Here you will find a chronicle of what I’m reading right now, the ideas that are shaping my ever-changing world view. Feel free to read along with me.
“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”~ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality … Continue reading Machette Season
"Government is not only a protection service; it is also a protection racket. While government provides protection against violence originating with others, like the protection racket it also charges customers for protection against harm that it would otherwise impose itself. The first action is an economic service. The second is a racket.In practice, the distinction … Continue reading The Sovereign Individual
What I read in 2020, the comprehensive list. How to read this list: * = Recommend** = Really recommendNC = No comment (or, really, do not bother)RR = Re-readF = FictionNF = Non-fiction If you trust my reading recommendations, I suggest you purchase a copy of whatever catches your eye at your favourite local second hand book … Continue reading 2020 A Year in Books
“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups” The premise of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson is simple: Policy should be honest about the losers, … Continue reading Economics in One Lesson
Narrative Economics by Robert J Shiller has been on my to-read list for a while (I was waiting for the paperback edition to launch in South Africa. The book looks at the thesis that narrative a way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of … Continue reading Narrative Economics
Everyone who thinks MMT is a good idea should read Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles. That's the review. (But if you're still here and still want more, I wrote some more thoughts about thinking though permanent solutions for temporary problems on my rather odd book review column here).
The Red Queen is a long, hard look at human nature. It reminds us that in spite of our skyscrapers and space rockets, we humans are still, deep down, naked apes with animal instincts and desires. The most base desire we (as a species and as individuals) have is for immortality - genetic immortality, creative … Continue reading The Red Queen
“Faced with wildly conflicting versions of reality, people selected the one that suited them.” Peter Pomerantsev's This is Not Propaganda is a book about our times for our times. It addresses the central catch-22 of our information age; namely whether central censorship (with the risk of top down propaganda) or decentralised free range information … Continue reading This is not Propaganda
"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." - A Soviet joke The Future is History by Masha Gessen is in someways the flip-side of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. While The Origins of Totalitarianism explains exactly that, how societies lose themselves to totalitarian ideology, The Future is History deals with the … Continue reading The Future is History
"Eppur si muove" And yet it moves. Terry Pratchett's Small Gods is a sage tale for times when nothing is real, anything is possible, the rules are made up, and the points don't matter. In times where reality itself is under attack and science denialism is reaching pre-Renaissance levels of surreality; it is good to … Continue reading Small Gods
