A book full of potential comparisons to our own day for the motivated, and strangely removed from our own day if you're really going to be honest about it.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

By: William L. Shirer
Published: 1960
1250 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A comprehensive history of Nazi Germany, from Hitler's birth to the Nuremberg trials. Written by someone who was there for a great deal of the most important period.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Shirer is a journalist, not a historian, but he did have access to the German state and party archives, plus some diaries, etc. that were captured at the end of the war. Plus he witnessed the rise of Hitler in the 30's. I love passages like this:

No wonder that Hitler was in a confident mood when the Nazi Party Congress assembled in Nuremberg on September 4 [1934]. I watched him on the morning of the next day stride like a conquering emperor down the center aisle of the great flag-bedecked Luitpold Hall while the band blared forth "The Badenweiler March" and thirty thousand hands were raised in the Nazi salute.

Who should read this book?

It's clear that this isn't the most accurate book about this subject. Scholarship is always advancing and this was written more than 60 years ago. But it may be the most readable book on the subject. It flows very well. 1250 pages fly by. (Or rather the minutes fly by, I listened to it, but with a physical copy for reference and anchoring.) If you're at all interested in this period I think you'll really enjoy this book.

What does the book have to say about the future?

I think a lot of people are trying to draw comparisons between the rise of Hitler and the Trump phenomenon. Other people see echoes of fascism in the ubiquity of woke-ism. I don't think history is going to repeat. And I'm not even sure it's going to rhyme this time around. People are still too aware of the dangers of populist demagoguery for someone to come to power in the same way Hitler did. Which is not to say there's nothing to be gleaned from this book, but I suspect that by the time things start lining up, in some bizarre fashion, it will be too late.

Specific thoughts: Pivot points

Policy proposals from the White Queen. (It's a Lewis Carroll reference. No, I'm not talking about the Mad Hatter or the Red Queen. It's from "Through the Looking Glass".)

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

By: Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl
Published: 2019
384 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A series of radical proposals for restructuring property, voting, immigration, investing, and employment. All of the proposals seek to solve the problem of "monopolized or missing markets" in ways that seem pretty strange. One has to wonder if there's a good reason those markets didn't exist in the first place.

What authorial biases should I be aware of?

Posner has his finger in all sorts of things, and has defended everything from post-9/11 government surveillance to increasing foreign aid. I guess the throughline is a belief in technocratic solutions?

Weyl is an economist working for Microsoft who helped popularize the idea of quadratic voting, and had a political awakening while reading Ayn Rand. This feels more like his book than Posner's but perhaps I'm imagining that.

Who should read this book?

I read this as part of an ACX/SSC book club. Most of the people didn't like it. They felt that it was too radical. (Though you can't say we weren't warned, it's right there in the title.) But if you want to see what mechanisms Georgist economists come up with when they're completely unrestrained, this might be the book for you.

What does the book have to say about the future?

Hayek is famous for noting that the big advantage of markets is that they are giant distributed systems for discovering prices and allocating resources effectively. They're obviously not perfect, and socialists have long dreamt of having a centrally planned economy that would be fairer and work better. Posner and Weyl imagine a future where computing power and machine learning could take over some of the work currently being done by markets, and thereby improve the outcomes.

Specific thoughts: "Six impossible things before breakfast"

One part documentation of a strange AI hallucination. One part panic about whether I'll be put out of business by AI.