I recently took Stewart Brand’s advice and started limiting my news consumption to a handful of science blogs. Science reporting is much more uplifting than its mainstream cousin. No gossip. No disasters. No rumours of impending economic doom. Just discoveries: Genuinely new stuff that we didn’t know before. While there’s a lot to absorb, my first thought was “How can we get more?”
I was first introduced to the concept of design patterns when working as a software developer. Design patterns, or simply ‘patterns’, are used to describe common solutions to common problems. Collections of patterns are called pattern languages.
I must confess that I have always had a bit of a pessimistic streak running through most of my worldview. The world was in trouble, and getting worse. Now, thanks to the appropriately titled work by Matt Ridley, I have started thinking that maybe things won’t turn out so bad, after all.
A thought experiment: imagine a world in the not-too-distant future where technology has advanced to the point where basic human needs for food, clothing and shelter are being met by autonomous computer-controlled systems. Setting aside dystopian visions of a human race enslaved by machines, let us instead assume that this situation is working pretty well for everyone.
The rioting in London seems like a fitting backdrop for reviewing a book about societal inequality, although the timing of my review, and their riots, is purely coincidental. In “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better” we are exposed to a compelling stream of data and analysis that aims to show that whether you care about health, or crime, or education, or social mobility, (or…), you should be caring about social and economic inequality.
Calgary’s mayor recently put out a call looking for ‘Big Ideas’ in the realm of poverty reduction. Not really wanting to limit myself to ‘Big’ I have set my sights on ‘Crazy’, which means that these likely will (and probably should) be dismissed out of hand.
In Paul Collier’s world, there are developed nation (~1B pp) and developing nations (~4B pp). And then there is the bottom billion. His book lays out four traps that these poorest nations fall into that keep them stuck in poverty. The author also lays out four tools, three of them untested, that might be able to break the traps and bring those worst off into the global middle class.
In Dead Aid, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo makes a passionate case that the West’s efforts to aid Africa over the past 50 years have done more harm than good, and that it is time to look at alternate solutions if we are to have any hope of lifting Africa out of its persistent poverty.
Human beings have an innate sense of fairness. That the world is unequal and becoming more so is a persistent challenge to our collective sense of living in a just world.
Nobody likes being forced to do something, even if it’s the right thing. That we often choose the wrong thing is the problem that Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein seek to address in “Nudge”.
“Nudge” is another in a growing genre of books that blends insights from psychology and economics. From Blink to Bounce, the Upside of Irrationality to Spousonomics and many others in between, these books are an alluring temptation for readers interested in the hidden workings of the human psyche.
