Thoughts on Books, Q4'25

It was recently put to me that, in our increasingly post-literate society, reading and--more correctly--the ownership of books has become entirely aesthetic. One does not read for the content of a book, but for the act of being seen to read, for being seen to be smart/cultured/informed, or whatever other banal personality trait one is too vain to ignore but too diminished to seek to genuinely resolve. One need only look at the Financial Times' How To Spend It section (always good for a depressing laugh) to learn that services exist which allow rich people to buy 'personalised' libraries, presumably so that they can project an image of being cultured and well-read to other rich people, without having to put in the 'work' of reading. (To be fair, this is essentially the nature of the transaction within higher education, too) I know of at least two people (one personally, another vicariously) who consider it virtuous to not read fiction. Now, I do not read fiction, mostly because I struggle to find the time between my other reading. But to gloat that one does not read fiction is a mark of a society where reading has become, or at least is becoming, wholly performative. As above, a post-literate society.

There are a multitude of dangerous which will arise from post-literacy. The most annoying is the proliferation of ignorant people who excellently demonstrate the aesthetics of worldliness and, for lack of a better word, intelligence, but who are in reality grossly incompetent and intellectually shallow. We all know someone like this. The most tragic, in my opinion, are all the conversations which we never occur. To read deeply and meaningfully is to engage in a dialogue with an author. Of course, the author's response to you is already set down in the pages not yet explored, but the adventure of reading is in the thoughts and feelings and conflicts which such exploration inspires in your own mind. To read well, and this is true even of terrible books, is to imagine oneself talking to the author, even when one has put the book down. Books are a window into the soul of the author, even those who try to be 'objective' is their writing and delude themselves as to the 'neutrality' of their texts. But books, used right, are also mirrors into one's own mind, and philosophy, and indeed, soul. What will it mean to be human in a post-literate society? Maybe, we might speculate, it will be as it were before the advent of mass printing. But before mass printing, our societies still had so many pillars which bound us into communities, from the toil of cooperative work to the tradition of oral story telling to the 'folk' nature of music. These things have all gone now, too. Our engineered societies discourage meaningful conversation, by which I mean conversation where we see one another as people, rather than assets or opportunities or something else instrumental. We are regularly told to fear one another; to mistrust one another; to value our own time, and establish a psychological exchange rate between the value of our time and the social capital received from an interpersonal interaction. This is a grossly unnatural state. Reading is one of those escapes which remains; as are other mediums of artistic expression (though these face growing pressures, too). What is there, then, in a post-literate society? I imagine the answer consists of us all, each alone, everyday asking a chatbot why we are so sad, simply so that we might receive that hit of positive chemicals when the sycophantic machine assures us that, "That's a great question!"

This quarter I read 13 books, which is a number that if it were representative of previous quarters would have meant hitting my book-a-week target. Of course, I failed to hit this target. This year, I read 41 books, or around 80% of my target. This is up from last year, where I read 38 books. So, I suppose I should be happy about this. In terms of pages--for who does not love a statistic?--I read 3,792 pages this quarter, compared to 3,736. So, only slightly more (this is despite last quarter mine having read only eight books). Such numbers should reveal what I already know to be true, which is that many of the books I have read this quarter have been quite short. But, fortunatel, several have been very good. Indeed, most of the books I have read this year I have enjoyed. Certainly, my general level of satisfaction with my reading in 2025 has been higher than in 2024, which I think is a positive sign. But this is only because, as above, I have been reading books which have encouraged me to have conversations, with myself directly and my own imagined voices of the authors. For all these numbers; the numbers do not matter.

To read:
1. The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Robert Gordon
2. Toward a History of Needs, Ivan Illich
3. The Invention of Science, Dan Wootton
4. Paradigms Lost, John Casti
5. Chokepoints, Edward Fishman
6. The Winner's Curse, Richard Thaler and Alex Imas
7. This is For Everyone, Tim Berners-Lee
8. A Sociology of Globalization, Saskia Sassen
9. How Progress Ends, Carl Benedict Frey
10. Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom
11. Korolev, James Harford
12. What Just Happened, James Gleick

Pursuing the Knowledge Economy, Nick O'Donovan

I am obligated to say that I know Nick, and that Nick has always been very generous with his time and his comments to me. I do not believe my comments on his book are biased by these things, but such things still run the risk (or, more likely, likelihood) that imperceptible elements of what I write will be influenced by this relationship.

