I try to remember here how I liked the books I read (and what books I read in the first place :-))
These books are only those that I really read to a big extent. So I leave out all the books I read half, but then had something better to do or technical books where I looked something up and then went on. And also I neglect Comics :-(
For the books I read in German, I will try to provide the english title.
- 2020
- The Mom test
- Der letzte Weynfeldt
- Other minds
- Risiko
- At Home
- Mit brennender Geduld
- Herbstmilch
- The Why-are-you-here Cafe
- Das verborgene Leben der Meisen
- 2019
- Nullzeit
- Die Pilgerjahre des farblosen Tsukura Tazaki
- Extreme Economies
- Winterbienen
- The relive box
- ... dann bin ich auf den Baum geklettert!
- Der Boxer
- Soundcheck. Geschichten für Musikfans.
- Cat's Cradle
- Why we sleep
- Lean Impact
- 2018
- Qualityland
- A crack in creation
- Never split the difference
- Leere Herzen
- Cheers
- Utopia For Realists
- 2017
- The Moral Economy
- Am Hang
- The Martian
- Als ich ein kleiner Junge war
- Perlmanns Schweigen
- The power of scrum
- The girl on the train
- 2016
- Montecristo
- Ruhm
- Brenerova
- 2015
- Farewell Marienburg
- 2014
- Schuld
- 2012
- Das Wüten der ganzen Welt
- Der Fall Collini
- Die Welt von Gestern
- Die Chemie des Todes / Kalte Asche
- Small World
- Das Paradies ist nebenan / Philip und die anderen
- Ein schöner Tag für den Tod
- Debt: The first 5000 years
- Manna
- 2010
- Der Knochenmann
- Sustainable Energy - without the hot air
- Die 13 1/2 Leben des Käptn Blaubär
- We the people- Consenting to a deeper democracy
- Hammer and tickle
- 2009
- Jugendstil
- Ein Junge aus Amsterdam
- Komm, süßer Tod
- Collapse
- The transition timeline
- The origin of wealth
- Mord im 31. Stock
- Freaconomics
- 2008
- Someone like you
- Die Kunst Des Stilvollen Verarmens
- A Theory Of Power
- Hard-boiled Wonderland und das Ende der Welt
- 2007
- Felidae
- Chart Throb
- Prinzip Menschlichkeit
- How To Survive A Robot Uprising
- I, Robot
- Der Schwarm
- 2006
- On Interactive Storytelling
- Life's Solution
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
- The long dark tea-time of the soul
- Geschichte machen
- Der Dritte Mann
- Die Vermessung der Welt
- Tropic of Capricorn
- Die Kunst über Geld nachzudenken
- 2005
- Ausweitung der Kampfzone
- Boomtown Blues
- Schiffbruch mit Tiger
- The Blank Slate
- Radical Evolution
- Unternehmen Stahlsprung
- Wie die Tiere
- Blink
- Das Rätsel Ödipus
- 2004
- Lieblose Legenden
- So zärtlich war Suleyken
- Der entzauberte Regenbogen
- Ladidel
- Gene, Meme und Gehirne
- The Language Instinct
- How The Mind Works
- Geist, Sprache und Gesellschaft
- Die Wiederentdeckung des Geistes
2021
One of the all-time popular self-help books, published in 1989. And for good reasons. One is that Mr Covey is a good writer. This book is helping me get into a productive mindset, but not in a selling or preachy manner. Just by being grounded and convincing. I can imagine picking it up once in a while to be inspired by the words again.
If I was asked to boil the book down to two messages, it would be this:
- Choose and live your personal objectives based on principles (Independence, habits 1-3)
- Serve others to create higher value for everyone (Interdependence, habits 4-6)
Here are the habits:
- Be proactive ― Discover that you are free to choose and how to react. Focus on what is inside your circle of influence. You'll expand it later. Begin to understand that you should build production capacity (PC), not only production (P).
- Begin with the end in mind ― What do you want to be remembered for? Write a personal mission statement, including all/most of the roles you perform. Recognize where your center is now, looking into security, guidance, power and wisdom. Visualise and affirm your mission.
- Put first things first ― Don't forget doing what matters most (the quadrant of important, but non-urgent tasks). In fact, plan your week and prioritise these tasks. Say no to others, so you make room. Delegate, but to stewards, not gofers.
- Think win-win ― It sounds logical, but most of us are actually stuck in (I)win-(you)lose or (I)lose-(you)win thinking. Win-win takes empathy, an abundance mindset and courage. Go for win-win or for No Deal. Specify results (not methods).
