Id like to start this interview by talking about you. I was talking a little more about you but i like the audience to start off honestly in your introduction. You got a note from a professor i believe saying youd never be apolitical scientist, can you talk about that . I put that in the book is i wanted to major in college and it was really torn between going into science and going into the humanities and social science and i finally decided on social science because i found those questions much more interesting and engaging and urgent for me. And in my Political Science course we read all these great political philosophers on up and they were all asking the question what is justice, what is good government, how can you organize government and organize society to make life better for people and particularly to make justice. So i ended up before i decided to become a Political Science major, i already had kind of a lack of confidence in my skills as a humanist for a social scientist because i didnt get very good grades in those courses but i got really good grades in my science and math courses. It was kind of a dilemma area. I dont even rememberwhat the paper was on it you never remember that stuff. You only remember thegrade on the nasty comments. This is an incredible effort to be a political scientist. I actually really, i remember myself as i became a mathematician but one of the reasons, i guess it was a similar dilemma, one of the things i realized in the school i believe was being selftaught about manifest destiny. And as it was like a thing that we believed and i just remember thinking from the perspective of the native americans that found their way across the country, this is not at all a reasonable theory. I justremember being like at least its geometry. But i proved something, i know i approved something and i have to be comfortable with that so i just reduce comfort somehow overwhelmed my interests but i think my interest was there and somehow for you i think it was. I think thats right. And also, i had a uncomfortable moment with what led to this book. For a long time. When i took my firsteconomics course , i remembered this professor put up these graphs on supply and demand curves and said what a beautiful model the market was because its this you believe that everybody believe that it was people buy things depending on the price. And suppliers sell things and at the point where the price is right, this the buyer wants to buy and the buyer seller wants to sell and the markets perfect and it makes everybody happy and i raise my hand and i said this isnt the onlything that people think about. And the professor said thats true but if we make a simplification, we can really reach some powerful conclusions by stripping away all the extraneous stuff and it enjoyed the heck out of me. I agree with you, thats why in college i was like, for exactly the same reason. Its just too many assumptions, i dont believe the assumptions. If they were pure mathematics , thats fine because you believe in this way anyou agree you have a strippeddown product. [inaudle] but what you just said is a sort of bookish questionwhich is i have en thinking through a lot. [inaudible] im not going to repeat what you just said but when you count things you have to strip them of context and thats something that is adeeply human thing, its something we teach our children to do. Though tell us a little bit about the process of classificaon and numbers as a metaphor. That is there key point of my book. I think that we are taught in school that and en by our parents that theres a right answer, that are just having a number word li 1 to 3, but in fact you have to decide what belongs in a group ofthings youre counting. So its a parent puts down a bunch of oranges and apples in front of the kid and says half apples. The kid has to know how that apples from an orange. They have to be taught those rules beforehand. Before they can start count so thats a simple one. Like its easy to teach kids apples and oranges but going to something more interesting , like counting ballots in a election. Somebody has to decide, youre counting votes,thats what we really want to do is count votes but somebodys making a decision before they ev count the votes. Whats a valid blot. It does this ballots me if its a mailin ballot, did you sign in all thright places and somebodys deciding whos voter. Who even gets to cast abt you whos in and whos out, these alwa get made before anybody starts to tally up the number of votes. On the balance. So. If you dont mind medoting on this for a few minutes. Its very profound point, we think of like, i have three children and we think of teaching our children to count and the way of you think you can exercise that fact and two comes after one and three comes after two. Etc. But what your book has done is really rethink that. That in fact thats the easy part. The hard part is the invisible part where were just asking to categorize. It reminds me of one of my favorite numbers that i came up with as a teenager was that when you, when you say broccoli, is it the entire stock or is it the little force at the end. I know thats ridiculous example but that kind of thing, what are these individual hierarchies of nature in this context. And thats what were always asking our sons and daughters to do is to decide what you want in this category isvery very important. Anher example that came up reading your book, im again thinking about this a lot is our, my friend is in taxes, and he does taxes and he thinks from his perspective its like people think that the tax calculation is hard but of course the tax calculation is really easy once you get into income. Just get rid of this and you have this sort of admit your income, once you have the income numbers, the taxcut deletion isreally easy. Thats a negotiation we are constantly doing but i think its a really important point. Do you want to come up with a couple more examples . I do, thats great. I kind of came to this insight when i was reading doctor rose 1626. I want to defend, ive been thinking about these numbers of such a long time