and for all by a little social democracy, which stopped far short of the welfare states of Canada or Western Europe; their formal espousal of the "horseshoe theory" which equated the "extremists" of the left with the right, and conduct in line with the "fishhook theory" that had them aligning themselves with the right against the left; all get overlooked here. So does the fact that by the late '30s economic reform had largely run its course, as liberals shifted their attention to other issues, whether the threat from Fascism abroad, or civil rights and civil liberties in the Cold War, concerns which spoke less to the working public than the Wall Street types with whom they aligned themselves (all of which has been very well-covered by those '50s-era social thinkers to which the very title of Frank's book alludes). There was the Great Society in the 1960s, but Vietnam and an overheated economy quickly imposed limits on that. By the 1970s the fading of the memory of the Depression and World War II; the weakening of the left by the militant anti-Communism of the Cold War fishhooking liberals so enthusiastically supported; the economic stagnation that made concessions to working people like the New Deal, or the Great Society, seem less necessary or palatable to those who were better off; freed it to return to its default mode. Indeed, as the Age of Reform gave way to the Age of Neoliberalism, it was not only predictable that the Democrats would lose interest in the lower classes, but that they would go so far in doing so, and in the manner that they did so.

The result is that Frank's book is more effective at chronicling that part of the tale on which it concentrates rather than comprehensively explaining it. However, its strengths at such a chronicle, and still more its vigorous and at times brilliant illumination of parts of what it chronicles, are such that they make it well worth the while, with the response of the Democrats to the book's warnings, and their defeat in 2016, only seeming to confirm his characterization of what has become of American liberalism over this past half century.

Interestingly, I found a work of film criticism picked up for quite different reasons, Peter Biskind's Seeing is Believing, rather helpful in understanding all this. You can read my review of it here.