Book Reviews

Eurocentric and disjointed. Was excited to read and compare to books on the same subject with different theses: Capitalism, Alone; The great Leveller, Rise and fall of american growth, even capital in the 21st century. Each other book was more compelling. By focusing on 1914-1980 in Europe, Piketty takes an exceptional time in history and makes it out as the norm. He then nearly completely ignored earlier time horizons or other civilizations (ahem china) with relevant data.

** Literary Junkfood ** The other day I introduced my wife and mother in law to Goldfish crackers. Despite the fact that they’ve lived in America for over 20 years, they somehow missed this nutritiously vapid tastebud tantalizer. Goldfish don’t taste extraordinary, but it’s the lingering flavor that matters. Independently, both remarked on the cracker’s ability to lure a consumer into just another bite: “you can’t stop eating them!” So this series is the literary equivalent of Goldfish. No nutrition, tastes only OK, yet somehow I’m still picking up the sequels.

This languished on my reading list for a long time, thinking it was a orthodox capitalist history. Exceeded expectations by being a reframing of financial history through the lens of anthropology, yet still not as good as Dawn of Everything. Maybe I have more priors in this space. I would read as a supplement to Dawn of Everything to understand Graeber’s evidence of societies that might have been, and why capitalism alone is not the single correct answer to the interaction of large groups of humans. ...

character development is for western novels. this plot, tactics, and wikipedia style info dumps 100% of the time. And I like it.

less about the nuances of checklists, more about how awfully unsafe medicine is compared to airlines

like their short stories better than they or novels. better than chiangs stores. i think it’s the characters

Seems like there is a high correlation between marxist or anarchist authors and good books. Must be some weird form of selection / filtering bias.

Applied Hayek Something in here clearly works, as evidenced by the success of Koch enterprises. But the guidelines are repetitions of basic economics, maidenly vague, or republican talking points many times two out of three. I think Koch has good ideas around using market pricing internal to a company and how to help use compensation as a motivation tool, but those ideas are really just left to the readers imagination.

** Flying Blinded by Indignation ** For the same reason my 16 month old loves to point out every plane in the sky, I’m fascinated by the aviation industry. Skunkworks was the first book I read, and after reading Freedom’s Forge and Losing the Signal, Flying Blind felt like a perfect fit. However, the narrative ends up becoming just another superficial journalist book. Specifically, it suffers from a lack of norming and indignation at satisficing. ...

surprisingly good, game of thrones + mulan + traitor baru thrown into one. Good setting.