Category: Books
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Fault Lines : Raghuram G. Rajan
Another take on the economic crisis: somewhat dry and academic but quite thorough. The most illuminating idea was a refinement of the distorted compensation incentives that poison Wall Street. Rajan’s idea is an employee’s performance bonus held in long-term escrow to ensure it does not blow up a too-big-to-fail bank employer within a year or…
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Cognitive Surplus : Clay Shirky
A sequel of sorts to his Here Comes Everybody, this book is a collection of insights from a master network thinker. The central argument of the book is that Wikipedia was assembled using 1 percent of Americans’ television-watching time. The potential human achievements that could arise from all this “cognitive surplus” seems nearly limitless. Wikipedia…
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Guide to the Good Life : William B. Irvine
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy is a terrible letdown. Irvine has taken a subject that would be of interest to the person who is educated but not educated in Stoic philosophy, and shaped it into a little egomaniacal ball of his own earwax. The book’s genuinely fascinating Stoic…
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The Soros Lectures : George Soros
Interesting ideas, prosaic text, and a streak of partisanship that is often unwelcome, despite the fact that I agree with him. Report card: C
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Bursts : Albert-László Barabási
A hundred pounds of stylistic icing on a few grams of cake. Nearly half this book is a sustained (though interrupted) narrative of 16th century Transylvanian military history, mixed with random thoughts about why Google may be evil, and why you sometimes roll a 6 on a die several times in a row. This text…