Reader Review: The Checklist Manifesto

This review was submitted by reader Josh Vogel. Please submit book reviews to metaist.blog@gmail.com.

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Review
The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande, is a manager's guide to making the professionals under his charge play at the top of their game. Throughout the book, Gawande stresses that checklists have a place in every business sector, from aviation, to finance, and, his main emphasis, in the operating room of a hospital. He goes to great lengths to show the successes checklist implementation has accomplished in often short periods of time.

Perhaps the most appealing part of this book is the points Gawande makes about how a checklist is for everyone at every stage of their career. The need for checklists, Gawande says, is especially true for those who have excelled in their positions and feel that they are infallible and do not need to rely on such checks during their normal work routines. The book further stress the point that checklists are an inexpensive tool to implement that can result in large rewards both physical and financial. Gawande also does an excellent job of detailing how to correctly implement a checklist in a corporate/hospital setting, promoting top-down support of the project and placing the responsibility for its use in the hands of those least involved, (i.e. nurses, etc).

Towards the end of the book, Gawande does become a little redundant in his message. While he does cover it somewhat, more time could have been spent reviewing the need for checklists in today's world, bringing more evidence for failures that occur as a direct result of not having a checklist in place. Nevertheless, Gawandes writing style is easy to read and eloquent, wasting no words and making his points clear. Gawande is on to something and using his ideas can produce dramatic results with little cost involved.

Josh Vogel is a Candidate for the Master of Public Health at Boston University School of Public Health.

Review text licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Additional editing by The Metaist.

Review: Mint.com

Summary
Mint.com is a website for managing your bank accounts, loans, and retirement funds. For the deeply paranoid, it's a conspiracy to gather all of your banking information that is already available online in another place online.

It starts when you notice their cool green color and refreshing taste.
(Photo: stankuns at Flickr)

Review
Mint.com is relatively new (since 2006), yet amazingly popular.

As I see it the main benefits of Mint.com are:

• Transactions - All your transactions across all your accounts (almost; some banks aren't supported). This includes things like your checking, savings, CDs, credit cards, loans, and retirement accounts. It's nice to be able to see them all together and categorize them appropriately.
• Graphs - Being able to easily make visual representations of your spending or the trends of your retirement account is nice.
• Notifications - Mint can notify you about certain important financial moments. For example, they can notify you
  • if your spending seems anomalous (this takes a few months to adjust),
  • when a large purchase clears, or
  • when you are near your credit limit.

Some downsides:

• Small Banks - Even though many institutions are supported, some smaller (e.g., local banks) are not, and there's no way to manually import your data. (Although, they say it's coming "mid-march.")
• Privacy - Mint has a strong privacy policy and many implicitly trust its security model. Nonetheless, it's a little strange to trust one entity with all of your transaction history (*Cough* Google).

On balance, Mint helps people who are interested in their spending habits get a larger picture of their income & expenses.

See Also

• MintLife Blog for personal finance articles that occasionally feature high quality infographics.
• Mint.com at Wikipedia for some other information.
• Want Everyone To See Your Credit Card Transactions? at TechCrunch for a discussion about Blippy-- a twitter-like site that tells everyone what you're buying.

Review: The Autonomy of Mathematical Knowledge

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Review
Curtis Franks' (full disclosure: he's is a friend of mine) PhD-turned-book Autonomy of Mathematics: Hilbert's Program Revisited is an exciting new look at an overlooked aspect of early twentieth century mathematics. Franks' writing is crisp and engaging, as he paints the picture of a man and his philosophy that so many have spurned.

The face of a brilliant mathematician or of a sun-hat enthusiast.
(Photo: Wikimedia)

Commentary
In the 1920's, Hilbert launched a program that was ostensibly aimed at solving the foundational crisis of mathematics-- the issues of paradoxes (e.g., Russell's paradox). The traditional understanding is that Hilbert's program failed because Gödel's incompleteness theorems threw a monkey wrench into any sufficiently sophisticated system that tried to prove itself.

Franks' thesis is that this is a narrow understanding of Hilbert's goals. While Gödel's results did complicate certain endeavors, Franks' suggests that Hilbert was really trying to take back mathematics. That is, certain other endeavors were trying to resolve the foundational crisis by rooting mathematics in some other discipline (e.g., philosophy). Hilbert's goal was to keep mathematics strictly within the realm of mathematics-- a unique feature of the discipline.

The Autonomy of Mathematical Knowledge is admittedly not for everyone (perhaps not even for me)-- about 20% of the book involves theorems I faithfully assume describe what the surrounding text tells me they do. Yet, about 80% of the book is eminently accessible-- the historical context, the epistemic issues, and the attempt to reconstruct a neglected approach combine for a great read.

