Thanksgiving Book Review: November 25, 2018 Snippets
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This week’s theme: Seven Days, Seven Books: a Social Capital reading list for Thanksgiving and the holidays.
Hi everyone, and happy Thanksgiving. This week in Snippets we’re going to do something a little different for Thanksgiving weekend: instead of the usual Snippets format with an opening essay, links to articles, and Social Capital news, we’re going to instead highlight seven really good books, one for each day of the week. Take some time, read a book; read seven, even. These books are all favourites from around the Social Capital community, some of which we’ve mentioned before, some of which tie into specific Snippets themes we’ve covered recently, and all of which we promise will leave you inspired. If you’re up for it — and we hope you are — go the extra mile and restock your library for the holidays. We’re more than happy to help you choose!
Monday: Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, 2nd Edition | Bill Janeway
We’ve recommended Bill Janeway’s book before in Snippets, but I personally believe that this is a book you can’t recommend, or read, enough times. (I’m currently in the middle of it for my 4th time through.) Bill Janeway has a rare and valuable point of view: as a leading economist at Cambridge and “grandchild student” of John Maynard Keynes, he has a commanding grasp of how many different pieces of the innovation economy come together to create an emergent system that is rarely described accurately. But he also knows how the real world works, too: as a practicing Venture Capitalist at Warburg Pincus during the 90s and 2000s, Bill has experienced a career arc that contextualizes, informs and illuminates his thesis on how the innovation economy functions as a whole.
A new edition of the book recently came out, and it’s worth rereading for the update alone. Unlike many 2nd editions of books that come out and shoehorn recent years’ events into the book’s existing thesis, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy has been thoroughly updated to reflect the rise of the Unicorn generation, the new mega-funds like Softbank Vision Fund, the new American political climate, the ongoing ascension of China as a tech superpower, and more. It’s a real must-read for any Snippets subscriber.
Tuesday: Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare | René Girard
We mentioned René Girard a few weeks ago in Snippets, and his worldview on mimetic conflict has earned a small but fierce group of admirers. Many of Girard’s books are challenging to tackle without sufficient preparation: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat are profound theses but aren’t exactly the easiest to jump into. So if you’re looking for an easily approachable introduction to Girard and to the most mimetic emotion of all (envy), look no further than Girard’s book on Shakespeare.
In this book, Girard makes the case for Shakespeare as having one core theme in all of his works: the power of envy, or what Shakespeare calls “suggested desire”, as a motivating factor for essentially all human conflict. Girard walks us step by step through a list of Shakespeare plays we’ve all read but may not necessarily have fully appreciated, explaining them all as a vehicle for illustrating Shakespeare’s one, singularly powerful understanding of mimicry as a pillar of the human condition. He gives particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, overlooked by many critics as being dumb or overly reliant on the supernatural, and calls it Shakespeare’s most perfect achievement of capturing the essence of human conflict: hard to do, for a comedy, but warranted in Girard’s view. After reading this, it’s hard not to feel any other way.
Wednesday: Investing: the Last Liberal Art | Robert Hagstrom
This book is basically an homage to Charlie Munger, and that’s just fine by me. Investing, especially in the public markets where information is plentiful and wisdom is scarce, is best understandable as a complex adaptive system: there is no one, single winning strategy, because the participants in the game are all continually coming up with new strategies, new rules and new complications. The best approach, according to Munger and to author Robert Hagstrom, is to treat investing like the liberal arts: to gain as broad as possible an appreciation for “The Big Ideas”, since you never know when one of them will turn out to be exactly what you need at the right time. Each chapter is devoted to one domain of these ideas: Physics, Biology, Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy, Literature, Mathematics, and then a final chapter on Decision Making. The ideas are straightforward, but fundamental, and all of them are really “required knowledge” for anyone who has any kind of investment portfolio, or really, anyone who would like to think of themselves as having a solid understanding of how the world basically works.
