What I’ve Been Reading

Books, books, books.

1. How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life by Russ Roberts. An engaging summary and analysis of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith’s Wealth of Nations is more popular but Theory of Moral Sentiments is arguably just as profound. Russ quotes extensively from the original text and adds color on what Smith was expressing about human nature. If you struggle with old fashioned writing, as I do, this account is a great alternative or supplement to the original work.

Russ quotes a Venetian proverb: “The sea gets deeper as you go further into it.” And then adds, “The more you know, the more you realize how much there is to know. You really don’t have to know everything. Admitting ignorance can be bliss.”

In the conclusion, I enjoyed the distinction between the warm world of intimate family and friends and the harsh and cold world of commerce with strangers.

As F.A. Hayek pointed out in The Fatal Conceit, a modern person has to inhabit two worlds at the same time — a world that is intimate and a world that is distant, a world that is held together by prices and monetary incentives. Hayek argued that we have an urge to take the norms and culture of our intimate family life and try to extend them into our less-intimate commercial life…Hayek thought that extending the norms of the family to society at large would put us on the road to tyranny.

2. Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao. Chock full of management tips and tricks, informed by real academic research. Some useful observations about how to scale something that works as well. I enjoy reading Bob’s blog and following him on Twitter.

3. Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Self-Promotion by David Zweig. The people who make the world go round you who you haven’t heard of. Zweig does a nice job with the storytelling of unsung heroes: the structural engineers of office buildings, not the architects; the wayfinders at airports who design the signage that tells you where baggage claim and rental cars are; ghostwriters who help the rich and famous write memoirs. Zweig makes a case that pursuing work you excel at that does not lead to public accolades can actually be more satisfying than achieving success that results in celebrity.

4. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips. There were some amazing paragraphs in the first chapter, but then I got totally lost as it descended into riffs on psychotherapy. Sample graph that originally intrigued me:

There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason – and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason – they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live.

5. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Some fun lines certainly about corporate office life, and I know Ferris is talented, but I couldn’t get into this novel. Some winning paragraphs nonetheless:

We believed that downturns had been rendered obsolete by the ingenious technology of the new economy. We thought ourselves immune from things like plant closings in Iowa and Nebraska, where remote Americans struggled against falling-in roofs and credit card debt. We watched these blue-collar workers being interviewed on TV. For the length of the segment, it was impossible not to feel the sadness and anxiety they must have felt for themselves and their families. But soon we moved on to weather and sports and by the time we thought about them again, it was a different plant in a different city, and the state was offering dislocated worker programs, readjustment and retraining services, and skills workshops. They’d be fine. Thank god we didn’t have to worry about a misfortune like that. We were corporate citizens, buttressed by advanced degrees and padded by corporate fat. We were above the fickle market forces of overproduction and mismanaged inventory.

 And:

When someone quit, we couldn’t believe it. “I’m becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,” they said. “I’m touring college towns with my garage band.” We were dumbfounded. It was like they lived on a different planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going-away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately. Invariably Tom would get drunk and berate the departing with inappropriate toasts. Invariably Marcia would find hair bands on the jukebox and subject us to their saccharine ballads while recalling the halcyon days of George Washington High. Invariably Janine would silently sip her cranberry juice, looking mournful and motherly, and Jim Jackers would crack dull, tasteless jokes, and Joe would still be at the office, working. “‘Every ship is a romantic object,’” Tom would blather, “‘except that we sail in.’” Concluding, he would stand and lift his glass. “So good luck to you,” he toasted, finishing off his martini, “and fuck you for leaving, you prick.”