It’s Nick and Goldy’s summer reading list!
We want to know what you’re reading, too. Let us know on Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics.
Remember to shop local and small when you can, or order from IndieBound or Bookshop.org—both of which support independent bookstores! All of these books are also likely available at your library.
Every book mentioned in this episode:
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich
Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel
Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Merit by Robert H. Frank
The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Democracy, Race, and Justice: The Speeches and Writings of Sadie T. M. Alexander by Nina Banks
Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope by Jon Meacham
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee
1491 by Charles C. Mann
Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic by Matthew Stewart
The Second World War by Winston Churchill
Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell
Debt by David Graeber
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
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Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Goldy:
Nick, one of the benefits of doing this podcast is we get to interview a lot of authors on the show, and that means we read a lot of books.
Nick:
We do indeed. We do indeed.
Goldy:
Which also is a great benefit of doing this show.
Nick:
It is. It is. Just in general, we read a lot of books to try to keep up with what’s going on and new perspectives and so on and so forth. Today we’re going to share a little bit of that.
Goldy:
Yeah. Some of our favorite books that we’ve read over the past year or so, our summer reading list.
Nick:
That’s right.
Goldy:
Which if you listen to this podcast is not going to necessarily be a light reading list, but still enjoyable nonetheless.
Nick:
Listeners, don’t worry about writing all this down, all these book titles and author names. We will have all the content in the show notes.
Goldy:
We’ll also be posting all of these books in our Instagram at Pitchfork Economics, and you can talk to us there. We want to know what’s on your summer reading list, so please leave us a comment. Why don’t we start with you, Nick. What’s at the top of your list that you’d recommend.
Nick:
One of the really interesting books that I read was by our friend, Joe Henrich from Harvard, the anthropologist from Harvard, who wrote a several years ago a really marvelous book called The Secrets of Our Success, about the evolution of culture. This book actually was the precursor of that, even though he wrote it afterwards, about the fundamental evolution of human psychology called, The WEIRDest People in the World. The core of the insight is, at least the biggest surprise for me, Goldy, was his basic insight that human psychology evolved in different ways in different places.
Goldy:
Right. And to be clear, the subtitle is, How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
Nick:
Yes. That’s right. We take, in the west, our psychology for granted. In fact, almost all research on psychology has been on people who are Western, and people in our psychological group are individualistic, we think analytically, we believe in free will. We take personal responsibility very seriously. We feel guilt when we misbehave. And crucially, we think nepotism is a bad thing.
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
It should be either discouraged or outlawed. We take that kind of psychology completely for granted as just a foundational thing in our lives. But what turns out to be true is that the majority of people on planet earth don’t think like that. They think a lot more holistically. They identify more strongly with their family or tribe. They take responsibility for what the group does. They feel shame, not guilt. They think nepotism, interestingly, is a duty, not a sin.
Goldy:
Right. Right. You should take care of your nephew.
Nick:
Of course. I guess, Goldy, it just never occurred to me that people were actually wired that differently. I really thought that there were a bunch of fundamental psychological traits that were true for virtually all humans. Of course, there are some. There are no cultures which celebrate murder unless it’s to other people that aren’t in your group.
Goldy:
Yeah.
Nick:
Anyway. But I know you read the book too.
Goldy:
I did. And I loved and to be clear, when he says that we’re weird, he doesn’t just mean we’re different from other cultures. It’s actually an acronym that has started to be used in psychology, which stands for Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.
Nick:
That’s right.
Goldy:
As I understand it, that term first started being used when psychologists realized that the psychological studies they’d done, all the empirical evidence they had, was mostly done with [crosstalk 00:04:33] weird college students.
Nick:
Exactly.
Goldy:
And so, they got certain results that didn’t actually hold up in other cultures because American college students are weird.
Nick:
Yeah. Another one of his very interesting claims is, the central role that was played by the Roman Catholic Church in prohibiting marrying your cousins and such.
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
He calls it an accident that we effectively dismantled kin-based social organization, and that catalyzed a bunch of changes, which included the capacity to cooperate at scale with people who are not your kin. Which is the hallmark of successful market economies.
Goldy:
[crosstalk 00:05:31] But also a prerequisite for modernity, for capitalism, [crosstalk 00:05:37] for the democracy, the type of market economies we have today?
Nick:
Yes, exactly.
Goldy:
Yeah. I’m going to take off of that point that Joe Henrich makes about this kind of accident of history and how it led to the modern world. I’m going to suggest Walter Scheidel, who I believe was on our very first episode-
Nick:
Yes. That’s right.
