“Shantaram” by Gregory David Roberts

A fun novel about Bombay in the 1980s. It gives the flavor of India- a side of the country few ever see from the slums, to the Mafia, brothels, and prisons. The book is loosely autobiographical and its rich detail lends authenticity to an amazing tale. There is violence, sex, friendship, death, betrayal, and honor. One could say that one of the characters is the city of Bombay itself, but the poly ranges to Indian village life and the mountains of Afghanistan. A true page turner with a little cultural knowledge mixed in with the fast paced plot.

“The Story of a New Name” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the second novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. It starts where the first novel ended and continues to follow the two girls’ friendship from Lila’s wedding day into their adulthood. Again, Lina narrates the story, but Lila figures as the center of her world. Lila has married young and moved up in the world. Not only is she a married woman, she is rich, at least by the old neighborhood’s standards. Her husband, Stefano, already owns two groceries and has just invested in a shoe factory in which Lila’s father and brother design their own brand. But the Solara brothers, with ties to the Naples mafia, are intimately involved as well. They seem to have their tentacles wrapped around every business opportunity in Naples, legal and illegal. By the novel’s end, Lila’s life has been turned upside down. Lila, despite being recognized as brilliant, quit school after eighth grade. Lina, meanwhile, through hard work and perseverance, is struggling her way through high school, learning to speak Italian without dialect, reading a daily newspaper for the first time, and is being introduced to people outside of the old neighborhood. The novel’s plot involves betrayals, love triangles, and much soul searching and inner angst. By the end of the novel Lila and Lena’s relationship has gotten even tighter and has become much more complicated. Lena has left Naples for Pisa, where she graduated from college, has become engaged to a bookworm philologist, and has had a semi-autobiographical novel published with the help of her fiancé’s mother. She has grown apart from the old neighborhood, but has she managed to truly escape it for good?

“The Moral Economy” by Samuel Bowles

Bowles wants to take down the idea that homo economicus rules. Of course, behavioral economics (as well as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and the other social sciences) have already posited that man does not always act in his longterm monetary self-interest alone. This might be because of lack of information, because of framing issues, time preference, or because of altruism. Nonetheless, the starting assumption in economics is that it is often best to think of man as a rational actor acting in his own best interest. Therefore, when designing a form of governance it is best to assume that men are selfish, acting for their own gain over the general weal. What is best is to restrain their motives and channel their selfish individual desires in a better direction for the group as a whole: to create a Constitution for knaves. Political theorists from Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, and James Madison felt that it was better to design a system based on the assumption man acted more as knaves than as angels. Bowles suggests, “what the classical economists (and most economists since) missed is the possibility that moral and other prosocial behavior would be affected- perhaps adversely- by incentive-based policies designed to harness self-interest.” Are incentives and morals additively separate as basic economics suggests or is Bowles onto something? Can we separate moral and economic worth? Do economic incentives, in fact, change people’s moral calculus? Does putting a price on something (be it a fine or a reward) change how an issue is framed? Does the moral sphere of society get crowded out by the economic sphere? The bottomline: if you put a price on something, make sure you are willing to accept it when someone is willing to pay it.

“Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist” by Robert Travers

A memoir by an amazing evolutionary biologist. You get some of his life’s work primarily studying lizards in Jamaica, but for much more of the book you get a bunch of crazy stories, from smoking ganga with Peter Tosh backstage at his concert in Sanders Theater while Travers was a professor at Harvard, to almost getting killed by a machete wielding burglar in Kingston, to Travers’ bouts fighting insanity in mental asylums while in college and after, to chasing away hyenas from pack dog kills in the Serengeti with a Land Rover, to getting mugged outside a brothel in Jamaica, to comforting Jane Goodall when her favorite chimp dies in a jungle stream. The book reads like a catalogue of near-death experiences told with humor.