but i thought i want to go back and see how whats that moment when you get the inside and i remembered it as a counting book. It starts out one fish two fish, red fishblue fish. And it goes on and on with different kinds of fish. And then theres another person who says high fish low fish. Fast fish slow fish. Not one of them is like another. Go ask your mother. And then i thought, if not one is like another, how do you know that theyre all fish. How do you count them all as fish area and we know and that made me look, everything is unique. And so its only human, we need to group things in order to make sense of our world and think about things. And when you think about it, language does the same thing when we see these words, we keep them for example, we teach them by pointingto my nose , daddys nose. Doggies nose. And my nose doesnt look anything alike and amys nose doesnt look like my nose but they have certain similarities that are meaningful to us adults. So we want them all under one word. So i really think numbers in language, numbers are just another kind of language for categorizing things. That really is a great segue to my next batch which is like,umbers are just a language, just really. We also have this unbelievable power and you talk about that brilliantly with respect to Storage Systems d with respect, i wanted youo talk about the system whereby pple are asked to measure their own pain in a medical situation. Talk about that and at does it mean to measure ones painon a scale of 1 to 10. So if wever had anything that causes pain as some doctor onurse willask you on a scale o1 to 10 , how bad is it and metimes theyll saone is highly noticeable and 10 is just i cant stand it anyre and i want to jump out awindow. And most people are baffled by this. Weont think about pain. We expernce it in a lot of different ways but we don experience it like a thermometer or with numbers. What i found interesting is i asked lots of friends about this paiscale when i was writing this book and everybody ys they find it really difficult with their painto put it in a number. Anyes yet, a medical system keeps confusing it and think it has some benefits, pain iuntenable. None else can feel your pain thats, its just one of those experiences that is yours and yours alone. Anits really impossible to indicate. So trying to do that with a number , its at least astart. Theres someone, a canadian doctor named rob morg who came over i think in a muc better way of asking people kind of maybe get a handle on peoples pain. Its a system of words and you just listen to people talk about their pain d they came up with about 100 different words, to characterize pain and most of the medical professionals i talked to say that they think their rds system is much more helpful in allowing patientsto express what they feel and helping inicians undersnd what they feel. And some words apparently are just words that a person says them and the person goes, i thats an example but even though i think the pain scale is very problematic and its frustrating for ople, its one big advantage is its a language. It allows people to communicate a little bit. So if you say my pain was a 10 yesterdaybut its seven now , youre communicating that you feel that much better. Or if a doctor gives you pai meds you say, they know to try Something Else so it becomes a language of communication and its better than nothing. Couple of fascinating details in that section about pain sufferers, its how well the more contextual, nuanced word language pertains to words. Like billing companies, Insurance Companies prefer the numbers. Its actually i think because they just want to know how much they can charge. Or maybe they, you seemed to imply there was a rule that you should be treated for it and the doctors responsibility is to give you a pain med. So thats really interesting that in some sense it becomes more this is quantified. It somehow becomes more objective from a perspective of a agency but the flipside of that is the extent to which their patients themselves learn that dave asserted control over their own treatment by deciding what to say or ask what your pain level. Can you talk about thatslip of asserting control of the patient to the system . I learned from a friend who had cancer and is on some pretty serious pain meds that she said to me they dont want you to be above the five and i said what does that mean . They tried to tell you not to stay above that and if youre above a five that means theyre going to wantto do mething about it, theyre gog to want to give you a med. So then i talked to more ople and people told me that they know its kd of a cat and mouse game. That these numbers, you put em in and say. [inaudible] so people who are experiencing all, pain meds make you really a zombie. They rlly mess with your head. They make you tired. People who have a lot of pain sometimes i dont want to just be dopedup on opioids. Soeveral of my friends told me that they learned that when they learned to use the scale to control what the nurse or the doctor would do. If they didnt want more pain meds they would say a number. One of the things i learned from the book was just homuch it was exerted in terms of their power and own authority. That if youre talking about a Public School teacher which your book also discusses, or some of the teachers in that systemlike their natural reaction was to trump up the number because it was four and were so used to. [inaudible] where we haveour iq score and were expected to trust these things. And. [inaudible] so its fascinating to see in that ample you gave up the pain meds the patient, in other words the target for these is actually taking corol and its so rare. Even if these words e power over the targets of the source and thats a rare case where the targets take back the power. Would you want to talk about the teachers and the scoring system around the teachers . Lets talk about power first. I think just to go back to the pain system, the reason patients take control is because theyre the ones scoring that system. Andthats unusual. Somebody elses scoring you and we all grow up in