In some ways, Pursuing the Knowledge Economy is just O'Donovan extending his (quite good) New Political Economy paper into something that runs to around 200 pages. But in many others, I think this book is much more additive than that paper, which I have always found to be a nice overview but lacking a bit of meat. Pursuing the Knowledge Economy fleshes out O'Donovan's thesis around the knowledge economy much better, and in doing so, functions as a strong resource on this topic, and on adjacent topics, particularly the economics of network effects and the digital economy. There are some dimensions of the discussion which I think could have been better explored, or at least elaborated upon. For instance, for a work of political economy, I would have liked to see more exploration of why politicians saw so much value in the knowledge economy, despite some of the obvious downsides now being experienced by so many (in my opinion, the NPE paper perhaps taps into this a bit more than the book does). Furthermore, I felt there was scope to say more about after the knowledge economy. I wondered how much scope there was for thinking about a kind of post-knowledge economy, which in a manner of speaking the engineers of AI are seeking to foster. I also thought more could be said about managing the knowledge economy. Much of what I think about--behavioural science and AI technologies--are what I have taken to calling behavioural technologies, insofar as they are build and deployed to extract additional productivity from knowledge work which is much harder to manage than a Taylorist mindset would imagine. Such ideas are not really explored in this book.

How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn

I am not normally one for popular history books, and certainly not for anything as over done as The West. However, I am also not usually one to be susceptible to advertising, but on this instance, some interview as part of Professor Quinn's book tour convinced me to buy it. In that interview, and throughout How the World Made the West, Quinn argues that the idea of the 'West' is really a historical fiction. The Greeks or the Romans were no more western than the Persians, Turks, or Africans with whom they frequently interacted. The heartland of today's 'West'--western and central Europe--were, for both the Greek and the Romans, the lands of savages, untamed land filled with cruel and ugly people. By contrast, Greeks ruled in Eygpt (for a time), and Africans sat Rome's imperial throne.

In terms of content, How the World Made the West is not the best book. It comes across mostly as a knowledge dump from something who is clearly very knowledgeable about antiquity. To this end, I'm not sure I was particularly taken with the book. The saving grace, though, is that Quinn could have created a broadly similar product, while emphasising how 'understanding these cultures is essential to understanding the modern West.' This is obviously a true statement, but one which could appeal to those boring and brutish people who lament the 'decline of the West' and propose plans to save it. Quinn's work is therefore more subversive insofar as it treats the topic on its own terms. Quinn argues, essentially, that the ancient world is fascinating despite its links to the modern idea of the West, not because of it; that we can love this history without indulging is silly, racial ethnonationalist nonsense. And that those who claim the ancient Greeks or Romans as 'their own' are, fundamentally, foolish.

The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell

I did not know what to expect from this book. This book might be called 'self-help', and I have never had any interest in that genre. But I think The Conquest of Happiness is much more reasonably described as philosophy than 'self-help'. That is not surprising, given the Bertrand Russell was a philosopher. From the outset of the book, Russell concedes on the question of specific behaviours that will result in happiness. He is aware, as I think we all are, deep down inside, that happiness is not like some battery meter that we can expect to move predictably up and down. Happiness is more elusive in character, sometimes sustained and often fleeting, conjured by coincidences and other coalitions of events to which we may forever remain ignorant. Russell, therefore, is less concerned with outling what happiness is and therefore what to do to be happy. Instead, Russell is interested in the conditions in that we might expect happiness to be possible. For instance, The Conquest of Happiness does not prescribe activities such as going for a walk, or socialising with friends, as activities that result in happiness, because while walking or socialising might be terribly good activities for the hiker or the socialite, the sedantist or the introvert may find themselves very uncomfortable. Some people like watching trains; some people like being in pain; when it comes to happiness, never are two the same. But, Russell argues that we may all enjoy more favourable conditions for being happy (e.g., improve our chances of happiness), regardless of our individual preferences, by cultivating both opportunities for those activities, and--more importantly--learning what those activities are.

To this end, half of The Conquest of Happiness is devoted to the question of what conditions may make happiness difficult to achieve, and half to what conditions may improve our abilities to find happiness in ourselves. Personally, I found the former more interesting than the latter. The crux of Russell's argument in this section is that suffering, want, patience and frugality--all things that might commonly be associated with causing unhappiness--are necessary experiences for us to develop our preferences, and to learn to appreciate those things we enjoy. For instance, in a passage that finds obvious resonance with contemporary concerns, Russell outlines the merits of boredom. He contends that the constantly stimulated mind will never find satisfaction, not through a lack of stimulation, but through an inability to appreciate the stimulation that they (the person with the mind) do achieve. Only someone who is blessed to suffer bouts of boredom can fully appreciate the merriments of entertainment, which are also available from time to time.

