How Do You Live? - a 1930s Japanese YA book about progress

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino is a novel aimed at young people released in Japan in 1937 (1). I read it over the past week, and was struck by how many themes in it relate directly to Progress Studies (2). I’d recommend it for people interested in how fiction can be used to inspire big-picture thinking about human progress, especially for ~8-14-year olds.

The vastness and importance of progress: The book explicitly deals with the “vast and marvelous prospect” of human progress across thousands of years. A major moment of growth for the main character is realizing how much he is dependent on the thousands and millions of other people in the world to bring him as simple of things as wool clothes and milk. He is encouraged by his uncle to be a producer, not just a consumer, and is taught by his uncle that the ancient Japanese learned from Greek, Persian, and Indian cultures, and then “the Japanese people, too, advanced the progress of the human race in their Japanese way.”

The difficulty of progress: There is an extended scene where his uncle explains to the main character that the inspiration Newton had in watching an apple fall was not enough - he then had to do the hard work of actually understanding what a falling apple has to do with planetary movement, and formalize it in math. “[T]he things that we call obvious are tricky. When you think about a thing as if it were self-evident and follow it wherever it may lead, soon enough you run into a thing that you can no longer call self-evident.”

The importance of using greatness to improve humanity: Human progress is visualized as a great river. Some people help push that river forward either on purpose or accident. But “there are more than a few who may be called great or heroic, but instead of advancing the flow, they work instead to try to reverse it.” Napoleon is given as an example of someone who, despite his brilliance and determination, “transformed into something harmful to the proper advancement of society.” The main character is admonished to become someone who is both able to achieve greatness, and then willing to channel that greatness into the advancement of humanity.

The beauty of science: The main character thinks of the all the people in the world as a molecules in a vast sea. Schoolkids have debates about the nature of electricity then look up the truth in their textbooks. Scientists like Newton and Copernicus are used as instructive examples for finding out about the world. Throughout, the book stresses the importance of building your own mental models  about how the world works, and then checking those models against reality and work already done by others (though Yoshino doesn’t use this language),

This book is great for understanding how people 90 years ago, in a different culture conceived of progress and communicated it to young people. I could imagine this book being great for American kids to think about progress (as well as character, ethics, and for exposure to literature from other cultures). And I think it serves as a good model for the type of communication that people involved in Progress Studies now could be engaged in (3).

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1. I was introduced to the book because Hayao Miyazaki is currently making a movie of the same name, which is either an adaptation of this book, or features this book as a plot point

2. Progress Studies is a great, recently started intellectual movement aiming, in the words of Jason Crawford, “to understand the causes of human progress, so that we can keep it going and even accelerate it.”

3. Historical aside: The historical backdrop of Japan at the time is fascinating and important to understanding both the story itself and the context in which it was written. As the translator’s note at the end says:

During this time Japan was becoming increasingly militaristic and authoritarian. In 1925, Japan passed the Public Security Preservation Law, making it illegal for anyone to say or write things that were critical of the government. A special branch of the police was created—the Tokko, also known as the “Thought Police.” They spied on political groups and arrested thousands of people for their progressive ideas, especially those interested in socialism and communism.”

The characters in the book push back against this restriction of thought, and the book itself teaches to think for yourself and stand up for what you believe in.

Nuclear power and cross-disciplinarity

Here’s an excerpt from the book Why Nuclear Power Has Been A Flop by Jack Devaney:

When we tried to make the argument for balanced limits to a group of Indonesian nuclear regulators, one member of the group had the honesty to stand up and say ‘I don't care what the problems with coal are. I'm a nuclear regulator. My job is to make nuclear as safe as possible.’ And under the instructions and incentives that he has been given, he's right. Unless these instructions and incentives are changed, horribly unbalanced regulation will continue to be the norm.

This crystalized an insight for me about the importance of thinking at a system level, and cross-disciplinarity.

• If your job incentivizes you to focus on a certain domain (in this case, safety of nuclear energy), then you will focus on doing that thing. 

