The First Quarter of 2021 in Books

Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash

In 2021, I’m reading 100 books.

While working an ever-increasing number of hours at the full-time job, taking graduate school prerequisite courses, trying to eat at least a few vegetables each week, and managing a fixer upper.

Alone.

In a pandemic.

I’m not sure why I thought this year would be so different from 2020 that I’d suddenly find myself with the time, energy, and motivation to read 2 books a week… every week.

Yet, here we are.

As far as the actual number of books I’ve read is concerned, it could be worse. I’m failing less at reading than I am at sharing what I’m reading. For a few weeks during the first quarter, I thought a weekly report would be a good way to share progress on the books and my other learning endeavors. Then I realized that adding more commitments to the year 2021 might not be the best way to solve the problem of having too many commitments in the year 2021.

So I’ve decided to take a more casual approach to book review and response posts going forward. In the meantime, this is the master list of all the nonfiction books that I read in the first quarter. I’ve consolidated all my book comments and included links to other book posts within this list. (If I didn’t write any comments or articles about a book, I’ve just included the title.)

January through March 2021 in Books

1. The Practice by Seth Godin | Link to post
2. Secrecy World by Jake Bernstein
3. The Color of Money by Mehrsa Baradaran
4. White Trash by Nancy Isenberg
5. Flash Boys by Michael Lewis
6. Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen
7. The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins
8. The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier
9. The Vanishing Middle Class by Peter Temin
10. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil This was a relatively quick read, and I found it both interesting and useful. Since I read and listen to effective altruism and global priorities research fairly regularly, I know that ethical design and implementation of Artificial Intelligence in particular and big data/data science more broadly are important. This book provided many examples of potentially negative consequences of algorithms, with an emphasis on why using data responsibly is so important and how we can do it better.
11. Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen This was not a quick read for me, but it was worth it (both because this book had a wealth of useful insights, and also because it shows up on a ton of interesting course reading lists I’ve reviewed). If I did write a post about this book, I’d title it “a call for nuance”. Economists tend to hate nuance (for evidence of this, see the next book on this list), but Sen isn’t just an economist. He is also a philosopher, and a human being with real-world knowledge of what does and doesn’t work in development. He doesn’t seem to feel the need to make his views fit cleanly within the box of any economic school of thought. Since the world doesn’t cleanly fit in a box either, I’m a fan of his approach.
12. The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan I’m not sure what to say about this book, except that it is an excellent example of taking an idea with merit (the purpose of school is at least partially signaling) way too far (we should use this fact to encourage kids that aren’t good students to drop out of school very early and send them to work). As a first generation university graduate, I’m on board with the idea that not everyone should attend college. As a person that attended public high school in a district with a dropout rate above 10% and several family members that dropped out either before or during high school, I also know firsthand what happens to communities, families, and future generations when kids have to give up their chance of finishing high school.
13. What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy by Thomas Nagel This book shows up on many of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) reading lists that I have reviewed and consolidated. This is a quick read, and I enjoyed the conversational format.
14. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant As a person that takes balanced risks, I particularly liked this author’s more nuanced take on risk aversion. Avoiding risk and jumping into things with no plan are not the only two options: there is a middle ground. That middle ground may look like creating your own learning project to make sure you want to go to graduate school, while retaining your full-time job until you are positive.
15. Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes This is another book that shows up on most of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) reading lists I’ve reviewed, so I’m glad I read it for that reason. I’m also glad I read it because it taught me an important lesson: always get samples of ebooks before purchasing them. I accidentally got an ebook version that wasn’t compatible with Kindle, which meant I was limited to reading on the Ipad. This particular version of the ebook had pages that didn’t fit the Ipad screen, which also meant it had to be read vertically with a lot of zooming in and out, and it didn’t allow Kindle font customization. Throw these issues in with the fact that this is a philosophy book written in the 1600s, and I’ll be honest: I’m not sure how much of this I was able to retain. Luckily, the book is a very quick read, so I can revisit a better version in the future.
16. Philosophy of Economics: A Contemporary Introduction by Julian Reiss One of the interesting areas of philosophy I’ve recently discovered (that I previously didn’t know existed) is called philosophy of economics. Since I tend to ask a lot of questions about what the right questions are in economics and whether or not economics programs are attracting or admitting aspiring economists focused on those questions, it’s no surprise that I found this book fascinating. This book came from the LSE MSc in Economics and Philosophy’s preliminary reading list, and there are several other books on this list I’m planning to read soon.
17. Misbehaving by Richard Thaler Misbehaving was the first behavioral economics book I read. I’ll be honest: I didn’t love the book when I read it last year, so I wanted to give it another chance this year. I’m not sure my initial criticism was entirely fair, but I walked away from the book thinking, “This is a list of ideas marketers can use to take more money from people.” While I still have some concerns, I wouldn’t say “better ways to swindle people” is the core premise of this book. The core premise is that people don’t behave like rational actors (as economic models assume they do) in all scenarios. There are factors driving behavior that are not rational economic factors: and these pesky human behaviors can throw off an economic model. Even if I have some ethical concerns about what different actors can do with this knowledge at people’s expense, I agree with this core premise. Acknowledging that people are not rational economic robots should lead to better, more nuanced, more accurate economic models, and that result would be profoundly positive. As an aspiring academic that doesn’t know much about academia, I also found the anecdotes about Thaler’s academic career as a professor, researcher, author, and founder of an economic discipline (behavioral economics) both useful and enjoyable.
18. Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein Since Nudge was published before Misbehaving, I technically read these books out of order. I enjoyed reading Nudge, and ethical concerns about the right way to use behavior to drive (or “nudge”) human decisions were more directly addressed in this book. In particular, I thought this book did a convincing job using the fact that you can’t opt-out of nudging behavior as an argument that nudging behavior in a positive and fair way is better than nudging it in a random way (that could be negative/worse). The authors are very clear about the importance of preserving people’s ability to choose to directly contradict the nudge in all scenarios: this freedom of choice is paramount if you want a free society, after all.

Where are the rest of the books?

If you’re interested in the complete list of books I’ve read so far in 2021 (including fiction), I’m keeping track of the reading goal with Goodreads.

Sarah