school being scored all the time. So were used to being the subjects of somebody elses power and unfortunately kids learn very early on that the teacher is right or the grade is right and a grade will make them doubt themselves. Ive certainly doubted myself and i thought i would neverbe a political scientist. [inaudible] so numbers have an aura in our culture as being objective and a lot of slogans nowadays, we want to make databased decisions, we want our decisions to be driven by fax. At people mean nowadays by fax and data are numbers. They think that those a objective and words are squishy and obctive interpretationswhh they are. [inaudible] so people used scoring systems and all kinds of organizations to make decisions that are going to affect other peoples lives whether they hire them or fire them, talking about a new book that gives them insurance, whether to give them a bank loan and so the example that fascinates us about teachers is that people in education as they are perceived wanted to make sure that teachers were qualified and could do something that had results so they came up with them a way to measure results which were testing students on reading and math. Pretty much those two subjects and then when students spent years in a teachers classroom and they did well on those tests, the results are distributed to the quality of teachers. So if students do well. Thats kind of a simple model of how it works but they developed fancy formulas to try to sort out exactly how much the students test scores was due to teaching and how much was due to extraneous factors which is what the student had learned before and what the student in t previous grade was. [inaudible] what i say is the teacher wasgiven credit if you did better than expected. But expected comes up in the results of themathematical model. So then in addition to scoring people, the scoring pieces, the systems also either rewarded or penalized them on the basis of this score. Either that they could get fired or schools could be shut down or taken over by Emergency Managers orwhatever. And School Budgets could be determined by how well these teachers were performing. So it could be lifeanddeath consequences, job losing consequences for the teachers who get a bad score. And its the combination of the scoring system and the attachment of rewards and penalties that leads to these consequences. The scores that i talk about in the book, all of us that education does so much more than teach people how to add and subtract and pass a reading comprehension test or know the right grammar rules. So we really appropriated. To my mind a good teacher is one who instills curiosity in their students and then excitement about learning and confidence that they can learn. Children want to learn, that they can and push them and so encourage their imagination and nurture their creativity. Sure, i want my kids to learn. And i want them to learn how to read and write. But i want them to do so much more than that and i want to educate him to do that and the problem is these formulas for how much value a teacher adds to a student knowledge are really so narrowly defined and they include always these narrow types of education thats a small part of it. I often say that this is the idea of assessing a teacher with test scores is easily insufficient content. We have to either go through this 12 year torture of teachers but i guess we did see that. I want to move into a few things about how those get counted and i have a few examples here but i want to give you one. The essential, violence against women. Were talking about violence against women and im partly thankful for the example but the gdp, what is counted as production or for other nations and of course the captivation is. [inaudible] so take one of those that youd like to go through about to sort of lay down that folly that its counting is the easy part, its about what counts, gets categorized appropriately so that we cacount it later. I think we can come back in another context but the un wanted to develop a way to measure Different Countries, it had a whole bunch of readings and inviting people from Different Countries and what they wanted to do is set up some indicators. So say what counts as violence, is it rate or is it murder, is it beating up somebody . Is it taking somebody . So they got some people, women who were from north america and europe had a list of activities or actions that they would count as violence and ultimately they go around and do surveys and people had experience withthis or that. So there was rate and beating and kicking and so on, the things that western people came up with. Then there was some bangladeshi women and they said we have different kinds of violence in our country. Learning, setting you on fire, dropping you from a hard place, putting needles under your fingernails, gnashing your hands read they also said it was psychological violence to take another wife. Or to berate and punish a woman for not giving birth to a male child. Those were things they considered gender violence. And the committee that ultimately designed the survey with all the indicators didnt include any of those things. At the bangladeshi women had brought up. So there you have a case where its a question of whos in the room. We come back topower, really. Was in the room when these decisions are getting made, what counts and bangladeshi women were in the room but they werent Strong Enough to get their definitions of violence and experiences of violence counted as a simple desire so until thats. [inaudible] it is really about power but we dont have time for all of these questions i have so lets move ahead. Id like you to because i want to highlight positive stories, i want to let you talk about numbers and weaknesses in this context. I just want to say that a lot of people when they first hear that message they worry that im telling people never trust a number, numbers are no good, we should not count and that is not my message at all. I think numbers can be extremely helpful and i have lots of examples of it in the book. So the michigan water crisis is