This is the last in this three-part series covering the non-fiction from the last two years. Ready? Set? go.
Economics (mostly pop-econ, but still)
It has been a pretty rough couple of years in pop economics, so I don’t have a whole lot to recommend in this field. Let me whip through these quickly then
As far as economic history goes, I read both Turbulent Empires: A History of Global Capitalism Since 1945 by Mike Mason and Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Rocked the World by Adam Tooze. The former is merely competent, the latter is bit more lively and creates one continuous narrative stitching together the 2008 disaster in the United States with the Eurozone crisis with Grexit. If you feel like reliving that horror-show of a decade or so, by all means read Tooze. The Technology Trap: Capital, Labour and Power in the Age of Information by Carl Benedikt Frey, tries to take a longue durée look at what Goldin & Katz term “the race between education and technology”. Frey is famous as the co-author of the prediction that “47% of US jobs were at risk of automation, and it seems to me that this book was written largely to rehabilitate his reputation and prove he’s not a luddite. The book mostly pushes the line that technological change is good in the long run but can cause significant dislocation along the way depending on such factors as mobility, access to skills, state power configurations, etc. Useful in that it situates present day problems in a much longer historical context; not so useful in that the range of policy prescriptions actually isn’t all that interesting. The Infinite Desire for Growth by Daniel Cohen is a similar long durée take on economics but for the life of me I could not tell you what the overall point of the book was (something about the Easterlin paradox and GDP being a bad measure of progress, I think).
Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation by Anton Howes, Aesthetics, Industry and Science: Hermann von Helmholz and the Berlin Physical Society by M. Norton Wise both focus on the role of small networks of people around the time of the dawn of modern capitalism (which was a bit later in Germany than England) and who worked at the nexus of art, science and industry. Howes is the definitely the easier read (I predict great things for him as a historian), but Norton Wise is probably the more interesting (if vastly more technical) story, which basically all takes place withing about five block of the Unter Den Linden over the space of many twenty years, and how artistic, technical and military schools were developed in such a way that set Prussia on the way to being the continent’s dominant military power sixty years later.
I am trying – for reasons related to my work with universities – to get a better handle on the link between knowledge, innovation and growth. So I read The Knowledge Economy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger (absolutely unintelligible), The Economics of Knowledge by Dominique Foray (intelligible but only occasionally useful), and Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: the Coevolution of Firms, Technology and National Institutions by Johann Peter Murmann (really interesting, but unclear how much of the lessons of the dynamics of the German/British/American chemical dye industries in the late 1800s are still relevant today).
On the pop econ side, there was a lot of “how the hell did we get into mess books”. Top among these, probably, is The Riches of this Land: The Untold Story of America’s Middle Class by Jim Tankersley (upshot: elites have kept whites and blacks fighting against each other instead of uniting for collective bargaining/political action); Not Working: Where Have All the Good jobs Gone by David Blanchflower (upshot: everything is worse than you think because underemployment). The Age of Increasing Inequality: The Astonishing Rise of Canada’s 1% by Lars Osberg is Canada’s contribution to this lit, but frankly it’s relatively unconvincing: inequality overall in Canada as measured by the gini coefficient has barely moved in twenty years, and while there has been a marked increase in the take of the top 1%, it’s mostly centerd in Toronto and has not – unlike the US – led to a massive change in political influence of the upper class (for which we have relatively strict electoral financing laws to thank).
There is the “what to do now”-type of books. Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth, The Economics of Belonging, by Martin Sandbu, and Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We can Do About It by Heather Boushey all are more or less on the same page in terms of making the economy fairer (the first two are a little heavier on income support and the latter a bit heavier on inclusion of women and minorities). If you don’t pay enormous attention to mainstream economics, you might like these books; if you do, there is nothing really new in any of them, though the way the broader arguments are weaved from the data might be of interest. In a different vein is Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, by Johnathan Gruber and Simon Johnson, is basically a long paean to what we in Canada know as “Superclusters”, which they think are the key to American economic revival (I am exaggerating a bit – their proposal is a bit more coherent than our superclusters, and let’s be honest there are a lot more US cities than Canadian ones which have the kinds of financial depth to support thriving start-up cultures in new industries, so it’s not an entirely crazy idea, but you know, colour me a bit skeptical).