Goldy:
… of Pitchfork Economics. He had a book last year titled Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire on the Road to Prosperity, in which he argues that the collapse of the Roman Empire and the failure of any unified polity to replace it in Western Europe, ensured a type of competitive fragmentation, both within states and between them, that also was a prerequisite for modernity that helped lead to the type of competition and innovation that grew into market capitalism. And that, once Europe escaped from Rome, it was able to launch the economic transformation that went on to change the entire world. I’m connecting those two because you see how certain things that are unique to the history and culture of a particular region can lead to very different outcomes and produce unexpected results. It turned out that the collapse of Rome, we wouldn’t have the modern world without it. If we had an empire, we wouldn’t have advanced to the world we live in today, the prosperous world we live in today.
Nick:
It’s so interesting. Walter Scheidel has also been the author of a lot of really interesting work on the collapse of civilizations-
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
… obviously, and he was on our podcast talking about the inevitability of that if we don’t address the kind of economic inequality that we currently have. A very depressing-
Goldy:
Well, in that book, he points out, it’s called the the great leveler, and he points out that we’ve only seen periods where inequality has dramatically lessened after catastrophic events like war, depressions, pandemics. In a way it’s a very depressing book, because it says that disaster has to strike before we can do anything about inequality. But it’s also in the moment, it tells you and I think we’re seeing a little of that as we come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, that workers seem to be more empowered. Wages appear to be rising. You see a Biden administration that seems much more concerned with the economic lives of working in middle-class Americans. So, silver lining to the horrible tragedy that COVID has been.
Nick:
… Yeah. So from there, I’d love to bounce to another very interesting book that is an analysis of the shape of Western societies certainly, which is Michael Sandel’s, The Tyranny of Merit.
Goldy:
Ah, that’s on my list too, Nick.
Nick:
Yeah. Well, we should talk about it because it’s a fascinating analysis and attack of one of the most fundamental cultural and social precepts we live with. Which is this idea that we live in a world of equal opportunity and those on the top are there because they’re the most meritorious.
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
That they are the smartest and they work the hardest and therefore they deserve it.
Goldy:
This is a meritocracy that we live in.
Nick:
That’s right. We live in a meritocracy. Sandel’s attack, one part of it is somewhat obvious. The second part of the attack was more of a surprise to me. The first attack, of course, is the relatively well understood proposition that in fact, it’s not an equal opportunity world at all.
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
The vast majority of people at the top started very, very near the top and virtually no one starts at the bottom and makes their way to the top, particularly in modern America. That is particularly true of entry into elite universities, which are today a passport to the upper middle class or the upper class. But that difference in possibility manifests itself in a billion different ways, and we’ve talked about this a billion times on the podcast, how both advantages and disadvantages compound over time. That’s quite interesting and of course true. But his deeper analysis, I think, which is more interesting, is that he attacks the concept of meritocracy in a way that had never occurred to me. Which is that, in a world where you’re never really going to get to equality of opportunity, but you tell everybody that the hierarchy in society is based on merit. Particularly in a highly unequal world, you end up creating a society where most people believe that they are not meritorious.
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
That they’re lazy, dumb pieces of shit, without talent or merit, and the people at the very tippy-top must be. That creates a massive amount of resentment and anger-
Goldy:
And also bad behavior on the part of the winners.
Nick:
… That’s right.
Goldy:
Because he points out that the flip side to that, he says that the whole notion of meritocracy fosters hubris on the winners and just inflicts in dignity on everybody else.
Nick:
Yes. Yes.
Goldy:
So, it creates bad winners.
Nick:
That’s right.
Goldy:
Because it underplays the huge role that luck plays in the economy, and in human affairs, across the board.
Nick:
Look … path dependence.
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
Obviously.
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
You can have two people who both grew up in Connecticut and went to Harvard, and one becomes a billionaire and the other doesn’t, and that could be attributed to luck. But to be clear, if you didn’t grow up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and go to Harvard, it’s way harder to get to be a billionaire.
Goldy:
Right. But that’s part of the luck is being born into a family in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Nick:
That’s right. That’s right.
Goldy:
So on this topic, I’ve got other books from the past, which this reminds me of, which adds on to this. One is Robert H. Frank’s Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, which is just a brilliant take down of the whole notion that this just an economic takedown.
Nick:
Right.
Goldy:
Whereas Michael Sandel is writing from the perspective of a philosopher,
Nick:
Philosophy. Right.