- Seek first to understand, then to be understood ― Practice empathic listening with a sincere desire to understand (mirroring without the desire is manipulation), setting autobiographic interpretations aside. Your negotiations will have the right order: ethos (-> credibility), pathos (-> empathy), then logos (-> your reasoning).
- Synergize ― Win-win (habit 4) can lead to high-value solutions, but you need to find them in a creative process. Value the differences (for which you need habit 5).
- Sharpen the saw ― Working on yourself matters (give this attention in habit 3). Four dimensions: Physical, mental, social and spiritual. As we practice all habits, we continuously cycle through learning, comitting and doing (this really sounds like the Lean Startup approach).
What I did / want to do:
- I wrote a first draft for a personal mission statement.
- Since two months, I'm practicing weekly planning.
- I want to practice thoroughly understanding somebody's position first before mine comes in.
- In my relationships, I want to develop a practice of servitude, from a strong & grounded center.
It is a long road, as it begins with & is based on principles.
Habits take time to learn. My week planning needed two months of practice to even begin to see how I can make it more useful (limit goals, check back mid-week, evaluate & reflect). My personal mission statement is not convincing me yet.
But somehow I'm still on it and I believe in the approach.
2020
I made a big step and cold-called over a dozen businesses this year. I was (and am) trying to find out which of my company's services they might need.
Now Mr. Fitzpatrick is telling me that large parts of these conversations were in vein and even misleading. He is talking about the parts of conversations where we make each other feel good ― you know, those friendly chit-chat moments. Instead of validating my ideas and services, my conversation partners were giving me meaningless "fluffy" compliments ― just like my mom would when I tell her about an idea of mine (hence the "Mom Test"):
You're great, tell me more later!
Well, he has a point. What's important is to learn from potential customers. Be casual, but inquire past the fluffy compliments and the meaningless complaints about problems they would never actually pay for to get resolved. A meeting is a success if and only if you either learned something valuable from them, or if you got a clear commitment or advancement. These conversations are also not random, they are a tool for keeping all eyes on what matters most: In a startup, all founders need to be involved in this learning. The three big questions need to be constantly addressed.
Learning from customers is the pure focus of this little book. I like that Fitzpatrick stresses how one should not put off building and measuring (the other two steps in the lean cycle), either. Get to it, come ever closer.
The book has really good examples of conversations, most of them sounding nice at first, but being mostly a waste of time. I can see why everyone in the entrpreneurial scene recommends it. I do, too.
Krimi im Kunstsammlermilieu und Love Story. Gut geschrieben. Einen Twist habe ich vorhergesehen und mir dann selbst auf die Schulter geklopft, aber Suter hatte noch einen anderen parat, auf den letzten paar Seiten. Interessanter Hauptcharakter, ein gut situierter Kunstexperte und Lebemann, der sich von seiner anerzogenen Passivität kurieren will ― und das ist natürlich gutes Krimifutter, wenn eine neue Frau in sein Leben tritt und ein paar zwielichtige Figuren ihn übervorteilen wollen.
Octopus intelligence, specifically. And the evolution of intelligent nervous systems in general.
Between these two angles lies the fact that Octopus intelligence developed on such a different path, it surely is much like studying Alien intelligence!
I studied Philosophy of Mind during my bachelor program, and I did find it fascinating. I used to think that I'd never dive into these topics again ― that I could only do it in my university years, when I had the time and capacity that only a university student has for such "dry" topics.
Peter Godfrey-Smith convinced me otherwise.
In this book, he combines three major disciplines very nicely:
- Philosophy of Mind:
- What is conscious subjective thought?
- What is intelligence?
- What is the role of our inner monologue in both subjective experience and intelligence?
- Marine Biology:
- How does Octopus intelligence work, when they have half their neurons in their arms?
- How do they create movie-like coloured displays on their skin, and why, if they don't seem to be able to see in colour?
- Why do Octopus only live between two and four years, given their high complexity?
- Theory of Evolution:
- How did inner nervous activity in organisms evolve in the oceans, hundreds of millions of years ago?
- Did language evolve from an inner feedback loop for control signals?
- How often has higher intelligence been created during evolution independently?
- How crucial is social life for intelligence, seeing the octopus don't seem to have too much of it?
There are stories from diving expeditions to a magical Octopus place off the coast of Australia mixed in between all of these deep pondering, making the book quite captivating.
