Books finished in December:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014) by Atul Gawande. A great book on keeping ones priorities right while dying. No nostalgic – punctures the myth that everything was better was several generations lived together: Separation was a form of freedom, and choices for the elderly have proliferated. Makes the case for hospices and terminal care and life quality rather than treatment, the dying have other priorities than only being safe and living longer, but this often not taken into account by the close ones. “Well-being is more than just health and survival and safety. […] ok to insist that our doctors and our institutions know that and respect that as well.” Definitely recommended. (Gawande has also written other good books.)

Blood in the Cage: Mixed Martial Arts, Pat Miletich, and the Furious Rise of the UFC (2010) by L. Jon Wertheim. Entaining read about the rapidly growing sport of mixed martial arts, by an enthusiast.

The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (Modern Library Chronicles) (2005) by John Micklethwait. The history of the company. I liked the first, historical parts best.
Share risks and rewards. European monarchs created chartered companies to pursue their dreams of imperial expansion.” Ex east India Company, Virginia Company. Limited liability was key. “[T]he three big ideas behind the modern company: that it could be an “artificial person,” with the same ability to do business as a real person; that it could issue tradable shares to any number of investors; and that those investors could have limited liability (so they could lose only the money they had committed to the firm).”
1.
Violent history, now different. Slavery, war, etc.
Merchants and monopolies. State monopolies inefficient. In Europe at least internal competition.
Unlimited liability. De Medici innovative-separate partnerships and profit sharing arrangements.
Northern Europe: copies much from Italy,but most imp contribution was guilds and chartered companies. Corporate bodies started, immortal. Towns, guilds, etc.
2.
Royal charter-exclusive trading rights. Joint stock company. Start to buy shares, and limited liability. East India company troubled initially, but managed. Exclusive rights to sell tea in the American colonies-Boston tea party. Monopolies, criticism from Adam Smith. Courts. Government of big organizations and many people.
3. A prolonged and painful birth 1750-1862
Reinvigorate the idea of the company. Partnerships most common, but unlimited liability a problem. State competition to have the least regulation in order to attract companies. Railways changed things.

Recommended for the historical parts.

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2014) by Radley Balko. A disturbing book about the American Police Forces.

The old “Castle doctrine” (A man’s house is his castle) is now broken, no knock warrants and raids have become common. Maybe too rosy view of self-governing communities depending on mores, etc before. General Patten revealed as mad, wanted to shoot and leave dead rebellious citizens.
The name SWAT was originally “Special Weapons Attack Team”, but was changed to “Special Weapons And Tactics” because that sounded less aggressive.
Two-sidedness of the commerce clause governing federal power over the states – civil liberties and Nixon’s crime on war and drugs. Villain Nixon-hid statistics, ordered easy arrests, could “stick it to the left” with his Supreme Court nominees.
Swat proliferation, started for exceptional cases of hostage taking and emergencies. Civil asset forfeiture. Drug raids became source of revenue. Impunity. Extreme increase in swat raids, and not even in cases of violent crime, mostly for drug raids. Swat more problematic in small places, not enough training and personnell.
States decriminalizing medical marihuana, but people still targeted by federal authorities-FDA.
Often wrong door, botched raids, accidental deaths. Also poker raids. And raids under the guise of food inspection etc. Bizarre: Shaquille O’Neill and Steven Seagal joining in raids for tv shows. Military equipment more and more common.
Cable tv and cop series->violence.
Police unions a problem. Advocates cameras and liability for police officers. Public needs to start caring; some positive signs.
Recommended.

The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World (2012) by Edward Dolnick. The scientific revolution. Easy listening for nerds. Recommended.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) by Thomas Piketty. Deserved its own review. Recommended.

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (2010) by Branko Milanovic. I liked this book. Short, many facts. The stuff about the EU vs US gini coefficient was interesting (coefficient about the same, but in EU much more inquality between states). Recommended. Below is a kind of summary.

How income and affluence present in daily life
“The objective is to unveil the importance that differences in income and wealth, affluence and poverty play in our ordinary lives as well as the importance that they have had historically”
1. Inequality between individuals in a community
2. Inequality in income between countries
3. Inequality globally. Increasingly important
-essay-Vignettes
Focus on disposable rather than marketable income.