Goldy:
Right. And then, I’d also recommend, if you haven’t read him, just about everything by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, but particularly The Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness, which get at these topics as well. Taleb comes off as just this brilliant erudite asshole, but with some absolutely crucial insights, better read than I could ever hope to be. He’s one of the few people, if we ever had him on the podcast, I would be absolutely intimidated to talk to, but I love his books. Even when I disagree with him, I love his books. He is a brilliant writer, definitely worth reading and adds a lot to this whole topic.
Nick:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Goldy:
Of what we think the economy is and what it really is.
Nick:
Yeah. Yeah.
Goldy:
Speaking of not seeing the economy for what it really is Nick, I’m going to go a little off base here, not an economics book, but by an author that I know you’ve read, Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True.
Nick:
Oh, interesting. I haven’t read that. Yeah.
Goldy:
And again, not a Buddhist here, but I loved this book.
Nick:
Yeah.
Goldy:
According to Wright, at the heart of Buddhism is the simple truth that the reason we suffer and make other people suffer is that we don’t see the world clearly. Then he goes on to back that up, not just with his own experiences through meditation and talking to Buddhist monks and meditation instructors, but also the latest advances in psychology and neuroscience. One of the things that appealed to me is, the path I’ve taken with you over the past six years, six-seven years, Nick, is one of seeing behind the curtain. That you learn how so much of what we’re convinced about how the world works and economics in particular, is this total misunderstanding that the conventional orthodox economic thought is just entirely wrong. In this book, Why Buddhism Is True, that insight about how we don’t see the world clearly, I think that really applies in the field of economics and also helps explain why it’s so important to understand it correctly. You get all of those misconceptions and emotions out of the way when we look at economics.
Nick:
Interesting.
Goldy:
Great book. It’s a fascinating read. A little off of my beaten path though.
Nick:
I read simultaneously, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, and Jon Meacham’s book, His Truth Is Marching On, about John Lewis, the civil rights activist and congressman. I didn’t mean to read them at the same time. I listened to one and read the other. But it was a great experience because Caste is a book about, obviously, these books are both about racism. Cast is a more analytical look at the history of American racism and the way in which we have built fairly deliberately, a caste society, not unlike India’s, for black and brown people in a very deliberate way, and there are some absolutely terrifying explanations of the ways in which the Nazis used the strategies that-
Goldy:
The Jim Crow laws in the South.
Nick:
… Yeah. The Jim Crows in the South as way to validate the final solution. It was just terrifying and depressing.
Goldy:
Yeah. There’s anecdotes in there that actually the Nazi’s thought the American South went too far in some ways. Obviously, so Nazis went pretty far. But in legalistic terms, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to reproduce the apartheid of the South.
Nick:
Yeah. But in both explanation and in description and narrative, she paints this really horrifying picture of racism, particularly in the South in the old days, although it was all over the country. And then simultaneously reading about John Lewis’s story, his experience of that reality. So you have this overarching description of these modalities of oppression that are going on, and then John Lewis living through it and fighting through it, was just absolutely amazing. And of course, John Lewis was an astonishingly capable and brave human. His personal story is really one for the ages. I wish I had gotten to meet that guy.
Goldy:
Nick, I’d like to add a third book …
Nick:
Okay.
Goldy:
… to those two, and that is Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, where I think those first two books chronicle the long and pervasive history of racism in America, much of it economic, and how it persists today, Heather McGhee goes there she talks about really how it impoverishes all of us to this day.
Nick:
Right.
Goldy:
How much racism is costing us both individually and as a society, and how much more prosperous we would be if we could address this, our historic, pervasive, institutional racism.
Nick:
That’s right. This is the central argument that we make on how market economies actually work.
Goldy:
Right.
Nick:
Which is that the more people you fully include in them, the better they work.
Goldy:
Absolutely.
Nick:
Which means that, if black people had as much money on average as white people, the economy would just be dramatically larger, which would be good for everybody. It just really simple. It’s just a very simple notion, but there are so many embedded obstacles to making that a reality that it’s just very hard to get there. But yeah, absolutely. Awesome.
Goldy:
Okay. Your turn now. You had another book?
Nick:
Yeah. Let’s jump from institutional racism in America to global genocide.
Goldy:
That’s a little light summer reading.
Nick:
[crosstalk 00:20:03] If you want to be even more depressed. I’m about a third of the way through this fascinating book, which is not new. It’s been out for some years, but really worth picking up. Called 1491, by Charles Mann. I’m not sure if you’ve come across it, but it’s basically analysis of the world pre-Columbus. The short story is that, the best data indicates that before Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere in North and South America, there were a hundred million people or something like that who lived in these places and had rich, complex cultures and built great things and had really interesting societies, and were wiped out by the diseases of the Old World. Like 95-97%.
