1. Uncivil Agreement, by Lilliana Mason. My review. I had many take-aways, including that tribal loyalty sometimes drives political beliefs (it’s not just the other way around), hatred of the opposing party has gone up by more than division on issues, and cross-cutting identities seem to have gone down, and they used to ameliorate polarization.
2. Blueprint, by Robert Plomin. My main take-aways are that variation in human traits is polygenic (dozens of genes, each having small effects) and that we should not think of psychological traits in either-or terms. Thinking about myself, my guess is that if we had a “spectrum” for a tendency toward schizophrenia and bipolarity, then I would be above normal in that direction. I believe that this makes me more creative than people who are normal or below-normal on this dimension. But if I were much further along on this dimension I would be too dysfunctional too often.
3. Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou. The tale of Theranos, the biotech startup that descended into fraud. I’ve recommended this to friends with a money back guarantee. There was no risk to me in doing that–everyone who has read the book is completely satisfied.
4. Minds Make Societies, by Pascal Boyer. He talks about how we have been trained by evolution in coalition management. A sample quote: “stating that someone’s behavior is morally repugnant creates consensus more easily than claiming that the behavior results from incompetence.”
5. Tomorrow 3.0, by Mike Munger. Not as much impact on me as the top two, but a really good example of “thinking like an economist.”
6. A Crisis of Beliefs, by Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer. If you are going to write another book about the financial crisis, at least have it be something like this one, which blames incompetence rather than moral repugnance. My review.
Some notable books that didn’t make the list:
Because it is only a revised and updated edition, I deemed as ineligible The Revolt of the Public, by Martin Gurri. Otherwise, it would be at the top of the list.
Suicide of the West, by Jonah Goldberg. My review.
Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Dineen. My review.
The Virtue of Nationalism, by Yoram Hazony.
The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
Click Here to Kill Everybody, by Bruce Schneier.
After writing this post but before it went up, Tyler Cowen posted his list. He has Gurri on it. He also includes Waldrop’s book on Licklider, DARPA, and the Internet. I read a free sample, which convinced me that it is likely the best book on the topic. But I judged, perhaps wrongly, that I already have read too many other works on these events to profit much from reading this one. I made the same judgment about the Andrew Roberts biography of Churchill.
Seeing Taleb’s Skin in the Game on Tyler’s list, it probably belongs on mine, too. Taleb was very disagreeable with me on Twitter for my essay calling him disagreeable, and that may have unconsciously caused me to forget to include his book.
The three GMU books at the top of Tyler’s list also merit inclusion. I read them in previous years, so it didn’t occur to me to include them here. I browsed the books by Mann, Heyes, Reich, and Chater, and I was not motivated to buy them. The other books on Tyler’s list I have not browsed.
Seeing Taleb’s Skin in the Game on Tyler’s list, it probably belongs on mine, too. Taleb was very disagreeable with me on Twitter for my essay calling him disagreeable, and that may have unconsciously caused me to forget to include his book.
That is because Taleb is too intellectually insecure to engage in constructive criticism/arguments so he just insults and blocks
The dis-agreeable factor does explain something with Taleb. I am addicted to reading polemics and found Taleb immediately charming when I started reading _The black swan_. It is easy to see that he would tend to rub people the wrong way and be abrasive or irritating. With him it’s probably not a bug but a feature.
Taleb’s tendency to question orthodoxy is often valuable. A non-trivial insight of his involves the necktie. He says whenever you find yourself talking to man wearing a tie you should be asking yourself “why is this guy wearing a tie?”
Perhaps Taleb iimplies that rather than listening to the nice man tie-wearer’s sales pitch or soothing explanation, maybe you should just keep asking yourself about the tie. “What’s this guy talking about? Hmm, whatever.
But…Why…is this guy weating a tie? I’ve got to think!”
The tie question–it sounds trivial but it’s not. Perhaps we could put it up there with Armen Alchian’s hypothesis that non-profit organizations will on average employ prettier secretaries.
Thanks for the link to the essay calling him disagreeable. It looks good.
Reading that essay, immediately I thought of “F*ck you” money and Greg Cochrane and the late Henry Harpending. How many people actually explore unpopular and controversial, yet potentially important research topics once awarded tenure? Is it lower than the optimal number? If so, why? selection early on in the career?
Who else goes on that list. Hans Eysenck? Bruce Charlton? Napoleon Chagnon? The list of disagreeables is an interesting one. Perhaps to be expanded in a future blog post.
Your summary of Jonah Goldberg’s “Suicide of the West” is excellent. I’ll take a stab at answering your question about why conservatives are afraid to experiment. If I recall correctly, Goldberg has no issues with individual experimentation such as gay marriage. Where he, and I, draw the line is requiring people to support and even participate in such experimentation and to abstain from disagreeing with it or noting any negative consequences.
No fiction? Or will that be a separate list? I read more non-fiction this past year than I do in most years and regret it. Am taking a vow to be more disciplined in selecting non-fiction and devoting more time to fiction.
If nothing else, book 4 tells us why there are few book 6’s.
Thanks for the recommendations. I read “Religion Explained” by Pascal Boyer a while back and it was excellent, so I’ve just ordered item 4.
#4 certainly sounds very interesting and likely most important: “stating that someone’s behavior is morally repugnant creates consensus more easily than claiming that the behavior results from incompetence.”
The true “meritocracy” is being replaced in US culture with some kind of PC – victimocracy. That consensus which is created has a name: culture.
Politics is downstream of culture.
See V. Postrel on how so many Libertarians seem obtuse about culture; I’m now claiming it’s more important in most ways for a policy to be culturally admired than to be “right”.
My take away from #1 about the increase in tribal loyalty plus hatred is that a big influence has been the acceptance by conservatives of the secret discrimination against Reps that most Universities have long been practicing.
Edgar, I recommend “The Sellout” by Paul Beatty, which I believe won the Booker prize a few years ago. Don’t hold that against the author though, it’s a viciously funny and fast read.
What’re the best books you read this year that weren’t written in 2018?
“Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much For Health Care” is quite good, though also quite unsettling with its relentless catalog of fraud and waste.