The Birth of Plenty
The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created is a nonfiction book on world history and economics by American author William J. Bernstein.
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What Hacker News says
- Forward looking:
Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World
Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
Historical:
The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
General:
Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
- William Bernstein has argued pretty well that the growth of economies over the long term has held pretty stable over (surprisingly) the last several hundred years. See his book, "The Birth of Plenty": https://www.amazon.com/Birth-Plenty-Prosperity-Modern-Create...
The keys to economic growth he identifies are (1) property rights, (2) scientific rationalism, (3) capital markets, and (4) adequate transportation/communication. All of these appeared in sufficient form for prosperous growth several hundred years ago.
There is of course no guarantee of continued growth at same rate as last several hundred years. But given the conditions that have prevailed it has settled at a fairly stable rate as sort of a natural law.
- Poor Charlie's Almanac -- can't beat Charlie Munger when it comes to explaining how the world works.
Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile -- Nassim Taleb reviles lots of new ways to think, first in finance, then everything in later books.
The Origin of Wealth -- Similar to Antifragile with a lot of mental models packed in on many different subjects: economics, business, biology, ...
The Design of Everyday Things -- the bible of design. Read it to know why everyday frustrations with tech are probably not your fault. His book Emotional Design is a good compliment.
The Essential Drucker -- "essential" reading for anyone in management or scaling a startup.
History, and why the world is the way it is today:
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
The Birth of Plenty, William Bernstein
They Made America, Harold Evans -- fantastic history book with each chapter telling the detailed story of a businessperson or inventor in U.S. history
- I've liked other stuff by William Bernstein. His book "The Birth of Plenty" is excellent. I haven't read the pamphlet mentioned in the article, but I just downloaded it.
I'll be interested to see what his advice is to younger people now. At least in the past, he was not quite the typical scold. I always liked this quote:
'An optimist might cite this as an example of the "magic of compound interest." Too much is made of this phenomenon. A pessimist would note that our industrious saver died an old man without enjoying his fortune; had he consumed even a few percent of it each year his estate would have been vastly smaller. Personally, I’d rather be a 26 year old roaming the boulevards of Paris with a few francs in my pocket than a rich old man. Everyone cannot be rich, but perhaps their grandchildren can.' (from: http://www.efficientfrontier.com/BOOK/chapter2.htm)
- I made a goal to read 100 books this year. I'm through 87 so far. Most of them have been non-fiction. Using this year to learn things outside of technology has been time very well spent for me. Here are some of my top books this year.
- Currency Wars, James Rickards
- The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein
- What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly
- The Art Of Happiness, Dalai Lama
- Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen
- The Four Agreements, Miguel Ruiz
- Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl
- Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky
- The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
- Good To Great, Jim Collins
- Abundance, Peter Diamandis
- The Mystery Of Capital, Hernando De Soto
- Pathologies Of Power, Paul Farmer
- Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff
- Seeing Like A State, James Scott
- Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
- Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
- Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier
- The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
- The Birth Of Plenty, William Bernstein
- it appears to me that almost the entire US legal and political system is driven by, and for the benefit of, corporate and big business interests
"Corporate and big business interests", i.e., publicly traded companies, are responsible for the majority of wealth creation (source: well it's obvious, but see for example William Bernstein, "The Birth of Plenty".) So what you said can be rephrased as, "The US system works to enable wealth creation", or in other words, "The US system is optimized for providing the best standard of living for its citizens." Which is exactly the case.