Goldy:
Disease, war, slavery, et cetera.
Nick:
That’s right.
Goldy:
But much of it, disease. Like 90% of the population is wiped out across South Central and North America.
Nick:
That’s right. Our view of these people as primitive is a consequence of the fact that their cultures were destroyed before we got to look at them, although Cortez got to see the Inca. By the time he left or some decades later, all of these people were wiped out. Smallpox would hit one of these cultures and kill 95% of the people. Same with influenza. One of the interesting scientific findings is that, the folks in the new world were super-susceptible to diseases of the Old World in two ways. They caught them easier, and then they killed them more, both. Because they were genetically more homogeneous and they had no experience. There was no biological experience with these pathogens. So, it just absolutely wiped them out.
And of course, as you said, Goldy, these diseases destabilize these cultures, which created wars and so on and so forth. And so, we are left with, in some cases, some archeological remnants, but no real picture of what was really going on in the past, except the growing awareness that there was a shit-ton more going on than we give it credit for. And that the natural world that we look at as pristine, in fact, was terraformed by people for way longer than we thought.
Goldy:
If you look at the Northeastern United States, which the Puritans described as an empty landscape. Ignoring there were Native Americans that lived there, but a fraction of what had.
Nick:
That’s right.
Goldy:
What they actually discovered when they arrived were abandoned villages.
Nick:
That’s right.
Goldy:
Nick:
What else you got Goldy?
Goldy:
What else do I have? Okay, well getting back to American history when Europeans arrived. This, I guess I read a couple of years ago. I love this book. It’s by Matthew Stewart. It’s called Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, in which he dives into a lot of those words and phrases that you recognize from the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents. Words, phrases like nature’s God or self-evident, and he reveals their provenance and their true meaning. He also, and this is as somebody who loves history books, he also reveals the really strange, unusual, and unheralded contribution of Ethan Allen.
Nick:
Do they make furniture?
Goldy:
Yeah, no. But that’s how we know him as the name of a chain furniture stores, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. But what a rich, ideological thinker he was and how he contributed much to the thinking of the early Republic and reflected it. It’s a bizarrely entertaining, fascinating history book.
Nick:
Interesting.
Goldy:
As long as I’m recommending history books here, Nick, let’s be clear to the audiences. I’m a very slow reader. There’s no way I can actually read all these books. Many of the books I read, I’m listening to as audio books. Many of them downloaded from the library. And so, completely off topic, you want something light and entertaining from my perspective? Winston Churchill’s six-volume history of The Second World War read by a Winston Churchill impersonator.
Nick:
Really?
Goldy:
It is great.
Nick:
Is it really?
Goldy:
Yeah. I have to say, well, Churchill was a great writer and you hear Churchill’s voice when you read it, you really hear it when you hear a Churchill impersonator reading it. It’s not a great history in that, the victors write the history and all that.
Nick:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Goldy:
He’s self-aggrandizing in it. There’s a lot of real facts there, but it’s a real fascinating read just to sit back and listen to Churchill tell you how we got into that mess. How we almost didn’t get through it. And how the Allies won in the end. So that’s a really fun read. If you want to go really light, I’ve got one more history recommendation. Sarah Vowell’s, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, as read by the author.
Nick:
Okay.
Goldy:
It’s about as funny a piece of history, and actually very historically accurate as you can get.
Nick:
I love it. That sounds fascinating.
Goldy:
Nick, one more book recommendation I’ve sort of read, but haven’t read. When I first started working for you, I got an audible subscription specifically to listen to Thomas Piketty’s he’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The very next book I listened to in audible, was David Graeber’s Debt, which is this really fascinating history of debt over 5,000 years of human history. How we’ve always used credit, and credit really was the first money long before there were coins or cash or anything like that. We were a society of debtors and creditors. Unfortunately, the author, the anthropologist, David Graeber, died last year. But coming out is the 10th anniversary edition with an introduction by Thomas Pikkety. It ties back together my first two books, my audible subscription coming together as one.
Also, just came out. Haven’t had a chance yet to read it. A new book, Democracy, Race and Justice: The Speeches and Writings of Sadie Alexander, the first black economist.
Nick:
Yes.
Goldy:
There we go, Nick, I think we’ve given our audience enough books to fill their summer.
Nick:
Well, that’s a pretty good list of reading for the summer for anyone. I hope our listeners either found us chatting interesting, or at least find the books interesting.
Speaker 3:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by civic ventures. If you liked the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at civic action and Nick Hanauer follow our writing on medium at civic skunk works and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork economics as always from our team at civic ventures. Thanks for listening. See you next week.