Our pick of 2011’s most interesting reads
Dec 23, 2011
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Embrace muddling
How does humanity progress, given bad ideas outnumber good ones? The answer, says Tim Harford, is that in the right environment the best ideas tend to bloom, while the bad wither. So we often progress “because our randomness generates plenty of gold amid the dross”, says Edward Glaeser in the FT.
The implication is that organisations must embrace trial and error: failure often triggers serendipity. Harford offers many examples: the maverick civil servant who commissioned the Spitfire fighter plane, sceptical of the popular view that bombers couldn’t be stopped; ‘horizontal’ firms, such as Google, that value innovation over control. The result is “a powerful combination of anecdotes and data to make a serious point: companies, governments and people must recognise the limits of their wisdom and embrace the muddling of mankind”.
• Little, Brown, £15.90.
Tracing a true history of debt
David Graeber is an anthropologist, anarchist, and what Businessweek calls the “anti-leader of Occupy Wall Street”. This is his take on the history of money and credit, in which he argues “that many of our existing ideas about money and credit are limited, if not wrong”, says Gillian Tett in the FT. The conventional view is that money developed from barter, and then you got credit and debt. Graeber says the evidence shows that debt came first. Debt, he says, maps the complex relations of power and tribute in all human societies. In the past, the shackles of debt were broken with periodic debt jubilees. Today, the state protects creditor interests at all costs. “Could this change in the coming years? Should it?” asks Tett. “The question is an intriguing one, and I suspect it will soon hit the radar.”
• Melville House Publishing, £21.99.
A pragmatic approach to poverty
In places like sub-Saharan Africa, despite years of aid, there is still under-development. Yet in the field of development economics, competing schools of thought still vie to have their preferred “solutions” implemented without any real evidence to back them up. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee aim to change this. They test and evaluate programmes using randomised trials, with the aim of finding practical, specific solutions. Their book, says William Easterly in The Wall Street Journal, is “marked by their deep appreciation of the precariousness” of the lives of the poor. The writers “have fought to establish a beachhead of honesty and rigour about evidence, evaluation and complexity in an aid world that would prefer to stick to glossy brochures and celebrity photo-ops… For this they deserve to be congratulated – and to be read”.
• PublicAffairs, £17.99.
Stagnant states
Tyler Cowen’s small book has a big theme: US resources are now efficiently deployed, so expect slower growth. It punches above its weight, says Matt Yglesias at ThinkProgress.org. You get an “insightful point per page across a whole range of subjects”. The thrust is that growth has been slow for the past 30-40 years due to a slowing rate of increase in basic science. “Low-hanging fruit” has been plucked: mass education and harnessing the full potential of fossil fuels, for instance. That helps explain the stagnation of the middle class. It is “a bravura performance by one of the most interesting thinkers out there”.
• Dutton Books, £8.28.
All you need to know about oil...
In 1991, Daniel Yergin wrote The Prize, his award-winning history of oil. “In the two decades since”, says The New York Times, this “one-man think tank… has had a virtual monopoly on the subject of energy and geopolitics.” The Quest is his long-awaited follow up, and “it’s an even better book”.
It is certainly not a light read: it is “encyclopaedic in its ambitions”. Industry mega-mergers, Middle Eastern supply risks, geopolitics – all are carefully analysed. But “strong set pieces propel the reader through its 804 pages”. Along the way, Yergin reaches some striking conclusions. He “mostly dismisses” the theory of “peak oil” (the idea that we are consuming oil faster than it can ever be produced), and devotes a lot of space to renewable energy and “disruptive technologies”. He sees diversity as key to energy security – a nuclear-armed Iran particularly worries him. But the one energy source that could have the most impact, he concludes, is also the simplest: “efficiency”. Products that make better use of our resources could “change the world”.
• Penguin Press, £30.
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