Two final books to mention: Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav and Too Small to Fail: Why Some Small Nations Outperform Larger Ones and How They are Re-Shaping the World by R. James Breiding. Bernav is *very* good in the sense that his is one of the very few books to forthrightly point out that the OMG-Fourth-Revolution-will-change-everything-robots-are-coming-for-all-the-jobs story is patent nonsense, good enough in fact that you can wade your way through all the handwaving about a post-scarcity economy and still fell it’s a decent book. Breiding on the other hand….look, every couple of years someone does a book on small economies, or Scandinavian economies, or emerging economies or whatever, and the “lessons” they have for the rest of it. It’s mostly nonsense. Really, what they tend to do is pick on one really cool thing in each country (say, transportation in the Netherlands) and say “how cool would it be if we could do this?” (where we = Americans). This isn’t about national “outperformance”, it’s that a number of countries are demonstrably good at one or two things in which they have acquired some advantage. The only decent book of this kind of books if you ask me is Mark Zachary Taylor’s The Politics of Innovation: Why Some Countries Are Better Than Others at Science and Technology (which I reviewed back here). Breiding’s effort is not at the same level.
The Populist Era
There have been a lot of books out in the last couple of years either on the threat to democracy posed by populism, or on analyzing the nature of the Trump and his appeal. Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump is short sweet and persuasive, Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age by Martin Moore is less so. William Davies’ Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason is wildly uneven: occasionally very good (especially on the place of experts and expertise and modern society) but frankly falling down in terms of creating a cohesive narrative. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum is very good on the rise of Law and Justice on Poland but less convincing when it comes to the rise of Trump. How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt is a pretty good back about the importance of democratic norms (more of a novel line of argument in early 2018 when it came out that it is today) though less so when it comes to how to restore them. Finally, there is the book everyone said “foresaw” the populist revolt under Trump, Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Lots of people thought this book was great: I thought it was only so-so. I though it was very good in general on how the internet transforms both communications and the nature of the “publics” attached to any given issue. However, some of the “observations” he makes about American politics to buttress his views are flat-out wrong; in fact, his take on Obama is so massively torqued that I have trouble taking anything else he says seriously.
Sports
I normally adore Jonathan Wilson’s books, but I found The Barcelona Inheritance: The Evolution of Winning Soccer Tactics from Cruyff to Guardiola a bit quotidian. Unlike Angles With Dirty Faces (Argentina), or Behind the Curtain (Eastern Europe), it sticks to familiar locales in Europe’s Big Three Leagues, and unlike Inverting the Pyramid it sticks to a limited period of time, following the coaching careers of a group of people who passed through Barcelona in the 90s (mainly Mourinho and Guardiola). It’s good, don’t get me wrong: it’s just that you don’t feel you are discovering things on every page the way you are in most of his books. Zonal Marking: From Ajax to Zidane, the Making of Modern Soccer by Michael W. Cox, is maybe a more interesting book on tactics. Certainly it’s a bit more controversial, dividing up the history of European football since 1992 into a series of four-year “eras” – Dutch, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German and finally English. It mostly works until you get to that last one. But in any case, it’s arguably a better guide to early twentieth century football than Wilson’s effort.
I did not find Soccer Under the Swastika: Defiance and Survival in the Nazi Camps and Ghettos by Kevin E. Simpson to be all that enlightening. If you are looking for soccer-as-and-organizing-principle-for-resistance-to oppression, try instead More Than Just a Game: Football v. Apartheid by Check Knorr and Marvin Close. Barefoot to Boots: the many Lives of Indian Soccer by Novy Kapadia is an extremely niche book that I expect none of you to actually read, but I really enjoyed it because it made me think about what it takes to create durable national leagues. We take these for granted all over the world, but due to poverty and geography, these never really came into play in India until comparatively recently (at which point it became cursed by having two competing leagues). Instead, what it had for decades were a bunch of local leagues and then regular invitational tournaments (which sometimes also featured international competition). Intriguing if not entirely riveting.
