six. Guns, Germs and Steel

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (Finished: Jan 23 2016)

Rating: 4/5

Difficulty: 3.5/5

Read if: You’re interested in studying ultimate causes of income and power discrepancies between countries, you enjoy overviews of Big History, you would like to read a non Euro-centric depiction of global history, you enjoy learning interesting tidbits about many different countries.

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Why did countries evolve so differently? Why did Europe come to dominate the world order? Why was the New World conquered by the Old, and not vice versa? These are difficult questions, and many of us know the proximate answers to such problems. When the Old World came to the New, it had superior weapons, more potent diseases and better technology, all three of which encouraged Europe’s era of colonization. However the problem underlying all such proximate answers is the ultimate question: Why did such benefits come to Eurasia and not the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Australasia? This ultimate question is the one Diamond tackles with remarkable comprehension, intelligence and broadness of knowledge in “Guns, Germs and Steel”. His answer ultimately comes down to one of geography – that some regions were endowed with geographical advantages that led them to acquire guns, germs and steel faster than other regions, facilitating their ultimate success.

To grossly overgeneralize, Diamond’s argument is that some regions (particularly Eurasia, which effectively encompasses all of Asia, the Middle East, Northern Africa and Europe) were endowed with more easily domesticable plants and animals, which gave them a huge head start in building complex societies. Such regions also had more access to the fruits of neighboring regions through trade, migration and war. For instance, one of the most interesting ideas within the book is that since domesticated plants adapt to the biome they are most commonly grown in, such plants travel much more easily in an East-West direction, within a single biome, than in a North-South direction, across many different biomes. Hence Eurasian countries, which existed primarily on a East-West axis, were able to quickly capitalize on the fruits of their neighbors. This initial spread of food production also came to determine the size and complexity of a community, the rate of technological innovation, the rate of technological spread and the level of herd immunity against plague diseases. All these factors endowed some regions and not others with massive head starts in the process of acquiring guns, germs and steel.

This is a whomping motherload of a book. The existence of this book by itself is a remarkable feat. As Diamond notes, a person attempting to find the ultimate causes of income and power discrepancies must be a historian, anthropologist, geographer, linguist and biologist all at once. Diamond demonstrates a remarkable grasp of many different disciplines, and shows a keen understanding of many different geographic regions (although perhaps some better than others). Noting the tendency of narratives that explain European world domination to be incredibly Euro-centric, Diamond travels extensively across the globe, paying close detail to a very diverse set of geographic regions. For instance, Diamond spends a chapter or two extensively comparing Australian and New Guinean geography, thereby explaining why indigenous life evolved so differently in the two island communities.

Diamond also starts his narrative in fixed opposition to the tenuous and prejudiced accounts of global history that stress the neurobiological differences between different Peoples that allowed the proliferation of some over others. These narratives were often rooted in racism and a mistrust in the other, justifying intolerance and authoritarian rule of racial minorities. For instance, many European scholars, under the so called “Hamitic hypothesis”, justified the rule of Tutsis over Hutus on the basis that Tutsis appeared more morphologically similar to Caucasian Europeans, and thereby were of a racial descent clearly superior to Hutus. By stressing the geographic determinants of history, Diamond repeatedly engages in the notion of essential human sameness, demonstrating that different “races” have been by and large equally intelligent, innovative and resourceful over the span of human history. The fact that this book strenuously proves the essential commonality of humanity does a great service in quashing racist, pseudo-scientific narratives of human history.

Besides the few larger takeaways from this book, there are also many small fascinating details within this book that in themselves make this book worth reading. For instance, it was really interesting to learn specifically how linguists can pin down the details of which peoples domesticated certain crops first by comparing the roots of words for the same crops in different languages. Also, any readers not yet versed in broad African history may find it interesting to read an account of the Austronesian settlement in Madagascar, which Diamond describes as one of the most remarkable feats of geography.

I think there are two main caveats to Diamond’s otherwise successful and fascinating depiction of macroscopic world history. Firstly, Diamond’s tale of geographic determinism can only go so far in explaining the shape of global history. Readers should take caution that Diamond’s ultimate argument is NOT that geographic determinism has been so overwhelming of a force within global history as to wipe out the successes of individual innovators, visionaries and intellectual movements in shaping global trends. Rather, his argument is that random twists of geography set some societies up with more resources to fuel innovation and complexity. Similarly, Diamond’s argument is not that geographic determination is so great of a force that it necessarily suggests that some countries are fated to be poor for all eternity while others will inevitably prosper for many millennia to come. This book paints a broad picture of global history but leaves to the reader the difficult task of figuring out where this narrative is relevant and where it is too broad to explain the specific proximate events that have shaped civilizations.