I am not sure whether The Conquest of Happiness is a book I would recommend. In the particular case of schoalrs interested in the Bloomsbury group (as I am), I do think there is something worthwhile to read here. If you are someone searching for a self-help book, I think this will be more enlightening and intellectually stimulating than most.

The Doctrine of DNA, Richard Lewontin

Having read Not in Our Genes last quarter, I was excited to see what Professor Lewontin would discuss in The Doctrine of DNA, a much shorter volume compared to Not in Our Genes. My conclusion is that I enjoyed this book, and I am a fan of Lewontin's writing (I know some are critical of Lewontin for his supposed politicising of science, but to a very large extent, that is precisely what I like about his work). However, besides being a tad more straightforward and provocative in places (lacking, for instance, the chapters on IQ that Kamin bought so authoritatively to Not in Our Genes), I do not think this book does too much to build upon Not in Our Genes. The alternative title for The Doctrine of DNA is Biology as Ideology, and I do think Lewontin's arguments around the interplay on science and politics are better developed here than they were in Not in Our Genes. Though, I must also concede that having read both books, it is always likely to be the case that the second book I read, explaining the same idea, will appear to be 'more developed'

The Race Between Education and Technology, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz

Goldin and Katz are royalty in economics. Goldin has won the Nobel Prize. Katz edits The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and so will probably win the Nobel Prize. I have no doubts that the analysis in this book is excellent economics. Even when I am in a mood to debate 'what is economics?' and to be more heterodox in my views, I would still maintain that The Race is an excellent, and at times interesting, example of mainstream neoclassical economics and its utility (pardon the pun) within contemporary debates around education investments and technology policy. The trouble is, the moments of interest are fleeting, and this book is generally extremely boring. And I have a high tolerance for boring. I can see why this is a core bit of reading within this topic, but I would never encourage someone to read this book. It's just very plain, matter-of-fact, and I think quite shallow in places. The kind of thing that, as you read it, you ask yourself whether anything would change if you did not. That's dangerous territory--though, perhaps I was just not in the right headspace. There have in the past been works that I have struggled to engage with, but that I have come back to and seen the deeper merits in. Perhaps this is one of them?

The History and Power of Writing, Henri-Jean Martin

I bought this book for quite a low price, mostly because I was curious to know if the proposed history could contribute anything to my thinking about artificial intelligence. Beyond this, I know (or, at least, knew) nothing about the history of writing. Well, I know one telling that comes from Ivan Illich's Shadow Work. I was curious to know if any of that perspective held water. But mostly, it was a blind moment of curiousity.

In my mind, there is little doubt that Martin is an authority on the topic of writing, the book, and their respective histories. Much of the book focuses on pre-Gutenberg methods of printing, which some elements discussing the evolution of language and the emergence of letters. The book shifts into a medieval history book around the emergence of Gutenberg, and also shifts focus away from writing, and towards the book as a historical object. As I understand it, the book is Martin's main academic focus. Unfortunately, The History and Power of Writing does not really gain any momentum, and certainly loses it in the post-Gutenberg discussion. While this book is on the older side, and so cannot say too much about things like the computer, it also does not say enough about more recent writing practices. Neither does it really get into the discussion of power. As above, one of my interests in reading this book was to compare Martin to Illich--who only really discusses the power of formalised writing, not its history or other dimensions. Yet, in my opinion, Martin says little about the power dynamics created by writing, or if he does, power is also a secondary discussion to a procession of names, places, and tidbits about language. Finally, returning to the history side of things, the book says essentially nothing about China. The book is better called The Western History of Power and Writing, for it is firmly a European affair. While I did not dislike the book, I am sure that for those who are curiousity about the history of writing, there will be more accessible, and perhaps better rounded, books to choose from.

Questioning the Millennium, Stephen Gould

I found this to be quite a peculiar book because a) I am not entirely sure I could explain what it is about, but b) it is also the best book I read in 2025. Or, perhaps, the book I enjoyed the most.

