AK's Reviews

~7% Chance This Guy Will Be President Come 2020. Let’s Review His Book.

Best Books While I have read quite a few books on WW1, only a couple really “stand out”: Niall Ferguson (1998) – The Pity of War: Explaining World War I [download] does justice to its subtitle, boldly reinterpreting most of the standard narrative through vivid statistical argumentation. For instance, the claims that there was widespread enthusiasm

Joseph Tainter – The Collapse of Complex Societies (1998) Rating: 5/5 Notes: Can be downloaded here. Access my other reviews here: https://akarlin.com/reviews/ TLDR: Joseph Tainter argues that the root cause of civilizational collapse is because of over-investment into and declining marginal returns on complexity. Societies invest in complexity to solve their problems and typically need to expend

Vladimir Voinovich (1986) – Moscow 2042 Rating: 2/5 TLDR: Good perspective on sovok-liberal Russophobia. Vladimir Voinovich died the other day. In the Anglosphere, this only seems to have been noticed by RFERL, where this Serb/Jewish literary dissident worked during his exile from the USSR in the 1980s. Like Solzhenitsyn, Voinovich opposed the Soviet regime – but that was

Karl Marx – Capital. Rating: 2/10 I did earnestly try to read Capital on about three separate occasions in my early twenties, before I wised up and stopped wasting my time on a pointless historical relic. At a basic level, Marx is just a very poor writer, and I say this as someone who read Adam Smith’s

Steven Pinker – Enlightenment Now [buy; don’t]. Rating: 1/10. My impression on getting through a third of Enlightenment Now is that it was essentially a summary of Better Angels, followed by running commentary on the graphs from Our World in Data and Gapminder. But I don’t begrudge him for that, since I agree with him (and Lord Kelvin) on