"Extreme Economies" by Richard Davies (2019)

 "...people are told they are free to choose the goods they buy and the careers they pursue.  In fact, we are 'slaves' to consumerism, enticed by markets that exist to create false wants.  Fashion exists, for example, to make people feel they have a deep need - in a Maslow sense - for the latest cut of jeans or pattern of dress.  The economics of data are the same, in Mr. Han's view.  Our data is in mass supply and freely supplied by us.  But we are slaves here too, chasing tokens of approval - likes on Facebook and Instagram - that we mistakenly feel are valuable."

Author Richard Davies is a former writer for The Economist.  He's also served as an economic advisor to the British government, and is presently employed as a Professor at Bristol University.  Extreme Economies is his first book.

In Extreme Economies he travels the world seeking out the most unusual areas with respect to production, distribution and trade.  He visits Aceh, Indonesia, which rebuilt itself with surprising speed after a tsunami.  He visits the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, where a remarkable system of trade exists between Syrian exiles.  He travels from there to Louisiana, where he interviews inmates on their own informal economy, and from Louisiana he inspects locations as far apart as the Darien Gap, Kinshasa, Glasgow, Akita, Tallinn and Santiago.  Each economy he visits exhibits its own unique characteristics.

His conclusion?  He sums up his travels by reassessing the value of social capital, and by remarking upon the aspects of economies that economists themselves often overlook.  Places such as Zaatari or the Louisiana prison system, which seem poor from the outside, are actually vibrant when considered from the standpoint of mediums of exchange, adaptability and their impact upon neighboring economies.  He arrives at the conclusion that a nation's GDP is never the end of the story, and that even in a place with high levels of income inequality there may be more than meets the eye.

I found this book very interesting and I recommend it without reservation.  It has a lot to say about the direction our economies may be heading in, and the author is very careful about the statements he makes.

Those living in Taiwan will want to read the chapter on Akita, Japan.  Many communities in Taiwan are experiencing similar challenges, and as our populations age we'll need to overcome many of the same difficulties.  Books like Extreme Economies are one way of doing that.

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"The Greatest Show on Earth" by Richard Dawkins (2009)

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"The Chinese in America" by Iris Chang (2003)

"The Greatest Show on Earth" by Richard Dawkins (2009)

"Once again, I am sorry to take a sledgehammer to so small and fragile a nut, but I have to do so because more than 40 percent of the American people believe literally in the story of Noah's Ark.  We should be able to ignore them and get on with our science, but we can't afford to because they control school boards, they home-school their children to deprive them of access to proper science teachers, and they include many members of the United States Congress, some state governors and even presidential and vice-presidential candidates.  They have the money and the power to build institutions, universities, even a museum where children ride life-size mechanical models of dinosaurs, which, they are solemnly told, coexisted with humans.  And, as recent polls have shown, Britain is not far behind (or should that read 'ahead'?), along with parts of Europe and most of the Islamic world."

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, author and noted atheist.  His 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which has also been reviewed here, propelled him to fame, and he's remained in the public eye ever since.

If you've read The Selfish Gene, or any of Dawkins' other books, you'll find much that's familiar in The Greatest Show on Earth.  In this work he champions Darwin's theory of evolution, his copy of On the Origin of the Species firmly in hand.  Creationism, he argues, is a threat to both our understanding of the world and the very underpinnings of modern society.  In thirteen chapters he rails against this threat, bringing to bear discoveries from biology, geology and chemistry.

It's a good book if you're looking for an overview of our present scientific understanding of the world, but I'm not exactly sure who it was written for.  Those who've followed Dawkins from previous works won't find much on offer in The Greatest Show on Earth, and those adhering to creationist accounts of life's origins will only be further alienated by it.  To compound this problem it really is condescending at times, and those coming to this book with a more open mind might find it off-putting for that reason.

For the record I agree with everything Dawkins states in this book.  But then again I already knew that I would agree with him.  So why did I read it?  Who was it for?  And why was it written?

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"Canada" by Richard Ford (2012)

"The Americans in the bar were mostly large, loud-talking men dressed in rough hunting attire.  They laughed and smoked and drank rye whiskey and beer and enjoyed themselves.  Many of them thought that being in Canada was highly comical, and made jokes about having Thanksgiving in October and the strange ways Canadians talked (I'd never much detected it, though I tried) and how Canadians hated Americans but all wished they could live there and could be rich."

