The first two weeks of August were a holiday reading fest, although mainly fiction. Now that I’ve climbed the email mountain waiting for me when we got home, I have time to reflect on the small number of books relevant to this blog.

Just as we left for sunny Wales, I finished Karen Hao’s Empire of AI. It’s a biography of OpenAI up to late 2024 by a journalist whose beat at the MIT Technology Review was AI. The subtitle, ‘Inside the reckless race for total domination’, sets the tone. The book is carefully reported – and none of the dramatis personae come out of it well. I did thoroughly enjoy reading it but didn’t find it at all surprising.

The other AI book was Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines. I’d spotted it via the wonderful Henry Farrell who has written two detailed blog posts – here and here –  about why the book is marvellous. He also explained what it says, which was useful as I didn’t understand it. Courtesy of this explanatory post, the key point in the book is that: “LLMs work as they do thanks to a remarkably usable mapping between two systems: the system of human language as it has been used and developed, and the system of statistical summarizations spat out by a transformer architecture, leading to a “merging of different structural orders.”” This figures. For example, Weatherby states that Shannon’s information theory is an implicit theory of language, and I can see this is so as language is how humans convey information. I can also see a parallel between LLMs and Wittgensteinian views of language. However, the book requires much more understanding of linguistics and structuralism than I have, so there were literally sentences I could not make sense of at all. Some points jumped out clearly. “The political risk in AI … is located not in the systems themselves but in the lazy methodological individualism we too easily revert to in thinking about them.” I’m on board for agreeing about the metholdological individualism but actually am not sure there is no political risk in the systems themselves.

Away from technology, I read The CIA Book Club by Charlie English, a thoroughly good read about exactly what the title says – how the CIA supported financially people smuggling books into Poland and reprinting and distributing them there, through the 1980s and the Solidarnosc era. One lesson to bear in mind: it takes real courage to read and share ideas that do not conform to the dictates of an authoritarian regime. The book made me wonder – again – why the remaining western democratic powers, and their security services, so easily forgot this lesson of the Cold War, that the battle of ideas and for minds is real battle.

Finally, when we got back I finished a book I’d started before leaving, David McWilliams Money: A Story of Humanity. As you’d expect it is superbly well written. It is a straightforward history and so ideal for people who haven’t read much on this before. The bit that was really new to me was a chapter on Roger Casement and the Congo – I learned that Casement was a veteran surveyor with much experience in Africa who told Joseph Conrad about the colonial horrors he had seen, so informing Heart of Darkness. The experiences made Casement an ardent anti-colonialist, a journey which ultimately saw him executed for treason by the British government which had previously knighted him. The book ends with a quick canter through MMT, crypto and MPesa, and chapters on the control of money in modern economies and the psychology of money. The book covers a huge span in its 350 or so pages, and is an enjoyable read.

Of the fiction in the pile below, I highly recommend Attica Locke’s trilogy set in Texas – this is the third. I’m a big fan of Natalia Ginzburg and – in a completely different register – enjoy the Elly Griffiths series. But there were no absolute turkeys in this year’s reading.

It’s taken me a long time to read Edward Tenner’s Why the Hindernburg Had A Smoking Lounge. It’s a collection of enertaining and interesting essays, largely about unintended consequences (for example, as a result of the marketing decision to include a smoking lounge to attract well-heeled passengers on said airship) or technology or both. However, it is a heavy tome and I could only read it in one place propped on cushions. So a good read but perhaps one to leave at home and dip into an essay at a time.

There are loads of aha! moments in the book. One of my favourite essays is ‘The Importance of being Unimportant’, arguing that the highest profit margins come from essential components that are a small proportion of the total cost of the finished product – bicycle valves for instance. This introduced me to the work of Edwin Mansfield, who estimated that stronger sewing thread had “contributed more to productivity and well-being than any other innovation, including information technology.” (And who knew that Kenneth Clark of Civilization fame was so rich because the former inherited money from the IPO of the Coats thread-making business.)

I also enjoyed, as another example, the essay ‘Engineers and Political Power’, which pointed out that the US Congress has almost no engineers as members – lawyers, rather – whereas non-Anglo-Saxon cultures often have many engineers as legislators. The point the essay makes isn’t just about legislation being made mainly by lawyers, though, but about engineers being uniquely “apolitical” in the Anglo-Saxon world.

If, like me, you’re a fan of new facts and surprising insights, this is the book for you. But not a beach read, given its heft, unless in an electronic version (or unless you want to tone your biceps on holiday).

