My Favorite Books of 2018

My 2018 reading year was bookended by the pure pleasure of discovering two authors who use language so deftly and originally that I find myself going back to their books again and again, and reading aloud passages to anyone who will hear.

The Peregrine, a book written more than 50 years ago by J.A. Baker as the peregrine was vanishing from Essex, ravaged by pesticides and development, is a fierce homage to what was being lost. No environmental screed, this is the diary of a birdwatcher, a man with extraordinary powers of observation (“the hardest thing of all is to see what is really there”), and a gift of expression rarely found outside of poetry. In his Afterword to the 50th anniversary edition, Robert MacFarlane wrote “I have come to think of Baker's style, indeed, as a kind of augmented-reality visor – an Oculus Rift of text that enables otherwise impossible precisions of seeing and movement.”

“I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision. They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us. Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion. They are old before we have finished growing.”

My daughter gave The Peregrine to me last Christmas, so it was one of my first reads of 2018. Fox 8, by George Saunders, which I gave this year as a Christmas gift to my wife after it was recommended by her father, ended the year with another bolt of pure reading pleasure. A short fable about a fox that learns to speak “Yuman” and the sad consequences of his attempt to reach out, Fox 8, like The Peregrine, reminds us that we are not the only creatures that matter on this earth and gives wise advice to Yumans who want to do better. Along the way, you will be laughing out loud at the inventive spelling and diction of Fox 8's Yuman language and his peculiar insights into Yuman behavior.

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, by Russ Roberts, was not at all what I expected from the title. It is not a defense of free markets guided by the “invisible hand” but about the other half of Adam Smith's theories of the economy. That is, it is not about The Wealth of Nations, but about Smith’s other great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explores the role of social norms as a check on self-interest. We must rediscover and reinvent those norms, or, gradually, then suddenly, we will continue the descent into economic and political barbarism. This is a lovely book.

It is also an example of a genre I love, literary criticism not as a dissection of a dead work but as a conversation with another author about what is true. I first discovered this style of enthusiastic review over forty years ago when I read Colin Wilson's first book, The Outsider, and tried to emulate it in my own first effort, a meditation on what I'd learned from the work of science fiction writer Frank Herbert. More recent examples include Alain de Botton's brilliant reading of Remembrance of Things Past as a self-help book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, which Roberts' book is modeled on, and Cass Sunstein's The World According to Star Wars.

I've been listening to Ron Chernow's magnificent biography of Hamilton on occasional long commutes throughout the year, and it's a wonderful antidote to current events. It reminds me that the enduring power of our approach to government didn't come easy, and that if our nation could survive the poisonous politics of the early Republic, it can survive today's version as well. That is not a reason for complacency, but a reason instead to fight harder for what we value.

It isn't just politics, though. Ever since Jen Pahlka and I began working on the Gov 2.0 Summit back in 2008, I’ve been concerned that if we can’t get government up to speed on 21st century technology, a critical pillar of the good society will crumble. When we started that effort, we were focused primarily on government innovation; over time, through Jen’s work at Code for America and the United States Digital Service, that shifted to a focus on making sure that government services actually work for those who need them most.

Michael Lewis’ latest book, The Fifth Risk, highlights just how bad things might get if we continue to neglect and undermine the machinery of government. It’s not just the political fracturing of our country that should concern us; it’s the fact that government plays a critical role in infrastructure, in innovation, and in the safety net. That role has gradually been eroded, and the cracks that are appearing in the foundation of our society are coming at the worst possible time.

The Value of Everything, by Mariana Mazzucato continues the defense of government as a source of value in the economy that she began in The Entrepreneurial State while challenging the rise of rent-seeking by industries such as finance and pharmaceuticals. She opens her book with an ironic reminder from Plato’s Republic: “Our first business is to supervise the production of stories and choose those we think suitable and reject the rest.” She reminds us that controlling the stories we are told is a prime instrument of power, and argues that one of those mind-shaping stories is about the source of value in the economy—where it comes from, who produces it, and who should get the benefits. It’s easy, Mazzucato argues, to believe the stories we have been told are simply true, and to no longer question them. And question them we must, because the stories that rule our economy today are often wrong and, at best, incomplete. (For my fuller review, see “Shaping the Stories That Rule Our Economy.”)

