Tagged

government

A collection of 23 posts

4-stars

Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution

"Valiant Ambition" shows how dicey the revolution was and how frequently both the British and American sides screwed things up. Philbrick guides us through Revolutionary War debacles and Arnold's steps towards treason.

5-stars

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

“Goddamn airplane is made out of balonium.”  Fighter pilot John Boyd had an extremely low tolerance for bullshit.  In a remarkable three decade career of military service, Boyd exhibited near-mythical talent, range, and insight.  As a tragic genius, he has few parallels in American history. He began as an unbeatable

5-stars

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Gurri explains how the internet and social media make the failures of government policies overwhelming apparent and are eroding the legitimacy of our ruling institutions and elites, opening our society up to a nihilist death spiral.

5-stars

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

Under Eisenhower, two brothers ascended to the commanding heights of the US foreign policy establishment. One brother was appointed Secretary of State. The other, Allen Dulles, became the head of the CIA. Or as he himself sinisterly called it, "the secretary of state for unfriendly countries."

4-stars

Billion Dollar Whale

Wright and Hope help us track the ascent of Malaysian con-man Jho Low and unravel the complex financial chicanery that enabled him to siphon more than 5 billion dollars from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund while financing the Hollywood movie "Wolf of Wall Street"

4-stars

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power

Coll clearly delineates the boundaries between ExxonMobil's profit-focused, engineering-driven enterprise and the messy, internally-conflicted, and constantly shifting world of official US geopolitics.

4-stars

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

2020 Democratic candidate Andrew Yang lays out his universal basic income plan and an optimistic vision for the future.

4-stars

The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

A revisionist history of Sino-US relations that traces how a concerted Chinese PR campaign duped American policymakers for generations and cost US taxpayers 3x more than the Manhattan Project.

2-stars

Los Zetas, Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico

Correa-Cabrera opts to take an academic, quantitative perspective on the war on drugs. Unfortunately, she falls flat, delivering a lifeless narrative that doesn't redeem itself with any real insight into the economics of the cartels.

5-stars

The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

Through the lens of selectorate theory, the authors explore corruption in resource-rich African states, International Olympic Committee and Fifa scandals, and how foreign aid often perpetuates problems rather than solving them.

5-stars

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

Treating the global narcotics industry "as if it were a business like any other," Wainwright delves into how drug dealers have to deal with supply chains, HR issues, and digital disruption just like everyone else.

5-stars

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth

Financial Times reporter Tom Burgis traces the illicit flows of tens of billions of dollars of African natural resource wealth to local dictators, Western corporations and financial elites, and - more recently - massive Chinese enterprises.

5-stars

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens

Reveals the mechanisms that are systematically shifting economic burdens from the wealthy to the poor and how this cheating destroys accountability between governing elites and the population at large, especially in developing nations.

4-stars

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

Browder documents his fight against crooked oligarchs and his long campaign for justice for one of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered while in Russian detention.

4-stars

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

GMU prof Bryan Caplan recoils in horror at the low societal ROI of our trillion-dollar annual investment in education (for comparison, Caplan notes, we spend only $700 billion on the dreaded "military industrial complex" annually)

3-stars

Science: The Endless Frontier

"Science: The Endless Frontier" is a landmark in the history of American science because it launched the National Science Foundation. At FDR's request, Vannevar Bush wrote this report to lay out how science would be funded in the US after WWII. Bush's career - entrepreneur, dean of MIT,

1-star

Report From Iron Mountain

"Report From Iron Mountain" is a book whose history is much more interesting than the book itself. Originally proclaimed as a "top secret" 1960's report that had been leaked to the public, Leonard Lewin ultimately claimed authorship and revealed the whole thing as a satirical hoax.

3-stars

The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin

The New York Times' Moscow Bureau Chief gives us an interesting but incomplete look at Putin's acquisition and maintenance of power. In fairness, any biography of Putin is going to be far from complete - he lives an intensely stage-managed life and much of his life is shrouded in privacy

5-stars

How Asia Works

"How Asia Works" rejects the neoliberal Washington consensus on free trade and deregulated financial markets. This book got on my list because Bill Gates said it was one of his top 5 books of the year. Studwell looks at Asian countries that have done well over the last

2-stars

A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations

I don't always read extreme right-wing conspiracy theory books, but when I do... "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations" is a bit better than I had expected. This book is the basis for the neoreactionary "Dark Enlightenment" that apparently is getting significant uptake among the West

5-stars

Hamilton

Chernow's "Hamilton" does justice to the oft-maligned and overlooked legacy of one of the greatest American geniuses of all time. Hamilton is finally - and rightfully - back in the spotlight now thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda's wildly popular hip-hop Broadway musical. This is the book that inspired the

politics

The Power Broker

"The Power Broker" pulls back the curtain on how things get done in America. This is the greatest book I have ever read. Robert Moses’ ascent from a marginalized Yale undergraduate to the supreme power broker in New York is a nearly unbelievable story, but Robert Caro does

5-stars

Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

In "Dying Every Day", one of history's greatest philosophers plays the tutor to one of history's most notorious dictators. Alexander had his Aristotle. Nero had his Seneca. Romm animates the famed Stoic and makes us see his world - an imperial Rome full of conniving courtiers, shifting alliances,