I picked Questioning the Millennium up in a charity shop. I decided I'd heard so much about Stephen Gould (academically, and in relation to Lewontin) that it was worth my time giving him a go. Immediately, I could tell why Gould had held such a position of authority in the popular science community. In a way I am ill-equipped to describe, I found Gould's writing so personal, and easy, and yet informative. What was I informed of. Again, I am not entirely sure what Questioning the Millennium is about. At a push, I'd say it's an essay on humanity's peculiar relationship with time. It is not a book about time so much as how people understand, interpret, and experience time. Written just before the year 2000, Gould uses this 'important' moment to discuss various aspects of how we think about time. I think his major point is that many temporal events, and temporal standards, feel very objective (who would dispute the passage of time?), but are actually much more arbitrary. The debate about whether the millennium begins on the 1st January 2000, or 2001, is given by Gould as evidence of just how much time people have spent arguing about time. This notion of objective time, but subjective interpretations of it, sees a return in Gould's most touching anecdote, where he discusses autistic people with an uncanny ability to recall days of the week when just given a date. Gould spends much of this chapter discussing how this might be done; essentially, the difference algorithms that could be employed to determine whether the 23rd August 1952 was a Tuesday (my algorithm is called 'you're right one seventh of the time'). For Gould, these different algorithms (none of which seem to match what autistic people actually do) demonstrate very different ways of understanding the cyclicality of time, of integrating the human adjustments to time measurement (e.g., leap years), and so on. Again, my reading is Gould is telling us that so much of how we interpret time is arbitrary, rather than absolute. The chapter is, of course, touching because Gould reveals that the main character of the chapter--an autistic gentleman able to solve days of the week from dates--is, in fact, Gould's own son.

Questioning the Millennium does not have a great deal of practical importance today, a quarter of a decade after the Millennium. But neither does it need to. This is a wonderful book, filled with interesting tidbits and no strong direction for the reader to take.

Command and Control, Eric Schlosser

Anyone who reads my reviews will know by now that I have a bit of a macabre interest in nuclear war. And, having such an interest, I have learnt over time what books on nuclear war people have, and have not, read. Command and Control is one of those books that I've been surprised to learn that a few people have read, while I (until recently) had not. I was quite excited. And, to be sure, this is an interesting and well-written book. Schlosser is a good writer, and he does well to give the mundane and innocuous personality throughout. I can see why people enjoy this book so much. However, I also thought it would be a bit more expanisve. The book focuses on one incident, juxtaposed with pieces of information about how the US nuclear arsenal developed over time. But, for my mind, there are two things that are essential in any book about nuclear war. The first is some articulation of the philosophy and the mindset of those who plan nuclear wars. Schlosser gives bits of this in discussions of, say, Curtis LeMay, but more could be provided. Secondly, and most importantly, the genuine horror of nuclear war must be properly conveyed to a reader. In my opinion, nothing but existential terror is acceptable. Nuclear weapons are an afront to humanity. They are the most terrifying devices ever conceived and constructed in human history. They hang over all our heads like the sword of Damocles. And we are always only minutes away from the end of the world. We are always only one accident, one misunderstanding, one madman, away from the end of the world. It would be a fate beyond any comprehension. Those who know of the effects of nuclear war pray they are in the range of immediate annihilation; as Khrushchev said, the living will envy the dead. And this is true. The living will suffer terrible third degree burns. Radiation will rot their skin and digest their organs. The sky will be black for a decade, the ground hard and frozen and barren, the stomachs empty. I say all these things in my best efforts to convey the horror that faces us all. Reading about nuclear weapons should leave each of us terrified, as if death itself were crawling inside our souls. This is a big, but necessary, ask. I thought Schlosser tried, in places, but could have said much more about this aspect of nuclear weapons. In not doing so, I think Command and Control sometimes trivialised the horror of the topic.

Historical Capitalism, Immanuel Wallerstein

I have a soft spot for world systems theory, though I cannot claim to fully understand everything that I have read within Arrighi, the main world systems theorist I am familiar with. Besides picking up Historical Capitalism quite cheaply, I had heard that Wallerstein was another eminent world systems theorist, and wanted to see how he differed from Arrighi. The trouble is, I am not sure I really got anything out of this book. Now, this is almost certainly because of my ignorance. Historical Capitalism is hardly one of those books that is indecipherable in terms of prose. From a prose perspective, it is fine. I think, given its shortness, I just found it all a bit vague. I am very good at abstract ideas and first principles; indeed, most of my own work begins in the abstract, and most of the thinking I do involves the manipulation of abstractions according to some logic system I have devised. So, I have no problem reading someone who wants to told about 'capitalism' as a character, rather than types of capitalism, or national capitalisms, and so on. That's not my grievance. My grievance is that, reading the book, nothing quite made an impact. It all washed over me, not in a wave of confusion, but of banality. Again, I am sure this book is great and I am an idiot. Maybe, as is so often the case, this was not the right time in my life to read Historical Capitalism. But when I think about Arrighi--the depth of his work, the models of capitalism cycles, and so on--even though so much of it is beyond my comprehension, it does not all wash over me.