In an illustration of how ideas compound over time, I read one of my favorite books of 2018 back in 2016. Alvin Roth won a Nobel prize in Economics for his work on market design. I read his book, Who Gets What – and Why at the recommendation of Uber's chief economist Jonathan Hall, and its thoughts on the economics of marketplaces shaped my own book, WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us. But I kept chewing on the idea now firmly planted in my head, that not just individual marketplaces but also the modern deity called “the market” are human creations, and subject to improvement.

Kate Raworth's book Doughnut Economics provided an additional key metaphor that dovetails so nicely with what I took away from Roth's book that the two are now inseparable in my mind. Raworth makes the case that a doughnut is a far better metaphor than the graph of growth going up and to the right that seems to dominate modern economic thinking. Much like the “Goldilocks zone” of astrobiology, the distance from a star that is not too hot and not too cold for liquid water, an economy too has a habitable zone between economic undershoot and economic overshoot. In undershoot, people don't have enough to eat; they lack clean water, shelter, access to education and opportunity. In overshoot, we face the perils of climate change, species loss, and resource depletion. The job of economics, Raworth argues, is to keep us in the habitable zone.

This idea fit perfectly with my continuing explorations of the design of technology platform marketplaces such as Google search, Amazon, Uber, and Facebook, not to mention my own company's online learning platform.

We like to think that we still live in a free-market economy, but our world is increasingly ruled by networked platforms whose algorithms decide who gets what and why. A platform may begin with an ideal of creating value for users, but its designers come to forget that a marketplace has to work for its suppliers as well, and as the master algorithm of financial markets demands constant growth, it leads even the best of them astray. They begin to allocate more and more value to themselves, impoverishing the virtuous economic ecosystem on which their success depends. (As Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson point out, this is also Why Nations Fail.)

Doughnut economics provides an alternative way to think about balancing who gets what and why. I have found it a really useful tool in understanding and developing our own platform strategy at O'Reilly. In contrast to Silicon Valley dogma, which calls for an unrelenting focus on user benefit (because that drives the hypergrowth markets demand) many of our most powerful innovations for users have actually come from a focus on creating value for suppliers. Lacking the monopoly power of the giant platforms, in our learning marketplace we have to continually balance benefit to users, to learning suppliers, and to ourselves as the platform owner.

In talks throughout the year, I explored lessons from tech platforms for the broader economy. It was a great pleasure reach beyond my usual technology audiences to talk to groups as diverse as the National Association of Business Economists, the Federal Reserve, the California Workforce Association, PWC, BCG, Stanford, the Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Kennedy School about how to think about the intersection of AI, technology platforms, market design, and economics.

I want to round out my favorite books of the year with two technical books published by my own company. Mastering Ethereum, by Andreas Antonopolous and Gavin Wood, and Hands on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn & Tensorflow, by Aurélien Géron, are both masterpieces of technical exposition. In addition to helping me keep up with world-changing technology, they remind me what a gift it is to be able to put down knowledge into an artifact – a book – and pass it so effectively to others. The clarity with these authors explain complex topics is a marvel.

Thanks to all the authors who have given me that gift of their work this year, compressing years of research and learning and life into a compact package that came to new life in my mind. We are shaped by the books we read as surely as we are by people we love and the company we keep. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote, “What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes.”

P.S. Honorable mention to a few other books I really enjoyed this year: Winners Take All, by Anand Giridharadas; Automating Inequality, by Virginia Eubanks; Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, by James Romm; In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larsen; AI Superpowers, by Kai-Fu Lee; Antarctica, by Kim Stanley Robinson, and its true-life counterpart, Mawson's Will, by Lennard Bickel.

P.P.S. How did I forget two other favorites? The Overstory, by Richard Powers, was a wonder. It opened as if it were a short story collection, more than a dozen stories about people and their relationship to trees, weaving in the deep science of trees and the history of our understanding of their complexity. Then gradually, the stories begin to coalesce and connect. A remarkable novel. I love books that teach as they entertain. I learned a lot of science from this one! And Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe! A visit to another world, where people lived lives very different from ours, with very different values, but were happy. Their world didn't fall apart. It was crushed, thoughtlessly and thoroughly, by people who were so convinced of their own superiority that they didn't even notice what was being lost.

And finally, The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer belonged at least on my runners-up list! The story of how hundreds of thousands of Islamic manuscripts were laboriously brought together into a magnificent library, and then, in a reminder of why they were originally hidden in the sands, threatened by terrorism, and rescued once again. Badass librarians indeed!