Written in 1995, this is an excellent (and eerily prescient) guide to understanding the foreign policy challenges facing the United States in the first half of the 21st century. Using the entire history of foreign policy in the West (starting in the 17th century) Kissinger clearly demonstrates why the United States can't singlehandedly dominate the emerging world order. But he also shows why it won't have to. From the very last chapter: "America will likely have the world's most powerful economy. Yet wealth will become more widely spread as will the technology for generating wealth. The United States will face economic competition of a kind it never experienced during the Cold War. America will be the greatest and most powerful nation, but a nation with peers."
2.) "John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More" by Norman Macrae
Very fun and entertaining book about one of the most brilliant and influential scientists who've ever lived. I was really blown away by how generous he was in helping the other great physicists of that era solve the really thorny, challenging problems that'd eventually make them famous without wanting to be cited or given any credit for doing so.
Fascinating list -- thanks for sharing. I was interested that you took the argument presented in Dead Aid at face value. I agree that much aid to Africa has been wasteful or even counter-productive ("The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working" makes a similar argument), but the overall balance of evidence seems to be that direct money transfers has been an effective way to bypass government corruption and inject liquidity into local economies.
We've given relatively large sums of money to various organizations over the years, a good amount of which I regret, but I've been impressed by the honest, evidence-based approach from GiveDirectly (https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly/). We've also seen first hand from traveling in Tanzania how this kind of approach has directly resulted in improved education and economic opportunities. It certainly seems better than the hierarchical, paternalistic approach that many NGOs take.
I'd question that "poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined" in sub-Saharan Africa -- is that really true in absolute terms? While there remains profound inequalities, access to clean water, electricity has improved drastically and literacy rates have improved, haven't they?
I can appreciate this perspective. Probably the comments is not the best way to have the "EA v. White Man's Burden" dialog but I do understand your view and do not want to take away from the work you've done and results you've observed.
On this book I did have a lot of personal experience, particularly in West Africa and with the World Bank where (and when) Moyo worked. You might even remember I did a few of my internal blog posts on Africa stuff (mobile phones, banking in Somalia, micro finance in Uganda/Tanzania, and roads in Ethiopia, and others I don't recall). So my agreement with the book was in part validation. I spent about 5 years after Microsoft somewhat connected to the Bank and saw a lot of this first hand.
I think the best approach still eludes consensus. There's lots of motivation and great work going on and much of the success is context-dependent and many problems remain in fighting corruption and in general systems that don't yet work well.
The Dragons and the Snakes by David Kilcullen - published in 2020 and very prescient of the world we live in now - https://amzn.to/3VjoWoy
Taylor Lorenz’ Extremely Online is a history of the social web from bloggers to the present day. - https://amzn.to/4fTxuuC
Panic! edited by Michael Lewis covers the 1987 financial crash, the 1998 debt crisis, the dot com bubble, and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8. I read the book in short bursts mainly due to asks on my time, rather than the nature of the book. Panic! seemed pertinent to read now. The publication of Pegasus Research’s iconic quantitative research on ‘burn rates’ in March 2000 on dot.com company burn rates makes it highly relevant to revisit when we are in hype cycles such as those surrounding health tech, fintech, crypto and more – if for no other reason than pointing out the folly of trying to pick winners in hype-driven public markets with a high degree of opacity. https://amzn.to/4f4mV72
In Burn Book Swisher gives us her potted history and hot takes on the people and companies that she tried to report on. I say tried because technology firms have made life difficult for journalists since blogging became a thing and they could go direct to the audience. Swisher came from an unhappy but privileged background and jumped into journalism with gusto. There isn’t anything that surprising in her reporting save how was it so late that Swisher really dialled into how toxic and nihilistic some of her subjects really were? https://amzn.to/41cbdne
Dark Wire – Joseph Cox was one of the journalists whose work I followed on Vice News. He specialises in information security related journalism and turns out the kind of features that would have been a cover story on Wired magazine back in the day. With the implosion of Vice Media, he now writes for his own publication: 404 Media. Dark Wire follows the story of four encrypted messaging platforms, with the main focus being on Anon. Anon is a digital cuckoo’s egg. An encrypted messaging service designed for criminals, ran as an arms length front company for the FBI. Cox tells the complex story in a taunt in-depth account that brings it all to life. But the story isn’t all happy endings and it does question the threats posed to services like Signal and WhatsApp if law enforcement see criminals moving there. https://amzn.to/4it64Ob