Richard Ford is an American novelist resident in Maine.  He's written several novels, and his book Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize.

In Canada a young man living in Great Falls, Montana learns of his parents' failed attempt at robbing a bank.  After they're arrested he and his twin sister part ways, and he's spirited away to distant Partreau, Saskatchewan.  Once in Partreau he's placed in the care of the enigmatic Arthur Remlinger, a fellow American who runs a hotel.

I found some of the word choices and sentence structures used in this book a bit odd, and I'm not sure if this oddness was intentional or not.  Was the author attempting to convey the protagonist's limited vocabulary?  Or the way people spoke in the late 50s/early 60s?  I'm really not sure.

In terms of pacing, Canada moves very slowly, and this would be my main argument against it.  It takes forever to get going, with the above-mentioned arrest taking place about halfway through the book.  Given the story it's trying to tell, Canada could have easily been half as long.

Most perplexingly, Canada as a country doesn't factor into the story for several chapters.  If the author was trying to use Canada as his theme, or as some kind of metaphor, he fails spectacularly to do so.  The nation of Canada isn't present in enough of the book to impart any larger meaning.

The protagonist's continual woolgathering also grows tiresome.  Events that might have had more impact are diminished by his extreme passivity, and the people he meets never seem to influence him as much as they should.  He never seems to have a stake in the things he witnesses, up to the point where a loved one's passing barely affects him at all.

Canada isn't a bad book, but it's definitely not as entertaining or absorbing as it could have been.  If the author had just revised it a bit, making Canada into more of a symbol and enlarging the roles of various characters, it would have worked a lot better.  As it is it's simply OK, and will probably fade quickly from your memory after you've read it.

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"Misbehaving" by Richard H. Thaler (2015)

"The premise of the article, and later the book, is that in our increasingly complicated world people cannot be expected to have the expertise to make anything close to optimal decisions in all the domains in which they are forced to choose.  But we all enjoy having the right to choose for ourselves, even if we sometimes make mistakes.  Are there ways to make it easier for people to make what they will deem to be good decisions, both before and after the fact, without explicitly forcing anyone to do anything?"

Richard H. Thaler is a Nobel Prize-winning Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago.  He is one of the founders of Behavioral Economics, a discipline which seeks to integrate findings from Psychology into economic theory.  If his name sounds familiar, it's because he appeared in the movie The Big Short.  He's the one explaining the "hot hand fallacy" and synthetic CDOs next to Selena Gomez at the dice table.

In Misbehaving he outlines the development of Behavioral Economics from the 1970s to the the present day, and also details some of the discoveries in the field.  In one sense the book could be viewed as his autobiography, with his life forming a backdrop for the experiments he describes.  In another sense the book could be viewed as an apologia for this relatively new discipline, providing arguments in favor of a more "human-centric" approach to economics.

One thing that worried me from the outet was the author's praise for Daniel Kahneman, whose Thinking, Fast and Slow bored me to tears.  I'm not a big fan of Psychology in the best of times, and the mentions of Kahneman's book had me thinking that Misbehaving was going to be more of the same.

I'm glad to say that this isn't the case, and even though much of what Richard Thaler lays out in Misbehaving seemed rather obvious to me, his humorous approach got me through the more involved chapters of the book.  This isn't to say I loved it, but I did have a much tougher time with Thinking, Fast and Slow.

I should also state that the "obviousness" of Thaler's arguments might be due to exposure to other recent authors exploring similar material.  Steven Pinker (another author I'm not fond of) comes to mind, as does the book The Anatomy of Violence, reviewed here last year.  It might seem strange for someone who professes a dislike for Psychology to have read so many books by psychologists, but I think this is more a reflection of the publishing industry than my personal taste.  I read what I can get, and books by psychologists are always on offer.

But going back to Misbehaving, my thoughts?  I think the author spends way too much time on interdepartmental politics and his career up to 2015.  Very few people are going to care about the personalities described in this book, especially considering the fact that they are/were Professors of Economics, and several of them are now dead.  As for the concept of Behavioral Economics, it seems like a no-brainer to me.  People aren't "rational" in the classical economics sense of the word, and we're always making imperfect choices based on incomplete information.  Just look at the Internet, and think of how much social media sites and deteriorating news outlets influence our lives.

