Books I read this summer

Some of the habits I re-established post pandemic are to dedicate more time for reading books, sharing thoughts, and shifting my focus away from being influenced by the daily headlines. These helped me to set up a clearer boundary between work and private time, to better control my attention span, to make conversation easier with others, and to focus on thinking about a particular big topic in depth instead of being distracted by multiple short-term noises.

This summer, I have read 3 different yet somehow correlated books. They, in many ways, changed my view on humanity and helped me see how the world functions from different perspectives, for good or for bad. I am sharing my book reviews here if any of you would be interested in reading them during your remaining summer break, having a discussion on those topics, or even recommending a few other books for me to read further ??.

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Strangers Drowning, by Larissa MacFarquhar

In Strangers Drowning, the author profiled a series of "do-gooders" - selfless individuals who are extreme altruists with high ethical commitments to devote their lives to helping those that are complete strangers. For example, a couple who are not financially well off but have chosen to adopt 20 children with many from migration background or under severe medical conditions. A lady setting up medical facilities in a highly conflicted war zone. Or a family dedicated their entire lives taking care of the marginalised leprosy patients in rural India. The author examined their intrinsic motivation, their moral dilemmas, the challenges they face from their surroundings and their behaviours, and tried to explore whether those do-gooder examples can influence the daily moral decisions we make for our own lives. All the stories were told beautifully and sympathetically, inviting us to think about what does humanity really mean to us.

Our society often praise the random generosity and the kind acts towards the poor, but not many of us (including me) are ready to give up our entire financial and personal wellbeing to raise the living quality of a complete stranger or even animals. We often have our "selfish boundaries" determining how much money and effort we are willing to give away to whom in a given circumstances, and those circumstances occur often within the family or close circle. This book questioned those boundaries we set by challenging our moral philosophically - is a stranger's life really worth less than those we know personally? If you can either save 2 random drowning kids or your drowning dad from a boat accident, what is the right thing to do? As our world is getting more complicated with geo-political conflicts, inflations, or natural catastrophes, this book helped me to reflect on my commitment to those topics, to those impacted, and has indeed pushed some of my own boundaries further to help out.

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Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, by Brooke Harrington

This book talks about the history, the evolution and the operating models of the wealth management industry - uncovering how wealth managers and private bankers help the top 1% of the world's richest population protect their wealth by operating in a ethically grey zone across borders. To complete this book, the author went undercover by studying the tactics and techniques of wealth management to acquire the full professional diploma, and by meeting the wealth managers, tax advisors, trustees, foundation managers, and lawyers globally to uncover their industry insights and their complex relationships with their super-rich clients.

Compared to the previous book [Strangers Drowning], [Capital without Borders] highlights the stories of the other side of the extreme who selfishly challenges the rule of law, contributes to political and societal corruption, and disregard fairness and injustice by lobbying policy makers, hiding assets and information from the stakeholders concerned, avoiding taxes & cross border legal enforcements.

Having worked for the biggest wealth management firm previously, many of the stories are not unfamiliar to me. However, this book helped me understand profoundly about the triggers of wealth management demands, the untold motives of the super rich while hiring a wealth manager, the beliefs of the super-rich influenced by their wealth managers, as well as the world orders influenced by the super-rich's behaviours.

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Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail, by Ray Dalio

As the book name suggested, this book analysed the rise and fall of the superpowers and their financial systems historically, and suggested multiple frameworks to help us make senses of what is happening in our world right now, which cycle we are in, what could the cause and effect of each incident be, and what could happen next if we don't act appropriately. The author researched and summarized many historically complicated issues in a clear, concise and logical manor.

After reading the book by using the patterns and frameworks suggested, it became clear to me what are the real motives of the each party in the given Ukraine-Russia war and in the deteriorating China-Taiwan-USA relationships that can easily lead to another world war scenario - resetting the world order again. I started to think more about the risks surrounded by those scenarios, how they may impact the society and the financial systems, and found myself ending up in an unsettling and conflicting situation highlighted by the previous 2 books in this post: what can I do more to protect the my wealth from being evaporated caused by conflicts, v.s. what can I do more to help those in need when conflicts occur? For now, I don't have an answer yet.

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#lifelonglearning #bookreview #summerholidays

Btw, forgot to mention, for this summer, my partner and I visited Eswatini and South Africa. Some pictures attached. Have a nice week start everyone :) !