In 2024, I finished exactly 30 books—fewer than the 43 I read last year but still one more than my 10-year average of 29 a year. Meanwhile, according to my bank statements, I bought 231 books in 2024 (Seriously!!?). You see the problem here. Guys, stop publishing so many new books! How am I ever supposed to catch up? And authors please, please, stop referencing other fascinating books that inevitably end up in my cart.
Of the 30 books I read (or rather finished, I started more) in 2024, only three were published that year: White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman; Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet by Richard Dixon; and Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick. A fourth I read and which came out in 2024, Thomas Piketty’s Nature, Culture, and Inequality: A Comparative and Historical Perspective, was originally published in French in 2023. And four of the books I read were from the 1970s: Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference (1975); John Kenneth Galbraith’s Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975); Thomas Sowell’s Classical Economics Reconsidered (1977); and Donald M. Marquis’s In Search of Buddy Bolden, First Man of Jazz (1978).
Which of the 30 books did I enjoy the most? The one I just finished this morning—perhaps that’s why, it’s fresh in my mind: Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (2017). This is big history at its finest. Picking up where Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) left off, Scheidel asks the follow-up question: Why has the distribution of income and wealth sometimes shifted dramatically toward greater equality? The unsettling answer: it’s not the economy or politics, stupid, it’s violence, and massive violence at that. From the stone age to the 21st century, economic inequality has always tended to increase over time (regardless of the level of economic development or economic growth), and throughout history only four different types of violent shocks have reduced inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics. So be careful what you wish for.
In 2024, I also finally tackled Shoshana Zuboff’s monumental The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019), as well es Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath (2015). Both deal in depth with the problems and the extent of data collection and surveillance of consumers and citizens, which new technologies have brought with them and have unfortunately become the business model of today’s Internet. This troubling trend is also covered in Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’ (2023) Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, as an example of how technological innovation can veer in the wrong direction.
The argument in Power and Progress—that technological progress does not necessarily improve living standards for everyone, even in the long term—prompted me to reread Ricardo’s chapter On machinery. This chapter, added to the third edition of his Principles of Political Economy (1821), reflects Ricardo’s own growing doubts about whether technological development benefits all classes over time. His skepticism emerged after grappling with poverty issues in Parliament. The topic is complex, and even Ricardo seems confused. For economists, I recommend starting with the bibliographical essay in the appendix of Acemoglu and Johnson’s book; I wish I had done so myself.
What else? I thoroughly enjoyed and learned a great deal (about market efficiency) from Andrew Lo’s Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought (2015), and Gareth Leng and Rhodri Ivor Leng’s The Matter of Facts: Skepticism, Persuasion, and Evidence in Science (2020), an excellent contribution to the philosophy and sociology of science. Dani Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (2011) also proved invaluable, especially in preparing me for the further decline in free trade and globalization expected next year. In hindsight, many of us (especially us economists) were probably too optimistic about globalisation—I wish I had read Rodrik’s book when it was first published. Also Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: How not to liberate the world (2011) was ahead of most of us. He termed the idea that the Internet favours the oppressed rather than the oppressor ‘cyber-utopianism.’ At least I read that book back in 2019.
Happy New Year everyone!
Dear Professor Moser, dear Evan, dear Miles,
By coincidence, I just came across your blog.
Due to my mother being a Professor of German Literature, I grew up in a house with an immensely big library. Hence, I started reading literature (e.g. Kafka and Muschg) by the age of 9. Of course back then I didn’t understand the full context of these books, but I realised my love for reading.
That being said, I never developed an own statistic or review on the books I buy and read on a yearly basis. By reading your blog, this has become one of my New Year’s resolutions – thank you for giving me that idea along a few interesting recommendations of books that were still not on my radar!
All the best,
Marwan