“Buddenbrooks” by Thomas Mann (translated by John E. Woods)

This epic, along with “The Magic Mountain”, won Mann the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. It details four generations of an upperclass merchant family, the Buddenbrooks. The novel’s subtitle is “The Decline of a Family” and the story details the slow withering of a once proud family. Throughout the course of the book there are births, christenings, marriages, affairs, divorces, and deaths, ups and downs in business and politics, both happiness and tears, but the general mood is one of a gradual, yet inevitable, degeneration of the family. The backdrop is a small town near Hamburg, close to the Baltic Sea. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this family witnesses the militarism of Napoleon, the European Revolutions of 1848, and the Franco-Prussian War. Its members witness the unification of Germany, through Bismarck, along with the democratization and liberalization of the town, as the lower classes strive for their rights and dues. As wealthy grain merchants, the family’s fortunes ebb and flow with the times, but they are always amongst the upper crust of the town. The original pater familias was a simple businessman, the next generation’s became the consul to Holland, and the last was elected as a town senator. Throughout there are family disputes, rivalries with other business families, illnesses, deaths, along with loves gained, lost, and forlorn. The story is distinctly German. Religion and the Protestant ethic play prime parts in the tale, as duty, faith, and honor crop up over and over again. The book is, at heart, a tragedy about a family that lives by a code that has become a relic with the new Enlightened commercial age. Proud and wealthy, still, the Buddenbrooks cannot adapt with the times and become resigned to be swept into the dustbin of history as an irrelevancy- a family rotting with decay. 

“Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy” by Frank McLynn

I knew this was going to be a detailed book when over fifty pages in McLynn hadn’t even mentioned one individual person or even a tribe. Instead, he spent time detailing the peculiarities of nature in the steppe region. The Gobi desert, the mountains, the lakes and rivers that made the terrain formidable. For a nomadic peoples the areas where horses, camels, goats, sheep, yak, bison, and cattle could survive during the harsh winters were of utmost importance. Finally, he began to describe the clans of the steppe from the Mongols where Temujin would emerge to the many other ethnicities, from the Chinese Jin, the Uighers, the Tartars, the Ongud, the Kereit, the Naiman, the Merkit, the Cuman, and other minor tribes who encompassed the steppe region.

It was no sure thing that Temujin would become Genghis Khan. He was born into a poor sub-tribe and numerous times escaped execution, starvation, and battle wounds by the closest of hairs. However, time and time again he escaped formidable odds to survive. He was a great warrior, but also a great strategist, and also a deviously cunning foe. He also knew how to delegate and choose his subordinates. He played off opponents against each other, retreated when he didn’t have the numbers, pushed the advantage when he sensed weakness, married off friends into alliances, allied with enemies to defeat common foes, forgave his bitterest rivals when the time was right, and brutally executed enemies when he had the upper hand. Perhaps, his most creative innovation was the breaking down aristocratic lines to form a society based on groupings of the decimal system that gave leadership roles based on meritocratic worth, regardless of ethnicity or age. He united what was once the many disparate peoples of the steppe into one united Mongol “race”. From there he systemically turned his war machine outside the steppe, first towards the Jin in China and then against the Islamic Khwarezmian Empire, who ruled from the Caspian sea to modern Afghanistan and (nominally) Iraq, and finally back to western China to destroy the Hsi Hsia Empire. Perhaps Genghis Khan’s greatest legacy was that his realm was the only “great man’s empire” to actually expand after his death. His third son, Ogedei, was named the next Khaghan, but his other son’s were given divided shares of the empire to rule under him as governors.

The Mongols were vicious warriors who often killed every last man, woman, and child in the towns they conquered. Mass rape, torture, and the slitting of fetuses from pregnant women were not uncommon. However, they also invented and improved on forms of warfare. For one, they often took the best artisans and military engineers from those they conquered and coopted them into their army. Therefore, they added Chinese siege weapons as well as river fording floats to their repertoire. The feigned retreat, the dispersal and lightening fast reuniting of the flanks of their formations, the use of prisoners as the vanguard of siege batteries (and human fodder), and the use of subterfuge in negotiations with towns considering surrender were all Mongol specialities. And throughout the centuries, even as they became more sedentary and accustomed to the finer delicacies of food and drink, their armies could still withstand tremendous hardships, forced marches, and bitter weather to make sure that they were always attacking the enemy at the time and on the ground of their choosing, creating strategic advantage despite most often their large numerical inferiority.

