100 books like Condorcet

Pistor’s book explains how global finance grew so large, powerful, and unstable. The short answer: elite lawyers did it.

Pistor argues that they did it by creatively devising legal instruments that could turn both tangible (land, for example) and intangible things (like intellectual property) into capital. When lawyers were able to make legal instruments enforceable around the world, capital could become truly global. Why did they do this? Simple: “minting” capital through creative lawyering is extraordinarily lucrative.

Before reading this book, I knew that elite contract lawyers were very well compensated, but I didn’t understand what they were doing and didn’t think of them as key players shaping the international economic order. Pistor’s book informed and corrected my thinking. 

This is a rich sourcebook on the emergence of inequality in human prehistory and history.

The authors move effortlessly across cultures from the entire globe, basing their analysis on written records, where possible, or archeological data such as buildings, art, tools, and bones. They confirm my own view that inequality is ubiquitous and that there is a tendency for it to grow over time, irrespective of the environment.

Political or religious elites have always tried to expand their power at the expense of the common man or woman, using myths about divine descent or other means of persuasion, and the majority has more or less successfully resisted such attempts.

For an armchair social scientist like myself, this wealth of data is tremendously valuable.

I enjoy myth-busting.

A favorite message from the economic profession is that free trade is good for everyone, and that those who do not agree are either misguided or defending vested interests of their own. In this book, Williamson shows that this view is false.

The welfare gap between the West and the rest of the world developed during the 19th and 20th centuries in large part because of trade-induced division of labor that led to de-industrialization, increased inequality, and volatile revenues in the losing countries—factors that all contributed to retarding economic growth and social development in countries that are now poor.

More recently, the free movement of capital has had similarly negative effects on developing and emerging economies, a fact that is now recognized also in organizations such as the IMF.

Torgny Lindgren’s short novel (100+ p.) is a tersely written tragedy from 19th-century northern Sweden, describing how an originally neutral relationship between a landowner-tradesman and a family develops into a nightmare of economic and sexual exploitation.

This is fiction but nonetheless a brilliant illustration of the origins of inequality. Lindgren was one of Sweden’s most eminent writers, a member of the Swedish Academy, and well-known for his characteristic, biblically tainted language (a challenge to the translator).

This is a dark story, although there are some rays of light—from art (represented by music) as well as from hope in an intervention from some benign providence.

One of the friendliest routes into mathematics, for many people, is its history. In math, unlike many sciences, ideas last indefinitely. Pythagoras’s Theorem is about 4,000 years old, understood in ancient Babylon a thousand years before Pythagoras was born. It was true then, and it is still true today. The history of math tells of the construction of a towering edifice, with each new level built on top of the previous ones. There are many histories of mathematics, but none quite like this one. The author is a much-loved English TV personality, famous for his enthusiasm for math and his ability to make it entertaining for children of all ages. His book is a rollicking yarn, a wild ride that nonetheless remains true to its subject.

In the mood for a graphic novel starring Bertrand Russell and a supporting cast of famous thinkers like Whitehead, Frege, Gödel, and Wittgenstein? Logicomix is for you!

Flip to Chapter Six, “Incompleteness,” for a peek of Vienna in the 1930s. The logic and philosophy illustrated throughout provide a great context for the work of Vienna’s famous philosophical circle led by Moritz Schlick, whose 1936 murder provides a chilling contrast to the intellectual pursuits of that time.

In this book, a little girl named Sarah is worried about starting her first day at school. She can’t help but imagine all the terrible things that could happen. Her friend named Benny helps her to change her perspective by showing her all the things that could go right instead of wrong. I really enjoy this book because it’s so easy to let our minds wander to the negative possibilities. I like how this book reminds us to see the good that can happen in situations and also encourages us to find good positive friends like Benny that will help give us a boost when needed! 

Reuben Hersh is responsible for a revolution in the way we look at mathematics. His main idea is very simple: mathematics is something that is created by human beings. Isn’t that obvious, you say? Not if you believe that mathematics is there even before life itself, that it is built into the nature of reality in some way. In philosophy, this view is called Platonism. Hersh had the radical but obvious idea that if we want to understand what mathematics is we should look at what mathematicians actually do when they create mathematics. Like all great ideas it can be stated very simply but the implications are enormous.  His ideas are what got me started writing my own books about math and science.

Zalamea’s book is the perfect introduction and survey if you want to understand how developments in contemporary mathematics are relevant to current philosophy.

Zalamea’s own approach follows closely in the steps of Peirce, Lautman, and Grothendieck, merging pragmatism, dialectics, and sheaf theory, but he also engages the work of dozens of other key mathematicians and philosophers coming from different points of view, sometimes cursorily, always tantalizingly.

No philosopher can read this book without a quickened heartbeat and eager plans to clear shelf space for some of the many volumes of mathematics and philosophy of mathematics canvassed here by Zalamea.

What if children are not little adults but a different species? Perhaps children are butterflies who develop into caterpillars? Child psychologist Allision Gopnik asks wonderful questions about human development. She notes that most of us produce our best art and ask our deepest questions (“Why is the sky blue?”) as small children.

Childhood, she says, is our time of basic research; adulthood is the time for practical applications. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she celebrates the unique gifts of childhood, but she does not offer suggestions about how we might recapture those gifts.