I read two books on Brazilian football this Doctor Socrates: Footballer, Philosopher, Legend by Andrew Downie and Kaiser: The Greatest Player Never to Play Football by Rob Smyth. The first – I don’t know, really. I don’t think this was the author’s intention but I mostly came away from it thinking that Socrates was perhaps too massively self-absorbed to be a genuine avatar of democracy. The Smyth book, on the other hand, is one of the greatest Shaggy Dog stories I’ve ever read: about a marginally talented Brazilian footballer, Kaiser, who “looked the part” and could organize parties like no one else basically kept getting drafted into top-division football teams basically because he was good for morale. It’s gloriously batshit, I recommend it as a beach read whenever we are let out of our homes again.
Finally, two more “global surveys” of football. James’ Montague’s 1312: Among the Ultras (1312 being the numeric translation of ACAB – All Cops Are Bastards). I admire Montague: somehow he has managed to get people to pay him to go to football matches and football culture in all sorts of weird out-of-the-way-places (see his earlier books Thirty-One Nil: On the Road With Football’s Outsiders: A World Cup Odyssey and When Friday Comes: Football War and Politics in the Middle East). That said, I’ve often not a fan of the way he inserts himself into the story, but it really works in this book, where he comes face-to-face with Nazis and criminals on three continents. At one level, ultra-dom is universally held together by testosterone, adventurism, and opposition to governmental authority (most often but not exclusively in the form of the police). But on the other hand, the local expressions of this can be very different, with local politics and economic making the phenomenon play out very differently in different parts of the world; as an MLS fan, I appreciated his coming over to LA and acknowledging that a different brand of ultra-dom, inclusive of race, gender is being born at least at some clubs (NYCFC however, with its Proud Boy supporters clubs, can fuck right off). There was The Age of Football: Soccer and the 21st Century by David Goldblatt. Now I loved Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer. Most amazing history of football ever. But this new book left me cold. It is encyclopedic in the sense that few countries’ current footballing situations are left uncovered (there’s 2/3 of a page on Kyrgyz football, ffs, but for some reason Canada is passed over in silence). But it’s dry and bleak (if you’ve heard one story of money corrupting football, you’ve heard them all) and frankly I don’t want encyclopedic. Maybe twenty years ago when I was just getting into football lit I might have appreciated it, but that was a long time ago.
In fact, after 20 years of reading this stuff, I have decided that football literature is mostly tapped out. All the national histories of football are done, pretty much. I would read new books that take in completely new topics or new regions – I have one on Turkish football on a shelf downstairs, and I might keep practicing my not-very-good Italian and Spanish by reading books in those languages – but other than that I think I am mostly done with the genre (football biographies will keep coming, of course, but those rarely interest me). So this year I shifted to another sport: basketball. I started with Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure by Alexander Wolff, which was written about twenty years ago and was meant I think to be a kind of Hoops version of Simon Kuper’s Football Against the Enemy. It’s good. It’s not Kuper-good, and being 20 years out of date it seems to under-emphasize African ball, but it’s worth a read. The Undisputed guide to Pro Basketball History by Freedarko is an irreverent and amusingly-illustrated short history of American pro ball. Peter Axhelm’s The City Game: Basketball From the Garden to the Playgrounds, published in 1971, must have been quite ground-breaking when it first appeared: half the story of the championship-winning New York Knicks, and half the story of basketball as played in the playgrounds of Harlem. I can’t say the Knicks part is too absorbing because I have no frame of reference for any of the players apart from Bill Bradley – heck, 85% of the story happened before I was born, but the rest is interesting.
Beyond basketball, I read The History of Karate and the Masters Who Made It by Mark J. Cramer, mainly to get a sense of what LMS was doing (and also getting ideas for a trip to Okinawa next year. A lucky find in the world oddest airport bookstore (Renaissance Books at in the Milwaukee Airport, where you literally can buy the entire Encyclopedia Judaica) was a 70s-era book on sumo entitled Takamiyama: The World of Sumo by Jesse Kuhaulua, the first American yusho winner and Ozeki. Not much new in here from a sporting POV for me – more confirmation that anything else about how little the sport has changed over the past fifty years. And finally, there was Beyond a Boundary, by CLR James. Which, to be honest, was something less than what I was expecting. Not a bad book, but my expectations were too high, I guess.