Secondly, while Diamond does an excellent job at comparing the differences between the Americas, Eurasia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Wider Australia, he is less skilled at distinguishing the differences between different parts of the same region. In particular, he is occasionally guilty of treating Eurasia too much as a monolith. Eurasia, after all, encompasses a very large range of countries. On one hand, perhaps this lack of nuance inevitable, given that geographic determinism may be too broad a force in history to determine the fates of local political struggles. Yet one is still left wondering – Why Europe, and not the Arab world, Central Asia, China or India? In particular, Diamond does a disservice to himself in relegating his comparison between Europe and China to one page in the book’s Epilogue, where he admits this may be a discussion more suited to other historians (one gets the impression that Diamond may not be as well versed in Chinese history as he is in the history of other nations). Nevertheless, as this is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of the entirety of global history, this flaw in Diamond’s narrative can easily be remedied by further readings.

Overall, this is an incredible book that is very worth reading. As with all lengthy narratives, you should set aside some time to read this book from head to toe in a short amount of time. For anyone at all interested in history, geography, anthropology and more, this book will give you the insights to go forth and analyze global historical trends with more clarity and confidence.

five. The Millionaire Next Door

The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko (Finished: Jan 18 2016)

Rating: 1.5/5

Difficulty: 2/5

Read if: You are interested in pursuing a high income, low expenditure lifestyle and would like to read some success stories, you would like some psychological motivation to become more frugal, you are willing to read studies that are interesting but methodologically flawed, you already consider yourself frugal and would like some fodder for your confirmation bias.

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I will admit upfront that I was pretty disappointed with this book. The book’s premise looks very intriguing – its authors attempt to take a new look at the phenomenon of the “blue-collar millionaire”, and in the process offer personal finance advice to the aspiring young career-person who would like to accumulate personal wealth. The entire book is based around a set of studies conducted by the researchers, who paid a set of millionaires between $100 and $250 to answer a questionnaire about their values, lifestyles, habits and financial philosophies. Among the insights they (probably inaccurately) uncover from such a study are that millionaires tend to buy inexpensive cars, watches and suits, millionaires tend to live in modestly priced houses, and that millionaires tend to enjoy accumulating wealth for wealth’s own sake.

Anyone who has ever picked up an introductory statistics read (here’s a good one) should find reading the description of such a study an excellent exercise set in spotting bad methodological practices. As pointed out by many others, the book suffers from huge survivorship bias, given that it exclusively interviews millionaires, instead of interviewing a cross-section of individuals at many different income levels. This is akin to discovering what makes a lottery winner successful by only interviewing lottery winners, and then concluding that because lottery winners are nearly all left handed that left handed people have a higher chance of winning the lottery. The book presumes that very frugal people are disproportionately likely to become millionaires without interviewing the many frugal people who may not have made it to the top of the wealth ladder. This survivorship bias severely undermines many of the claims the book attempts to make.

There are also many instances of selection bias within this book. It could simply be that millionaires who would deign to offer an hour or two of their time to university researchers for the measly compensation of $100 are simply more likely to be frugal, less consumerist, etc. (a fact that even the researchers themselves admit!) The millionaires interviewed also tend to be within the same age range, simply because it takes a significant chunk of time to accumulate large amounts of personal wealth. These millionaires could happen to share similar values and financial philosophies simply because they were from the same generation. Drawing any sort of sweeping conclusion about how to become successful without accounting for such biases will necessarily give you a very flawed picture of what it takes to become wealthy.

That is not to say, of course, that being frugal and maintaining financial discipline won’t necessarily lead you to a more wealthy future. The idea that maintaining low expenditures and high incomes will help you gain financial success seems like a very reasonable claim. However, a) presumably you do not need to read an entire book to benefit from this simple piece of advice and b) relying on this book as evidence for such a claim would be terribly unwise.

Even putting aside the many methodological flaws within this survey, I found its steadfast emphasis on “wealth accumulation” a little puzzling. While accumulation for the sake of attaining financial independence, sound savings funds, high quality education for your children etc. sounds like a very reasonable financial objective, the book is clear that for millionaires, wealth accumulation is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Often, the book stresses the importance of buying cheap suits and cheap consumables, painting any non-thriftiness as wasteful.