On Anarchism, Noam Chomsky

For such a short book, I will not say too much. I picked On Anarchism on sale. Because I have a burgeoning interest in anarchist theory, I was quite interested to here what perhaps the worlds most famous anarchist had to say on the matter. Unfortunately, I found this short volume quite disappointing. The first chapter is a reprint of a chapter found in Chomsky's Understanding Power, a book I have read, reviewed, and enjoyed. As such, in a 130 page book, I could immediately skip nearly half of it. The rest of the point is Chomsky's commentary on the Spanish civil war, an interesting conflict about which I know too little. However, I did not find Chomsky's writing on it especially enlightening. It was not as well written as other bits of Chomsky, and--I think--reflects the fact that Chomsky is a better speaker than writer. As such, by the end of On Anarchism, I did not feel like I had learnt anything. Feyerabend rejects political anarchism, yet has taught me much about Dadaism. Illich does not consider himself an anarchist, yet has taught me much about radical critique of the modern world. Graeber, too, has built up my understanding of the everyday absurdity of an illogical and inefficient system. I have yet to read Kropotkin. I must read more Bookchin. I mention these thinkers because, in comparison, On Anarchism just feels so diminutive. And that is not because it is a short book.

It Ain't Necessarily So, Richard Lewontin

As with The Doctrine of DNA, I picked up It Ain't Necessarily So while on a Lewontin kick, without really knowing what the book was about (incidentally, my copy was beautifully maintained). It turns out that this book is a collection of Lewontin's review for the New York Review of Books. As such, it is less repetitive than The Doctrine of DNA was (when compared to Not in Our Genes). Furthermore, I got a sense of more of Lewontin's personality coming across in this book, than in the others, because Lewontin is in part providing opinion, not just scientific analysis. Still, the science is a main feature of this book, with Lewontin treading familiar and (at the time) timely ground, notably around genetics and cloning.

Unlike The Doctrine and DNA or Not in Our Genes, a reader will find little in It Ain't Necessarily So that seeks to education, or expound on the ideas of biology as ideology that these earlier works set out. Instead, while Lewontin is writing to education on basic topics, we insight see Lewontin in a much more adversial role. He is writing from the perspective of some who understands that the readers respective his disciplinary authority, and so rather than challenging the content of the reviewed works per se, Lewontin challenges the 'worthwhileness' of the works, from the perspective of do they give a worthwhile overview of the topic at hand. I found it quite interesting that Lewontin's reviews (and I assume others) were rarely of a single book. Instead, Lewontin would review several at once, all on the same topic, allowing him to 'review' many different books with the same strand of critique.

I cannot say I'd recommend this book. It's not really enough of an educational book to be called educational. But as a fan of Lewontin, his style and his philosophy, I really enjoyed it.

This is Not Normal, Mike Davis

I purchased This is Not Normal is the Verso sale several years ago, and it has just hung around in my 'to read' pile. Every so often, I get annoyed at the lack of progress I have made on that pile, or more specifically, on my tendency to prioritise newer purchases over older purchases. So, I committed to reading this book, if for no other reason than to get it off the list. Frankly, I expected this book to be something verging on pol-Twitter post-Brexit whinging. Not liberal protestations, as I know better of both Mike Davis and Verso; but some kind of argument that essentially boils down to 'I agree with the outcomes liberals seek but disagree with the foolishness by which they behave.'

