I Am Charlotte Simmons

I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

A bright girl (Charlotte Simmons) from rural North Carolina goes off to fictional DuPont college, one of the top schools in the United States. There she encounters the prep-school elite that are more concerned with sex and sports than academics. She discovers that her French literature class is conducted in English - and is a popular one for jocks. In the class, she notices a student starts to give a smart answer, then plays dumb jock. The student later hits on her. She resists, but encourages him to not be dumb. (She didn't realize he was a basketball star.)  She switches out of that class and succeeds academically, but becomes disillusioned with the social life. There is plenty of underage drinking and her roommate boots her out in the middle of the night to have sex. She falls to peer pressure with some other girls and attends a frat party. A frat boy comes on to her. She spends time with him, but resists when he tries to get her alone in a room. One more boy, "a dork", comes onto her after running into her at the library and gym.

Despite not trying hard, she has a frat boy, a jock and a nerd all wanting her. They also have some connections to each other. The "dork" is on the newspaper and doing a story related to the frat boy and some bad behavior from the California governor. The dork works as an academic tutor and wrote a paper for the jock. At a tailgate, some boys get in a fight over her. The frat boy ends up stepping him to defend her. She later goes back to thank him. He invites her to an out of town frat formal. There, she ends up getting drunk and having sex with the frat boy. Gossip spreads after that and she feels horrible and loses her friends.

When she goes home for Christmas, she finds that is not home anymore. Her life with the rich kids at school is in a different universe than her rural home life. Her depression is also hitting her, resulting in her being even more distant from her family.

When she returns, her depression hits high gear. She doesn't want to be in her room with the other girls. She can't do much of anything. The dork boy helps save her. She moves in to his apartment (in a non-sexual way). He helps her to improve enough to go to her finals and eventually get mostly out of her depression. Then things flip. The dork tries to spill all beans to a professor regarding the paper he wrote for the jock. However, the professor uses that as an admission of guilt to press charges. Now he is depressed and needs her help. She helps for a bit, but is not as patient as he was. She eventually gets him to read his email and finds that his story about the governor's misdeeds is blowing up and the professor is now willing to drop his charges. As part of this, the frat boy has also become popular in school - but also lost his near-six-figure job.

The novel then jumps to a brief epilogue. The jock has had a career renaissance. He is one of the top players on the team. He is also challenging himself academically. He went against the coach's desires and took an advanced philosophy class. The next semester he challenged himself with even more academically challenging classes. Charlotte is now his girlfriend and has been helping push him to his academic success.

The book is a fairly easy read, but it is long and vulgar. The language is a bizarre combination of profanity and anatomical terms. The characters are mostly caricatures. The only character that experiences real growth is the basketball player who realizes that academics and discipline are valuable - and can improve his on-court performance. The main character spends time stepping out of her zone, but realizes it just made her feel worse. Keeping true to herself is what lead to a better experience. 

The author was a half-century removed from college when he wrote this book. He tried to get some details through research. This was written at a point in time that doesn't exist anymore. Cell phone were just coming into use - but only as phones. Social media was not yet a thing. College athletes still had the mirage of being students and were not yet fully professionalized. The view in the book is already dated. There were also some key details that were just missed. The school had finals after Christmas break. While high schools may do that, almost every college finishes before break. It also stretches credulity that all the "important" guys would be hitting on the same country girl. And would she be so cruel to just ditch the dork (even after telling her family that he was her boyfriend.)  What is the point of a not-quite accurate portrayal of college life with stock characters? Perhaps it is just an exercise in how 70-year old men see college students.

Welcome to the Monkey House

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut (Wikipedia)

This collection of Vonnegut short stories expressed many of the concerns of the day. The "modernization" of society and sexual revolution are key concerns. The titular story deals with a means of birth control that "numbs" people from the waist down to prevent excess reproduction (as an alternative to birth control.) 

Other ones that stuck was a story about a man with a lot of inherited wealth that lived as a pauper. He didn't want to use his wealth because working as a jazz pianist at a dive club provided him great joy. Another was about an anti-agining serum and a family that fought against each other in regards to the constantly changing will of grandpa.

There are a number of interesting stories in the collection. Vonnegut was a great short story writing.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

