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I’m late to link to this, but here are my Book Thoughts on Liftoff by Eric Berger, which is about the early years of SpaceX:

I picked up this book to better understand how big leaps forward in hard tech innovation happen, but as I got to the end, including the annecdote above, all I could think about is whether or not history is contingent.

I didn’t put this in the Book Thoughts post because it somehow felt out of place, but here are the factors that seemed most essential to SpaceX’s success (not necessarily in order):

• Have a big mission. This helps to pull in talent in a way that smaller projects don’t

• Be as iterative as possible in taking on technical challenges. Your speed of failure is inversely correlated to your speed of learning. In a way, the culture of tight deadlines at SpaceX helped with this because it forced the organization to learn from reality rather than debate.

• Either buy things off the shelf or make them yourself. If you try and find a middle ground between off the shelf and fully customized, you risk getting neither of the benefits.

• Early customers are in many ways investors. They need to be treated as such, since they’re likely to not get the full benefit of your company existing.

Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, is a classic book about trust and society. As a part of my obsession with trust, I felt like I had to read it. The book, which was published in 2000, is about the decline of social trust in the United States. I didn’t find it to be dated — if anything, I think the additional distance from the publish date helped the book. From the vantage point of 2022, I felt like the book previewed some of the challenges that lay ahead of American society when the book was written and was detailed enough to help me hypothesize about how trends since 2000 may or may not have continued since then. It’s a classic for a reason!

So what leads people to have trust in their community and society? The book isn’t as explicit here as I wish it would be, but far as I can tell, though, the critical factors are:

• Having relationships with people in the community; spending informal time together, having both close friends and friendly faces in the crowd; in everyday life, this looks like things like game nights, card games, social dinners, church attendance, and yes, bowling leagues

• Feeling agency over how the community is organized; in particular, joining in a group activity with other people to solve a community problem seems to be a particularly powerful contributor to trust; in everyday life, this looks like things like club membership, running for office, serving in a volunteer group 

Trust in the United States has been falling pretty steadily since the late 1960s.

Putnam makes a convincing case that this is not just people changing the way they answer a survey question, but a general decline in social capital. Across almost every dimension he studies — church membership, bowling leagues, running for office, formal involvement in volunteer groups (like the Lions club), sports leagues, volunteering at local charities, dinner parties, you name it — Americans are less involved and less trusting by the end of the 1990s than they were in 1960s.

Moreover, this pattern holds across different groups. People with more education are more likely to be involved and trusting than people with less education, but both cohorts are less involved and less trusting than they were 30 years ago. Same with race, gender, and income. It really is striking how many different cuts of data tell basically the same story — a decline in trust and participation starting in the late 1960s.

The one exception to this trend of declining participation are social activities that can be done alone. So as an example, people don’t join a local volunteer group, they write a check to an issue based organization; they don’t join a bible study, they are spiritual at home. Individual activities, however, don’t create trust.

So where is all this trust going? The book makes the case that there are four factors worth considering:

So where do we go from here?

First, from the vantage point of 2022, I have a hard time not seeing a lot of the trends outlined by Putnam getting worse. Based on what Putnam said about the impact of TV on participation, it’s hard to imagine that social media and online gaming have made the situation better. Add to this the pandemic, which broke the habits of engagement for many people, and it’s easy to see how people might start to feel like the world is spiraling out of control for them. I would predict this to continue in the near term!

The one silver lining I see is that I feel like the pandemic and shift to remote work has made it significantly easier to create social capital online. In an additional chapter from the 2020 version of the book, Putnam discusses the potential impact of the internet on social capital and posits that it will be good for organizing, but bad for creating relationships that lead to meaningful change. Based on my experience, I think that this was true before 2020, but sometime during the pandemic, it shifted. Since about mid-2020, I’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of professional relationships I have with people I’ve never met in person (even outside of my current company); a handful of these people have become legitimate friends. This feels like something I’ll have to learn how to cultivate through the rest of my career.

Second, reading this book has made me feel more strongly that we should be nudging young adults towards civic service and potentially even have mandatory/highly encouraged civic service programs. Based on the generational replacement chapter, it seems likely to me that one’s habits towards trust and civic participation are set somewhere between the ages of 18-28, so nudging people towards service during this time in their life should pay dividends for years to come.

Third, it became clear to me while reading this book that I needed to have a personal social capital plan in the same way that I have an exercise routine and other personal health habits. Finding both informal ways and formal ways to be a part of the community matter for individual happiness as well as community outcomes and I should be intentional in how I invest in it. Ideally civic leaders would latch onto this message and start to reinforce it within the communities they lead.

Finally… at some point while reading this book and looking at all of the charts where things go sideways starting between 1968 and 1974, I started to think of this chart of productivity in the United States.

