Welcome to the first book post of 2021! As with December, I’ve added a TV show to this one.
Let’s take a look at what I’m reading in the new year.
Mehrsa Baradaran – The Color of Money
Baradaran closely examines racial wealth gaps in the U.S., particularly the gap between white and black Americans. She’s especially interested in how to solve the problems, and she criticizes current options as insufficient or even counter-productive. In particular, Baradaran hammers away at the idea of ‘black business’ as the solution to the problem.
Baradaran’s work puts her at odds with a certain tradition in black politics – that of Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, and various black nationalists – that claims black business will lead the way. I’ve discussed some of these issues and related misconceptions in earlier posts.
Central to her case is careful evidence of the fact that black businesses start out with various structural disadvantages. Black banks, for instance, hold greater risk and serve people with less money, structurally limiting their ability to multiply the wealth of the people they serve. To overcome these challenges, black banks work with white institutions, creating forces that pull wealth out of black communities. Furthermore, white people – due to racism – behave in ways that economists would consider ‘irrational’ (e.g., white flight), further exacerbating problems. As I’ve pointed out before, economic ideas about ‘rationality’ and ‘supply and demand’ explain little.
While Baradaran does a great job analyzing many structural problems, her book comes up short in offering solutions. She generally falls back on some of the same liberal/progressive policy ideas that likely wouldn’t work if passed, and almost certainly won’t be passed anyway.
Jane Jacobs – The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Anyone with even the slightest interest in urban planning and broader sociological considerations of American cities has probably run across the name Jane Jacobs at some point. This book is her classic work on the topic.
You’d think a work on urban planning from the early 1960s would be a bit dated at this point. And, to some extent, it is. Some of the examples no longer quite make sense, and obviously the contemporary discussion of cities doesn’t quite work any longer. But most of Jacobs’s work still applies. It often applies as-written.
Jacobs points out that much of the conventional wisdom on urban planning – some of it still conventional wisdom to this day – misses the mark. Cities shouldn’t build huge highways. They shouldn’t just build more parks and green space and call it good, without going through a deeper thought process on how people will use it. Cities can’t gentrify their way out of crime. And few people actually want to live in sparse suburbs.
To boot, she hits Robert Moses repeatedly. And hard. Overall, her core point is a simple and elegant one – people like living in dense urban neighborhoods with lots of things to do, lots of mixed usage, and lots of places to catch the eye. Surprisingly, it’s a point many people still fail to see.
Steven Levy – Facebook: The Inside Story
Who’s Steven Levy and why’s he writing about Facebook? He’s a tech journalist who covered Facebook for years and landed a number of interviews with Mark Zuckerberg. He writes a thorough book here – a highly competent history of The Zucc and the tech industry that spawned him.
But he doesn’t do much more than that. As a tech journalist, Levy seems to have gotten very comfortable with his subject matter. While there’s criticism of Zucc and Facebook at the margins, there’s really not much here in the way of deeper critical analysis of how the tech industry in general, and Facebook in particular, impact their world. If readers look here for more than interesting facts about the founding of Facebook, I don’t think they’ll find it.
The Expanse, Season 4
I’ve been a fan of The Expanse – the novels – for a number of years now. And I’ve also gotten into the TV show. The show has complemented the novels thus far like almost no other show. The fact that the authors of the novels also write for the show likely helps.
Anyway, The Expanse is one of those stories that I’d recommend everyone check out in both book and TV form. We find few contradictions between the two formats. The TV show builds certain visual aspects of the fictional universe and consolidates a few of the messier characters and plot lines, while the novels develop more details of the characters’ back stories and plot intrigues.
I’m pretty excited to see how the show wraps up the story in Seasons 5 and 6!
What to Read Next?
If you look at the blog’s categories, you can find the rest of the monthly reading lists under the category ‘Books’!
