Reading
Books, writers, and intellectual influences.
A structured list of what I am reading, have read, and return to. Notes where they add something; none where the title speaks for itself.
Currently reading
Complexity: A Guided Tour
Melanie Mitchell
A rigorous but accessible treatment of emergence, feedback, and complex adaptive systems.
Debt: The First 5000 Years
David Graeber
Provocative revisionist history of credit and obligation. Useful for interrogating assumed economic foundations.
War and Peace and War
Peter Turchin
Quantitative modelling of historical cycles. A rare attempt to bring rigour to grand historical narrative.
Political Science
The Origins of Political Order
readFrancis Fukuyama
The most rigorous account of how stable institutions emerge from statelessness. Essential reading for understanding path dependency.
Behavioural Economics
Thinking, Fast and Slow
readDaniel Kahneman
The empirical foundation of modern behavioural economics. Useful less for its conclusions than for its methodology.
Political Economy
Governing the Commons
readElinor Ostrom
Empirical demolition of the standard tragedy-of-the-commons narrative. Important for institutional analysis.
The Entrepreneurial State
readMariana Mazzucato
Strategy
The Art of War
readSun Tzu
Philosophy
The Precipice
readToby Ord
A serious treatment of existential risk that takes the long run seriously without becoming millenarian.
Computer Science
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
referenceAbelson & Sussman
The canonical text on computational thinking. Highly relevant to understanding programs as systems.