The interviewers and interviewees seem to suggest that the only alternative to thriftiness for the high income earning person is egregious consumerism. This is simply untrue. There are other fine alternatives high income earning people can pursue in lieu of aggressively accumulating wealth, such as giving a significant portion of that leftover wealth to the most efficient charities (a path that has been adopted by several notable multimillionaires), that would perhaps disqualify them from the ranks of the very wealthy but would still let them lead happy, financially independent lives. I think this book does itself a disservice in touting the ultimate goal of wealth accumulation instead of a broader goal of financial independence, which could be applicable to a wider readership.

This book came very highly recommended, but ultimately felt like a waste of precious reading time. At its most useful, it gave me time and reason to reflect upon my own personal finance and practice my evaluation skills. Unfortunately, this book seems to be symptomatic of a larger trend within personal finance books where authors try to sell their readers finance strategies that are poorly backed up. The fact that this book is based on a larger scale study of millionaires makes it marginally more convincing than a book on personal financial success strategies written by a wealthy investor who may simply have gotten lucky, but for me, this is still definitely not the most compelling read out there.

four. This Idea Must Die

This Idea Must Die, edited by John Brockman, written by miscellaneous (Finished: Jan 14 2016)

Rating: 2.5-3/5 (varies)

Difficulty: 2-3/5 (varies)

Read if: You want to be exposed to a large variety of different perspectives on what, you want to familiarize yourself with current debate within various different disciplines, you are knowledgeable about one academic field and want to read snippets of discourse within that field, you are very physics-oriented, you enjoy the TED-talk format of learning.

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The pursuit of knowledge within academia has given rise to many amazing ideas, but has also given rise to boatloads of rubbish. This book serves as a valid attempt to reject some of that rubbish in order to make way for better ideas. Each of the numerous short essays within this book attempts to answer the question: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” Among the many famous scholars that have contributed to this collection are Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Richard Thaler, Nassim Taleb, and many more.

The essays span an incredibly diverse range of academic disciplines, ranging from physics to psychology to anthropology to more physics (a surprising amount of physics) and any variety of topics in between. Unfortunately I found myself less able to appreciate many of the otherwise great physics essays because they just weren’t accessible to my current knowledge base. Out of the essays that I was able to more fully appreciate, there was a large range in the quality of different essays. Admittedly, many were very concise and well written, and very immersed within current academic literature. On the other hand, several essays cause one to wonder whether their respective authors were bribed/forced/dragged into contributing halfhearted attempts to the collection.

Some essays I particularly enjoyed included: Simplicity, Race, Science Makes Philosophy Obsolete, Long Term Memory is Immutable, Nature vs Nurture, Moral Blank-Stateism, Large Randomized Controlled Trials, Mouse Models, Moore’s Law, People are Sheep, Culture, Crime Entails Only Actions of Criminals and The Power of Statistics. I found all of these essays to be readable and pretty thought provoking. I’ve always found reading criticisms of existing poorly thought out ideas a great way to refresh my evaluative skills, enrich my critical understanding of various debates and generally immerse myself within academic literature.

While there are some real gems within this collection, I found the essays too short to more than raise one or two interesting ideas each. They reminded me a lot of TED talks – quick and easy to digest, they are great for refreshing your minds and prompting moments of serendipitous insight. However, many essays are also very forgettable (indeed, I’ve already forgotten the majority of what I’ve read from this book). You could argue that shallow, quick-and-dirty criticisms of various ideas are more unhelpful than no criticisms at all. Similarly to TED talks, the short essay format also gives rise to many sweeping conclusions. I’d definitely agree that these essays are meant merely to start conversations rather than end them. There are some that would find reading such small snippets of criticism a waste of time, but if you find that TED talks enrich your life, you’ll probably like this book as well.

This is an excellent example of a book that should not be read from cover to cover. Initially, I was very adamant about reading ALL of the essays within this book, before I realized what a terrible misallocation of time that would be. More than anything else, this book was quite humbling in giving me glimpse at the many many things I still do not understand. I think that this could be an interesting book to flick through once in a while, but that I probably will opt to read books that cover more depth than breadth in the future.

three. Naked Statistics

Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan (Finished: Jan 12 2016)

Rating: 3/5

Difficulty: 3/5

Read if: You would like to learn more about statistics but are not willing to crack open a textbook, you would like a lighter mathematical read than your textbook (both literally and figuratively), you have finished your formal education in mathematics but would like to renew your math intuition, you would like to understand the social applications of statistics, you would like to understand various research methodologies in greater depth.

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If you have ever attempted to prove any claim ever in your life, you will most likely have stumbled across the alluring power of statistics. Statistics provide empirical rigor to otherwise unverified claims. They allow us to catch cheaters, predict weather patterns, prove correlations and evaluate interventions. Yet, despite their omnipresence, statistics are poorly understood. “Naked Statistics” offers a charming and funny introduction to the nature of statistics for the uninitiated.

The book is replete with very cool examples of statistics in action. For instance, Wheelan walks through the 2008 financial crisis, explaining how financial tools that were seemingly both accurate and precise led to overconfident investors and poor decision making. By ignoring the small probability of very large losses (even though over enough time, at least some of those large losses are bound to occur) investors made poor bets that ultimately backfired.

In another section of the book, Wheelan explains the method of regression analysis through an attempt to prove that height and weight are empirically correlated, explaining how to control for other factors such as gender, age, etc. and hence isolate the effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable.

In addition to explaining the usefulness of statistics, and perhaps even more importantly, the book lists several ways statistics can be misleading or just plain wrong. For instance, it stresses the necessity of large and representative data sets, the importance of understanding precisely what one statistic is meant to prove, the difficulties in proving correlation (never mind causation), the problems with measuring the effects of two similarly used interventions, etc.

One of the most interesting points made in this book is the idea that while statistics can provide better and clearer descriptive information about the world, they cannot make normative judgements on their own. I think this is an important and necessary lesson for those (myself included) who are shying away from “fuzzy” anecdotal or theoretical knowledge and towards more “rigorous” empirical or evidence-based truths. Pushing for “evidence-based actions” certainly has a lot of merit, insofar that data can sufficiently provide accurate descriptive information about the world, but data alone cannot make decisions for us.

While this book does provide a lot of interesting and useful information, I would not recommend it to anyone interested in actually learning how to conduct the math of statistics (except for very simple probability lessons, perhaps). Perhaps I am too used to the formalized study of math, but I find it incredibly difficult to learn mathematics simply by reading the equations and proofs associated with a particular field of math. To understand the actual math behind statistics, I would most likely need to actually do problem sets to strengthen my quantitative muscles. Thus, Wheelan finds himself in the perplexing situation of offering both too much and too little information about a subject – too little to allow me to comprehensively understand exactly what methods he is using, but too much for what could otherwise serve as a simple introduction to the social uses and pitfalls of statistics.

Overall, this book largely serves its function as a well-written, humorous, light introduction to statistics. It provides the reader with enough information to allow her to evaluate the social uses of statistics in an educated manner, and follow along simple statistical methodologies. For those reasons I think this book is worth reading, as long as one does not expect to actually become a statistician by its end.

two. Nudge

Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (Finished: Jan 10 2016)

Rating: 3.5/5

Difficulty: 2/5

Read if: You are interested in behavioral economics, you are interested in libertarian paternalism, you are curious as to what “libertarian paternalism” might be, you are interested in data-driven policy, you are interested in great (social) design, you are interested in economics or social psychology or some mixture of the two.

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The idea of “libertarian paternalism” is one that is meant to straddle the classic policy divide between right leaning and left leaning camps, and put an end to the “big government vs. small government” debate. It recognizes that while people often have noble intentions (e.g. quit smoking, start exercising, read 52 books or more in a year), due to laziness, ignorance, forgetfulness, temptation or any number of human vices people have trouble actualizing their intentions. A “nudge”, therefore, is anything that influences people towards their self-expressed desires without forbidding any alternatives. Because of the gap between peoples’ intentions and actions, Thaler and Sunstein stress that there is room for a form of paternalism that reinforces free will.

Nudge is an incredibly interesting read, and offers many new ideas for all choice architects – that is to say, anyone that designs the advertisements, leaflets, forms, emails, websites, signs, room layouts, apps and other billion influences on the choices that people make. While the beginning of the book spends some time detailing what a nudge is and when it is most useful, the majority of the book offers practical suggestions for how to integrate “nudges” into real life.

