Book Reviews

** 29th book of 2021: 21st Century Economy ** He is 1/4 crazy, 1/4 brilliant, and the other half is a fight between his ego and genuinely caring for people. * While this sentence describes Adam Neumann, it could be said about almost any startup founder or successful venture capitalist. Every startup needs an element of irrationality when salaries of companies like Google and Facebook are enough to surpass even the lofty expectations of ivy-league millennials. The most successful VCs must make contrarian bets to stand out, and the ones who win at the casino table return lauded as geniuses. Players on both side are selected into a system of increasing bravado and ambition. Add in a 20 year bull market for technology companies and a world awash in capital, and nonintuitive results, such as plowing billions of dollars towards nice office space with a great salesman ensue. ...

** 28th book of 2021: Power Politics ** I started my career watching Iraqi political brawls punctuated by assassinations, and now spend my days plotting personalities and reactions in the modern corporate version of a royal court, so I find royal courts endlessly fascinating. In pre-modern royal courts, social capital was not only the raw expression of human relationships unconstrained by economics or equality, but a life-or-death struggle of rumors and intrigue. ...

27th book of 2021: Shaky Foundations A house is made of materials, sometimes these materials are expensive, sometimes they are cheap. You can buy a house. A house is a place that people live in. Different customers will want to live in different types of houses, you should research your customers before buying a house. Construction as an industry is far from automation, but this book a robot could write, maybe write better than the author.

** 26th book of 2021: History does not leap, it saunters. ** History’s allure is either to understand how the world works, or experience worlds otherwise inaccessible. Contrasted with Gibbon’s style of *‘natural connection of causes and events broken by frequent and hasty transitions’ * Durant prefers sauntering through antiquity’s streets, languidly painting an image of culture, literature, and thought, while only lightly touching on the endless accumulation of wars and succession. ...

** 25th book of 2021: A Country Gone Mad ** “Others demanded that the victims lie down on the ground to be shot through the neck, I did not approve of these methods. Why? Both for the victims and those who carried out the executions, it was psychologically an immense burden to bear.” This statement is from a Nazi official who had enough empathy to understand the effects of different execution styles, yet ordered thousands of executions nonetheless. ...

** 24th book of 2021: Global Warming Factfulness ** Global warming is a vast problem, but not intractably complex. We emit about: 52 billion tons of carbon / year. The only way to stop global warming is to bring this number to zero. The problem can be broken up into 5 sectors, and while we are making progress in #2 and #4, we do not have good solutions for the rest. ...

** 23rd book of 2021: Nothing Lasts Forever ** Humans are terrible at anything other than linear thinking. Our collective inability to understand the difference between linear and exponential growth during COVID shows even with life hanging in the balance, we choose wrong. In academia, exponential growth becomes dogma, where constraints are ignored and experts create trend-lines so divorced from reality that they can be “dismissed as meaningless mechanical calculations”. As Smil quotes: *Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical on a physically limited planet is either mad, or an economist. * ...

** 21st book of 2021: Trauma and Children ** “Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” * Adoption is a leap of faith of a different order. With biological children, parents have control over many circumstances, especially in-utero and in early childhood. Even if adopted at birth, adopted children face the inevitable trauma that must be processed. When adopting kids that come from the foster system, parental control is further diminished. The Berrys insist that while it’s critical to be as honest as possible with adopted children, they shy away from the specifics of their own stories. Still, their advice hints at the tribulation adoptions, especially later in life can bring: have locking doors in the house to keep kids apart, safety plans to protect kids from potentially violent biological family, and be ready for litigation at any point. Throughout the book their advice veers back towards honesty with the children, empathy for the struggles they face, and drawing clear and consistent boundaries for acceptable behavior. That advice is useful anywhere, not just the trial-by-fire that caring for 23 kids can bring.

** 2021 #19: Path Dependency ** The problem with understanding civilization is that our small sample. There was only one Athens or one Rome, who’s to say what westerns civilization would have been without those past beacons? Emergency skin is the story of such a path dependency, one planet that took the road of Sparta, and the other that of Athens. The encounter plays out as one would expect, with the shock of post-modernity-humanity weighing heavily on the Spartan outsiders, particularly our unnamed protagonist. Neo-Athenians (earthlings) are depicted in unabashedly optimistic colors. The focus of the story is not on the sins of earth, but on the potential of what we can become. In this way Emergency Skin is a story of pure optimism, and a quick reminder of what humanity could accomplish, contrasted with the typical ruts civilization gets stuck in.

** 2021 #20: Hero’s AI Journey ** Hero builds an AI. Hero falls in love with AI. AI becomes sentient and destroys humanity. Maybe there was something deeper to this story, if so it was too subtle for me.