one of them. Where the city of flint switched its source of water from a detroit reservoir to the flint river i think it was called. And shortly thereafter, people started noticing that their water smelled and tasted funny and they started having pretty serious hair falling out, skin rashes. Aneverybody kns i think it turned out there was a lot of lead inthe water and a lot of heavy lead poising because of this water. But the numbers were really critical to finding out what the cause was. It turned out that the epa had run out protecons, had standards for what are safe levels of lead in water and there shouldnt be lead in water and the clean water act said no one should be using lead pipes anymore, that w 1986 but old pipes were grandfathered in. And flint michigan had a lot of other in their heights and the cdc uses numbers to say how much is a safe level of of it any childrens blood. [inaudible] particles of ad, thank you the cdc says no level is safe but above a certailevel we should be concerned but we dont need ttreat about 45. So what happened was the citizens had Water Engineers come in and test the water and figured out right away that there was probably led in the water because of corrosion from old pipes. And so he tested the ter d sure enough ere wa very high levels. By the way, michigan the department of Environmental Affairs had tested the water and claimed that there was, that it was safe, that there was no lead in it and the way they tested it it turned out and this water engineer discovered was they told, they sent their inspectors in and they let the water run for 30 minutes sthey flushed all the lead paicles out of the pipe so of course they got low readin. But this water engineer came in and he said, he got numbers that were very alming and then his doctor was a pediatrici what concerned the mothers of certain patients. And he had acss to all the blood levels, but blood lead testing, he was in the hospital where it was done anhe compared the blood levelswith kids before they switched to the new system of water and sure enough, the levels went up dramatically. So those two sets of numbers put together were part of the story at the water engineer made convincing. Lead pipes corrode and send particles into the water which then infect peops blood. Those numbers became the witnesses to the city for its change a its lack of doing anything about the water. I still feel like the story is so often the case that we can find that the numbers weren your side and get you lost. But there st have been and i think the answer is i think i even heard that the leadership with npbut somehow those real numbers like the non fake water levels, they were somehow brought to the surface. The power somehow was overcome. You know how . I think two things dits pretty typical. There were a few citizens, i think one mom in particular who just knew not to trust the numbers and she insisted on, she ought water samples into Government Agencies but i think she contacd the Water Engineers but the second citizen advocacy was one thing. She eventually got lots of moms to test their water. The kits that the Water Engineers provided. The second ingredient for overcoming power is that citizens had allies who are in agencies, in government or science experts like the water engineer. So they became passionate about the problem and they worked with the citizens, the patients, the homeowners and so on. So course numbers even when they are right they dont always emerge victorious. Can you tell me about what you call this effect because im skeptical. I know im going to ask some pushy questions. Was that little device you wear on your wri and encounter steps and people try to make them exercise by counting t steps and they tried to reach goals and the interesting thing is everyone i know who has a fit bit says that more because the fitbit is countinthem. You want to look good on the measure that you will change your behavior to get a good count, to get a good number. That is the big benefit. Here is what i will pus back on that. I hope you appciate my point d i dont disagree with the fact that people like to look good and i if there is an impactful metric measuring them they will change their behavior in order to make their metric look good and that is certainly well understood and i write about tha myself and my book when i talk about colleges trying to game the College Ranking model and its an important factor but with respect specifically i have been a proponent of the fitbit and all fitbit users whether its been a couple months or they completely iore them. One of the things that has happened is that you are listening to the people whose not only where there fitbit but still talk about it and its a very narrow group of people if you nt mind me saying like the real fitbit effec is that fitbits are annoying to most people and they are ignored. You know what i mean, the ovwhelming story is that they dont tually cause peopl to change their behavior but there are a few people for whom the fitbit is whathey want and for them its the story is different. To hear what im saying . Yet, i do and its a good enough point and clearly people, only people motivated to change their behavior will get a fitbit and where it once they are no longer motivated but what im saying still holds and maybe it doesnt change peoples behavior for the long term but at the moment during that time may be a coup of months when they are infatuated with the new fitbit and gung ho just as people start a diet and they are gg ho and they do lose weight atirst and maybe they dont stay on it and. Diet is the ultimate example of this but fitbits or for that monitor, dt, one thing that is selfselected because theyre more likely to be super users of fitbit but most people who buy fitt but there are good eeriments when because super users look so goodn fitbit that Health Programs will buy fitbits for everyone on their Health Policy and guess what, those people who never even wanted fitbit to begin with and not fascinated th it and its a complete disaster and its very selfelected small slice of humans where tt actually happens but