Other Stuff
I don’t read a lot of books about the arts – performing or otherwise – but I read a few things of note. If you have any interest in classic sci-fi, then Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee is a must-read. It’s partly a history of the magazine Astounding, which Campbell edited for a couple of decades, and partly a history of the three major writers he recruited (Asimov, Heinlein and Hubbard). Wild stuff – particularly about Hubbard and the origins of Scientology. All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of the Wire by Jonathan Abrams is an ok oral history of the series. Finally, there was The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christophe Booker which is a fascinating analysis of global story-telling norms but a) is easily three hundred pages too long and b) pretty Western-centric. Worth skimming, anyway. Rockonomics: A Backstage pass of What the Music Industry Can teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger (who unfortunately died by suicide not long before the book was published) is a great examination of the music industry.
There were a bunch of books that I assumed would be better than they were. I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism, A.M. Gittlitz, should have been absolutely spell binding. Latin American Trostkyite cult with an ET fixation? What is not to love? But actually it was kind of boring. Cities in Civilization by Peter Hall, a 1000-page tome divided into 20-odd 40-50 page essays on particular periods of efflorescence in the world’s great cities. Sounds fascinating. And I had lugged this book around from house to house for almost twenty years after buying it in the British Museum in – I think – 2001. And I finally set aside part of this summer to read it. And my God what a disappointment. Just one story after another – almost no integrative theory (there is some, actually, but it’s not very good). And then War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Shaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century by David Patrikarakos. Just…I dunno, maybe important if you want to see good the Israeli Defence Forces’ twitter game is, but otherwise meh.
The Meritocracy Trap by David Markovits was deeply annoying (that’s the short version: the longer one is here) because a) he keeps getting plutocracy and meritocracy confused and b) that his problem is not so much with awarding positions based on effort and talent, but on the way the rich can game the system to ensure their children are seen as having a monopoly on both. Which, you know, fair enough, but it’s not the same thing. A somewhat more interesting and multi-cultural look at the process of elite formation is Stepping into Elites: Trajectories of Social Achievement in India, France and the United States by Jules Naudet & Renuka George. Very interesting if you actually want to think about social mobility outside of a narrow American perspective. In a similar vein, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, is a good primer on how early human societies gradually developed a hierarchical structure – surely a useful remedy for all those who seem to think inequality is a product of modern capitalism (though James C. Scott’s brilliant Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States is an excellent reminder no to get too carried away with interpreting human history based exclusively on the stories of sedentary peoples: as in his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, he puts in a useful case for why many – even most – people tried to get our of sedentary city-states if they could, on the basis of the whole massive exploitation thing).
I liked Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, by Gary Marcus: it’s a concise debunking of most of the worst “the robots are coming” nonsense out there. I was less keen on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shohsana Zuboff. I mean, she’s not wrong, exactly, but nor is she anywhere near as novel as she thinks she is (and God does she lay it on thick).
Higher quality books in this category include Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney (which I read in 2019, not 2020). A very good book in many ways, but what is most interesting about it now, perhaps, is the almost complete lack of detail on how life changed socially after the pandemic (the answer, apparently, is “not very much”, which is a reason I think to be skeptical about claims about how much the pandemic will change in our lives long-term). The Professor and the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking by Adam Sisman is a hilarious tale of a fake sometimes-priest, fake sometimes-religious studies professor who managed to keep getting appointed to academic positions for about 30 years despite a total lack of qualifications – an interesting reminder of what academia was like prior to the internet. Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air, a history of early twentieth-century anthropology, focussed especially on Margaret Mead, is flipping excellent – every discipline should have an origin story this good.
And then, finally, there is Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom, which is simply brilliant. Has there ever been a book this witty about feminism and race? Everyone needs to read this.
I can’t quite pull a top ten out of all this, mainly because all the econ books were so mediocre, but if I have to a top five, it would be:
5. Kaiser: The Greatest Player Never to Play Football by Rob Smyth
4. Zonal Marking: From Ajax to Zidane, the Making of Modern Soccer by Michael W. Cox
3. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee
2. Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King
1. Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
So Many Books To Read 