Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

This book is incredibly interesting. Each chapter introduces some aspect of how we think and then at the very end of each chapter, he gives examples. For economist to make their theories work depend on human being unemotional and rational and always doing what economist believe is in our own best interest.

Of course the problem with economic theories is that we are not econ beings and a few economists are now trying to take that into account in their theories. The person that wrote this book is not an economist, but a psychologist. Not all economists have yet twigged to the idea that we do not make decisions the way they think we should.

This book is all about how and why we come to the decisions that we do. We have two systems. System 1 is our intuitive system and thinks fast, with no conscious thought. System 2 is slower and monitors System 1 but can be lazy or engaged.

He also talks about our two selves, our experiencing self and our remembering self. Our remembering self only remembers peaks and ends. Like the peak and end of a holiday. If you keep notes during the holiday, you probably would have a different feel for that holiday. This is all very interesting stuff.

There is a very good review of this book at Business Week. The reviewer Roger Lowenstein talks about what he likes and dislikes in this book. In the Globe and Mail review by Janice Gross Stein we are told how brilliant Kahneman and his book is. She says that it is “impossible exaggerate the importance of Daniel Kahneman’s contribution to the understanding of the way we think and choose”. The review in the Financial Times is by William Easterly. He says “There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

There is a very nice short interview by Time Time that lasts just 6 minutes. There is a much longer (1 hours and a half) video of Daniel Kahneman in conversation with Richard Layard loaded by Isewebsite. Kahneman starts talking about 8:40 minutes into this video. There is also a long History and Rationality Lecture Series video of Daniel Kahneman at the Hebrew University. Go in 2:30 minutes and it is in English.

There is a wonderful review of this book at the Association for Psychological Sciencesite. It leads to a great column in the New York Times by Daniel Kahneman. A great deal of what he says here is in this book, so it gives you a good idea what reading this book would be like.

There is another wonderful column on Daniel Kahneman and the writing of this book by Michael Lewis at Vanity Fair.

On my website is how to find this book on Amazon if you care to purchase it. See Kahneman. Also, this book review and other books I have reviewed are on my website at Book Reviews.

You Could Live a Long Time by Lyndsay Green

This book full title is You Could Live a Long Time, Are you Ready? This is a very easy read and it offers suggestions on how to age well. She uses role models to tell us how we can live longer better. Her role models are health active and very much engaged.

One thing that is very clear is that you need friendships. You will certainly need to make new friends as you age. This is extremely important. You need a social network and you need to keep at this all your life.

This very much influenced me. I realized that I had not made a new friend in a long time (I read this book two years ago.) Since then I have joined a couple of meetup club and have made new friends. I do not know how this will all work out. Most of my friends go back 30 or 40 plus years. Will my new friends last as long?

Lyndsay has her own blog and you can find it at Lyndsay Green’s site. See an interesting entry on her blog about her aging role model.

Lyndsay wrote a book review at Review Canada on Michael Adams’s latest book, Stayin’ Alive: How Canadian Baby Boomers Will Work, Play and Find Meaning in the Second Half of Their Adult Lives.

She says that if you wonder why we boomers did not fulfill the promise of the 1960s and create a world of peace and love, free from war and poverty you should read this book. Basically, she says this occurred because we are not all alike. Another thing she points out about this book is that it talks of men’s and women’s expectation in retirement. Basically, men expect to spend a lot more time with their spouses than women do.

See The Curse of a Long Life (Living to 100: blessing or a curse?) with The Agenda panel . The panel included Lyndsay Green. It is 52 minutes long, but well worth watching.

There is an interesting site called Engage as you age that has done a review of this book. See their Book Review. Their blog is the most interesting part of this site.

On my website is how to find this book on Amazon if you care to purchase it. See Green. Also, this book review and other books I have reviewed are on my website at Book Reviews.

Life Ascending by Nick Lane

First of all, if you really want to understand some basic economics of why we are in such current problems, see the video below from RSA.

Well, I am whittling down pile of books I have on my library floor. This is, of course, another great book. Its full tile if Life Ascending, The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution. In this list is death. I have seen such list before and I know it is hard at first to conceive death as a great invention. The others are the origin of Life, DNA, Photosynthesis, the Complex Cell, Sex, Movement, Sight, Hot Blood, Consciousness and Death. Just how did this all happen? Nick Lane’s book is here to explain it.