lets not dwell on that point and as a metaphor, its perfectly reasonable so lets talk about pulling and racist pulling in the fitbit effect. So, social scientists have really decided to understand racist attitudes and racist thinking. They do that by asking people civic questions and so some of the questions, when i started looking into this, it appalls me that anyone could even ask these questions. One of them is on a scale from oneseven where one is lazy and seven is hardworking and where do you think blacks fall . And the same thing on intelligence. The same thing on violence. For example, i tnk survey questis like these and lots of other survey questns to think immigrants are generally good for the country or bad for the cotry . Its a ridiculous question when you think about it. What to thoseuestions do . They have an implicit lesson which is stereotyping is legitimate a you can decide th every member of a racial group is some degrees of laziness or harworking and that is a legitimate way to think and that is what the question implies is a legitimate way tohink and i think it reinforces for people that waste is a real thi and a real category and tha people can be categorized easily and into black or white in it reinforces for people that they can make judgments about a whole group and that political leaders who are waiting to hear their political opinions want to know how people stereotype. I think the self reinforcement effect that i like into the fitbit. It is connected to this idea that you want to look good for the poll takers . Yes, so there is a lot of work and in survey research where people called the social desirability effect and people want to give a desirable answer and they want to appear smart and they want to appear not prejudice and what is amazing and the Racism Research is that plenty of people are quite willing to express prejudice but in general i think a huge problem with survey research is that people sometimes are done it facetoface or Television Interviews but they want to sound good to someone interviewing them and i think half the time people dont know what a question means or they dont even understand it but theyive an answer just so they wont sod dumb. Like a lot of latenight tv talk shows that use that, by interviewing people with absolute non place guard herbage questns and they get people to ansr them quite seriously. I would like to talk about the census and the category of hispanics because i found that to be a fascinating story in the section of the book and also related to this fitbit effect, if youont mind mentioning that. Sure. The census, it first started asking a question about, is this person hispanic in 1980. Before about 1970 the term hispanic wasnt even in much use in the United States and people, there were a lot of people from whose origins were in Spanish Speaking countries, particularly metric mexico, cuba and puerto rico and they tended to cluster together in certain areas of the United States and they didnt think of themselves as hispanic but thought of themselves as cuban or puerto rican or mexican but then with the late 60s and 70s after the Civil Rights Act and equal opportunity act the government wanted to get racial and ethnic classifications in order to make sure they can enforce equal treatment and equal voting for example, so it started or wanted to collect data on that and so the Census Bureau wanted to have a hispanic question but they reallyidnt know what the leaders didnt know how ty were going to get people to think of themselves as hispanic so they called a meeting of hispanic leaders of these different groups and asked them to promote the census to their immunities and to encourage people to identify as spanic. The readers were all in favor of that because at tt point they understood that it would be benefits to be had from having big numbers and maybe you would get more seats i congress as more people were countedn the areas where they live and you would get more federal aid to cities and places where hispanic people lived so aga, this measuring instrent and the census created the category and put the question out there and then quite actively recruited people to encourage people aner yes and to answer it all in answer yes. It was an interactive kind of feedback effect where the category was there and people put themselves into it. Yet, but i liked about tha story and first of all, i did not know that unlike the cens by taking on that category actually had an effect on people self regard and selfimage and the identity was interesting but also reminds me going back to the earlier discussion we had about people choosing pain a number that would give them the treatment they want and this is another example of someh the targets of the counting the census targeting, t people asserting conol over their own own, you know, own agency by filling out their own form and sometimes th were, again, masters of their own destiny by deciding and naming theirwn ethnicity at their own rates ich holds a different discussion that you also could have their about the race they might choose. Yeah, thats a, thank you for making that analogy. I did not see it quite that same way but thats very much true the people, the censusives people a chance to identify and to say what their ethnicity is and ep that in work categories and what choices you can have can write in some other race one fascinating factoid iame up with is that se other re was the Third Largest category of race than the 2010 census which tells me that people dont like to accept or a lot of people dot like to accept the categories that they areffered and that is, you know, a funny paradox of the census on one hand and it says you can identify whatever race you say you a or you want to be or consid yourself butn the other hand the census people give categories, except for the race once they provide some categories. The last topic i wanted to cover, i have a few more but we are running out of time is this concept of the allegheny Services Hotline algorithm which is a mouthful but basically child abuse hotline and ive read the wonderful book of that talks about