What I've been reading

Dan

6 minute read

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

By Scott Anderson

I think I have actually read the kindle version of this book a couple years back but bought a hard copy when picking up a bunch of Scott Anderson works. At some point it clicked that I had read it before and gave up on the re-read but I would still recommend it (although I guess not for re-reading….). The subtitle is pretty accurate for this one, it is ostensibly a biography of T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) but it is more about the geopolitical jockeying by European colonial powers during and after World War I which shaped the middle east as we know it today.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adama Neumann and WeWork

By Reeves Wiedman

Man, there is really something about the epic failure of once high-flying startups who crash and burn because of what should have been obvious flaws that I find fascinating. Bad Blood, Super Pumped and now Billion Dollar Loser all trace such stories (althgouh Super Pumped, about the rise and not quite fall of Uber is a far less dramatic reckoning) but with very different flavors. The WeWork saga is like the exact middle ground between Theranos and Uber. In the former case you had the complete implosion (including criminal charges) because of outright fraud. In the latter case you had a business whose fundamental unit economics were never aligned with the valuation from investors and which eventually had a reckoning. Nevertheless they are still an operating business and, all things considered, probably be one for the forseeable future. It's a good business, just not a internet-scale business.

With WeWork you kind of have a more extreme version of the Uber scenario, but with a more abrupt and sever reckoning. The fundamental business of WeWork, taking out long term leases on office space and renting it out to short-term tenants at a steep markup, is a perfectly reasonable business. It's a commodity business though without the increasing returns to scale you might expect from traditional tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc. So the idea that it was wort $47B dollars at any point in it's history seems absurd in retrospect.

Nothing

By Jane Teller

A pretty big change in pace from my normal reading, this is a young adult novel translated from the original Danish. It is…. very dark. I don't want to give away any plot points so I'll just say that it is about a group of young kids who are searching for meaning in life and that search leads them to some very dark places. Definitely recommended but beware it will leave you with a very uncomfortable feeling for a few days after you finish it.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger

By Matthew Yglesias

Vox co-founder and former (reigning?) “Chief Neoliberal Shill” Matt Yglesias makes the case for a larger American population. The basic premise of the argument is pretty straightforward, it is basically:

  1. America as the leading global power is good relative to the most likely alternative of China being the leading global power
  2. China has roughly four times the population of the United States
  3. China is still quite poor, but given their huge population they will become a larger economy then us just with “catch-up growth”
  4. Therefore, to maintain the economic standing of the United States in the world we need more people

So how do we get to one billion Americans? Basically we have two levers we can pull:

  1. Pro-natalist policies which allow current US citizens to have more children
  2. Pro-immigration policies which allow more foreigners to come and live in the US Yglesias covers a number of specific policies that could help with both but overall this isn't a “here is my 17-point plan to achieve this goal” sort of book. It is more of a “this is something we should all want to do” with soem example policies just to demonstrate that we can in fact make progress if we want to, although there are other policies to consider as well and the details are something we can work out as an implementation detail.

The immigration issue is something the resonates quite a lot with me. In my particular field, software engineering, there is definitely a current of anti-immigrant bias because it is “suppressing wages of American software engineers” which seems incredibly short-sighted to me. Currently, brilliant engineers from around the world want to come to United States to work, which means if you are a tech firm, the US has the deepest pool of talent anywhere in the world. If we start barring software engineers from coming to the US, then the immediate effect might be to drive up salaries for engineers who are already here. But over (a relatively short, I think) time it just means that tech companies start operating out of other countries. This in turn will drive salaries for software engineers in the US back down.

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold Ware - A Tragedy in Three Acts

By Scott Anderson

Story of the early CIA centered around key characters who were instrumental it it's early development: Frank Wisner, Michael Burke, Peter Sichel and Edward Landsdale. Spoiler alert, it doesn't end well.

There is a lot to this book and I would highly recommend reading it from cover to cover if you want to understand the history of the Cold War, but the thing I found myself thinking is how much this is a sort of generic story about beaurocratic dysfunction and a case study in Goodhart's Law. What do you get when you mix:

  1. A strong bias towards action
  2. Litte or no oversight
  3. No way to measure the real underlyig goal
  4. Easily games vanity metrics to take their place

Well, you get the CIA in the 1950s. The Soviet Union is bad so we need to have an organization willing to take direct covert action against them. But of course nobody in “official” Washington wants to be responsible for any of these covert actions so you end up with an organizational structure sepcifcally designed to remove any direct or meaningful oversight. And finally, you have no way to actually take meaningful covert action against the Soviet Union so you measure success by the number of operations you launch, leading to increasingly ill-conceived an hare-brained schemes to inculcate rebellion in the eastern european Soviet satellites.

And of course the heartbreaking cherry on top is that when there is a real, organic rebellion against the Soviet regime in Hungary in 1956 which has a real, fighting chance of success, all the harcore cold warriors who have trying to preciptate just such a situation for the past decade just hangs them out to dry.