• You will not focus on how, in the big picture, to achieve the theoretical goal of your work (in this case, safe and reliable electricity production). 

• But your work and theoretical goal are closely connected to work in other domains (in this case, making it difficult to build nuclear plants makes it relatively easier to build coal plants, which kills people)

• Unless someone is explicitly given the job of making trade-offs across domains, nobody will spend much time on it and we will not make the right trade-offs to achieve our goals (they also of course need the authority to ensure their evaluations enact change)

Here’s a running list of examples of where this sort of cross-domain thinking is missing. I’ll add more as I come across them. Let me know if you have additions!

• Energy regulation: tradeoffs between nuclear, coal, solar, etc.

• Pandemic response: Spending resources procuring vaccines vs. enforcing costly lockdowns

• Carbon emissions (management consulting): In management consulting, tradeoffs between doing projects helping oil companies extract oil more efficiently, and spending money on carbon offsets

We can debate what the right tradeoff is on all these issues. But my point is that it doesn’t even seem like anyone in a position of power is responsible for thinking at a system level about how actions in one area affect the other.

Who is responsible and has the authority for making these trade-offs across different highly technical domains of knowledge and expertise? Who is John Galt?

Iowan corn and Kenyan corn

I was back home in Iowa a few weeks ago and was struck by how thickly and greenly the corn grew:

It’s hard to go for a bike ride in West Des Moines without running into at least a little corn

Compare this to Kenyan corn (we call it “maize” here):

Left: Small patch of maize parked between two buildings. Centre: Close up of maize field. Right: Part of field is devoted to other crops like soybeans

My pictures aren’t great, but I still think this visually illustrates lessons about the US vs. the Kenyan economy:

• Crop variety and risk exposure: Iowan corn is monocropped (i.e., only one crop is grown on large tracts of land), while Kenyan farmers always grow many different crops. A major factor in these decisions is ability to mitigate risk: Iowan farmers can buy insurance and sign advance sales contracts to protect themselves in the case of bad yields or price fluctuations. Kenyan farmers don’t have access to those financial instruments, and so rely to a much greater extent on hedging by planting multiple crops. If maize isn’t selling well, then maybe avocados are.

• Scale / farm size: Kenyan farms (average size: <6 acres, with most farmers having ~1 acre) are much smaller than Iowan farms (average size: 355 acres). This means Iowan farmers have more market power, are more easily able to find buyers, and pay less in unit prices for transportation, seeds, fertilizer, etc.

• Access to inputs driving yield: See how big, closely planted, and green that Iowa corn is (1)? It is GMO corn, nourished with lots of environmentally-harmful fertilizer, to be used mostly in animal feed, ethanol, and manufacturing. Kenyan corn is non-GMO (almost all GMO crops are illegal), and farmers don’t have access to as much fertilizer. US annual corn yields are ~4,000 kg/acre, while Kenyan yields are 5x lower at 800 kg / acre (2).

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1. Okay it is a little hard to tell scale in these pictures, and it is later in the season for Kenya than Iowa, but in real life the Iowa corn plants look much larger and healthier to the untrained eye (and I think to the trained eye as well)

2. Kenya bans the importation and growing GMO crops other than cotton. The policy is pretty popular among Kenyan people.

The ban leads to some frustrating situations. Kenyan manufacturers of animal feed are not able to import the cheaper, GMO-grown maize and beans that they process into feed. However, Kenyan farmers are able to import feed from other countries that was made from GMO ingredients. So it is difficult for Kenyan feed manufacturers to compete with imported feed.

Another interesting bit of collateral damage: The lack of access to GMO ingredients makes it difficult for Kenyan feed manufacturers to use futures to hedge their exposure to fluctuations in the prices of their inputs. Feed manufacturers are exposed to risk in non-GMO crop prices, while international futures markets are traded based on GMO crop prices. The GMO and non-GMO prices are not well correlated.

This is not to say that Kenya should allow for GMO crop inputs, just that the ban has unexpected ramifications.