I used to often compile links posts on my old blog, but the format is poorly suited to WordPress. So, I’m starting again on Substack.
I like links posts because of how they capture a snapshot of what is influencing someone at a particular moment in time. It’s also a good way to reflect on your media consumption, and causes your readers to share relevant recommendations. To quote Henrik Karlsson, a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
In any case, here are the highlights from what I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to in January:
Books
Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi. Simply magnificent. By far the best book I have read about India. All things considered, Guha is relatively kind to independence and to Jawaharlal Nehru. The partition of Ireland was small potatoes compared to India; after the British left, everything was up for debate. One of my favourite parts of the book was about the States Reorganisation Commission, and Nehru’s reticence to divide the states along linguistic lines.
Bryan Caplan, You Will Not Stampede Me. There is something about the format of collected blog posts that is so readable, like intellectual popcorn.
Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads. I found this to be vapid and meandering.
Thoma Nagel, Mortal Questions. Superb. There is a certain type of reader – one who is experienced with academic writing, but hasn’t had the time to read much formal philosophy – for whom this is the best introduction to philosophy I’m aware of. I particularly liked the essays on death and sexual perversion, and the famous ‘What is It Like to be a Bat?’ paper is included too.
Blogs
Dynomight, Shorts for January.
Sam Altman, What I Wish Someone Had Told Me (“It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter”)
Matt Yglesias, The two-state solution is still best.
Cam Peter, favourite things New Zealand.
Alvaro de Menard, Recommended Reading. A list with many gems, but it comes across as showy (c’mon, I am not going to read all 4,000 pages of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire…). Note that the page has suffered significant link rot.
Shruti Rajagopalan, What I read this year. I will certainly be ordering Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping biography. I don’t know if this exists, but if there is a book that is the equivalent of Ruadhán Mac Cormaic’s The Supreme Court, but for India, I would very much like to read it.
Matt Lakeman, Notes on the Ivory Coast. Who is Matt Lakeman? What does he do for a living? How does he have the time to regularly publish 30,000-word masterpieces about West African political history? I am so confused.
Andrew Batson, The best books I read in 2023. Bloggers benefit from a significant halo effect. Because Scott Sumner has excellent taste in films, I am more inclined to believe him that nominal GDP targeting is the correct approach for central banking. And because Andrew Batson has good taste in jazz, I’m inclined to trust his writings about China more.
Zvi Mowshowitz, dating roundup. Lots about signaling, matching markets, and applied micro here.
Scott Sumner, China travel tips. A bit facile, perhaps, as he just recounts traveling from one city to another with no real reflection. Still, Zhangjiajie looks incredible.
Podcasts
Joseph Walker is doing a great job, and his podcast remains greatly underrated. I particularly enjoyed Shruti Rajagopalan on spotting talent, Raghuram Rajan on monetary policy, and Zach Carter on the reign of Keynes.
The Rest is History: The Nazis in Power and the Battle for Italy.
Very Bad Wizards discuss Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.
Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers on whether sperm counts are in decline.
Bryan Caplan on the case for not reading the news.
I was also a minor character in a recent episode of Conversations with Tyler. Self-recommending, as they say…
Music
Some new albums I’ve discovered this month:
Wings, Back to the Egg.
Tord Gustavsen Trio, Changing Places. There is a hugely disproportionate amount of good jazz coming out of Norway. Hat-tip Tyler Cowen.
Jamie Branch, Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die. Hat-tip to my friend Gavin Leech. I found some of the lyrical pieces a bit silly, but ‘borealis dancing’ is a new favourite.
Brad Mehldau, Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles.
Bobby Timmons Trio, In Person, especially ‘Dat Dere’.
Chet Baker, Conception (Live in Paris).
Tommy Flanagan Trio, Presenting the Tommy Flanagan Trio
Paul Chambers Quintet, Paul Chambers Quintet (Remastered), especially ‘Softly as in a Morning Sunrise’.
Films
Hayao Miyazaki, Kiki’s Delivery Service. Charming.
Sergio Leone, Once Upon a Time in America. My first spaghetti Western!
Lee Chang-dong, Burning. Based on a Murakami short story. The film captures the feelings of unease and envy perfectly. If I hear one more person describe a popular piece of Korean media as a metaphor for capitalism, I’m going to burst into flames.
Papers
Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou, Historical Legacies and African Development. A good overview of the economic legacy of colonialism in Africa. All in all, the arbitrariness with which Africa’s borders were drawn comes across as more harmful to its long-term prospects than colonisation per se. The different colonisation strategies employed by different European powers were meaningfully different, with the British system of indirect rule faring much better than the French strategy of complete domination.
Douglas Stone and William Ziemba, Land and Stock Prices in Japan. In 1991, all the land in Japan combined was worth $2 trillion, or more than 20% of the world’s wealth (and double the value of all stocks combined). Just the land under the Emporer’s Palace in Tokyo (three-quarters of a square mile) was estimated to have been worth more than all land in California combined. Madness! This paper is concerned with whether these absurd-sounding prices were justified by economic fundamentals, and whether Japanese land was a bubble (with relevance to questions about whether bubbles exist in general).
Michael Heuemer, In Praise of Passivity. An argument that, because society is so complex and the public is so ignorant, the correct ethical course of action for most people is to stop trying to solve society’s problems.
Joseph Rotblat, Leaving the Bomb Project. A Manhattan Project physicist recounts what it was like, forty years later, to leave the project for ethical reasons.
Nick Bostrom, Infinite Ethics. I’m considering writing my undergraduate dissertation about infinite ethics, so will be reading everything I can about it. If you know of anything in this area you think I should read, shoot me an email: s [dot] enright [at] sms [dot] ed [dot] ac [dot] uk.
I've found Vogel's Deng biography to be detailed, but bland in tone and gentle in its judgments, overly so, especially compared to the factionalism and tyranny described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tiananmen_Papers. We may soon find ourselves with a US President incapacitated and manipulated by his carers as Deng was in his final years.
Thanks for the links.