John Cassidy, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (2009)

Another Will Pyle-recommendation, another hit! I plan to use selections in my upcoming course on "capitalism(s) since 1945. Cassidy writes about the economy for the New Yorker and in this book he explains even difficult ideas quite clearly. While I was generally familiar with much of what Cassidy covered, I still learned quite a bit; and the refresher was most welcome. The book is divided into three sections: 1) utopian economics; 2) reality-based economics; and 3) the 2008-9 Global Financial Crisis. In the first part, Cassidy focuses on how economics became a mathematical science, based on many unrealistic assumptions, describing the fiction of innumerable, interconnected markets, i.e. where supply and demand are in equilibrium. This was known as "general equilibrium theory." One of the unrealistic assumptions, previously unfamiliar to me, was this was a world made up only of small producers - large oligopolies and monopolies would ruin the equilibrium. (One of my only quibbles with this excellent book, perhaps my only one, is that Cassidy barely discusses Schumpeter, who wrote a lot about how companies seek to escape price competition, by dominating markets, innovating, or creating niches.) Utopian economics depends on three illusions of the market - that market interactions are harmonious, stable, and predictable. It is more unified than reality-based economics, which has identified endemic externalities, informational asymmetries ("lemons"), skewed incentives ("moral hazard"), prisoner's dilemmas, Keynesian beauty contests, Minskyian ponzi schemes, herd behavior, heuristics and biases, etc. One of the points that was new to me was that Adam Smith's vision of the market depended on negative feedback, which brings the system back to equilibrium (as a thermostat and heating/cooling system do), while in reality, especially in financial markets, there are positive feedback loops, which take the system ever further away from equilibrium.

Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload (2021)

Call me a Cal Newport fan. I was drawn to this book because I have increasingly found myself overwhelmed at work by the sheer variety and frequency of claims on my attention, much of which comes through email. And I had heard good things about Newport from my wife. The book didn't disappoint. Newport is an unusually gifted individual - an expert in one field (computer science, distributed systems, in particular), but also knowledgeable about the business world, widely read, and, crucially, a talented communicator. Newport makes the case that the "hive mind" enabled by email is bad for productivity and bad for our peace of mind. He provides an interesting, multifaceted account of the reasons for email's rise to ubiquity: evolutionarily, we are predisposed to hive-mind communication, but in small groups (think of a hunting expedition in which many small adjustments have to be made in real time); knowledge work, as Peter Drucker claimed, relies on individual autonomy, seemingly precluding centralized control; finally, various vicious circles (such as the "tragedy of the attention commons" - once one person begins expecting a rapid response to email messages, it's only natural that one respond in kind) cemented email's grip. Perhaps most valuably, Newport argues that this hive mind workflow is not something fated and unavoidable. He offers many suggestions, illustrated by accounts of bold experimenters in the business world, for how an organization or individual can minimize and even abandon email (and Slack), thereby rediscovering focus. Next up in my Newport queue: Digital Minimalism, which I think captures my philosophy or, at least, aspiration.

My book of the year: Joshua Meyrowitz: No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior

Barry Naughton, The Rise of China's Industrial Policy, 1978 to 2020 (2021)

My friend Will Pyle described Naughton as the "dean of academic economists working on China," so I figured I had better read him ahead of teaching my course on capitalism(s) since 1945. Naughton argues that from 1978 to about 2006, China's unprecedentedly fast economic growth derived from the state ceding ground, in a haphazard, unplanned manner, to the market. Starting in the mid-2000s, however, China's leaders returned to the idea of industrial planning. They did so, apparently, largely in response to the slowing down of China's growth. However, Naughton doesn't explore in detail the reasons behind this epochal shift. What was at first a tentative turn to state steering gained momentum over the next decade. First, the Chinese state's significant expenditures in response to the 2008-9 Global Financial Crisis provided unprecedented funds for the dawning industrial policy. Then, around 2015-16, Chinese leaders became convinced that revolutionary advances in information and communication technologies, as well as artificial intelligence, provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for China to seize the commanding heights of this epochal breakthrough. At the very least, China could not afford to fall behind. This rationale has since justified industrial policy far more ambitious than anything tried in any other country, including Japan and South Korea, with which China is often compared. Naughton suggests that it is too early to know whether these efforts will succeed or not - they constitute, in his eyes, a major gamble. Naughton's and Wang's books both ascribe significance to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-9, but in different ways. For Naughton, as mentioned above, the Crisis necessitated a response by the Chinese state that made vastly more money available for an industrial policy that was already nascent. For Wang, the Crisis itself inspired a new goal for China: not to follow the US's path into financialization and becoming a service economy; rather, China should not deindustrialize. Naughton's periodization and argument will be of value for my course, which hopes to assess the relationship between wealth and power. For Naughton's argument implies, at least indirectly, that China's 2001 accession to the WTO was - contra some recent arguments - not a self-inflicted wound on the part of the US and the West. Pre-2006 China, even one growing rapidly, might have comfortably coexisted with the US. Technological powers, Naughton suggests, need not become enemies. Instead, he implies, the current hostility between the countries is due to China's choice to try to leapfrog the US and other leading technological powers. Yet another account might suggest that it's the nature of the current technological revolution itself - with its dual uses and exponential growth rates (Moore's Law) - which unavoidably generates mistrust - and fear of falling behind.

Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future (2025)

In search of reading material for a course next semester on capitalism(s) since 1945, I asked my friend Will Pyle, a professor of economics at Middlebury, specializing in the Russian and Chinese economies, what he would recommend. He told me that Wang's book has been getting a lot of attention. It's quite readable and I will almost certainly use parts of it in the course. Wang contrasts China's engineering society with America's lawyerly one. Wang writes as an insider in both countries - emigrating from China to Canada with his parents when he was seven, Wang lived as an adult from 2017 to 2023 in China, working as an economics and technology analyst; he has studied and held academic positions in the US. Wang skillfully interweaves analysis and personal anecdotes and reflections in his account of each society's strengths and weaknesses. In the Chinese case, he ascribes China's unprecedented growth over the last four decades to its determination to build infrastructure, even on a scale that often outstrips current demand, and to the Chinese workforce's giant pool of "process knowledge" - the often tacit skills gained by working in foreign-funded factories, which later could be transferred to Chinese-owned endeavors. By contrast, each factory closing in the US has not only impacted particular workers, but has also diminished the country's process knowledge. The book doesn't present much, if any, systematic evidence; rather, it paints a portrait and gives the author's assessment. Wang's argument about process knowledge was new to me, and I'd be curious how academic specialists view it and the book generally.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (1987)

This book, by one of the preeminent historians of Iberian exploration and colonization, significantly deepened my understanding of the centuries-long background to Columbus and da Gama. The process was multi-sided and dynamic - first the Catalans took the lead in conquering Majorca in 1229; later Castile, in concert with Genoese financiers and navigators, came to the fore, especially with the slow conquest of the Canaries from the mid-fourteenth to late fifteenth centuries, which became the key launching pad for Columbus. As with the English domination and conquest of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland at about the same time (see the previous review), this process also involved many different actors - nobles, royal houses, Popes, Catholic orders - and motives. The book describes the "spectacular" emergence of sugar plantations on Madeira and some of the Canaries in the 1450s, and the further innovation, from the 1460s on the Cape Verde islands, of plantations worked by slave labor. One of the most fascinating aspects was the European struggle to understand and categorize the indigenous "primitive" Canarians - whether they were noble innocents or barbaric savages. In many ways, then, the European encounter with the peoples of the Americas were prefigured on this East Atlantic archipelago more than a century before Columbus. Reading this book made me want to read much more about Europe's dynamism of the high middle ages and reread books such as Thomas Ertman's The Rise of Leviathan (1997) and Robert Bartlett's seminal The Making of Europe (1994). I'd be curious to learn more, for example, about the state-building of Aragon-Catalan and of Castile. This book mentions the Reconquista but doesn't leave the impression that it played a predominant role in these states' dynamism.

R.R. Davies, Domination & Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1100-1300 (1990)

This slim volume is a masterpiece. It's tightly argued and clearly written, using apt quotations from many primary sources to support its case. Davies deftly combines observations about basic trends with acknowledgement of complexities and countervailing trends. His basic argument is contained in the title, which initially puzzled me. I had assumed that conquest came first, followed by domination. However, the reality was the other way around: first came domination - a slow, sometimes invisible process, by which the Welsh and Irish (and to a lesser extent the Scottish) adapted themselves to "Anglo-Norman" patterns of thought, economic relations, acknowledgement of a diffuse feudal "overlordship," Church practices, etc. Domination was not limited to soft power, however. Anglo-Norman "conquistadores" were its sharp cutting edge, as they claimed small islands of direct control, extending outwards from their castles, though rarely very far. The English kings only intermittently took an active role in this aristocratically driven enterprise. The lack of written records and the predominance of customary relations, for one thing, limited the reach and power of the English colonizers. Only in the thirteenth century did domination take on a harder edge, part of the growth of centralized, bureaucratic state power across Latin Europe. The book fits well with Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe, which was published just a few years later and probably draws on Davies. Both books are helpful for understanding Europe's growing vitality and drive to expand in this pivotal period. Domination & Conquest is also invaluable for its convincing portrait of the varieties and subtelties of colonization.