Could there be a relationship between declining trust and declining productivity? At least at an intellectual level, this makes sense: if more trust allows two people or four people to be more productive together, why wouldn’t more trust allow a society to be more productive?

Interestingly, whilte Putnam does discuss the importance of trust to economic productivity and he shows a lot of charts, he never shows this one. Even more interesting, while I’ve seen a lot of musings about the causes of the Great Stagnation, I’ve never seen anyone put forward declining social trust as an explanation; it doesn’t mean it’s not out there, but I’m surprised that I haven’t run into it. I’d like to do more reading here!

1:  An alternate version of this book is the self help version – Bowling Alone: Why the key to health and happiness is cultivating friendships and community involvement
2: wonder if this means that some of the nostalgia for an earlier American age is in fact driven by a longing to return to a higher trust society? Another interesting question is whether more social conformity / segregation is needed to create higher levels of social capital; I’m not sure I agree but would love to see data.
3: This is where I hear a voice in the back of my head saying “after the defeat of Carthage, the Romans became complacent and decadent…”
4: It’s interesting to imagine how more flexible work arrangements could change this.

Inspired by my recent favorite podcast The Rest is History, I finally read the copy of The Gallic Wars that I had lying around. It is Julius Caesar’s account of conquering the various peoples of Gaul and bringing their territory firmly under Roman rule.

The book is surprisingly readable and relatable, even two thousand years later. The fact that it was Caesar’s own account of his campaigns is really fantastic. Even though you can’t take it all at face value, how often, even in the modern era do we have a first hand account from someone of Caesar’s stature?

I love the fact that Caesar wrote these accounts in order to raise his own status in Rome. The image that came to mind for me are the giant status updates that teams send inside of tech companies to keep everyone up-to-date on project status and build momentum. Julius Caesar was literally doing this!!! And he became dictator for life!

Caesar comes across as charismatic. His ability to project confidence and rally his teams despite the odds ahead of them is compelling. You can see why the men wanted to follow him. He both pushed them and related to them. Like a character from The Sopranos or The Wire, you root for him despite the human cost of his actions. He claims to have killed a million Gauls. Historians consider this to be an exaggeration… but still, this is who you find yourself rooting for!

The high point of the book is the Siege of Alesia, where the Romans surround their foe Vercingetorix in Alesia and then put a wall around their siege in order to hold off the force that had been sent to relieve Alesia. Absolutely astounding and not the sort of thing that works out for a lesser general. If you’ve never heard of this, take the time to read the wikipedia article. It’s worth it.

Vercingetorix is a tragic figure in his own right. His appeals to liberty and self rule resonate today. He is clearly a talented leader, going toe-to-toe with Caesar. And yet he comes on a little too late and is not quite able to unify the Gallic tribes enough to prevail. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a novel / movie / Netflix show made from his perspective yet.

I’m not a military historian, but I was struck by how often Caesar created advantages for himself by showing up places where his enemy didn’t expect him to be or by understanding what his enemy was going to do via intelligence. He also does a great job of weighing the cost of inaction — frequently the risks he takes are due to his assessment that delaying an engagement is an even greater risk.

Despite the readability, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re already interested in the topic. I am a total dork for Roman history and I still got lost in the names of tribes, commanders, and local rulers.

I picked up House of Broken Angels as another stop on my literary tour of California, but after reading it, I wouldn’t call it a California book. It’s a San Diego book, through and through. I’m not sure how it reads to someone who hasn’t lived here, but even as a relatively new resident, I recognized places and neighborhoods.

House of Broken Angels is the story of two half brothers, both named Angel, of a man from Tijuana as the elder Angel (Big Angel) nears death from cancer. The two Angels wrestle (figuratively and literally) with each other’s and their father’s sins, as do the rest of their families. It’s a book about how short life is and about how frail humans are.

The other thing that places this book in San Diego is the connection the characters have to Tijuana, where the main character immigrated from. The two cities, just 20 miles a part, share an economic and social relationship. They mayors regularly meet with each other. Now that I live here, this seems obvious, but it surprised me at first.

The book brings the relationship between the two cities to life. The Angels’ father is from Tijuana, but immigrates to San Diego when he leaves his first wife (Big Angel’s mom) for his second wife (Little Angel’s mom). When I lived in Europe, one of my favorite things were the border regions where cultures bled into each other. The Italian part of Switzerland, which feels like both Italy and Switzerland, the northern part of Spain, the feels both Spanish and French. San Diego has elements of that. This book the way that people, relationships, and culture move back and forth across the border.

To me, the best part about this book was the way that it approached the end of life, the yearning for one more Christmas morning, and regret over mistakes. The other thing I’ll take from it is some understanding of the Mexican-American San Diego experience.