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You’ve been baking and enjoying some delicious national greatness for a while (about 75 years, give or take). But something’s gone wrong, and your old recipe just isn’t working the way it used to. It’s at times like this that you need some input from the neoliberal cookbook. One Billion Americans: the recipe You will… Continue reading Recipe and review of One Billion Americans

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (2020): I skimmed this book as parts about the technicalities of open source weren’t of interest to me. Parts about the (dis)incentives faced by open source developers – and other online creators – were worth reading, though. Snow (2020): This book started really well… Continue reading Recent reading

In response to Balaji Srinivasan’s post on founding vs. inheriting, I want to reflect on that most classic of historical analogies: Rome. The Roman Republic had an odd mixture of founding and inheriting in its political system. There was a formal aristocracy, enshrining a privileged group (of men) at the top of society. But they… Continue reading What Rome can teach us about ‘Founding vs Inheriting’

Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel, by Tom Wainwright (UK/US) Tom Wainwright’s aim is to analyse the cartels as if they’re international businesses, and it’s a good fit. There is an abundance of concepts like supply and demand, monopsony, competition, principal-agent problems, vertical integration, mergers and acquisitions – you can learn a lot of… Continue reading Narconomics summary and review

I love the podcast Conversations with Tyler. In it, Tyler Cowen hosts a wide range of guests, from music critics to archaeologists to investors – you never quite know what you’re going to get. When you start listening to each episode, there is very little exposition. You are immediately launched into a discussion of whether… Continue reading Six memorable episodes of Conversations with Tyler

Chinese cooking, but not as you know it: If you think Chinese cuisine is limited to what you can get at your local Chinese takeaway restaurant, then this show will blow your mind. Did you know you can cook lily bulbs? That you can cook dough in the small intestine of a sheep? And that… Continue reading Why Flavorful Origins is the best show on Netflix

Many books are longer than they should be. We’ve all read books that are based on a thesis (often a useful one!) that could have been adequately explained in 30 pages instead of 300. Apparently some authors get told to add words so that the spine of the book ends up bigger and stands out… Continue reading Short non-fiction books

N.B. Speculative post, feedback especially welcome. I read Martin Gurri’s book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, in late 2019. As many others have noted, the book (originally published in 2014) is widely credited with predicting Trump and Brexit, or at least the dynamics that would lead… Continue reading The Revolt of the Public and how to survive it

A review of Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health by Professor David Nutt, with comments. N.B. all statistics are from the book unless otherwise indicated. The book mainly concerned itself with the United Kingdom, but I think the lessons are broadly applicable to other Western countries too. This useful little book provides… Continue reading Against alcohol