How did life invent itself? Where did DNA come from? How did consciousness develop? These are just the sort of questions that Lane’s book is prepared to answer. We have great new research methods to help him do so.

The one think he seems to find very fascinating is the fact that at one time one cell got inside and life just exploded from there. As far as we know at the moment, this just happened once. How this happened is quite well explained in a BBC video called “How did the evolution of complex life on Earth begin?” See a 4 minute video on this. The implication is that life happens quickly or not at all.

He says interesting things about oxygen. Oxygen respiration is 40% efficient (better than other forms, like sulfur). Long food chains are only possible with oxygen. This makes big life possible. It is also only with oxygen that predation pay.

Nick Lane has his own site. It is well worth visiting. There is a great review at The Guardian. There is another one at Newsblog.

And an even better review at Take on Darwin. This reviewer Shaun Johnston compared this book to Dawkins' "The Ancestor's Tale". In my opinion, this is a much better book. I had high hopes for Dawkins book, but it was a disappointment. This book is not. Nick Lane is very passionate about science. Dawkins is very passionate about who he hates (Bush, Christians, Creationist). He used to write better books and be more passionate about science.

In 2010 his book, Life Ascending, wins Royal Society Prize for Science Books. See article on this in The Telegraph.

This is a very good short video by Nick Lane on YouTube. It is around 4 minutes long. There is a short interview with Nick Lane (6 minutes) at BBC. However, you have to put up with a short commercial first. Also, BBC has a tendency to take things off their site, but hopefully it will be up there for a while.

On my website is how to find this book on Amazon if you care to purchase it. See Lane. Also, this book review and other books I have reviewed are on my website at Book Reviews.

Economics of Good and Evil by Tomas Sedlacek

First of all, if you really want to understand some basic economics of why we are in such current problems, see the video below from RSA.

I got this book from my favourite book shop in Toronto. The book shop is Nicholas Hoare. It is at 45 Front Street East. Their web site is here. Whenever I am in the area, I take a look and I always buy a book. That is because there is always a book that I find interesting and I am afraid I would not find it elsewhere in Toronto.

This book is the subtitle of this book is “The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street”. Sedlacek talks about the first business cycle. Egypt’s pharaoh has dream of 7 good years and 7 bad years. He asked Joseph what this means. Joseph said to save gain in good years to use in bad years. Even today we should try to level out the business cycle. Part of the reason we are in such trouble is that we built up debt in good years and we are very overstretched in current bad years.

When you borrow money, you borrow money from your future, not the bank. You borrow from the future via the interest rate charged on a loan. You really borrow energy from the future for today, feeling that you will not need the energy or the money in the future, but that you need it now.

There is a Wikipedia entry for Tomas Sedlacek . There is a great review of this book and Tomas Sedlacek at Czech Centre . According to the blurb on this site “Tomas Sedlacek, leading Czech economist who is considered to be one of the ‘five hot minds in economics’ by the Yale Economic Review”.

Thomas Sedlacek is on Authors@google. He talks about things he mentions in his book. This is a video worthwhile watching. Also he gives a talk about his book at RSA. This is the video to watch to get a good handle on economics for today. This video is just over 20 minutes, but it is all you need to have a greater understanding of what is going on. He makes it very easy to understand.

On my website is how to find this book on Amazon if you care to purchase it. See Sedlacek. Also, this book review and other books I have reviewed are on my website at Book Reviews.

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson

This book is a great one to bring you up to date on Ancient Egyptian history. There is a lot to be updated on. First it was not slaves that built the pyramids. Secondly they have found an ancient city beside the pyramids were the workers lived. Most of it is still intact and their graves undisturbed. So they found lots of tools and carvings. They have a much better idea now how the pyramids were built.

One other interesting thing he talks about it that original sin, underworld of dangers and demons, the final judgment before a great god, the promise of resurrection are all Egyptians concepts that later echoed in and shaped Judeo-Christian traditions.

Toby Wilkinson has his own web site. He mentions the Lost City of the Pyramids as a television show. I found this, at least I think I found what he was referring to at Google Video. This is part 1 and it is some 45 minutes long. Another YouTube video of Building the Great Pyramid by BBC starts here. This is the first of 6 parts, all about 10 minutes long.