1. Study of distribution important historically. Among social classes-workers capitalists landowners. Pareto started with individuals. Iron law-80/20. Kuznets theory of change, inverted u. Later augmented K curve.
Good and bad inequality. Keynes quote, view of capitalists as savings machines. Social monopoly vs incentives.
Atkinson welfare measure-equally distributed, equivalent income. But dependent on adding utilities. And higher u functions-Sen. Pareto criterion, but almost impossible to satisfy in the real world. Rawls: “Injustice is simply inequalities that are not in the benefit of all”, and in particular the poor.
Measurement of inequality. First about finding technical measure satisfying certain axioms. Gini. Lack of data, fiscal records often about taxes and without income and consumption, use hh surveys, but these also often not available.
Top income share, gini, etc. Between and within inequality decomposition.
Vignette 1.1. Pride and prejudice contains economics, love-wealth trade-off. Same today, but stakes do change. Anna Karenina, ratio between possible incomes w different husbands, like England stakes changes in Russia. 1.3. Richest ever, consider amount labor that could buy locally with yearly income-modern richer-Carnegie-Gates-Rockefeller. But locally khodorkovsky richer, and Slim even more. 1.5 Was socialism egalitarian? Yes, but lack of incentives, nothing exported, political inequalities, privileges, priority for goods, behavior of elites stood out. 1.7 Who gains from fiscal redistribution? The poorest, but not upper middle. 1.8 several countries in one? In Soviet Union as different as South Korea and Ivory Coast. Rich territories wanted out. In Yugoslavia regional income ratio as big as 8:1, Slovenia vs Kosovo. Raises questions about china, eu, Nigeria. 1.9. China unity survive? Soviet dissolved. Am inequality distributed more broadly, soviet regionally, like in china. Some regions (5+6?)-gang of maritime cities and provinces . 10:1. But language similar and history shared. But ethnic cleavages. 1.10 Pareto and Kuznets. Functional vs interpersonal. Recent tensions between “inequality” and “poverty”. Pareto controversial, anti-socialist. Pareto constant. Human history is history of aristocracies, some elites always in top.

2. Unequal nations
Used to be small, big started with industrial rev until 1950’s. Two methods: unweighted and weighted by population. Same previously, now more diverging last 30 years. More nations and comparability in space and time are problems-construct the new nations and use PPP. Intercountry inequality increased. But when use weighted measure, dampened, though absolute differences still huge, so poor countries need to grow at extremes just to keep up, since so low base.
Neoclassical economics: globalization->convergence, because of fdi, copy easier, specialization, can use good ideas. But we have seen divergence-have not seen much foreign investment, technology does not come free (ref e.g. IP rights).
2.1 Marx. Real wages actually started to rise around publication of Das Capital. Global inequality used to be driven by class, now by location. Third world solidarity has plummeted. 2.2. GDP is about averages. Within nation inequality needed. First divide a nation into 20 income groups, ventiles, convert income by PPP, find position of each venture in the global income distribution. Brazil extreme, covers almost from top to bottom, many countries, ex India where richest ventile is poorer than poorest of US. With percentiles a little overlap. Citizenship is fate.
2.2. How much income inequality determined at birth? Place of birth explains more than 60% of variability in global inequality. With income class of parents as well, more than 80% explained. Portion left for effort small.
2.4 Migration. A rational response to inequality. Income inequalities rising, so also migration pressure. Both push and pull factors. Integration issues. Mexican wall going to be longer than Berlin Wall.
2.5. Hraga. People who burn their papers. Frontex costs as much as what the travelers pay. Lampedusa-“the camp of identification and expulsion”. What to do with the dead bodies? Algeria did not want them. Rethorical question: “can these separate, and unequal worlds coexist…?”
2.6. Three generations of Obamas.
2.7. Globalization has not decreased inequality. And deglobalization in the beginning of 1913-38 did not increase inequality. WWII: divergence- some countries grew much positive or negative. Great Depression: rich countries lost, many others not much affected.

3. Unequal world
Inequality among citizens in the world. Do not have the data globally for before. But recent years, 1988 onwards, have good household surveys for most countries. The world extremely unequal, high gini around 0.70. Decile ratio about 80:1. In dev countries seldom above 10:1. Probably not more unequal since late 80’s. Forces for greater inequality: rising within countries and divergence of incomes between countries. Force for smaller inequality: fast growth of china and India, faster than works average. Trilemma: globalization, increasing between-country inequality, restricted migration. 3.2. Talk of global middle class exaggerated. 3.3. Eu gini about the same as in US, but structure different: more inequality between nations in eu. Social policies should target countries in eu, poor people individually in US. Positive to free circulation of people within EU-cause to believe that poor countries will catch up. 3.5. Capitalist European football system.
Rawls migration: not concerned with global inequality, takes peoples as given, and differences in their preferences; Burdened and ordered countries.
Wants EU to help Africa.
Key challenges: “how to bring Africa up, how to peacefully bring China in, and how to wean Latin America of its self-obsession and bring it into the real world, and doing all if these while maintaining peace and avoiding ideological crusades.”

A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma (2014) by Wendy Law-Yone. About Burmese newspaper man Ed Law-Yone working in Burma under the military dictatorship, written by his daughter. Picked the book up since I was going to Myanmar/Burma, but it was way too slow capture my attention.
Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in November:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(2014) by Thomas Piketty. Deserves its own review. Recommended.

