What I’ve been reading – Marginal REVOLUTION

1. Allison Schrager is very good, including her new book Worth the Risk: The Seven Myths that Keep Us from Taking the Chances We Need to Take.

2. Dialogues of Confucius, translated and edited by Brian Buya and Wenwen Li.  It seems these works, once considered doubtful in provenance, are likely by Confucius after all?  So this is an epic volume of real import.  But does it raise my opinion of Confucius as a thinker?  No.

3. I liked all of Thomas F. Madden’s The Fall of Republics: A History from Ancient Carthage to the American Constitution, but most of all the section on Venice.

4. Frank Callanan, James Joyce: A Political Life.  An excellent book, and it truly induces us to revalue Joyce and understand him in a new light.  Joyce was in fact highly politically conscious, heavily influenced by Parnellism, and in part writing a critique of Irish nationalism from an internal perspective.

4. Alastair Reynolds, “Zima Blue,” one of the better short stories about AI, and also aesthetics.  Via R.

5. Justin Gest, Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy is a political economy argument that widespread immigration can drain home countries of their democracy supporters to some extent.

Daniel Susskind, What Should My Children Do?: How to Flourish in the Age of AI is a book that needed to be written.

Melissa S. Kearney and Luke Pardue, editors.  Demographic Headwinds: The Economic Consequences of Lower Birth Rates and Longer Lives.  A short volume, to the point, worry is in order.

And there is Jeremy A. Simmons, Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade.