“What a piece of work is a man!”
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
The human brain has changed little since the dawn of civilization: our decisions are fraught with confirmation bias and loss aversion, our intuitions are bad at statistics, we are more often than not overconfident, and we tend to overlook mean reversion. Instead of despairing over these takeaways about human inclinations, how can we better utilize them to build better institutions for societal improvements? An enlightening classic for the everyday Econ constantly puzzling over normal Human behaviour.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert
“Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.” The history of man may be brief relative to this earth that bore us, but the vast impactwe wrought upon her is anomalous. This is a book of heartache, but also of cautious optimism. There is a curiosity and madness unique to our species which enables us to on one hand drive species to extinction, and on the other revive them through last ditched conservation efforts.
Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt
"One of the challenges of shifting the direction of public policy debate in the US is to overcome the ingrained suspicion of anything that smacks of 'socialism'". Socialism sought to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a regime based on an entirely different system of production and ownership, whereas social democracy tends to compromise: the acceptance of capitalism and parliamentary democracy as the framework from within which to address issues such as poverty, inequality, and minority rights.
Do we hasten to seek partisan self-identities and dismiss opposing views too readily? Why not seek to build a more comprehensive set of policy expectations and outlooks for society as a whole? We lack a collective confidence today which permeated post World War II Europe and America. The societal identity - "Who is 'we'? Whom exactly do we trust" - provides markets with trust and cooperation, greases the free-flow of information, enables the creation and maintenance of public goods. The vision is to ethically inform, to reopen the public dialogue of, take on the self-assigned obligation to "raise popular standards rather than condescend to them" and effect incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances rather than espouse radical system-wide changes.
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman
Feynman's wit and animated passion for physics shine through these short pages. If a physics lecture could be a thriller novel...
What is quantum electrodynamics? What do photons and electrons do, probably? And what is this matter of light and matter? We start with wonderful little arrows that can solve all our problems, dance through some quantum field theory, but are dropped off at the grand entrance to the complicated state of the rest of physics. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"