her work and other stuff to and you know, i have to say ive spent quite a bit of time talking to people who started the algorithm and i do feel like im not saying its perfect and it is not perfect. In fact, the flaws are well laid out in your book and poor people are much more going to be gas lighted and people of color are more likely to be reported on in choosing their wrong prediction variable which means that they are predicting their own reality saying this is more likely to be taken from the home thus making that kid more likely to be taken from their home and theyre all sorts of problems but let me make this following a plea. First of all, this is not talkin about power for power but a lot of the times i g frustrated because people are assuming authority and power in an unreasonable and on accountable way. Theyre trying to get out or away with something basically and that happens a lot with numbers and believe the scoring system because its objective in any way you have no right to appeal type of thing. I would argue that in the case of social workers trying to deal with child abuse like i would like them to have cover, a little bit of cover. If it works for them. I say that as a friend of social workers who have g burnout because they have so much response ability toake the right call on these actual life and death matters and do you see what im saying . In some sense i would love it an i think we could all agree on it and i would love itf they had a machine that could actually have them do tir job and it if the machine was wrong then the machine is wrong but usually wh someone says dont blame me, blame the machine but thats a copout, take with ones ability but in this case unlike yeah, you did your best. Its really hard to make cls and it really is hard but the other more relevant plea i will make for that algorithm and again is problematic, it is problematic is that because it is, because it is data and because you are collecting data it is auditable and has a very kind of in this is the same thing that could be true or could be said of hiring and managing by algorithms. These are systems that once they are made algorithmic the good news isou can also make them work betr because they are following rul and so you can shift rules if the old rules arent working well. Thats my other plea. Final thing i will say is you talk in t last part of the book about ethics andhe thing that i keep on pointing out when i talk abouthe child abuse hotline is that there is a trolley problem and that child abuse hotline and it is for children. There is a false positive of an algorithm or a process in the process itself of how to decide whether to take a child from their home if they are at risk for abuse you can be taking kids away from their home when they shouldnt be takennd you could be leaving kids in their home when they should be taken and those are two mistakes that a system could make and they are different mistakes and they are not equal. It is worse to leave the kid to abuse than it is to take a kid away from a family thats not abusing them. Im not saying this is a good idea but im saying this is worse. Let me jump in. Absolutely. You know, anything we can do to help people and help our leaders make better decisions is a good thing. I think the good thing about numbers is that trying to measure things and come up with a system whether algorithm or simple indicator is that the exercise of trying to measure things forces us to think about what we value and what we care about and what is important and i think the point i want to leave people with is weve got a system and maybe it is better and it still has problems but it is better than winging it and anything that could take the burden off is good but we still dont stop ever. We should always be trying to improve those systems and those measurements and i think if we think of numbers as a language for talking about our values what is important and who is being hurt and who is being helped then we are using them wisely. If we think of them as this is the score and that is the end, im right, you are wrong and you will never be [inaudible] but that is not a recipe for progress. Debra, i could not agree more and reallglad that i had a chance to read this book im glad i had the chance to discuss this today. Thank you very much. Weeknights this month or featuring book tv programs as a preview of what isvailable every weekend on cspan2 but tonight its a look at business and economics and starting a 8 00 p. M. Eastn university of virginia business professor ed freeman discusses response ability and ethics that h says unites influential businesses. History professorcott exploiters black iovation between 18881930 and its effect on u. S. Capalism to the story of the Saint Luke Bank in richmond, virginia, the first and on bank r by black women. Later mit professor Thomas Levinson looks at howhe leaders of the 15th century scientific revolution applied their new ideas to people, money and markets and as a result embedded modern finance. Thatll begins at 8 00 p. M. Eastern and eoyed booktv this week and every weekend on cspan2. Book tv on cspan2 has top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Coming up this weekend saturday at 9 00 p. M. Eastern former president barack obama reflects on his life and political career in his new released memoir a promised land. A sunday and 9 00 p. M. Eastern on after words open markets Institute Director sally and her book monopoly suck, seven ways big corporations ruin your life and how to take back control. Shes interviewed by Bloomberg News reporter david mclaughlin. At 10 00 p. M. Former appellate judge and george mason univsity law professor Douglas Ginsburg and his book, voices of our republic. It examines the constitution to the eyes of justice, legal scholars and historians. Watchful tv on cspan2 this weekend and be sure to watch indepth live, sunday, december 6 at noon eastern with our guest, author and chair of African American studies at princeton university. Representative rick larsen, democrat from washington recently joined book tv to discuss the books he is reading