The Circle (2013)
by Dave Eggers. Privacy, surveillance, etc. Takes up important questions, but reads like a caricature most of the time. Not unrecommended.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014) by Nicholas Carr. It is good that someone is emphasizing the drawbacks and dangers of increasing automation (stop thinking for ourselves, do not learn, do not challenge ourselves, leave power in the hands of others), however Carr’s book is too one-sided to be convincing. That is a pity, since the anecdotes and research that he presents are often thought provoking and potentially important.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014) by William Easterly. The book is superficial in that it repeatedly and uncritically lumps together technocrats, experts, authoritarians and dictators as tyrants. Read David Broodman’s review to see what I mean. But it also has good parts. Hayek is a hero of Easterly’s and the beginning is a good intro to Hayek’s ideas about knowledge. Rights before economic development is a pet cause, and something too few talk about. (Well-meaning) racism was a crucial element in the development of authoritarian development ideas – the powerful (colonialists, Chinese leadership, or others) had to lead for the benefit of those who were led. Another interesting history part is about research on the role of social and civic capital in the development of in particular Italian city states. Chapters 8-9 on migration are very sensible. Recommended, and do consider his critical words seriously, but ignore the unsubstantive and unnuanced ones.

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005) by David Foster Wallace. Four intelligent and witty essays. I liked best the review of the sports star autobiography genre and the report from a porn film award festival. The title essay about a lobster festival and how the author experienced 9-11 were ok. The book made me want to read more by Wallace. Recommended.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in October:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch) (2013) by Ann Leckie. Winner of several of the big science fiction prizes in 2014. The protagonist is an ancillary, a human body inhabited by an AI, named Greq. The AI used to be in control of a full starship including all the ancillaries onboard, but Greq is the only survivor after the starship disappeared for mysterious reasons. We follow Greq on her/his(/its?) quest for revenge. I really liked the idea of an AI in a human body as the main character.

Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It (2014) by Ian Leslie. Some good anecdotes and references, like one study from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Maryland, in which “[t]he researchers measured the propensity of 374 five-month-old babies to crawl and probe and fiddle, and then tracked their progress over the following fourteen years. They found that the ones doing best at school aged fourteen were the ones who had been the most energetically exploratory babies.” Claiming that curiosity is the key here is of course jumping to conclusions, but I have always found early (baby-level) markers that predict subsequent behavior very interesting. Many places in the book it is annoying how selection issues are often ignored, Leslie writes uncritically about the “effect” of reading to children, watching television, etc., when it is just run-of-the-mill correlations. In chapter 3 too he starts off unthinkingly critical of the internet, although more nuanced as the chapter went on. An ok book.

A busy month again, although at least I managed one up from the previous month.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in September:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson. Too much about certain broad, canonical business strategies (“reach for blue ocean markets”) and LEGO’s failures, or rather failed timing, applying these strategies, but maybe that is just how business book are. The thing that keeps the book floating is its case – the Lego brick.

A busy month.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in August:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004) by Bill Bryson. Great book. Popular science history from the Big Bang to the present. Recommended.

Odalisque: The Baroque Cycle #3 (The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver) (2006) by Neal Stephenson. Final part of the 17th century historical novel Quicksilver. We initially get back to Daniel Waterhouse, the scientist from the first part (which is also named “Quicksilver”), now becoming a member of the English court. Eliza has financial and other success in the French court. Much high politics involving England, France, the Netherlands and Germany. The catholic king James II is finally deposed in the Glorious Revolution with the help of William of Orange. Entertaining, and it is always good to learn some science and history.

Family Life: A Novel (2014) by Akhil Sharma. Ajay moves with his parents and older brother from India to the land of opportunities US. The accident in which the talented older brother becomes brain damaged changes current and future life of the family. Hardship and lost dreams. OK.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in July:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (The New Cold War History) (2007) by Vladislav M. Zubok.

Zukor is professor of international relations at LSE. I enjoyed learning some more about the Soviet Union and Russia, although I guess much, though not all, of the material is well known for people who are knowledgeable about the subject. Zubok writes about the general secretaries of the post WWII period, and claims that the Soviet leaders were often less scheming and more influenced by both ideology and domestic concerns than Western observers often assumed. The first secretary-general of NATO, Lord Ismay, said in 1949 that the purpose of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” I would not bet on the incoming secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg making similar remarks.

I found the last part, about the Gorbachev period, most interesting because I found it easier to relate to this newer material. Zubok writes sees Gorbachev as inconsistent, without a plan and no big statesman, but that he was nevertheless important. He writes of Gorbachev that: “His first priority […] was the construction of a global world order on the basis of cooperation and nonviolence. This places Gorbachev, at least in his image of himself, in the ranks of such figures of the twentieth century as Woodrow Wilson, Mahatma Gandhi, and other prophets of universal principles (p. 315).” The way these somewhat idiosyncratic beliefs influenced the general secretary made him have profound historical importance.

Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle No. 1) (2006) by Neal Stephenson. We follow the fictional character Daniel Waterhouse, a close spectator of the scientific revolution taking place in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and the Enlightenment in general. Daniel is a friend and aide of Newton, a member of the Royal Society, and encounters several scientifically significant characters, like Leibniz, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and John Wilkins. This first book of the trilogy Quicksilver ends when Daniel seems to arrive from the US back to England, to which is summoned by Princess Caroline (of Ansbach) to help repair relations between the two great men Newton and Leibniz. Enjoyable.

King of the Vagabonds: The Baroque Cycle #2 (2006) by Neal Stephenson. Second part of the first (long) novel of Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle”. Centered on vagabond and adventurer Jack Shaftoe. One must love this fellow who when he was a kid earned money by hanging on the legs of people sent to the gallows in order to hasten their death, and later tried the equally morbid profession of test-living in pest-infested houses, but the story was far from as entertaining all the time, and I was happy when I reached the end. I look forward to when the arcs from the two first parts are brought tohether in the third instalment “Odalisque”.

Ratings and old books are in the library.

Books finished in June:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Imperial Life in The Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (2006) by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Heavy indictment of the American civilian administration in Iraq during the occupation 2003-04. The amount of groupthink, suppression of dissent and intentional conformity pressure present that Chandrasekaran details is almost hard to believe. Republican party connections and a right-thinking attitude were the most important qualifications for employees to have. Of course the situation involved many genuinely hard decisions that did not have one “right” answer, but the administration did not seem to have had the humility to admit this. Chandrasekaran is a bit quick to dismiss the efforts at economic reforms as misguided-these had to involve hard trade-offs one way or the other, but it is clear also they were approached haphazardly: A German working on the privatization of state-owned East-German entities in the German unification says they had 8000 people working on it; the privatization in much more chaotic Iraq was managed by three people. Recommended.

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) (1995) by Neal Stephenson. Largely entertaining, but I completely lost the thread among all the subplots. The most interesting theme for me was how artificial intelligence could help to educate kids by giving them appropriate challenges and lessons.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2005) by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Impressive work about Stalin, who at all times was some combination of cynical, ingenious, paranoid, brutal and mad. Purges work some of the time, but give personnel challenges. I should read this again to get more of the history.

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (2014) by Nikil Saval. A history of the office and office jobs, from nineteenth century clerks, to todays “knowledge workers”, going through different management fads, worker aspirations and status, design ideas, office frustrations.

A Deepness in the Sky (2000) by Vernor Vinge. A great book. To begin with, it has a fantastic plot in which two different human cultures, the largely sympathetic traders Qeng Ho and the at least governmentwise unsympathetic authoritarian Emergents, are on their way to a planet with newly discovered alien life. The inhabitants of the planet have the forms of spiders, but are in other aspects very much like humans on Earth in the 20th century, when atomic energy, space flight, video imaging and other technologies were on the verge of being invented. This provides the ground for topics like governance, research and the benefits of public knowledge, drugs, slavery, free markets, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, all amidst a curious mix of new technology like localizers, focus, and mindscrub and the more known ones emerging among the spiders. Recommended.

Rainbows End (2007) by Vernor Vinge. Near-future novel set in 2025. Augmented reality – implemented by smart clothing and contact lenses – has become ubiquitous, but is also a tool for controlling others. Noah Smith sold this book as being about future labor markets where seniority rules do not apply and older people must go back to high school, but to me it was mostly a confusing mix of conspiracies, literature nostalgia and family affairs. It did not catch me.

Permutation City (1995) by Greg Egan. Mind-boggling novel about personal identity and artificial life and evolution. Mind uploading has become possible, but being such a “copy” is not a fulfilling existence for most. Part of the story is about a scientist who designs a program within which lifeforms could be capable of evolving. In what must be a reference to Asimov’s I, robot, the evolved creatures do not accept the hypothesis of having been designed. Complex and difficult to follow at times, but recommended nonetheless.

The Gold-Bug (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe. Short story. A man decodes a cryptographed message. According to Wikipedia, Poe played a role in popularizing cryptography.

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
(1999) by James Gleick. About how everything goes faster and faster. I found the book disappointing. Some people’s obsession with having accurate watches is different from being in a hurry. Gleick criticizes value of time calculations, but what is the alternative when evaluating the costs of seatbelts, road safety, etc? He validly criticizes a confusion between saving time and doing more on the part of other authors. Even though the benefits of the acceleration is mentioned at times, they should have figured more prominently. E.g. many of us wants to do more.

Ratings and old books are in the library.