I’ll begin with a story that is one of my favorite essays from Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa) by Yoshida Kenko, a world-wise Japanese monk from 1331. Kenko writes:
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When I went to see the horse racing at the Kamo Shrine on the fifth day of the fifth month, the view from our carriage was blocked by a throng of common folk. We all got down and moved towards the fence for a better view, but that area was particularly crowded and we couldn’t make our way through.
We then noticed a priest who had climbed a chinaberry tree across the way to sit in its fork and watch it from there. He was so sleepy as he clung there that he kept nodding off, and only just managed to start awake in time to save himself from falling each time. Those who saw him couldn’t believe their eyes. “What an extraordinary fool!” they all sneered. “How can a man who’s perched up there so precariously among the branches relax so much that he falls asleep?”
A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Any of us may die from this one instant to the next”, I said, “and in fact we are far more foolish than this priest — here we are, contentedly watching the world go by, oblivious to death.”
“Thats so true”, said those in front of me. “It’s really very stupid, isnt it?” and they turned around and invited me in, and made room for me.
Anyone can have this sort of insight, but at that moment it came as a shock, which is no doubt why people are so struck by it. […]
Much has changed in the 690 odd years since Kenko wrote his essays. But then, if we contemplate, much has not. Even today, we go on making plans in our lives, inured in our false sense of impregnable strength. We forget how weak and spindly hang the threads of our lives.
Some critical moments jolt us back from the futility of our vague dreams. The shakes of the tree wake us up. These moments are important.
For there are no dawns in unending daylight.
Dawns are glorious beginnings, and they make us look forward to the bright new day.
Here is wishing everyone the best of 2020s!
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On the personal front, 2019 was tumultuous: I trapezed between joys and disappointments, held by gossamer of tender hopes and melancholy. I wrote less than I wanted to. We had a big family move, made a deep commitment, and had a heart-torn renunciation. There were family greetings and goodbyes, true friends through thick and thin, and there were multiple jaunts across the globe (Japan, China, and India). I finally saw the Daibutsu at Kamakura, a dream that I had cherished since I was 14.
Airline travel and hospital corridors are often about being voluntarily locked in spaces with strangers in a heavy suspension of germ colonies. However, there are some unheralded benefits. They are the last remaining modern retreats, hidden doors to the inner citadel, where one can disentangle from distracting comforts into reading and reflection.
They gave me dead-time to catch up with books that have marinated in my thoughts for a few years, and make a decent dent in my anti-library, only to add more to it. Here are some books that I fully recommend, beginning with books written by my colleagues.
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The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust by Kevin Werbach explores the Hobbesian environment in the current growth of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Werbach amasses arguments and evidence from disparate sources (Thomas Hobbes, Avner Greif, Vili Lehdonvirta) to contend that a (centralized) regulatory backstop may be necessary to make decentralized blockchain technology successful.
Kartik Hosanagar’s A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence focuses on a lack of control/transparency in consumption decisions and proposes an algorithmic Bill of Rights.
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On to other books:
The most moving book that I read this year was on mass incarceration, an issue that is belatedly gaining attention across the entire political spectrum. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson is a difficult read, but a very memorable read. Stevenson (who was 2019 Penn Commencement speaker) approaches this issue with personal stories of faith, misfortune, mercy, and redemption. The numerical policy case against incarceration is important — Stevenson also makes the moral case. See my notes. If you care about the issue, you can donate to EJI here.
Science, Economics & Society.
Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (thanks RP for the gift of the book!) is a proponent of the engineering approach to economics: solving global problems require locally implemented solutions. Many of the topics covered already familiar to the academics from the papers we have read, but this book is a compendium of well-argued positions on taxation, immigration, and poverty. The book refers to Samskara, one of my favorite Kannada films. Also, the book mentions only one woman has won the Nobel prize 🙂 (the book predates their prize). It would be cool to see how this changed fact gets updated in the next version.
Raghuram Rajan makes a gentle case for populism in The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind. The solutions to build communities with “Inclusive Localism” is an important challenge we face. As Ed Glaeser points out in Triumph of the city: How our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, cities such as Sao Paulo and Mumbai, continue to be those places that attract both the rich and the poor and remain rife for local experimentation.
