Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

This book is interesting, but flawed.  Graeber compiles a broad socioeconomic history that spans centuries and the globe, which I found enjoyable and insightful.  I also found his argument that money is, effectively, debt rather convincing (I was, however, a proponent of that view before reading the book, so I might be a bad judge of that argument).  As far as that's the book's message, it's very well done.  Graeber, however, tries to do a lot more.  He attempts a close-to-Marxist critique of contemporary market economies, making several moral and policy assertions, but his claims about the world today fall very short.

His failures stem from two primary causes.  The first is that, while he has impressive anthropological insights about the way that transactions have fit into the social relations in various cultures, he really doesn't understand economics, in the traditional sense, at all.  This results in criticisms of the field and of the policy implications that come from it that are entirely untethered from reality.  He erects more than a few straw men in this book.  It also results in a utopian vision for the modern world (even if, perhaps, his utopia is less ambitious than most.)

The second, likely related, root cause of his book's shortcomings is that he glosses over the key developments of the 19th and early 20th centuries with very superficial analysis.  After giving in depth analysis of various ancient tribal wedding practices, it was bizarre that he didn't have more to say about Bretton Woods.  A corollary issue is that he was only limitedly successful in bridging the gap between his ideas about the social implications of money on an individual level and his critical ideas about the modern economy on the level of the global system.  Because of his limited coverage of the construction of today's global economic systems and his limited understanding of broad economic theories, there are a lot of holes in his attempts to use his anthropological analyses to criticize neoliberalism and its institutions.  This isn't to say that there's nothing convincing about any of his criticisms... It's hard not to be at least a little bit sympathetic to the argument that it's absurd to hold a nation responsible for IMF loans made to the dictators who oppressed them, and there's something inherently emotionally compelling when Graeber puts "in a good word for the non-industrious poor," since, "At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.”  However compelling one might find all of that, though, it's superficial.  He doesn't really suggest what it means for us or what could be done differently... he avoids the messy technical details altogether (and with economics, debt, and finance, the devil can often find a spacious abode in the details).  Plus, no one needs to read 400 pages to get a couple of brief, simplistic, emotional appeals like that.

I would recommend this book to those rare people who are so fascinated by economics, culture AND history that reading a 400 page book about them seems like a great idea... and who have sufficient knowledge of all three (especially economics) to recognize Graeber's shortcomings.  Parts of the book will be captivating for those people.  I wouldn't, however, recommend bothering with it if you're interested in it primarily to learn anything about the world today... not much of this lengthy book deals with that and, when he gets to the topic, a quarter of what he says is preposterous, and most of the rest is pedestrian.

The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan

This book, while not light reading, is an important work. It is one of the best investigations into the Challenger disaster out there and will be appreciated by those interested in that story from history. This book, however, is not just a history book. It explores how bureaucracies work and why they often fail. It reminds the reader that a bureaucracy's failure is not necessarily the failure of one man in particular, or a result of gross incompetence at any step in the decision making process... that, often, these failures are rooted in the systems and cultures within which people work. That message can be eye opening, and is applicable to better understanding the workings of other government bureaucracies, and even, perhaps, our own private employers. This is one of those rare books that can change the way you look at the world around you.

Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland; Or, Why It's Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All... by Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky

This one is not a light book, and if you're not particularly interested in the nuts and bolts of public (or, perhaps, organizational) policy, you might not particularly enjoy it, but...

If only every policy maker and every voter would read this book! Pressman and Wildavsky dig in and show how the best of intentions, and even seemingly great plans, fall apart when it's time to implement them on the ground. They show the difficulties in coordinating the many stakeholders that governments have to bring together, in synchronizing steps carried out by an array of public and private organizations, and of keeping everybody on board over the course of the time it takes to execute plans. They show that even if each step in the implementation of a policy seems like a no-brainer, a long series of steps that are, individually, almost certain to succeed can be almost certain to fail! The human mind sees a series of steps that have a 95% chance of success and thinks that the process is likely to work... we rarely appreciate that if there's a 95% chance of each of 15 things working, there's a less than 50% chance that they all work. And when you need to coordinate them to all work on a tight timeline, forget about it! Pressman and Wildavsky's Implementation shows, in both human and theoretical terms, how these miscalculations caused government policy in Oakland to fall apart. A reader will have no difficulty finding parallels in current news (no matter when "current" is for their reading).

What to Expect When No One's Expecting by Jonathan Last

Jonathan Last is always an enjoyable writer so it was no surprise that this book was an enjoyable read, even if it was, at points, a little dark.

One should certainly read this book critically. I found a few ideas in it that I don't think add up, and I'm pretty sympathetic to Last's overall viewpoint. Nonetheless, his treatment of America's falling birth rate, its causes and implications, is as thorough as it could be without turning into an academic tome.

Most importantly, I think that this book is a critical contribution to the national dialogue in the US. Many Americans have been impervious to the lessons of Europe's more advanced demographic decline and still cling to the mindset of Ehrlich's discredited The Population Bomb.Hopefully this book is just the beginning in a serious public discussion of American demographics, and one that's not dominated by overblown fears of a risk of overpopulation.