High frequency stock traders will pay enormous amounts to shave small fractions of a seconds off of electronic communication time. Some of this could be beneficial for computer technology if they were willing to contribute back to open source projects. Alas, they like to keep their work very secret. After all, speed helps them to make make money. By being crazy fast they can perform time-base arbitrage, acting on changes in prices in one location before they have changed in another. They even brag about the benefits of ultra-fast speed, even when it does not benefit them. High frequency traders can use the speed to "get in between" a buyer and seller, making near riskless profits.
Flashboys covers a few somewhat related stories. In one, Sergey Aleynikov was arrested by the FBI and tried for "stealing" valuable source code from Goldman Sachs. This was portrayed as an incompetent witch hunt. He had uploaded code to a public SVN repo, with little attempt to hide his activity. (He could have easily walked away with all the code on a USB thumb drive.) The code he had was a mixture of open source code with the code written at the company. There was very little of the "secret sauce" from the company. He had been somewhat disgruntled that he had been unable to contribute back to the open source community. There were multiple attempts to make him an "Example". However, it seemed that there was no real damage done. (Lewis likens his activity to keeping a notebook of meetings at a job.)
The other story is about high frequency trading. There is the story of a cable from Chicago to New York built at great cost to be straighter to save a few fractions of a second off the time it takes a signal to travel. There are a few other stories about people that worked to help colocate near exchanges to be super fast.
The bulk of the story focuses on Brad Katsuyama, his experience at RBC and the people he brought together to create IEX. He gradually "uncovered" some of the oddities of high frequency trading. He got together a bunch of idealists to help create an exchange that would be immune to some HFT trading abuses. He identified some issues, such as high frequency traders taking advantage of the time it takes an order to reach different exchanges. IEX tried to prevent this by adding delays. They identified many of other bits of challenges. One thing they identified was the constant regulation/loophole loop. It seems that abuses in the financial system are enabled by previous regulation. The previous regulation was created to eliminate a previous abuse. And the path keeps going back.
The book does not go into great detail explaining high frequency trading. It does mention the great sums of money they are willing to pay for programmers and for speeds. Some have bragged about not ever losing money in a day's trading. The assumption is that they can make a few fractions of a cent in a few fractions of a second and just multiple that into real money without other noticing they have lost.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

In boomerang, Michael Lewis explores some of the sovereign players in the financial markets meltdown of 2009. He plays up the country stereotypes. Iceland is populated by men that do not listen to their wive.s After conquering the fishing industry, they figure they must be naturally gifted at investment banking also. Greek are loners who think everyone else is cheating, so must cheat themselves. The Irish had always suffered, yet they had a rapid economic turnaround. They guaranteed all banks, leaving each long-suffering Irishman with a huge share of debt.
One of the final discussions deal with California and local governments. Arnold Schwarzenegger thought he had a mandate to fix things. However, he discovered that people and politicians simply wanted a lot of services and don't want to pay for them. Thus there is a lot of future debt and a willingness to shift things to local governments. These governments end up spending hugs amounts paying for their current and former employees. Thus cities like San Jose can't afford to staff new community centers. Vallejo couldn't afford anything and ended up bankrupt.
Alas governments are just behaving like individuals who go into debt to pay for things later.

Boomerang

People of the world have transformed into gluttons. They are getting fatter and finding themselves more and more in debt. (Part of this may be due to centuries of "scarcity" that have left man hard-wired to accumulate everything he can.) This seems like an individual problem, right?

Well, in Boomerang, Michael Lewis shows that the same problems appear in government. He rights in a fast paced anecdotal narrative style that helps bring home the issue he "accidentally" discovered. Governments themselves are over-leveraging themselves. They are using debt to provide an increasing numbers of services This leaves them susceptible to massive failures.

The book presents case studies of some of the biggest government economic collapses. They seem to have occurred for a number of different reasons, though all seem to come back to the "money for nothing."

The graft bubble: Greece collapsed under a huge volume of debt. It has a huge public sector that is significantly overpaid. People in the private sector (and in general for that matter) feel it is their civic duty to cheat on taxes. Thus income is low, while expenses are ridiculously high. The public sector tends to be very inefficient. (An anecdote is that it would be cheaper to just pay for everybody's taxi fare than to run the Greek railroad.) Workers can also retire early. Is it a wonder this system lasted as long as it did?

The banking bubble: Iceland had a different type of failure. The country was for the most part well run. However, the Icelandic people discovered investment banking. The banking sector sprouted overnight and led to a run up of the currency. People discovered that they could borrow foreign currency and thus get things for cheap as the Icelandic crown appreciated against the foreign currency. Alas, the run up was built on a large number of not-well-researched investments in the banking sector. When the banks collapsed, they brought down the currency with it.

The property bubble: Ireland also had a banking collapse. However, there banks were primarily investing in development of Irish real estate. The loans were given out liberally. Real Estate prices were skyrocketing upwards. Jobs were plentiful and people felt rich. Then they realized that supply outstripped demand. Everything dried up at once. The government stepped in to bailout the banks. And the country continued to inch along.

He also provides cases in the United States. Vallejo California declared bankruptcy. The salaries of police and fireman overwhelmed the budget. (While the workers probably appreciated the generous pay, they also felt disillusioned with the union for taking things to extreme. They would almost rather see a stable city with more officers at slightly less pay.)

Vellejo's problems are symptomatic of California and the United States. Arnold Schwarzenegger was voted in as governor with a mandate to fix California's mess. However, his proposals floundered in the legislature. When he put them directly to the people, they were voted down again. People love getting as many services as possible, but don't want to pay for them. Thus, they have an income tax that depends heavily on high taxes on the very rich. (If the hollywood movie stars and silicon valley billionaires decide to take a hike, the state is pretty much dead.) Employee pensions consume a huge amount of the budget. Generous welfare policies are in place. The state has even been required to spend huge amounts of money to improve the condition of the prisons. (The same prisons where prison guards can make an easy fortune.)

The strange budgeting leaves cities like San Jose with brand new libraries - but no money for books or staff.

The United States itself seems to be living on borrowed time. The government is dysfunctional and debt is piling up. New benefits are being added, but the revenue to support them are lagging. Should the government collapse, a lot of the world economy will go down with it. Could we be in the stage before the new dark ages?