I enjoyed the exploration of causal inference in The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie. My Ph.D. class read Martin Ford’s excellent Rise of Robots, last year. So, it was interesting when Ford tackled AI next. In Architects of Intelligence: The Truth about AI from the people building it Ford approaches the topic, in the correct way by talking directly to researchers working in AI, and entrepreneurs with commercial stakes and ambitions. There is no consensus among the interviewees. I think that AI news coverage fits the maxim, that more you know the technical details, the more circumspect you are.
China, India & the World.
I recommend beginning with the following books on the history, politics, and economics of Modern China. The Search for Modern China by Prof. Jonathan Spence, which provides a great view of the context of Modern China’s growth, On China with Kissinger’s personal views of how China-US relations developed, with interesting takes on Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping, and How Asia Works by Joe Studwell, which I think is one of the best books on understanding the success of industrial policy in Asia. For human vignettes and lives in fast-changing China, I recommend River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler and Factory Girls: From Village to City in Changing China by Leslie Chang. I read The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu — an exemplar of the current golden age of Chinese Science Fiction. See my Notes of China for an extended discussion of these books and podcasts on China. Also, see my discussion of my favorite films from the part of the world, and my travel notes from the long trip to HK and Mainland China.
My India reading was lower than usual, but I enjoyed Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast — a whimsical travelogue of food and culture along the southern coast of India. I finally caught up with William Dalrymple’s book City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi. (I am reading his book on East India Company now). Also notable is Manu Pillai’s book on Deccan before the emergence of Shivaji, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji. My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit is a moving, troubling and terrific must-read on the aspirations of the peoples and complex history of the region, told from an unabashedly Israeli nation-state viewpoint.
Fiction & Poetry.
I tried to read authors that I have not read before and translated works. I loved the mysterious dreamy narrative in Orhan Pamuk’s White Castle (thanks to OS for the gift!). Apparently, it is Acemoglu’s favorite Pamuk’s work as well. I discovered through NYRB, the Hungarian author Magda Szabo. Her writing is delicate and sparse, strident, and sympathetic, all at once. Katalin Street is a sparse discomfiting study of lost childhoods. The Door is a heart-stopping exploration of human frailty, ignorance, and intelligence through a relationship between an author and her housekeeper. I gained enough courage and read the feminist classic The Golden Notebook (review).
I enjoyed reading The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson (a Penn Colleague). I found the meaty introduction by Wilson, helpful for the novice Homer reader in me to grasp the nuances (e.g. hosting strangers in ancient Greece). I learned how sirens are NOT highly sexualized temptresses that we have come to imagine. It is indeed tempting to imagine them akin to Apsaras in Indra’s court. In fact, as Wilson states, their allure is cognitive. They offer vast knowledge but cloud your judgment.
America, Histories & Memoirs.
Rebecca Traister (another Philadelphia native) is the most unique voice in feminist writing today. In Good and Mad: Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, she makes a studied and measured case that, far from being considered futile, women’s “anger” and “madness” actually change the world. See my notes.
In The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits makes a provocative, and an important, thesis: Meritocracy is often purported to be fair, but it is in fact incomplete, faulty, and ultimately, a false promise. Unlike the nobles of the 19th century, today’s elite work harder to secure their privileged position — accruing benefits that remain assuredly inaccessible to a vast majority of the population — using meritocracy as a cudgel for defense. But, this relentless need to display wealth and educational status “earned” through hard work and an industrious application of “talent” leaves everyone, including the elites, miserable. Not many solutions here, but the beginnings of a radically important issue facing us.
In the same vein, it is a fallacy to mistake higher educational degrees for higher wisdom. I chose to read about the only President in the 20th century who did not go to college. Here are my five lessons from the life of President Harry Truman, from the book Truman by David McCullough.
Even if you have never surfed, you should still read the Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, a contemplation on lost loves and growing old, distance and fondness, life and companionship. I loved the nostalgic Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik. Jeffrey Toobin’s take on vacuity and politics in SCOTUS in The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, holds up well after 10 years and increased judgments, rather than jurisprudence, by drama queens in judicial robes. Justice Rehnquist was right when “he didn’t think the opinion mattered very much; only the votes did (pp.276).”
You can see my entire booklist for 2019 here, and subscribe to my blog here.
Happy 2020!