The culture of warfare was so engrained in the Mongols that it was able to survive the death of Genghis. Ogedei’s first campaigns were to destroy what was left of the Jin Empire in northern China and to repacify Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula. Perhaps the Mongol Empire’s most impressive feat was the establishment of their postal/courier service, the yam, established by Genghis, expanded by Ogedai, and reaching its apogee under Qubilai. At its peak the yam had over 10,000 staging posts for over 200,000 horses. A rider could be expected to ride over 250 miles a day and at night was accompanied by runners with torches between staging posts to supplement the moonlight. The yam was a unifying force that was also integral for tax collection. By 1230’s Ogedei had to deal with the fracturing of his own empire as his brothers and their sons vied for more power and riches. His solution was ever more war- this time with the principalities of the Rus. By 1241, the Mongols had conquered the entire western steppe, all of Russia including the great southern city of Kiev, the great northern city of Novgorod, and what was then the small village of Moscow, and were firmly entrenched in eastern Poland and Hungary. However, after reaching the border of Western Europe within a couple of years the Mongols would withdraw back to the steppes. Internecine fighting finally broke into the open with the Golden Horde faction taking control of Russia and the western steppe for the next two hundred years, while the official Khaghan in Mongolia would focus on defeating the Song in southern China, eventually ruled by Qubilai in what would become the Yuan Dynasty by 1279. The Chagatai Khanate would carve out central Asia- most of the modern Stans and parts of modern Mongolia, China, India, and Russia, while the Ilkhanate founded in 1256 would encompass eastern Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Georgia, Armenia, and some of the other modern Stans. Genghis’ empire had finally split into four, but not before reaching a land mass covering twelve million contiguous square miles, bigger than North America or Africa.

“The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker

At the heart of Pinker’s book is the debate of how much of the human mind is a tabula rasa and how much of human nature is imprinted upon us before birth. Pinker’s core argument is that although both nature and nurture play their parts, nature has gotten the short end of the stick. Social scientists have tried to imagine the mind as a blank slate for their own moral and political purposes. If nothing is innate than anything is possible. We are all born equal. Pinker suggests this does a disservice to science, the truth, and can skew morality in unintended ways. Saying people have different innate capabilities in no way diminishes the need to treat all people equitably. Some ethics are cultural artifacts, but others cross most cultures and seem to be expressed in babies even before they can speak. All human societies put a primacy on familial ties, communal sharing is limited in scope to kinship bonds at first, dominance and violence is displayed in threat if not in fact, and there is in-group vs. out-group rivalry. In fact, the only people who seem to not possess certain universal morals are ones whose brains have been damaged at birth or by an accident. Innate imprinting can also explain different deviant behaviors without excusing them. Evolutionary dispositions are not written in stone.

Humanity's moral circle has expanded over time. Pinker makes the case that humans have evolved to be less and less violent with every generation. These are adaptive techniques to increase the chance of reproductive success. Humans, more so than bonobos and chimpanzees, developed effective strategies to punish alpha (male) bullies and so the brain has evolved to become more social. Free will can still exist in a world where genes largely determine intelligence and even personality. Twin studies and adoption studies have shown that genetic resemblance can account for half of intelligence, personality, and life outcome similarities, while living in the same household accounts for close to zero. Non-shared experience, most importantly peer relationships, account for most of the rest. The fact that humans are born with innate capabilities and desires might mean we can not be molded like putty to the whims of social engineers, but it in no way reduces the imperative to treat every human equally, with the same moral and ethical compass.

“Ties” by Domenico Starnone (translated by Jhumpa Lahiri)

This short novel was translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri. It is the story of a dysfunctional family, told by three narrators. The story begins with the revelation of an affair that ruins a marriage and a family. The superficial “tie” in the story is the unusual way the father has taught his son to tie his shoelaces. The subconscious ties that run throughout the book, however, are the ties that bond and break a family- the promises that you make and sometimes fail to keep when you start on the project of creating a family unit. The novel deals with conjugal love, parental love, filial love, and sibling love. Scars and resentments build, old secrets surface, and revenge is sought and found. The story is tightly written. You can feel the pain and emotion building as more and more is revealed. The author is supposedly the husband of Elena Ferrante. Although it takes place in Naples and Rome, it is more a story of the human condition than a distinctly Italian tale. It a story of love lost, sacrifices made, and family bonds that can be strained, but never broken, for better or for worse. 

