January-June Book Reading Roundup
Some highlights from books I have read over the first half of the year
Happy Friday, everyone. Now we are into the second half of the year, I thought I would do a different type of reading roundup and highlight some of the books that I’ve read so far. I’ve managed to get through a fair few, and I won’t go into them all, but many of them have really influenced my thinking and work in often quite different ways.
I hope you enjoy!
Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy - Neil Lee
Innovation is crucial for economic growth and rising living standards. But if the innovation economy remains exclusive and its rewards concentrated, it will sow the seeds of its own failure. A backlash against pro-innovation policies has been under way across many countries, with some justification. The exclusion of some groups from the innovation economy-because of who they are, the skills they have, or where they live-is a waste of talent and resources. In some places, too few people benefit. Making sure the high-tech economy is inclusive is the best way to share the benefits, but also the best way to sustain innovation overall. - Neil Lee
A truly must-read book if you are interested in, or working on, innovation policy. Lee argues much of what I’ve echoed here in the newsletter, that innovation is not just about the generation of new technologies and should not be pursued to rank highly in global comparison or because of some belief that innovation automatically means good. Instead, innovation policy: “should aim to create good jobs and ensure prosperity is widely shared. Innovation itself is vital but only half the answer.”
Innovation isn’t something that happens in isolation. It must be grounded in an understanding of the type of outcomes we want, the type of economy and society that we want to build. We must actively steer policy (not just innovation policy) in that direction.
My report on Canadian innovation, to be published this Fall, draws inspiration from Lee. Stay tuned for that!
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI - Madhumita Murgia
Philosophers believe that ultimately a person’s freedom is threaded inextricably with the quality of their agency – their ability to perceive their actions and desires as their own, and to feel able to create change. In small and large ways, AI systems are impinging on this, creating a feeling of individual disempowerment – even a sense of loss of our free will. - Madhumita Murgia
An excellent book on the impacts of the development and deployment of AI on a global scale. It is an important read about what it means to be human in a time of AI, and how AI’s use impinges on the humanity of society’s most vulnerable communities. At a time when the federal government is sprinting towards deploying AI at scale, I wish every public servant working on it would read this book before they act.
I wrote at length about Murgia’s book back in April, so I won’t go into too much more detail here. I also recently read Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con, which is a good companion to this book in many ways. I plan on writing about that one much more fully, so I won’t get into it here either.
Imagination: A Manifesto - Ruha Benjamin
The most effective means to refute the prevailing ideologies is to do so collectively—crafting new stories, images, ways of interacting, and investments in those who have been denigrated and discarded. - Ruha Benjamin
Another one I wrote about back in the Spring, Benjamin’s book is a call to think differently. Getting into who has the freedom to imagine at all, Benjamin makes a case for the transformative power of imagination. As she argues, “Imagination is a field of struggle, not an ephemeral afterthought that we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize.”
This book has heavily influenced my thinking around the need for storytelling and collectively developing alternatives to the status quo. But Benjamin doesn’t see this kind of imagination as a passive exercise in intellectual curiosity; she also makes the case that we need to do something about it:
When we work to cultivate a collective vision for transforming the world, we must be careful not to fetishize imagination as somehow operating magically and independently from other powerful ingredients, like strategizing and organizing, to make our vision a reality.
I couldn’t agree more with Benjamin’s argument. I still don’t know the best way to organize when it comes to some of these technology and innovation policy issues that I focus on but I certainly haven’t lost sight of its importance.
Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back - Torsten Bell
Projects of national renewal often involve sacrifices – this is why we do need a new patriotism to supplement, and on occasion overcome, our individualism – but the sacrifices the state asks of the public must be just, and be seen to be just. - Torsten Bell
I don’t think it is appreciated as much as it should be that we are not alone in many of our problems. Our lagging productivity and weak commercialization, our affordability and inequality challenges, our lack of investment and weak state capacity—all and more have equivalents elsewhere and are often rooted in shared, global challenges.
Understanding better how these problems play out in other countries provides some much-needed context. Of course, that doesn’t mean that any one problem is the same, nor that the solutions would be the same, but understanding both the historical roots and the global context is so important.
In that light, this book by former think tank leader, and now MP and Minister, Torsten Bell, is a worthwhile read. He discusses many of the UK's complex challenges and sets out a policy agenda to address them.
It is the kind of deep thinking that I think we lack in Canada right now, as we similarly embark on addressing our challenges. The quote above is particularly pertinent in my view. I wrote on Wednesday that we are also a country in need of renewal, and last Friday that we need to reckon with the threat we face from a fascist America before we can have an honest debate about the sacrifices required to meet that threat.
But instead of asking for sacrifices from those most able to make them, we are cutting taxes that disproportionately benefit the most well-off. We are also asking Indigenous peoples to sacrifice their rights in favour of national projects where they receive a disproportionate share of the harm and nowhere near an equitable share of the benefits.
None of that strikes me as just.
How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World - Deb Chachra
Economic growth cannot sensibly be treated as an end in itself. Development has to be more concerned with enhancing the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy. Expanding the freedoms that we have reason to value not only makes our lives richer and more unfettered, but also allows us to be fuller social persons, exercising our own volitions and interacting with—and influencing—the world in which we live - Deb Chachra
This rather narrow title disguises one of the best books I have read in a long time. If you want a book that approaches the topic of Abundance as it should be, then this is that book.
Scarborough-born Chachra explores infrastructure in a way that speaks to some fascinating engineering but also approaches the essential relational and societal role of infrastructure and the historical context of who receives the benefits and who bears the cost of infrastructure (sound familiar?).