See Also

• Russell's paradox for our discussion of that issue.
• Computational Theory for Lawyers for our discussion of the issues of intensionality (discussed in the book; not to be confused with intentionality).

Review: Economics in One Lesson

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Review
Economics in One Lesson (PDF version) is an excellent primer to economic thought. If I didn't know that it was published in 1940's, I could easily have assumed that it was a pamphlet discussing the modern financial, automotive, music, or newspaper industries.

The main purpose of the book is expose common economic fallacies that "are at last so prevalent that they have almost become a new orthodoxy" (Hazlitt vii). This is accomplished through two dozen "lessons" that derive from a single lesson summed up by Hazlitt as the essence of economics:

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
(emphasis his; Hazlitt 5)

The Broken Window
The first of the "applied" lessons is based on the parable of the broken window as explained by Frédéric Bastiat.

(Photo: Wikimedia)

What follows is my brief paraphrase of the parable. Imagine a hoodlum throws a brick through a baker's window. The baker runs out of his shop and starts chasing after the rock-thrower, but is unsuccessful. As the baker walks back to his shop, a small crowd of people gather around the his window-less shop. After the customary outrage, someone points out a bright side: some glass-maker just got $200 worth of business. Moreover, the glass-maker can use those $200 to spend on other merchants who, in turn, can spend money on yet other merchants; the flow of money benefits all. The logical conclusion, then, is that the hoodlum should continue to break people's windows for the benefit of society.

If the conclusion sounds strange it is only because the crowd failed to consider the larger picture. While it is true that some glass-maker will receive $200 worth of business, it is also the case that the baker, who started the day with $200 and a window, is now left with only a window. That is, the net worth of society went down by the value of a window; that other windows can be manufactured is irrelevant because had the hooligan not broken the window, the baker would not need a new window.

While it may seem obvious that destruction leads to reduced net-worth, there are many ways of obscuring the destruction to make it more palatable to the masses, and Hazlitt covers many such fallacies in eminently accessibly prose.

The reader is urged to read at least the first two chapters of the book because many future posts will depend on understanding the "Fundamental Lesson of Economics" and it's applications.

Review: I Will Teach You To Be Rich

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Review
Ramit Sethi (that I guy I quote a lot), author of the website IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com, published a book by the same name about personal finance for twentysomethings.

Although I knew the book would not differ much from the content available on his website, it was pleasant to have Ramit's thoughts presented in close proximity to each other rather than spread out across the years I've been following his blog.

Most of his advice revolves around a single theme: stop loosing money by doing nothing. It occurred to me that while in the world of economics, such appeals to opportunity cost are customary, the world of twentysomethings would much rather feel guilty about doing nothing rather than actually figuring out what needs to be done and doing it. (Please pardon the gross oversimplifications; there are many responsible twenty year-olds, but few who think they can do anything about their finances.)

The blog contains much, if not all, of the advice in the book, but the book highlighted three things I had failed to implement (though I read them on the blog). First, I finally took Ramit's advice about negotiation, and negotiated a bill. I clearly have more work to do in that department, but it was good to have a plan of how to approach the conversation, and not feel weird about talking about money. To Ramit's credit, he portrays negotiation as asymmetric warfare: you, a novice in negotiation, are battling with experts who negotiate with people every day. However, you needn't become a Spartan to negotiate effectively. In fact, being pleasant (and smiling) makes it even easier. Negotiation is a fascinating phenomenon in the world of human interaction; it has elements of conflict, optimization and compromise. Each party seeks to optimize results that favor him or her, yet done right both parties can win. A critical part of Ramit's advise is to avoid yes-or-no questions when you really want to ask "how can we make this work?" That one question saved me $180 (over six months) for 2 minutes worth of effort.

The next piece of advise I had failed to implement was to synchronize your bills with your paycheck (to the extent possible). The idea is to have a more predictable and automated flow of money. While I've got much of the flow nailed down, I never thought to change the billing date to a common date; we'll see how this works out over the coming months and years.

Lastly, the book provided a clearer perspective on what it takes to buy a house. Again, this isn't anything that Ramit hadn't said previously about buying a house. It was just easier to focus on his points when I was reading a book (about finance!) rather than reading my daily blogs. The only change in behavior this created was creating a little "dashboard" for important goals. Previously the goals were general (house, travel, etc.); now they are very specific (20% down payment, trip to California, etc.). This small change forced me to also estimate the cost and, by extension, the date of fulfillment of each of the goals. Again, the payoff is mostly psychological, but it helps take down some psychological barriers.

Overall, I recommend this book to most people as an example of how to set up an automatic system that helps alleviate certain kinds of stress. It's an excellent short read and his good humored presentation doesn't hurt either.