This Time No Mistakes by Will Hutton seemed to be a must-read document in the face of an imminent Labour party victory in the general election. Hutton’s The State We’re In was the defining work of wonkish thinking around policy as Labour came into power under Tony Blair in 1997. Three decades later and Labour is poised to rule again during a time of more social issues and lower economic performance. The people are poor and the economy has been barely growing for over a decade. The State We’re In was a positive roadmap of introducing long-term investment culture into British business and upgrading vocational education. This Time No Mistakes is an angrier manifesto of wider change from media and healthcare to government involvement in business. Both books outlined a multi-term roadmap for politicians. In the end, Labour didn’t deliver on The State We’re In‘s vision; this time they are even less likely to do so. - https://amzn.to/4gcktwa
Fiction
The Murderers by Frederic Brown provides a criminal side view to a story in a world that one would recognise from James Ellroy‘s neo-noir crime world of Los Angeles. - https://amzn.to/3CSxeNT
The Old Woman With the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo. It worked on a number of levels for me. Firstly, I loved its portrayal of modern Korean society, from the aging population to the Confucian view of seniority that makes everyday interactions more complex than other Asian societies. Without revealing too much, the old woman in question is someone in the twilight of her career and how she is coping with new up-and-coming rivals at work. - https://amzn.to/4igdW5h
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro moved from my to be read pile to must read pile given everything that has been going on with generative AI over the the past couple of years that it has sat on my bookshelf. Ishiguro uses speculative fiction to explore the different kinds of love and attachment, alongside loss. From a machine learning perspective it poses interesting questions about applying observational learning rather than rules based learning in systems that are supposed to exist in the real world. Klara is an ‘artificial friend’ for a child who is going through ‘levelling up’. Levelling up could be seen as a euphemism for everything from the cramming schools popular in Asian education systems to the challenges humans face in an information heavy environment. Ultimately there is something more human and child-like in Klara’s experiences than the human co-protagonists. https://amzn.to/4fTxPxo
Adding a bunch of these to my cart! In return, a couple recs: The Postcard by Anne Berest (fiction but with enough historical grounding that I bet you’ll like it) and Last Call at the Hotel Imperial by Deborah Cohen (about the foreign correspondents who covered WWII with so many echoes to how we talk about journalism today).
1.) "Diplomacy" by Henry Kissinger
Written in 1995, this is an excellent (and eerily prescient) guide to understanding the foreign policy challenges facing the United States in the first half of the 21st century. Using the entire history of foreign policy in the West (starting in the 17th century) Kissinger clearly demonstrates why the United States can't singlehandedly dominate the emerging world order. But he also shows why it won't have to. From the very last chapter: "America will likely have the world's most powerful economy. Yet wealth will become more widely spread as will the technology for generating wealth. The United States will face economic competition of a kind it never experienced during the Cold War. America will be the greatest and most powerful nation, but a nation with peers."
2.) "John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More" by Norman Macrae
Very fun and entertaining book about one of the most brilliant and influential scientists who've ever lived. I was really blown away by how generous he was in helping the other great physicists of that era solve the really thorny, challenging problems that'd eventually make them famous without wanting to be cited or given any credit for doing so.
Love these! Thank you!
Fascinating list -- thanks for sharing. I was interested that you took the argument presented in Dead Aid at face value. I agree that much aid to Africa has been wasteful or even counter-productive ("The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working" makes a similar argument), but the overall balance of evidence seems to be that direct money transfers has been an effective way to bypass government corruption and inject liquidity into local economies.
We've given relatively large sums of money to various organizations over the years, a good amount of which I regret, but I've been impressed by the honest, evidence-based approach from GiveDirectly (https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly/). We've also seen first hand from traveling in Tanzania how this kind of approach has directly resulted in improved education and economic opportunities. It certainly seems better than the hierarchical, paternalistic approach that many NGOs take.
I'd question that "poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined" in sub-Saharan Africa -- is that really true in absolute terms? While there remains profound inequalities, access to clean water, electricity has improved drastically and literacy rates have improved, haven't they?
Thank you for the comment Tim.
I can appreciate this perspective. Probably the comments is not the best way to have the "EA v. White Man's Burden" dialog but I do understand your view and do not want to take away from the work you've done and results you've observed.
On this book I did have a lot of personal experience, particularly in West Africa and with the World Bank where (and when) Moyo worked. You might even remember I did a few of my internal blog posts on Africa stuff (mobile phones, banking in Somalia, micro finance in Uganda/Tanzania, and roads in Ethiopia, and others I don't recall). So my agreement with the book was in part validation. I spent about 5 years after Microsoft somewhat connected to the Bank and saw a lot of this first hand.