It was then, to my surprise, that I really enjoyed this book. Davis has always been an interesting writer. I recall reading The Happiness Industry several years ago, before I knew much about the behavioural world (incidentally, that is a book I should probably return to one day). It was quite good. But what I like about This is Not Normal is the level of introspection on offer here. One gets the sense not of Davis trying to understand how to make the abnormal normal again, or even why the current political economy of the UK has failed. Rather, Davis' book is grounded in the question of how does the new normal look like? Or, perhaps, how can we understand and navigate this new normal? There are some principles that, certainly, have helped shape some of my political thinking in the past few months. Firstly, people want politicians who are genuine, and that this, strangely, influences the toxicity of hypocrisy in politics. Liberal aesthetics often make a big deal about hypocrisy, but someone can be a hypocrite and be forgiven, perhaps, so long as they are genuine about their motivations and intentions (to be sure, I do not think Davis is suggesting hypocrisy is no longer a bad thing, only that it is less important than other qualities). Secondly, the idea of policies as memes. Yes, we need serious people working to develop policies that work. But in an age of viral information, policy must have virality. I think this trait has always been a facet of politics--the Bolshevik's famously, and simply, demanded "Bread! Peace! Land!" I also think, in the cultural sickness that was the 1990s/2000s liberal apathy throughout the West, those who sought to reanimate political engagement, particularly on the Left, felt they needed to be on top of the policy agenda. And, to be sure, they should be. But the Right realised, much to our collective suffering, that you can just call the precocious, insincere liberal opposition a slew of 4chan-derived insults, and voters will be engaged by it (whether positively or negatively). After all, returning to point one, it looks authentic.

Today, more than any time previously, I believe that it is the Left, and only the Left, that has a set of ideas for building a better future, and a set of social values to make that future one people will want to be a part of. Even as fascism marches onwards, and is more empowered in its violence and its discrimination, even as the hounds seek out more innocent flesh to rip from the bones and feast upon. Even now, as the clock ticks closer to midnight, and the present morphs with the biblical notion of the end times into some grotesque chimera, the era of the zombie; a path to a future, yearning to be born, can be found. To quote a line I stole from one whose name I forget, there are only radical futures left. Davis, in his book, embodies that sentiment. He offers thoughts on new tools in a emerging era of hyperpolitics, rather than ideas for resurrecting some now firmly dead 'normal.'

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Friedman

In recent months I have been on a bit of an economic growth kick. Unfortunately, I think I have also come to discover that I dislike most books that discuss economic growth. I have not read much of, say, the degrowth literature that challenge notions of economic growth. Much of what I have read (that will come in next quarter's review) instead touts the merits of economic growth. As a contrarian, I find that all terribly annoying. But, I want to set aside that subjective dissatisfaction with popular discussions of growth here, because my criticisms of Benjamin Friedman's The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth would stand, even if I, too, were a keen evangelist of neoclassical economic growth theory.

Friedman's basic contention--a contention so common nowadays it must duly be described as lame, though perhaps Friedman made it first--is that economic growth grows the size of our collective pie, which in turn allows more of us to be satisfied without having to compromise our desires with those of others. The effect, than, is moral development and positive social relations. Friedman argues that the moments of social progressivism in US society broadly correlate with moments of economic expansion and confidence. Now, here's the essence of my perspective. I kind of agree with Friedman's argument. I think people get along better with one another when we each, as individuals, feel save and confident about the future. But Friedman's evidence that it is economic growth that drives social and moral development is correlative at best, and shallow consistently. For instance, Friedman points to the civil rights movements of the 1960s as an outgrowth of a booming American economy. It does not occur to him that the occurence of those things need not be seen as supporting his thesis. Instead, one could say that despite a booming economy, black Americans still had to fight tooth and nail for their rights. Similarly, there is no real discussion of redistribution, or how much social progressive has come not from the expanding of the pie but the recognition of the need to share more of the pie first. And, of course, all of Friedman's analysis is juxtaposed against rampent resource imperialism, a word that receives no mention in this book at all.

I do not want to be misunderstood as attacking Friedman individually. Again, as next quarter's review shall illustrate, these problems--loose correlation between growth and positive outcomes, neglect for the role of redistribution, ignorance of the role of imperialism--are common features of all of the other books I have read that espouse the merits of economic growth. I guess, then, I have failed to set aside my contrarian tendency. But I have failed for a reason. Friedman likes economic growth. Writing in the early 2000s, a distinguished economic professor, he likes the neoclassical synthesis, the American model of liberal capitalism, and so on. He is probably an end-of-history type. This book was never not going to be a love letter of sorts to economic growth. And that, I think, is the major sin of the book. Not that the main thesis is wrong--that people treat each other better when we each feel confident and secure in ourselves--but that the narrative, implicitly, was always going to be morphed to make economic growth the hero. Sometimes, it might be. But a much more interesting book, a book with more radical and transformative potential, would not treat economic growth as the hero, but instead examine the range of conditions that allow people to feel confident and secure. This would sometimes lump praise on economic growth. It would also, of course, sometimes demand we challenge an exploitative economic system.