David T. Courtwright, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (2019)

I wholeheartedly recommend this book. The topic has been on my mind for the last decade, as I've become increasingly alarmed by our phone-based lives. Courtwright has read very widely and integrates evidence and ideas from many fields. His writing is taut, witty, often masterful. His judgment, at least in my eyes, is superb - for example, while castigating "limbic capitalism" - a term he coins here - he pays homage to the great good done by its benevolent twin, plain capitalism. He contrasts undisciplined and disciplined pleasures. The book belongs on the shelf of anybody interested in "big history." Courtwright starts with hunter-gatherers, who generally stumbled on limited pleasures in their diverse habitats, before he quickly and skillfully moves through the role of trade and the first globalization in creating globally homogeneous pleasures (as well as glocalized ones). The last two-thirds of the book consider the accelerating pleasure revolution of the last two hundred years, as pleasures, vices, and addictions have been engineered and relentlessly marketed. Courtwright makes interesting observations about the reasons why the anti-vice movement of the Progressive Era generally lost out to the pro-vice movements of World Wars and rising affluence. He cautiously subscribes to the recently emerging consensus that all addictions share the same neural footprint, all being diseases of the brain. Courtwright acknowledges that his emphasis on the supply-side of addiction (engineered pleasures, big business) must be complemented by the demand-side story, which traces the rise in addiction to the dislocation, isolation, and anomie of modern life. Bruce Alexander has pursued this story in The Globalization of Addiction. Age of Addiction was persuasive enough to make me rebalance my assessment of capitalism. Its somber assessment must now join Shoshanna Zuboff's indictment of surveillance capitalism and Fred Hirsch's and Robert Frank's works on zero-sum status competition (as well as older works by Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell on the cultural contradictions of capitalism) as another dark, and possibly growing, stain on capitalism's reputation.

Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)

For a tutorial on social capital, I've had the chance to reread this modern classic. What a joy! Bowling sets the standard for how to do social scientific research. Putnam has a knack for writing in a very accessible way, for finding all sorts of relevant data, and for humanizing the data with stories. Published 25 years ago, it's fascinating to see how he discerned trends that have only gotten worse - for example, the crisis in mental health, especially among the young (when I read Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation, I assumed that this crisis had started around 2010 - but Putnam points out that it goes back decades earlier). And of course, the collapse of community of his subtitle has now morphed into disastrous polarization. Putnam is one of my heroes.

Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality (2023)

Incoherent wishful thinking I read this for a reading group I've been in for the past 10 years. It's one of the worst books we've read. I'll start with some relatively minor (but still significant) flaws: 1) This reads like a piece of journalism blown up to 200 pages. Much of the book consists of Saini setting the scene of her encounters and quoting conversations with scholars rather than pointing to specific, more substantive evidence and scholarly arguments. 2) There are insinuations of gender biases in the literature (male scholars argue this way, female that) and of the role of European colonialism in spreading patriarchy to the rest of the world. These remain at the level of insinuation, so are never defended systematically. Some of Saini's own evidence undermines her own insinuations, especially in the case of Europe's impact (this is an instance of the incoherence I mentioned above; for more of which, see below). This is not to deny that European colonialism may in some cases have reinforced or changed patriarchy. I suspect this happened in smaller-scale societies, where patriarchy may not have existed already or been as entrenched. 3) Saini explains that her title - Patriarchs - is meant to acknowledge that there is no single thing patriarchy, just different versions of it. Yet repeatedly she discusses patriarchy precisely as a single thing. Furthermore, patriarchy, according to Saini, hasn't really diminished over time - a strange conclusion to anyone familiar with world history, especially in the last 100 or so years. 4) The greatest incoherence and wishful thinking occurs when it comes to Saini's central thesis. She argues that patriarchy is not at all rooted in biology, but rather took off when the state, needing growing populations, imposed rigid gender categories on their populations. But Saini's own evidence undermines her theses! She points to genetic bottlenecks that occurred before states formed as men who were successful in raiding and war were able to capture females and have lots of kids (this was one of the main rewards, and presumably drivers, of early warfare) while other men failed to reproduce. While she occasionally acknowledges these inconvenient facts (without, of course, recognizing how they simply don't dovetail with her the-state-launched-patriarchy thesis), she never wrestles with the extensive literature on the millenia of raiding and warfare before the state. Looking deeper in evolutionary time, Saini's treatment of human evolution is wholly inadequate. For example, she never discusses the fundamental evolutionary point that male and female mammals generally have different reproductive strategies - the former, whenever possible, favoring many offspring, the latter fewer and of higher quality. (These strategies don't apply at all times or under all circumstances, but they are a good starting point for explaining mammalian reproductive behavior). Saini never considers Richard Wrangham's influential work on male violence among the great apes (Demonic Males) or Bernard Chapais's on the evolution of pair bonding (Primeval Kinship). She mentions Christopher Boehm once, but does not explore the potential relevance of his ideas for the origins (and now decline) of patriarchy. Namely, Boehm argues that hunter-gatherers were not more egalitarian than chimpanzees because their individual desire to dominate had disappeared; rather HGs developed collective mechanisms to tame alpha males. Once agriculture happened, and population increased, however, those mechanisms broke down. The alphas were unleashed. My hunch is that this tracks what happened with patriarchy as well. And in recent times, of course, conditions have changed once again with industrialization, urbanization, democratization, modern communications. And the pendulum is swinging back the other way, toward equality. Boehm's explanation includes biological elements, but also an important role for circumstances of one kind or another.