For instance, one practical idea for people who design surveys and forms is that if most recipients have already completed the form, when you send out the form to new people, you should include prominently the information that over half of their peers completed the form to date. Social psychology suggests that people like to conform to the choices that the majority of their peers have made, and hence this strategy has been proven to be very effective at increasing form submission rates.

Another simple and cost-effective “nudge” applicable to many scenarios is to require companies of all kinds to become more transparent about their environmental standards, financial records, etc. Simply by requiring companies to publish (easily understandable) records about their own behaviors will a) call attention to easily solvable problems and b) give corporations an incentive to improve their behaviors to avoid ending up on “worst polluter” lists.

Finally, because people often don’t have the time (or energy or knowledge) to choose between many highly complex choices (such as different insurance plans, investment plans, healthcare plans etc.), choosing a good default option that would suit the majority of people is an incredibly important. For instance, choosing a reasonable healthcare plan that would maximize returns for most individuals would help many people enjoy better quality lives even if they do not research extensively many different healthcare options.

While often brilliant, towards the end the book occasionally feels repetitive. While hand holding you through policy suggestions for every sphere of social and economic activity, Sunstein and Thaler largely repeat a fixed range of (admittedly very cool) ideas. Nevertheless, if you are interested in any specific areas of policy (e.g. issues within education, the environment, healthcare, marriage, etc.) “Nudge” will most likely have useful and interesting issue-specific policy recommendations you may enjoy reading.

As a book devoted to the art of good policy, Nudge reminds me that good policy is not necessarily rooted in one ideological camp over another, but is rooted in good data, a results-oriented viewpoint, a willingness to experiment with new ideas and a deep compassion for the issues at hand. Too often, I’ve allowed myself to confuse my normative opinions about what the state of the world ought to be with my policy opinions about how we should attempt to achieve those goals. I should keep in mind the fact that simply believing a problem should be solved does not suggest an immediate solution to the said problem. Where governments and interested agents can solve problems at minimal cost to individual liberty (or to limited resources), they should take that most desirable of options.

pointfive. Poor Economics

Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (Finished: Dec 26 2015)

Rating: 4/5

Difficulty: 2.5/5

Read if: You’re interested in developmental economics at all, you’re interested in economics and economic experiments, you’re willing to challenge your perceptions of poverty.

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Even though poverty is an incredibly interesting, complex situation that lends itself to a complicated and nuanced economics, the economics of poverty is often ignored when it comes to policy-making. While developed world economics is seen as incomprehensible to ordinary people, developing world economics and in particular the economics of poverty is treated as though it were incredibly simplistic. We assume without hesitation that all charitable initiatives will do some good, even though we’d never assume that all developed world policy proposals invariably create good outcomes. The greatest service Banerjee, Duflo and other writers of popular books on developmental economics do for the general public is in complicating the simple narrative of poverty that many people believe, and in doing so promoting a more empathetic and data-driven look at policies for the poor.

The second greatest service “Poor Economics” does is in establishing the place of randomized controlled trials in developmental economics. Often a field contaminated by the three is of ideology, ignorance and inertia, Banerjee and Duflo reinvigorate the study of developmental economics by breaking the field down into a series of small experiments that focus on solving specific problems faced by specific communities. In doing so, they demonstrate where and when a poverty trap exists, the importance of listening to the poor when constructing poverty-alleviation initiatives, the place for markets within development, the decisions made by people with little income, the markets that exist to serve the poor (and the markets that don’t), and many more interesting lessons.

One of the most important ideas that I took away is how profoundly similar people are, regardless of how much they earn. When explaining the actions of the poor, we often endow the poor with attributes of great nobility or heroism (especially those of us within the liberal camp), and forget that poor people are not particularly courageous or moral, but are simply human beings living within a particular economic circumstance.

For instance, an early section of the book comments on a study that found that as the extreme poor (those living under $1USD per day, PPP adjusted) become slightly richer, even if they are starving they not to consume more overall calories, but will consume better tasting ones. So for instance, if someone typically consumes coarse grains and becomes slightly richer, she tends to consume more luxury grains (like rice) than to consume a larger quantity of grains overall. While it could perhaps lift someone out of a “poverty trap” if they consumed more calories, this effect is both insignificant in situations where a persons economic welfare is not strictly tied to their physical well-being, and is often so minute on a day to day basis as to go completely unnoticed. Information asymmetry tends to be very great among the poor, who often don’t know (or don’t believe) the benefits of good nutrition and cannot perceive the economic benefits of nutrition over a short scale of time. So of course, it makes perfect sense that even starving people will sometimes choose to consume better food given additional income as opposed to more food. This data-backed realization has interesting and significant implications for policy-makers worldwide.

