What Are You Currently Reading? 2012

[Firn]

In the last couple of months:

Thinking, Fast and Slow - Brilliant book. It is not surprising that it already has been discussed here. Regression to the mean and the law of small numbers surprised even me, despite having studied statistics at the uni. But then again, if we consider the base rate of those who failed, it is not surprising at all that I was among them.

Ironically the Marshmallow Study which is cited in the book has a clear shortcoming, which can at least partly be explained by other chapters of the book.

For the past four decades, the "marshmallow test" has served as a classic experimental measure of children's self-control: will a preschooler eat one of the fluffy white confections now or hold out for two later?

Now a new study demonstrates that being able to delay gratification is influenced as much by the environment as by innate ability. Children who experienced reliable interactions immediately before the marshmallow task waited on average four times longer—12 versus three minutes—than youngsters in similar but unreliable situations.

The Checklist Manifesto: It doesn't has the grand span of Thinking, Fast and slow but it made its manifesto very well. It shows how hard but important it is to do consistently the right things in the right way and order. Discipline forced by something like a good checklist can empower initiative and thinking, making a big difference in performance.

Wages of Destruction: The best economic book I have read about the WWII, from an author which actually studied macroeconomics. This often basic economic knowledge was sometimes obviously missing in Why the Allies won and even more so in Freedoms Forge.

It always amazed me that such basic and thus key elements like ressources, capital, labour, productivity, monetary policy were not yet investigated with similar scientific rigour before, at least not in a widely available (and cheap) book. Even more so if we consider the amount of ink spent on this period.


Freedoms Forge: A nice book with good stories but it suffers greatly compared to Wages of Destruction. It is written by somebody who has no professional education in economics and it really tells. If it just had sticked to the stories, maybe with a bit less drama about heroic men and American exceptionalism it would sill be a great book. But the black-and-white description of business and labour and the fact- and senseless attacks on the New Deal of New Dealers often broke the flow. Critic is important but it should be based on facts and those were just not there. This narrow ideological approach does weaken the whole book. And this comes from a convinced capitalist.


The Halo Effect: It is in its scope similar to the Checklist Manifesto. It limits itself, in this case to a strong attack on the way we often think and write about business, managers and success. This simple, fact-based approach makes the book powerful.