“Specialization and Trade: A Reintroduction to Economics” by Arnold Kling

Kling starts by making the case for why the social sciences are so different from the hard sciences. “First, more causal factors are at work in economics than in physical science. Second, although physical relationships are relatively stable, the economy evolves rapidly, including evolution in response to government’s attempts at regulation.” Instead of falsifiable facts, economics operates on “frameworks of interpretation” in which one “single anomaly does not lead someone to abandon an interpretative framework.” There are no controlled experiments for the economy as a whole and so multiple causal facts influence economics in the real world. 

No one in today’s world is self-sufficient and that is a good thing. Because of specialization the economic pie has been able to grow beyond any single human’s capabilities to satisfy his own wants. Trade is the other side to the specialization coin. Since we no longer produce all that we need, we must trade for those things. “When the value of different tasks can be isolated, specialization will tend to take place between firms, coordinated by the price system. When the value of a particular task is difficult to measure, because its value varies a great deal depending on how it is combined with other tasks, specialization will tend to take place within the firm, governed by instructions.” 

Kling tries to move beyond looking at the whole national economy as one giant GDP factory with homogenous lumps of labor and capital. “A job does not consist of producing a fraction of generic output.” Instead, he describes an economy moved by “patterns of sustainable specialization and trade”, which are constantly evolving slowly. This is a world full of Schumpeterian creative destruction. “Substitution takes place on the basis of existing technology. Innovation represents the successful implementation of new methods of production or new means of satisfying consumer wants.” 

Another big piece of the modern economy is financial intermediation. “If trade entails trust among strangers, then financial intermediation entails trust over time.” Destruction in trust in financial intermediaries can be so destructive because of the role they play in facilitating business production across a number of otherwise unrelated industries. “With specialized, roundabout production, financial intermediation is embedded in every business. If financial intermediaries must shrink because of a sudden loss of reputation, then that could disrupt many patterns of specialization and trade, and it could lengthen the time it takes for new patterns to emerge…. That does not mean that all economic fluctuations originate in the financial sector. Instead, it could be that shifts that take place elsewhere are amplified as they hit the financial sector.”

Kling also makes a couple of tangential points which are worth pondering. Kling does not minimize the role of government in facilitating business. However, he emphasizes the roles of ever-fluctuating prices in gaining the specialized knowledge necessary for sustainable patterns of growth.  “Competition and reputation are a form of decentralized regulation.” In the realm of sustainability, he quotes Solow, “it is an obligation to conduct ourselves so that we leave to the future the option or the capacity to be as well off as we are… Sustainability is an injunction not to satisfy ourselves by impoverishing our successors.” Again, however, Kling sees the price system as the best means of accomplishing this goal, “if two methods of producing a given output exist, the market will select the method that uses the fewest resources when those resources are valued at market prices,” with the huge caveat that, “market prices reflect costs only when resources are owned and priced.” He cites the successful achievements of reducing water and chemical use, such as nitrates, in America even as agricultural yields have grown, as well as the reforestation of most of Western Europe and America in the latter twentieth century, due to efficiencies in paper production and substitutions in ship and home building. For a short book, Kling packs it in with contentious big ideas and unorthodox viewpoints, but he certainly makes you think about an alternative framework for viewing macroeconomics.

“My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the first of four books in the anonymous author’s Neapolitan Novels quartet. I cannot recommend this book enough. It details the intertwined lives of two young girls growing up on the streets of a lower class Naples neighborhood infested by the Camorra, as well as your run of the mill street thugs. The style of writing has been compared to Knausgaard in its detail, but I find Ferrante incomparably more readable. The psychological aspects of the friendship of two young women as they struggle with adolescence amid their toxic milieu add vibrancy to the most mundane of everyday occurrences. Lina is the homely, bookish narrator, somewhat in awe of her friend. Lila is the radiant star pupil, who also enchants with her rare beauty. She dominates and captivates Lina, who dutifully plays second fiddle in their friendship. There are rivalries between the two in school and in romance, but, through all their trials, there is a bond of love that endures. The quality of each and every sentence is impressive, reminding one of verse written as prose (if that makes any sense). This is a gripping tale as lovely for its descriptions as its story.