For those with NO knowledge of Behavioral Economics I would recommend this book.  I would encourage those who are acquainted with it to pass Misbehaving by.

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"First Person" by Richard Flanagan (2017)

"Early on the Sunday afternoon, a few hours before my flight back to Melbourne, Gene Paley rang to say he had read the draft chapter.  He declared it good as far as it went.  Though he felt I had conveyed something of the psychology of Heidl, what he needed now was a story.  Readers need a story.  The trade, he went on, needs a story."

Richard Flanagan is an Australian novelist born in Tasmania.  Two of his other novels, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Gould's Book of Fish, have also been reviewed here.

In First Person, his newest book, an aspiring novelist takes on the job of ghostwriting an autobiography for a notorious con man.  He finds the task much more difficult than he first imagined, and he is confronted by constant attempts at psychological manipulation.  

On another level, it's a novel about writer's block, featuring the author-as-protagonist setup familiar from any number of other writers ranging from Stephen King to Philip Roth.  It's also tirelessly depressing, endlessly repetitive, and that big "reveal" you're waiting for never comes.  The author offers us not so much a story as a state of mind, and I'd have to say that the results are decidedly mixed.

As someone who loved Gould's Book of Fish and admired The Narrow Road to the Deep North, I'd have to say that First Person is something of a misfire for Richard Flanagan.  I went into it wanting to enjoy it, but now that I'm done with it I find myself wanting to read a novel with more of a story, with more variety, and with something more to say.  The kind of existential despair conveyed through First Person is just a bit too easy, and I know the author could have done a lot better.

"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins (1976/1989)

"An uneasy tension disturbs the heart of the selfish gene theory.  It is the tension between gene and individual body as fundamental agent of life.  On the one hand we have the beguiling image of independent DNA replicators, skipping like chamois, free and untrammeled down the generations, temporarily brought together in throwaway survival machines, immortal coils shuffling off an endless succession of mortal ones as they forge towards their separate eternities.  On the other hand we look at the individual bodies themselves and each one is obviously a coherent, integrated, immensely complicated machine, with a conspicuous unity of purpose."

Richard Dawkins is a well-known popular science writer, and also one of the most noted atheists of modern times.  His life as a public personality almost overshadows his work as a writer and scholar.  One of his other books, "The Blind Watchmaker," has guided many discussions on the role of religion in modern life.

"The Selfish Gene," for the most part, steers clear of religious debate.  Instead it concerns itself with the role of the gene in evolutionary development, and the way in which many leading scientists have focused on the evolution of the individual organism (or group of organisms) at the expense of the true change agent - the gene.  Group selection, argues Dawkins, is most often a case of failing to see the trees for the forest, and to even talk of individual selection can be grossly misleading.  In Dawkins' account, one does not speak of the survival of a group or even of the survival of an individual organism, but rather of the survival of individual genes that are temporarily bound together within that organism.

I liked this book, even if Dawkins can be condescending at times.  I felt that he also takes some unnecessary jabs at religion, where using less controversial examples would have better served his arguments.  I didn't feel that the "faith vs. reason" argument had any place in this book, and it only alienates readers who would have otherwise learned a lot from this overview of evolutionary theory.  In the end I think the "faith vs. reason" argument is pointless, because the faithful invariably have reasons behind their faith, just as the reasonable have faith in their ability to reason.

But perhaps I digress - just as Dawkins digresses, on innumerable occasions in "The Selfish Gene."  In the course of the book he discusses genes as "replicators" and individual organisms as "vehicles" for these "replicators, the structure of genes and their arrangement within chromosomes and DNA, kin relationships as a reflection of gene survival strategies, tension between generations of individual organisms and how this contributes to gene survival, sexual relationships, group dynamics and altruism, a genetic theory of ideas (this part is fascinating), and the long reach of the phenotype (also fascinating).

Of all the topics listed above, I found the sections on sexual relationships to be the most interesting, followed by his theory of "memes" (ideas), and how the phenotype of a particular gene might extend well beyond the organism in which it inhabits.  Dawkins dwells on game theory a bit too much during one of the later chapters, and his chapter on "the gene machine" is slow going.

I could attempt to recapitulate some of his arguments here, but if you are interested you should probably just go out and buy the book.  The first few chapters are less than captivating, but the chapters near the end had my complete attention.  I'll probably read Dawkins' "The Extended Phenotype" when I get the chance.