There is an interview (in print) of Toby Wilkinson by Daisy Banks at the browser. In this interview, Toby recommends 5 books on Egypt. There is also a profile on Toby Wilkinson at Bloomsbury. There is another interview (in print) at Speakeasy.

There is a great review of this book (and a couple of related books) at the Guardian. And another great one at the Washington Post.

On my website is how to find this book on Amazon if you care to purchase it. See Wilkinson. Also, this book review and other books I have reviewed are on my website at Book Reviews.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The full name of the book is The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable. How would his ideas affects you personally? Well, he talks about systems and situations being robust or fragile. For example, if you are up to you eyeballs in debt and something happen, it could cause a catastrophe for you.

If you had your finances well managed and you had an emergency fund, your financial state could be robust and if something unexpectedly side swiped you, you could probably handle it and not have a catastrophe on your hands.

If you do not know the origin of the black swan, I will tell you. All Europeans thought swans were always white, because that is all they had seen. When they went to Australia, they found black swans and this was very unexpected.

One tale of unexpected risks comes from a casino example. Casinos spend millions of dollars on gambling risks. However, a casino’s biggest risk can come, not from gambling, but such things as someone wanting to blow up a casino or from a casino not filling the right tax forms.

He also points out that people generally attributes their success from their skills, but attributes their failures to events outside their control or randomness. He also points out that capitalism destroys large companies but socialism does not. Socialist’s governments tend to protect their monster companies and kill off all potential newcomers in the womb.

A nice short video review of this book (less than 2 minutes) is at YouTube. Another short video that discusses both Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan is also on YouTube at Papamedia. There is also a 9 minute video with Taleb at Harvard University talking about social problems . See 40 minute interview by Richard Herring at Wharton.

There is a good review at the Guardian. Giles Foden very much loved the first book Taleb wrote called “Fooled by Randomness, however, he feels this book was rushed and badly written. I must say, I very much enjoyed this book, but then I have not yet read Fooled by Randomness. I probably should.

Another review is by a blogger called Grumpy Old Bookman. This review is quite long, but well worth reading.

I found this a very interesting book and Taleb says many very interesting things. However, he is quite full of himself.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has his own site. This book has an entry on Wikipedia at The Black Swan. There is also an entry for the theory.

On my website is how to find this book on Amazon if you care to purchase it. See Taleb. Also, this book review and other books I have reviewed are on my website at Book Reviews.

Debt by David Graeber

David Graeber, as an anthropologist understood why and how our ancestors stop free riders. As a socialist, he wants more of it today. In what world is a family collecting welfare into the 4th generation is not a free rider? Can we really afford that all these people never contribute to our society? (And ironically now, if you are temporarily destitute now, you get to live on the streets. What sort of progress is this?)

He talks about how we think that virtual money is new. (Virtual money is when you do not pay for things with physical cash, like paying with credit or debit cards.) But this has very long history and was really the original way people dealt with each other in a market place. We had credit systems, kept tabs, even expense accounts before we had cash.

We seem to assume that billion is money, but this idea come and gone through history. History really has switched between periods when money was billion and when money was virtual or an abstraction.. He talks about the vast majority of Mesopotamia’s cuneiform documents were financial in nature. Things were priced in silver, but apparently silver was not in circulation.

Credit goes back a long way. And money is basically an IOU. Money is a measure of trust in other human beings rather than a measure of value.

Another thing he talks about is how markets sprang up around ancient armies. The rise of states and the rise of markets go together. Rather an interesting connection.

Graeber can also go off on tangents. He says that Cortes was murderous because he owed money to banks, and therefore we should blame his actions on capitalism. However, Jinkis Khan was also a murderous bastard with the same sort of followers Cortes had, but it did not do what he did, conquer, rape and pillage because he owed money to banks.

This is rather a long book, but there are all sorts of interesting things Graeber says about early history and anthropology. It is well worth the time to read.

There is a video of David Graeber being interviewed by Charlie Rose. There is also a later one on David Graeber being interviewed because of this book, debt. See Conversations with Great Minds David Graeber on Debt, The 1st 5000 years.

On my website is how to find this book on Amazon if you care to purchase it. See Graeber. Also, this book review and other books I have reviewed are on my website at Book Reviews.