I think the best approach still eludes consensus. There's lots of motivation and great work going on and much of the success is context-dependent and many problems remain in fighting corruption and in general systems that don't yet work well.
Non-fiction
The Dragons and the Snakes by David Kilcullen - published in 2020 and very prescient of the world we live in now - https://amzn.to/3VjoWoy
Taylor Lorenz’ Extremely Online is a history of the social web from bloggers to the present day. - https://amzn.to/4fTxuuC
Panic! edited by Michael Lewis covers the 1987 financial crash, the 1998 debt crisis, the dot com bubble, and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8. I read the book in short bursts mainly due to asks on my time, rather than the nature of the book. Panic! seemed pertinent to read now. The publication of Pegasus Research’s iconic quantitative research on ‘burn rates’ in March 2000 on dot.com company burn rates makes it highly relevant to revisit when we are in hype cycles such as those surrounding health tech, fintech, crypto and more – if for no other reason than pointing out the folly of trying to pick winners in hype-driven public markets with a high degree of opacity. https://amzn.to/4f4mV72
In Burn Book Swisher gives us her potted history and hot takes on the people and companies that she tried to report on. I say tried because technology firms have made life difficult for journalists since blogging became a thing and they could go direct to the audience. Swisher came from an unhappy but privileged background and jumped into journalism with gusto. There isn’t anything that surprising in her reporting save how was it so late that Swisher really dialled into how toxic and nihilistic some of her subjects really were? https://amzn.to/41cbdne
Dark Wire – Joseph Cox was one of the journalists whose work I followed on Vice News. He specialises in information security related journalism and turns out the kind of features that would have been a cover story on Wired magazine back in the day. With the implosion of Vice Media, he now writes for his own publication: 404 Media. Dark Wire follows the story of four encrypted messaging platforms, with the main focus being on Anon. Anon is a digital cuckoo’s egg. An encrypted messaging service designed for criminals, ran as an arms length front company for the FBI. Cox tells the complex story in a taunt in-depth account that brings it all to life. But the story isn’t all happy endings and it does question the threats posed to services like Signal and WhatsApp if law enforcement see criminals moving there. https://amzn.to/4it64Ob
This Time No Mistakes by Will Hutton seemed to be a must-read document in the face of an imminent Labour party victory in the general election. Hutton’s The State We’re In was the defining work of wonkish thinking around policy as Labour came into power under Tony Blair in 1997. Three decades later and Labour is poised to rule again during a time of more social issues and lower economic performance. The people are poor and the economy has been barely growing for over a decade. The State We’re In was a positive roadmap of introducing long-term investment culture into British business and upgrading vocational education. This Time No Mistakes is an angrier manifesto of wider change from media and healthcare to government involvement in business. Both books outlined a multi-term roadmap for politicians. In the end, Labour didn’t deliver on The State We’re In‘s vision; this time they are even less likely to do so. - https://amzn.to/4gcktwa
Fiction
The Murderers by Frederic Brown provides a criminal side view to a story in a world that one would recognise from James Ellroy‘s neo-noir crime world of Los Angeles. - https://amzn.to/3CSxeNT
The Old Woman With the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo. It worked on a number of levels for me. Firstly, I loved its portrayal of modern Korean society, from the aging population to the Confucian view of seniority that makes everyday interactions more complex than other Asian societies. Without revealing too much, the old woman in question is someone in the twilight of her career and how she is coping with new up-and-coming rivals at work. - https://amzn.to/4igdW5h
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro moved from my to be read pile to must read pile given everything that has been going on with generative AI over the the past couple of years that it has sat on my bookshelf. Ishiguro uses speculative fiction to explore the different kinds of love and attachment, alongside loss. From a machine learning perspective it poses interesting questions about applying observational learning rather than rules based learning in systems that are supposed to exist in the real world. Klara is an ‘artificial friend’ for a child who is going through ‘levelling up’. Levelling up could be seen as a euphemism for everything from the cramming schools popular in Asian education systems to the challenges humans face in an information heavy environment. Ultimately there is something more human and child-like in Klara’s experiences than the human co-protagonists. https://amzn.to/4fTxPxo
Adding a bunch of these to my cart! In return, a couple recs: The Postcard by Anne Berest (fiction but with enough historical grounding that I bet you’ll like it) and Last Call at the Hotel Imperial by Deborah Cohen (about the foreign correspondents who covered WWII with so many echoes to how we talk about journalism today).
Ooh good sounding ones. 🙏