Best books I read in 2022
I try to read >100 books/yr (mostly because I realized how few this actually is over a life — realistically there are >20k books I’d like to read, and barring some extreme advances in medical science, that’s unlikely to happen…). Last year, due to lots of work activity (a couple consulting clients which got huge during the year, and my role as CSO at Evertas, I only got through 121 (compared to 183, 172, 193, 208 in previous 4 years..). About 90% of these are audiobooks — I use Audible, and have ~4000 books in my account now, which I’ve just finished ripping using OpenAudible and storing locally for the inevitable future where Audible (owned by Amazon) becomes evil somehow.
I am involved with the Prometheus Awards in finding finalists and also general voting, so I try to read current-year publication sci fi in time to nominate it, especially if it has a libertarian theme. Otherwise, I tend to go for classics in sci fi, deep dives in multiple books in areas of interest (wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, privatization of military conflict and other “inherently governmental” functions, computer security, space, technology generally), books by my friends, and “thoughtcrime” — books banned for political reasons, usually by the left but sometimes by the right.
I mostly track my reading using Goodreads (Ryan Lackey on Goodreads) as it makes it easier to see which books I’ve already read, next book in a series, etc. That site has long been a zombie corpse barely animated, and getting bought by Amazon hasn’t helped it, but the alternatives like LibraryThing don’t seem substantially better.
In 2022, my favorite books were (in no specific order)
Michael Gibson’s Paper Belt on Fire — the story of Thiel’s 20 under 20 fellowship, with 1517 Fund, anti-credentialism, and entrepreneurship. I’m friends with Danielle Strachman the other GP in the fund, and had previously been a 20 under 20 mentor (where I met, among other people, Eliezer Yudkowsky and learned about Urbit!). This book makes me want to be an LP in their fund.
Ruthven Todd’s “Space Cat” series — a beautiful series of illustrated children’s books about an astronaut and his cat, visiting space, Mars, and Venus. Interestingly Ruthven is primarily a biographer of William Blake. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthven_Todd)
Peter Kemp’s Alms for Oblivion — the third book about Peter Kemp’s adventures. The first, Mine Were of Trouble, was by far the best — an account of an English gentleman and law student serving in the Spanish civil war, on the Nationalist side. Alms for Oblivion is primarily about post-WW2 de-colonialization operations in Asia, including working with Japanese troops during demobilization. Wonderful insights into Bali and other areas in the region.
Andy Greenberg’s Tracers in the Dark — story of tracing “anonymous” bitcoin payments, essentially the origin story of Chainalysis (Kraken guys helping out with Mt. Gox investigation, turning it into a company), ongoing work with law enforcement, etc. I’m a big proponent of provably unlinkable Zero Knowledge systems, and actually was strongly anti-Bitcoin from 2009-2012 or so due to it being a massive step back from Chaumian blinded tokens (which had been available since the 1990s, and initially proposed in the 1980s).
Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State and available online at https://thenetworkstate.com/ — Balaji’s proposal for a successor to the nation state, and a path to achieve it. I found a lot of the book somewhat unnecessary (the motivation for “why”, but the “what” and “how” of the new structure is very interesting. I think in a future expanded form he’s going to break it up into multiple volumes. Also, Fuck Taylor Lorenz and the New York Times, generally.
Nick Lane’s Life Ascending which presents evolution as a series of inventions. Not too difficult from a biology/chemistry perspective, but enough detail to actually be interesting.
Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross’s Talent — interesting insights into hiring and talent management, especially in startup, technology contexts. Mostly, it's about discovering systems. It doesn't really provide too many concrete procedures running the talent search, but does include a lot of heuristics which can be part of it, and things to consider. The first few chapters were probably the best, with some examples of good interview questions and the types of questions which can't be trivially rehearsed in advance; the middle/end of the book focused a lot on biases and underutilized sources of talent and maybe an excessive degree of focus there. Weakest part was probably the "video assessments/zoom" chapter -- the real takeaway should be "just do audio-only", rather than wasting a bunch of pages on how video doesn't work well in various ways.
James Rickards’s Currency Wars — Good book about historical currency wars during the period of open trade (post-Mercantilist; particularly 1920s, and then 1970s), written during the "great financial crisis" 2007-2013 (and thus not reflecting covid's massive money printing, etc., but predicting stuff like it). To some extent, it's an argument for a good/hybrid gold standard as a possible future, and advocates strongly for studying the use of gold. Doesn't include anything about crypto or general commodity and competing private money (my personal favorite solution, given technological progress), but partially that's due to when it was written.
Donald Kirsch, Ogi Ogas, and James Foster’s The Drug Hunters — A very engaging introduction for the non-professional to the fascinating world of drug discovery. Uses historical examples (insulin, penicillin, etc.) and also has a good framework for the different categories (botanical, chemical, etc.) of drugs. The most interesting part, however, is that it's written by someone who is actually an expert in the drug discovery field himself, and he includes personal experiences, plus a more nuanced view of FDA and the regulatory/compliance process than usually found.
John Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics — This is probably the best book on international relations yet written. Mearsheimer became more famous recently from his "Why Ukraine is the West's Fault" lecture from 2015, and is one of the leading "realist" thinkers in international relations. In this book he develops a framework for why countries engage in warfare (essentially active defense), analyzes the past 500 years of great power interactions, and makes predictions for Europe and Asia with respect to the US, Russia, and China. Ultimately it's a fairly depressing book -- conflict being inevitable, and actions the US has taken with respect to Russia and China being exactly what we shouldn't have done, leading to predictable consequences.
Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works — Read this on recommendation from Noah Smith, and it was probably the best book about Asian development and industrial policy that I've ever read. I don't agree with government management in all cases, but it's pretty clearly and convincingly argued that different levels of government policy involvement make sense in different places and phases of national development.
Using the examples of major countries in Asia (Vietnam being tragically the only forgotten one), the argument is made that a few things counter to libertarian orthodoxy make sense:
Land reform; distribute land to the people actually using it, vs. large estateholders. Generally the moral basis of initial land ownership in undeveloped countries is far from the libertarian ideal. There are practical arguments for land reform independent of moral -- it removes the issue from the toolkit of communists and other evil forces -- and can be done in relatively non-destructive ways.
Initially, "Gardening" or "family cultivation" level agricultural production, to increase total output and keep people employed. While it's less productive per person-hour invested, it produces more total food, and early in development there's a surplus of labor. Producing the maximum food output (using domestic inputs) is more important than maximizing efficiency.
As industrialization proceeds, shift agriculture to greater efficiency, and shift labor to export-focused industries. The key insight in the book (and something I'd not thought of) is that "export discipline" lets the country avoid most "planned economy" pitfalls -- you use the international market to keep local firms efficient and honest, rather than domestic command economy (which would at best be decisions by government lacking complete information, is more often incompetent local decisions, and sadly often corruption domestic and international.
Avoid the standard international push for unregulated financial markets, unrestricted FDI until a reasonable level of development has been reached.
The winning examples (Korea, Japan) vs. the losers (Philippines and Southeast Asia generally) are used to explain these principles. Overall, a pretty solid argument. There is some ambiguity around when this kind of policy stops working (and when more free market policies make sense), but in general the argument against universal economic policies for all places and all times seems to be convincing.Laura Shin’s The Cryptopians — Amazingly well sourced. The definitive history of the formation of Ethereum and the drama between founding and approximately 2020. Lots of insight into the personalities (and seems accurate for the ~4 of them I know reasonably well personally, so I'll assume accurate for the others), and for events. One of the most interesting revelations: the DAO Hacker is identified fairly conclusively for the first time as Tony Hoenisch, an Austrian living in Singapore, co-founder of TenX.
Herman Pontzer’s Burn — This isn't a diet book -- it's an (accessible) book about the science of metabolism. Lots of interesting data from non-human primates (who are vegetarian, don't really exercise, but are incredibly muscled and low body fat -- if they eat more, they just get more muscle), anthropological studies of remote human tribes who walk a lot (humans adapt, but not in the ways we really would want them to), etc. Makes the case for moderate diet/exercise incidentally, but it's primarily a book about metabolic science, and quite fascinating.
Isabel Wilkerson’s Warmth of Other Suns — This is a truly exceptional book which both is the definitive account of a major population movement in the US (black people moving from the Southeast to Northern/Western cities from approximately WW1 until the 1970s) as well as a great example of how to tell history (using specific representative individuals and their personal journeys to motivate the broader history).
I was somewhat aware of the "labor demands of war industries" as well as "generally bad conditions living in the South under Jim Crow" before reading this, but I didn't realize how close to slavery the conditions were post reconstruction. Presumably a lot of this was due to the actually low productivity of farms under sharecropping -- the costs to maintain a subsistence farmer approximate their earnings anyway -- but there weren't economic analyses provided for the income of farms, just that the sharecroppers rarely ended up ahead.
Another interesting detail is whether this was more internal migration (i.e. motivated economic or political movement by the more capable members of a group) vs. refugee (broader based and thus lower average skill/resources) -- it appears it was much more a migration movement early on, and broader later, although the book doesn't really provide statistical arguments. I'd assumed it was the less skilled/wealthy people fleeing Jim Crow, but due to political and legal issues there really weren't opportunities outside very few professions ("black doctor for black people").
It did drag a lot toward the end, once it became "people who had resettled in the North/West and how their lives ended up"; the interesting parts of the book are life under Jim Crow and the migration itself. I'd love a comparable book which goes into the "white flight" era as well as general consequences from 1970s-1990s, and then a book on how foreign immigration has again caused internal migration/demographic changes (e.g. Oakland black people moving out) from the 1990s-now.
It has been interesting watching the pushback/mockery of Lex Friedman’s 2023 reading schedule — 1 book/week, largely selected from canon of great books of the West. Some people making fun of him for choosing “basic” books (some of them are re-reads for him; I’ve read all but 4 of the books on his first half-year list already (Meditations, On the Road, Siddhartha, and The Plague), but they’re worth a re-read), some (including Nasim Taleb, notorious troll) claiming one can’t meaningfully read at that rate (wrong; the books vary widely in length and difficulty, but on average one per week is quite attainable; my goal is 3 books/wk for 2023). “Get fucked” is the appropriate response to critics here, but in his endlessly civil and cheerful personality he replied to Taleb with “I'm sorry you feel this way, and that you felt the need to tweet this. I love your work and will continue to celebrate it. Happy new year [heart emoji]”.
(San Juan, PR — ~50 minutes)