Thursday: Extraordinarily Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds | Charles Mackay
A surprising amount of people in the investing world have never heard of this book. That’s a fixable problem. Although there are other more serious books on bubbles (Charles Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes, for instance, or Robert Schiller’s Irrational Exuberance, Mackay’s still stands the test of time as the most entertaining, and in many ways, the most illuminating. Although his book covers the whole spectrum of human crowd behaviour, including phenomena like the Crucades, the first and most famous half of the book concerns three famous historical bubbles: John Law’s Mississippi Scheme (the first and arguably greatest of all financial manias and crashes), the South Sea Bubble in England, and the Dutch Tulip Mania. (Of those three, the Tulip episode is the most well known, but arguably the least interesting. The Mississippi Company story, on the other hand, is bonkers.)
Like many great historians and storytellers, Mackay was supposedly himself wrapped up in the 19th Century Railroad boom, and got in a good bit of trouble himself by getting too close to his own material.) And, as you might guess, the book has particularly delightful relevance today as cryptocurrency goes through its own speculative roller coaster. (The parallels between John Law and Satoshi alone are worth the time.)
Friday: Keeping At It: the Quest for Sound Money and Good Government | Paul Volcker
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in the public service, or in fact anyone anywhere, who has played a greater role in shaping the second half of the 20th century than Paul Volcker. Volcker is best known in his role as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and for conquering the “Stag-flation” of the 1970s: slow economic growth coupled with runaway price inflation, a one-two combination for which the Fed classically has no “levers” which it can pull to fix. Crowned by his years of steering the US Economy through some very challenging years of hard medicine (including holding double digit interest rates for years), Volcker earned a well-deserved reputation for being the consummate public servant: willing to do whatever it took, with whoever he needed, to serve his country and its citizens. At a moment where we need public servants with Volcker’s skills and character more than ever, the book is a timely reminder fo what we can overcome with people, willpower and perseverance.
Saturday: Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing | Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd & Laurie Macfarlane
This book unpacks and examines the dynamics of the residential housing market: in England, the United States, and several other developed countries. It’s easy to follow, but it tackles some challenging subject matter: from a basic mistake we’ve all been taught in economics class (that land ought to be treated as a form of capital; the authors argue convincingly that it should not.) to how the positive feedback cycle of how housing prices can perpetually rise faster than incomes, to some bitter but necessary medicine that they prescribe for the future. It has urgent relevance to anyone who lives in the Bay Area, as the Silicon Valley tech industry combined with decades-old city and state level policy has created an unusually potent mixture of housing appreciation and shortage. But really this book should be required reading for anyone who owns or aspires to own a home, anyone who wants to understand this quietly enormous source of power and financial leverage in modern society, and how homeowners are steadily pulling up the ladders behind us as we risk closing the window of the American Dream for good.
Sunday: The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics | Bradley Tusk
Finally, round out the week and our list of recommendations with The Fixer, Bradley Tusk’s new book about the murky, fascinating overlap between startups, government, and populist power. As a former behind-the-scenes advisor and operator for politicians like Chuck Schumer, Rod Blagojevich, and Mike Bloomberg, Tusk initially cut his teeth deep in the land of government, far from Silicon Valley. But in a second phase of his career, he found acute and intense product-market fit for his skillset with an unlikely customer: startups like Uber, whose skyrocketing growth had left them flatfooted and exposed in city after city, facing angry local governments and with no playbook to handle them. As the tech industry matures and consumer-oriented companies dig progressively deeper into the fabric of civic infrastructure and everyday life, Tusk’s book paints a sometimes-shocking and always entertaining picture of the new, emerging skill set that’s opening up for those who want to operate in this messy zone of conflict and opportunity.
Finally, we’ll leave you with something from the Social Capital family: this fantastic Ted Talk from Saildrone founder Sebastien de Halleux. If you’re looking for something to share with friends and family over Thanksgiving, then this video fits the bill: it’s fascinating, it’s approachable, it’s meaningful, and it speaks to our mission at Social Capital.
From all of us, we hope you had a happy, grateful and recharging Thanksgiving. Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
