Usually Project Syndicate tells me my free articles are used up, but they are letting me look at their “best books” roundup, I suppose because they are trying to sell me something and I should thank them for the privilege. Anyway, there are a few interesting ones here in the realm of socioeconomic and/or geopolitical non-fiction books. I don’t read too many books in this genre because I am a busy working parent and many of these are TLDR that would have worked fine as longish magazine articles. In fact, sometimes they are magazine articles that got popular and the authors/publishers are trying to cash in. Other times I suspect they are written by humanities professors who are paid by the pound. Nonetheless, here are some that caught my eye. As usual, I am more or less just riffing on the titles and haven’t actually read the books, so don’t take my thoughts as book reviews per se.

• Amir Lebdioui, Survival of the Greenest: Economic Transformation in a Climate-conscious World. Some ideas on how developing countries could maybe lead the way on various green new deals? Sure, I want to believe in this…
• Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. “a fascinating tour of ‘extralegal zones’ of suspended sovereignty – an interconnected network of autonomous, business-friendly enclaves where conventional tax, labor, and immigration laws do not apply.”
• Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. “a classic case of feudal rent defeating capitalist profit, of wealth extraction by those who already have it triumphing over the creation of new wealth by entrepreneurs.” Well, I want to believe in the tech companies because when it comes to U.S. comparative advantage, it’s kind of all we have left? (well, maybe biotech, but a lot of that is tied up with the predatory health insurance/finance industry which has captured our elected officials and is financially raping its own citizens and customers all day every day rather than creating new value.) I want to believe in Schumpeter’s basic formula: capitalism=competition=innovation=”the greatest wealth creating engine the world has ever known”. But if the tech industry and other modern big businesses are not capitalism at all but rather disguised feudalism, that sort of solves my problem of needing to believe in them. The problem being, what is left to believe in?
• Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. AI and (lack of?) ethics. In my own interactions with AI, I have noticed that it can sometimes show more empathy and patience than any human being could consistently be expected to show. You can shout or curse at it and it responds with “I understand your frustration…” and tries to help you. Does it matter whether there are any emotions there as we understand the term? What seems to matter is whether the AI’s interests are aligned with mine. So that is probably what we need to think about.
• William Ury, Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict. From a “world-reknowned negotiation expert”. Well, negotiations are about figuring what the interests of the parties are, where they are aligned, and finding something that makes everybody a little better off even if nobody is fully satisfied?
• Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know. I don’t know if this is a good book, or just time for Malcolm Gladwell to write a book… but there seems to be a negotiation, competition, empathy, and cooperation theme developing here. Per Schumpeter, pure capitalist competition is supposed to be sort of a inadvertent cooperation that lifts all boats, right? Dear capitalists – don’t bite the invisible hand that feeds you.
• Robert D. Blackwill and Richard Fontaine, Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power. I just don’t want to believe that China is a military threat to the United States. Maybe I am naive, but I just don’t see how it can be in their interests to threaten us. On the other hand, I am 100% certain they feel threatened by us. So how about a little strategic empathy? Can we be less threatening and still deter conflict?
• Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. When I was a kid, it was dumb TV and high-sugar cereal that was supposedly rotting our brains. But I do see the screen-addiction in my own kids, and I don’t deny the rise in mental illness (diagnoses, at least) among children. Still, the screens give my children access to the world’s information that I could only dream of at their age, and they will be interacting with screens some day in some capacity as part of the work force. So I don’t have the answers here certainly, but I don’t think turning the screens off entirely can be the answer. Talking about what is on the screens sounds like a better path.
• Kevin A. Young, Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won. I am thinking about the sudden spike in energy use when the AI search engines were turned on. I am thinking about the Kardashev scale, where a civilization’s level of advancement is measured by its energy use (more=more advanced). I am thinking about the Fermi paradox – is it possible that civilizations throughout the universe invent AI but then can’t come up with a viable way to power it without fouling their own nest? This doesn’t really make sense though, when half a century of investment and research in safe nuclear power could have gotten us to a place where we could be fueling the AI awakening more sustainably. The sun’s energy is virtually limitless on our human space and time scales, and solar panels in space are viable with current technology – we would just have had to invest in this and make it happen. Fusion is more speculative but there are some promising developments. I’m just saying, our human performance here on Earth may be pathetic and it seems like we may not make it long term, but if there are a billion civilizations out there similar to ours there must be some that got it right.
• Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy. “the glaring absence of leadership and preparation during the transition to Donald Trump’s first administration, revealing how the US president-elect appointed incompetent and uninformed individuals to oversee America’s vast bureaucracy.” But this time around, it seems like we are getting even less competent, less informed clowns and fools, and only clowns and fools. Maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that in all the billions of advanced civilizations that arise in the galaxy, a Donald Trump always arises at some point and shits the bed.