The weeks shoot past, and here I am again doing a catch-up – I blame the end of term, and a week of lectures at the University of Bayreuth, as well as general day job activities. Anyway, I’ve read a few excellent – and varied – economics books along with a selection of fiction.

First up, Ben Chu’s Exile Economics. This is an excellent overview of the changing global order, and the turn from globalisation to autarky (or ‘exile economics’, even if more in rhetoric than reality even now. The book begins with the intellectual and political origins of this turn, braiding together events like the financial crisis with the multiple strands of thinking that make up modern Trump-style autarky. Successive chapters then use a particular theme as a lens on the shift from acceptance of global interdependence to the idea of self-reliance: for example, food, energy, people, medicine.

The final chapter is bravely titled “The Future”. It ends with a telling story about the young Ben Chu visiting China with his family for the first time, in 1985. He was shocked by the low standard of living of his relatives in Guangzhou – a standard utterly transformed for the better by globalisation. But the vulnerabilities and economic failures created by globalisation are clear. It has failed to deliver for many people, as opposed to corporates. Some countries have certainly seen a hollowing out of their production capabilities in important sectors. Yet – he writes – “When I began researching this book I was sceptical of the case for dismantling global supply chains. Now my sense is that anyone who advocates it … has simply not examined these supply chains closely enough.” The book ends with a plea for policymakers to focus on developing economic strengths rather than on weakening interdependencies. We will see. A really interesting read, enlivened by the author’s reporting and a lovely writing style.

I suppose Hilary Cottam’s The Work We Need could be read as an antidote to the casualties of the globalised economies. Its question is how to redesign the future of work, particularly for those in low-paid or insecure or unpleasant or disrespected jobs and communities. The book draws from a series of community events she organised in the UK and US, Imaginings. These events asked participants to redesign their working lives. What form would work take, and what would be needed to enable change? Six themes emerged, getting a chapter each: Basics – enough to live on; Meaning; Care and repair; Time; Play; and Place. The chapter on time was particularly interesting to me, as I’ve been for a while thinking about the use of time as a better way of accounting for what’s happening in the economy. It crops up in discussions about hybrid work and the four day week. Digital platforms torpedo workers’ control over their time.

The Work We Need is an inspiring book, and it does end with a call for a radical rethink of how the world of work – and therefore most people’s days – is organised. A chapter on ‘The Just Transition’ makes the case for the scope for intellectuals, enlightened intellectuals and governments to bring about a shift. It’s an optimistic end; Hilary writes: “Injustice is acute, divisions between geographies are deep, political populism grows and the lived realities for many are painful.” She sees this as evidence for a turning point. I applaud the optimism – but it does seem a world away from the prevailing conversation about work, namely how many jobs will be eaten by AI.

Something completely different: A Modern Economic History of Japan by Russell Jones. The author wrote an excellent modern economic history of the UK a while ago, The Tyranny of Nostalgia. This new book is just as interesting, beginning with a bit of the prewar history but focusing on the postwar era to Abenomics. It takes a macroeconomic perspective, so most of this was new to me, as the little I know about Japan concerns industrial policy, the supply side. Russell Jones spent years working in Japan and this shows in his sensitivity to the way the country’s history shaped modern policy choices. I don’t feel qualified to comment on the analysis, as a very much non-macro person, but I learned a lot.

Transitioning from economics to my broader reading, I polished off Fiona Hill’s memoir There is Nothing For You Here. She grew up in a working class family in the north east of England and ended up as a Russia expert, a scholar at Harvard and a Washington insider, working – albeit briefly and not happily – for the first Trump administration. So it’s a fantastic read as a personal saga. The point of the book, though, is how to begin to tackle what has gone wrong for the past 40 years and more for the kind of community she grew up in, and thus how to tackle some of the root causes of divisive populism.

Finally, some other reads in between:

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham. Utterly gripping account of the technical, organisational and personality contributors to the tragedy of the 1986 launch explosion.

Paper Cage by Tom Baragwanath – a very readable thriller set in a Maori community.

Fortress of Evil by Javier Cercas – final book in the Tera Alta trilogy; I loved these.

On The Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. Weird. A sort of groundhog day tale of nothing happening. Not my cup of tea.

Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd. Excellent accidental spy romp.

A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet. Another part three of a trilogy, the dark side of dull small town life in France. I enjoyed them but they might be an acquired taste.

Broken Threads by the wonderful Mishal Husain. Another page turner, a family memoir covering the end of British empire in the Indian subcontinent and the horrors of the 1947 partition.