Five books that impressed me this year

There are some books I have read this year that have made a lasting impression on me. And since Christmas is coming up, some of my readers may be looking for good books to give to friends and family or read themselves over the holidays. Thus, I have decided to give you a short list of five books that I found deeply interesting and insightful.

My readers sometimes ask me for book recommendations. Usually, they want to know which popular finance or investment books I recommend, but I have to disappoint them. I don’t read popular finance books anymore – or rather so rarely that I write a review on them when I do. This is not because I am a snob about these books after having written my own. There are plenty of great books out there, but I am working 12 hours a day on investment topics including reading on average two academic papers a day. So, in my spare time, the last thing I want to do is read more finance stuff.

Hence, none of the books in this list are finance or economics books. Here they are in alphabetical order:

Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Anne Applebaum)

Late in 2021, Anne Applebaum published an article in the Atlantic called The Bad Guys Are Winning. In this article, she made the argument that unlike in the past, autocrats around the world are working together these days to ensure their mutual survival. Her short book Autocracy Inc. expands on this core idea.

Applebaum has focused most of her writing on the evils of totalitarian states with her Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Gulag putting her firmly in the top echelons of chroniclers of Stalin and his ilk.

Back in the days of the Cold War, the Socialist and Communist autocrats in the USSR, China, and North Korea had one thing in common: They were ideologues, trying to create a communist paradise on Earth. But socialism and communism don’t work. Crucially, they undermine the economic foundations of a society. And it doesn’t help if autocrats kill millions of their people in the name of ideological purification as has happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, North Korea under Kim Il Sung, etc.

Today’s autocrats have smartened up. The fundamental lesson they have learned from past failures is that if you cannot sustain the economy, you cannot sustain the ideology. This move started with Deng Xiao Ping’s opening up of China in 1979 and has led to China becoming the second largest economy in the world and one of the largest consumer markets.

This changes the playing field. In the Cold War days, most socialist/communist countries were resource-rich but had no domestic consumer and industrial base to sell their resources to. So, they had to sell oil and metals to Western Europe or the US to survive. Unfortunately, this meant that these countries were slowly running out of money as commodity prices dropped and their domestic economies atrophied. Once Reagan stepped up the arms race with the Soviet Union in the 1980s it was game over.

In her book, Applebaum shows how this has changed. Yes, prominent totalitarian states like Iran or Russia still depend heavily on commodity exports to survive. However, what is different is that today, they have China (and to a lesser extent India) that they can sell to and that provides a massive consumer base for them. Even more so, Western companies are all too happy to do business in these autocracies and even self-censor some of their products and services to do so.

This means that China, Russia, Iran, etc. can get consumer goods, machinery, and equipment at low prices and high technological standards from Western businesses as well as other autocrats (China is a major supplier of consumer goods and equipment to Russia, Iran, etc.). Hence, the system is much more sustainable economically and people ruled by autocrats suffer a slower decline in living standards and personal freedoms. Why bother with freedom of expression if you get cheap TVs and have low crime in your neighborhood?

This isn’t to say that there is no decline in living standards in autocracies, but it seems to be much slower than in the past.

What makes this possible is the change in attitude of autocrats, according to Applebaum. Today’s autocrats are perfectly happy to cooperate across ideological and political divides if it helps them stay in power for longer. China is still a communist country; North Korea is an ultranationalist country rooted in socialism. Russia is an ultranationalist country free from socialism or any ideology. And Iran is an Islamic Republic. There is no natural foundation on which to cooperate, except that it is mutually beneficial to all these countries to decouple from the United States and Western Europe so they cannot be blackmailed economically.

So, they choose to put mutual survival above ideological differences and try to create an alternative economic system to rival the Western free world. Whether this will be successful is an open question, but reading Applebaum’s book makes you wonder if have to be content in the West with a containment strategy rather than trying to win a new Cold War with China and other autocracies.

Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Kevin J. Mitchell)

What differentiates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is one of the enduring questions in evolutionary biology. Paul Bloom in his book ‘How Pleasure Works’ came up with a pretty good answer: “Man is the only animal that enjoys Tabasco sauce.”

Kevin Mitchell, a neurogeneticist from Trinity College Dublin takes a more serious approach by focusing on free will and how the ability to make deliberate decisions has evolved. This is still a field in development and there are different perspectives on free will. Some scientists argue that free will doesn’t exist and that what appears like free will to us is just the conditioned responses of our neural networks. Others argue that while there is no such thing as free will, there is ‘free won’t’ based on lab studies that indicate that while humans may not be able to proactively choose one course of action over another, they can proactively choose not to take some action. To put it thus: We can’t say ‘yes’ to something but we can always say ‘no’ to it.

Mitchell, however, makes a compelling case that free will exists and traces it back to the evolution of single-cell organisms. His book is a tour de force of evolutionary biology. Many people will know a lot of the evidence presented here but what made the book so fascinating to me is that Mitchell puts different pieces together in such a way as to make it clear how all these evolutionary developments combined over time to create something that we today would recognise as free will in humans.

It doesn’t mean that this was a deterministic development or that the development of free will was inevitable. It just means that free will was created out of millions of years of mutations and adaptations. His book is about the best way to show anyone how evolution can work over long time spans to create something so complex and awe-inspiring that people for millennia resorted to an all-powerful God to explain it (and some still do today).

This book is also an ode to the scientific method in general. It shows how humans can make sense of even the most complex things in the universe using a combination of logic, empirical data collection, and lab experiments. In this day and age when science is often maligned as wrong and people supposedly had enough of experts, I think we need more books like this that show that experts are really important because they drive progress and make our lives better in so many ways. They make mistakes, for sure, but they make fewer mistakes than the charlatans (aka influencers and secular gurus) that so many people follow these days.

Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (Keith Hayward)

Let me make a couple of things clear. If you name a child after a character in a Disney movement, I think you should be prohibited from having more children. If you are over thirty and your favourite book contains any of the following, magic, elves, dragons, vampires, I think you should not be allowed to vote because clearly, you have not grown up and you are thus incapable of making a responsible decision about the future of the country. And don’t you dare show up at an airport trying to board a flight wearing a football shirt and flip-flops…¹

I know I sound like a curmudgeon, but I have been irked for some time about the growing number of people who refuse to grow up and instead of becoming responsible, serious adults remain ‘kidults’. This is something that has not happened in the past as Keith Hayward documents in the book that will give a voice to so many people like me.

His book documents two important trends in our society. First, we have raised a generation of people who are rich in confidence and poor in the skills needed to function in a world of adults. Even normal criticism is considered bullying and the stress of fitting in a new environment (e.g. when leaving school and starting their first job) is so high that it causes mental health crises.

To quote from an article in The Times:

Analysis by BCG of people’s routes into long-term sickness found that students were now one of the biggest contributors. In 2021-22, 63,392 people aged 16 to 24 went straight from being economically inactive because they were studying to being inactive through long-term sickness, up from 36,866 in 2019-20.

And while these people are unable to take it in, they are perfectly happy to throw a tantrum whenever something happens they don’t like. In this respect, I love that Hayward heavily criticises both developments on the left of the political spectrum and the right. He takes apart the intolerance of young people towards speech they don’t like as well as the childishness of the manosphere movement and ‘toxic masculinity’ in general which he exposes as nothing more than a bunch of grown up toddlers refusing to respect anything other than their primal impulses. The trend is towards a serious lack of psychosocial development or, as he puts it: Adulthood is not aging well.

The second trend he takes down is society’s tendency to cater to these immature, selfish toddlers. Companies that hire consultants on how to deal with Gen Z employees, governments enacting ever more detailed health and safety rules to protect stupid people from themselves, and lawyers coming up with ever more ludicrous arguments for why a defendant cannot be held accountable for his or her actions. The latest trend is to argue that the brain is not fully developed until the age of 25. Well, if the brain is not fully developed until the age of 25, we should treat these people like children until that age, meaning not only no right to vote, but no right to drive a car, drink alcohol, or enter into any substantial financial commitment whatsoever. Oh and application of the rules of having sex with minors for anyone under the age of 25 as well.

Infantilised is an angry book and it does not hide its righteousness and I loved it for exactly that reason. But then again if you are a member of Gen Z or have a child named after a Disney movie character, you might disagree with me.

The Last Yakuza: A Life in the Japanese Underworld (Jake Adelstein)

I am a huge fan of Japan, its society, and its culture. If you aren’t then this book is probably not for you.

Jake Adelstein is a US journalist who became one of the first Westerners to ever work at a Japanese newspaper. His breakthrough book was Tokyo Vice, where he describes his efforts to investigate the Yakuza crime syndicates in Japan at the turn of the century. While probably embellished and partly fictional, Tokyo Vice has since been made into a TV show with the second season out earlier this year.

The TV show is highly recommendable, not least because it is the only movie or TV show I know that manages to make Tokyo look as good as Lost in Translation. It is a true feast for the eyes.

This year, Adelstein followed up with The Last Yakuza, an allegedly true story of the life and career of a Yakuza Adelstein hired as a bodyguard. Reading it, I think there are once again some embellishments on real-life events but that does not detract from the book at all. It is a fantastic story of the history of the Yakuza from the 1970s onward.

The Yakuza had their heyday in post-war Japan and developed strong ties with top-level politicians. Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori was rumoured to have links to the Yakuza and Justice Secretary Keishu Tanaka was forced to step down in 2012 in part due to organised crime links.

However, since 2011/2012, the laws in Japan have changed and law enforcement has increasingly cracked down on the Yakuza, leading to their marginalisation in Japanese Society. Jake Adelstein’s book is a wonderful read because it describes how this crackdown created major problems for the Yakuza and demystified the gangster life which to this day is glorified in Japanese society through fan magazines that portray Yakuza gangsters as heroes of society.

Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany (Harald Jähner)

Do you think the culture wars are a 21^st century phenomenon? Think again. Journalist and culture critic Harald Jähner wrote a somewhat unusual history of the Weimar Republic in Germany.

Yes, it contains chapters about the major events, starting with the German Revolution of 1919 after the country lost the First World War, the hyperinflation, the roaring twenties when Berlin (not New York or Paris) was the capital of the world, to the Great Depression and the rise of the Nazis in 1933.

But what makes his book so enjoyable is that these chapters are interspersed with chapters about the changes in everyday lives and how attitudes about society changed. It shows how traditional values dominated in the countryside, while the cities were far more progressive.

The book has chapters on how women in cities started to enter the workforce as typists, secretaries, and phone operators. How men fought against women’s rights and their increasing presence in business and politics and how, in turn, women fought for their right to vote, and be accepted in professional life. In the process, this emancipation of women created a massive backlash from conservatives.

Today, the culture wars centre around men wearing women’s clothes, a hundred years ago it was women wearing men’s clothes. Just think of the famous photo of Marlene Dietrich in tails and top hat smoking a cigarette.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Let’s just hope that our political tensions today don’t end like the Weimar Republic in 1933.

1. If you think I am exaggerating, note that a couple of days after I wrote the first draft of this post, it is a warm autumn day, and in the lift, I run into a manchild who is clearly in his late thirties or early forties. And what can I say, he wears shorts and flip flops, a pair of these massive headphones that make you look like Mickey Mouse, and on his backpack dangles a badge with a Star Wars stormtrooper and the slogan ‘Best dad in the galaxy’. FFS.