Another important and interesting idea the book touches upon is the subject of microfinance. The microfinance debate will be familiar with anyone that has studied developmental economics before, and is still a key issue that many developing countries contend with. When first introduced as a financial innovation, microfinance was hailed as a game changing innovation in the field of developmental economics and was even honored with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. In recent years, it has been both exalted and vilified by numerous voices from many different political leanings. Again through an examination of the effects of microfinance on (shocker) a micro-level, Banerjee and Duflo reach a conclusion on the benefits of microfinance that strikes a balance between extremes.

All in all, this book is extremely interesting both in the breadth of issues it covers and in the meticulous examination with which it regards all of its subjects. Definitely worth a read!

 

one. Nothing to Envy

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick (Finished: Jan 3 2016)

Rating: 3/5

Difficulty: 2/5

Read if: You know little about North Korea but would like to know more, you have a general interest in North Korea / Korean politics, you enjoy generally great longform journalism pieces.

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No other country is so routinely vilified and mocked as is North Korea, and yet despite the fact that the DPRK is the butt of so many jokes and intense debates, we know very little about the country or its people. In this book Demick, a South Korea based journalist, recounts the narratives of North Korean defectors from the city of Chongjin, North Korea’s 3rd largest city.

I think overall this book was a great (if at times shallow) introduction into the lives of people in North Korea. While Demick obviously has a political bias in beseeching for a united Korea (as she states in her introduction), there is still room for a lot of nuance within the book. Several of the defectors acknowledge that the happiest moments of their lives occurred within North Korea. In fact, I think one of the most compelling parts of this book is that it sheds light on the lives of defectors in South Korea and neighboring China. While many of the defectors do not live blissfully perfect lives after defecting (one becomes what seems to be a “madam” in South Korea’s sex industry, several report symptoms of depression and isolation), their lives still seem improved on par after escaping the DPRK. One of the defectors, who was a rather prestigious doctor in North Korea, describes finding that the dogs in Chinese villages ate better than the doctors in North Korea.

Having just finished attending a seminar class on Authoritarianism, this book reminded me of the idea that globalization of information helps to decrease authoritarianism by shedding light on how poor the living conditions in authoritarian regimes tend to be for everyday people. It does seem that a large part of what motivated people to defect was the promise of much better lives in other countries.

This book also reminded me of the incredible depths of poverty and hunger that some people continue to face in the world. It certainly reminds me of the fact that plain white rice is considered an extreme luxury for some communities. I think reading such detailed depictions of hunger have made me more conscious of my own consumption. Incidentally, I’d love to read much more about global hunger in the future. Poverty alleviation has made tremendous strides in raising the per capita income levels of many people over the last few years (particularly in India, China, and other population dense emerging economies), and this has helped to give many more people access to food. As pointed out by a really interesting chapter in the book Poor Economics, the problem seems to have shifted from providing people with enough calories to survive towards providing people with nutritious, good-tasting calories. Nevertheless it is incredibly sad to read of the kind of hunger, that killed kind-hearted people first, that caused pain and disease and heartbreak, that was the norm in N. Korea during the ’90s.

I think this book also greatly romanticizes the idea of a world without technology, where young couples would find the prospect of walking for hours in the dark exciting and mysterious. It has become the norm to wax nostalgic about an antiquated past, but nevertheless there still seems something compelling about the idea of living devices-free. Even if the idea of living without technology is a little silly, I think a legitimate question still remains unanswered: How can we actually measure the effect of technology on our happiness levels? In fact does technology actually make us happier at all? Has this effect on happiness (presumably a positive effect) reached severely diminishing or even decreasing returns yet? In the book, a young woman writes that given the instant gratification of technology her romance with another defector fizzled out. The idea that there is some value in making an effort to achieve some things that greater ease of communication / action has destroyed is again, not a new one. Still, perhaps it is worth re-examining whether technology has an appreciable and desirable effect on human well-being (and in the process return to age-old questions about what well-being/happiness constitute.)

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Apologies for an incredibly rambly, tangential start to my reviews!