Moreover, she bases here argument and analysis on the kind of politics of care I’ve been speaking of recently—“Infrastructural citizenship is not just care at scale, but care in perpetuity.”
I listened to the audiobook, so I don’t have the copious highlights and notes I would with a physical book or ebook. But I plan to buy and reread this properly and return to it soon in the newsletter.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Omar El Akkad
The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer. - Omar El Akkad
You should read this book.
I went to the Toronto book launch for this back in the Spring and wrote about it then, but I’m not sure I can fully capture the impact reading this has had on me.
What does it mean to bear witness as genocide is happening right before our eyes in Gaza? What does it mean when so many are silent in the face of the mounting evidence of what is happening? What does it mean to live our lives of privilege, to get to write or read these words, to eat and drink when we need freely, and to play with our kids carefree? All at a time when children are murdered while standing in line to receive medical treatment, as happened yesterday?
I don’t have good answers to these questions. However, our approach to Gaza as a country certainly seems to reveal our real underlying values when push comes to shove. As El Akkad put it:
It is not simply the case that, seeing this kind of thing up close, one is made to contend with some new, terrible degeneration of the West, a corruption of its ideals or stated ethical orientation. It is that, upon seeing this, time and time and time again-in beautifully catered awards ceremonies celebrating apartheid, and in the killing fields of Gaza, and in the blunt knowledge that the two are not all that disconnected-one cannot help but realize that there has been no degeneration, no corruption. That so far as the West stands in historical reality, nothing has evolved, nothing has become more enlightened, nothing has been learned. It has always been this way.
If we need care and solidarity as the bedrocks of a fairer and more just society, they must extend to everyone everywhere. It must involve reckoning with the real harms being caused and our complicity in enabling them, from the extremes of genocide that El Akkad writes about to the harms from AI that Murgia explores and much else besides.
Please, read this book.
Good Company: Economic Policy after Shareholder Primacy - Lenore Palladino
Changing the rules within which corporations operate will not, on its own, change the political economy of corporations. Changing the rules serves as a positive step but not a decisive one. If the questions of the political economy of corporations are how innovation occurs, whom innovation benefits, and who has control over the corporation, policy reform creates opportunities for different answers. If corporate control is understood as the potential to make decisions, then rule changes enable new groups to contest for a voice in such decision-making authority. The purpose of policy reform is to reorient the political economy of corporations away from decision-making and benefits concentrated among a wealthy elite and toward innovation and sustainable prosperity. - Lenore Palladino
Reading and writing about different policy questions can feel insufficient at a time of so much suffering. It is certainly inadequate to match the moment. But it isn’t irrelevant. The systems that our policies create and perpetuate are intimately tied to not only what is happening in Gaza but also to the real outcomes here in Canada. If we want different, fairer, and more just outcomes, then that means engaging in real fights across various policy areas.
In that vein, Palladino’s book connects neatly to Neil Lee’s and is a great place to end the longer write-ups. If, as Lee argues, innovation is only half the answer to ensuring widely shared prosperity, then we need to flesh out the other half.
Palladino’s book explores part of that: the need to challenge shareholder primacy and reorient the political economy of corporations away from extraction for the benefit of a small elite. Instead, she makes the case that benefits firms receive should come with the obligation to operate as innovative firms for the public’s benefit.
It is a tremendous and detailed read. It is, however, focused on reforms in the US context that don’t apply fully here. For example, suggested changes to corporation law to clearly establish fiduciary duty as more than just a responsibility to shareholders, already exist here since the 2008 Supreme Court ruling BCE Inc v 1976 Debentureholders. That decision was then codified in 2019 to establish that “when acting with a view to the best interests of the corporation, one may consider, but are not limited to, the interests of shareholders, employees, retirees and pensioners, creditors, consumers, governments, the environment and the long-term interests of the corporation.”
Nonetheless, there is a lot in here that I want to explore more in the Canadian context, including how these duties are executed in practice, the need to reform how pensions and asset managers operate, the role of worker representation on boards and employee ownership, rules around stock buybacks, executive compensation, and far more.
I’m increasingly of the view that tinkering with innovation programs and policies is a near-pointless exercise if it isn’t accompanied by a broader program of economic reforms of the kind Palladino sets out. The challenge is mapping out clearly what they would be in the Canadian context.
Other Reads
I could go on about every book I read, but this is already long enough. Here are just the titles of the rest of the nonfiction I read. Some of these have also been very influential in shaping my thinking. I’ve also written about others here in the newsletter. If any scream out that you’d like to know my take, then do let me know.
Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality - Edward Broadbent, Frances Abele, Jonathan Sas,
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion - Jia Tolentino
The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau - Stephen Maher
A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains - Max Solomon Bennett
Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto - Tricia Hersey
Canadian Public Policy: Selected Studies in Process and Style - Michael Howlett
Life in the City of Dirty Water: A Memoir of Healing - Clayton Thomas-Muller
The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel
At The Trough: The Rise and Rise of Canada's Corporate Welfare Bums - Laurent Carbonneau (my interview with Laurent)
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - Timothy Snyder
Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives Beyond Markets and States - Derek Wall
Strategy: A History - Lawrence Freedman (this one took me 5 months to work through. I learnt so much, but it was also a slog and a half).
The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind - Dan Davies (this is a book I will come back to for sure, if only to expand upon his clear conclusion that “You can’t have the economists in charge, not in the way they currently are.” Given we have an economist in charge right now, we should understand Davies’s argument.)
The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want - Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
Living Disability: Building Accessible Futures for Everybody - Emily MacRae (Editor)