Recent posts – Page 8

From Anime to the Karaoke machine and the Gameboy, Japanese design has had an outsized influence on pop culture

Highly entertaining book, providing entertaining facts and refreshing perspectives.

Governments of developing countries should: 1. stimulate household farming 2. push through land reform, and 3. protect their budding manufacturing industry – in that order

Interesting historical perspective on economic development with renewed relevance in a post free-trade world.

The US postal service is a success story of the benefits of public funding

Winifred Gallagher – How the post office created America

In theory a fascinating topic, but in practice a boring read; as I should have expected because the Post leveraged rather than drove innovation.

To solve the problems facing our planet today, we need to think ahead seven generations

Roman Krznaric – The good ancestor

Hard-felt plea for including future generations into political decision making.

Bayesian nets help prevent flawed statistical arguments and enable the leap from correlation to causation

Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie – The book of Why

The practical and relevant examples (health effect of smoking, impact of humanity on climate change) of causal inference alone make the book worthwhile.

A pragmatic programmer has to be an inquisitive, realistic critical thinker and fast adapter that is open to new perspectives and technologies

David Thomas and Andrew Hunt – The pragmatic programmer (20th anniversary edition)

Surprisingly philosophical for a book that has ‘pragmatic’ in its title.

Traders trying to make a killing in an ever more sophisticated market economy are driven to ever smarter deals and lower moral standards

Javier Blas and Jack Farchy – The world for sale

Well documented account of how instrumental commodity markets have been in global politics.

Flawed data collection and interpretation hurt the position and prospects of women in many different ways

Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible women

Great exercise in spotting biases, and understanding how these manifest themselves in how the world around us is shaped.

Almost any country can hack its way to power, posing a threat to political systems and essential infrastructure world-wide

Nicole Perlroth – This is ho they tell me the world ends

Although the writer clearly picks sides, she does not shy away from the role of the US in the cyber arms race.

Today’s dominant ideology is the acceptance of ‘how the world really is’ and that any attempt to change that will lead to ruin

Slavoj Zizek – Like a thief in broad daylight

Mix of interesting Marxist perspectives on contemporary politics and confusing rants about old movies.

A hero is someone directing their rage towards achieving an unattainable goal and, if successful, ending up a star

Stephen Fry – Heros

Fresh and highly entertaining retelling of classic tales.

Statistical thinking leads to better decisions, but unfortunately most people are bad at that

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein – Noise

Overly simplified presentation of basic statistics that cuts some corners, as superbly pointed out by Andrew Gelman.

To make the fashion industry sustainable (from both environmental and social perspective) consumers need to care and get engaged

Maxine Bedat – Unraveled

Maxine Bedat does for fashion what the Michael Pollen did for food, but with a much more solid program behind it.

From the start, WeWork’s business model was eerily similar to that of Regus while Adam Neumann’s main skill was conning investors

Eloit Brown and Maureen Farrell – The cult of We

The book is too overtly written with the benefit of hindsight, which makes the cautionary tale less compelling.

A start-up in retail should resolve significant friction in the value chain and/or the consumers’ lives

Christiane Lemieux and Duff McDonald – Frictionless

Story on repeat: X had a frustration, X is so privileged that she can raise at least a couple of $100k from friends and family, and X starts an amazing company to solve the problem – at least in theory – for herself and the rest of the world.

A good archeologist makes Sherlock Holmes’ deductions look rather elementary

Mary Beard – Pompeii

The best feature of the book is that the author explains how archeologists infer facts about life 2000 years ago.

China’s debt-fueled economic growth cannot continue in the same way

Dinny McMahon – China’s great wall of debt

October 2021: Apparently, the financial troubles of Evergrande are the first cracks in the wall.

July 2019: Interesting perspective on China’s impressive rise over the past years, providing more context to the recent trade war with the US and contrasting the view of Kai-Fu Lee.