What is also captivating is that during the research for this book, Godfrey-Smith could follow the latest advancements in Octopus research. For instance, the Octopus genome was sequenced in 2015, which back-dated the evolution of intelligence in Octopus and Cuttlefish (it happened independently even within their evolutionary branch!). Also, theories about the ability of the Octopus skin to produce colours were advanced just a few years ago.
This is science journalism at its finest.
Was ist Risikokompetenz?
- Die Wettervorhersage deuten können (Was heisst X% Regenwahrscheinlichkeit eigentlich?)
- Defensives Entscheiden erkennen und meiden.
- Heuristiken (Faustregeln) für die Entscheidungsfindung schätzen lernen.
- Verstehen, was Testresultate (z.B. ein positiver HIV-Befund oder Down-Syndrom Früherkennung) wirklich bedeuten.
- Wahrscheinlicheiten (z.B. für den Sinn von Krebsvoruntersuchungen) in natürliche Häufigkeiten (x von 100) umwandeln, und auch visuelle Darstellungen benutzen ― probate Mittel, um sie zu durchdringen.
- Wissen, dass auch Experten mit Doktortiteln Wahrscheinlichkeiten nicht verstehen.
Das ist sehr nützliches Wissen!
Ich denke, das Buch hätte kürzer sein können, aber Gigerenzer hat auch noch andere, weniger nützliche (aber dennoch unterhaltsame) Dinge über Banker, Ärzte und Liebende zu sagen. Und er hat noch ein Kapitel für seinen Wunsch, Riskiokompetenz als Schulfach einzuführen.
Got this as an unexpected gift from Jan. Thanks!
How has our home developed to be what it is today? Bill Bryson packs many interesting stories into one book.
When he says "home", he means all rooms but also the garden. The garden will also have stories about parks, because those preceded what we today like about gardens. Furniture is in homes, too. And sleeping and dying happens there. All of this changed over time, so Bryson can talk about it.
It reads really well sometimes, it depends if you're into the current tidbit. I have the feeling Bryson had a lot of interesting stories lying around from research into his previous books which fit no other theme. And I'm fine with it. A good book to read.
Ein älterer berühmter Roman, mit erfolgreicher Verfilmung. Gute Urlaubslektüre.
Eine Hauptfigur ist der berühmte chilenische Dichter Pablo Neruda, der in einem Fischerdorf voller Analphabeten seiner Arbeit nachgeht, bevor er von Allende als Diplomat nach Paris gesandt wird. Es geht viel um Liebe, aber auch viel um Politik. Interessanter Mix.
Interessant ist die Lektüre vielleicht auch in einem moderneren Kontext, wo Nerudas skrupelloses Verhältnis zu Frauen neu diskutiert wird.
Es ist tatsächlich sehr lehrreich, in diesen Erinnerungen zu lesen, wie wenig erstrebenswert es ist, sich zurückzuwünschen in die "gute alte Zeit". Auf dem Lande war das Leben für die meisten Menschen kein Zuckerschlecken.
Selbst bei so interessanten Bräuchen wie dem gemeinschaftlichen Dreschen der örtlichen Felder gibt Wimschneider den entscheidenden extra Hinweis: Nur wer komplett im Dorf integriert ist, ist dabei im Dreschprogramm. Und das kann schon mal drei Generationen dauern.
Das Leben war vor allem Arbeit. Für persönliche Lebenswegentscheidungen kkein Platz. Auch nicht für liebevolle Zeit mit Kleinkindern.
Wimschneider ist sehr stolz, dass sie auch immer ihr Los akzeptiert hat, ohne zu murren. Die Liebe ihres Mannes und ihrer Kinder, der wirtschafliche Erfolg und der Neid der anderen geben ihr Recht. Das klingt mir etwas einfach aber so sind halt die Autobiographien ...
A little story written by a life coach. Say you sat down in a strange cafe, where the menu read:
Why are you here?
Do you fear death?
Are you fulfilled?
Then the waitress and the chef basically chat with you about these questions. Well, mostly the first one. It can be quite thought-provoking at some points, if you are ready to search for some more focus in what you do during each day. It mostly cricles around the question if you should start asking yourself what you purpose for existing (PFE) is (because once you do, it's hard to go back!).
While you'll find that many people report this book helped them instigate a major change in their lives, I believe this book can also be dangerous. Strelecky has some underlying hypotheses here:
- Everybody can find their PFE.
- As a consequence, if they can't, it's their own fault for not searching well.
- Advertising makes us sick and unhappy, but if your PFE is doing advertising, you should go for it.
- Saving money for your future from work you don't particularly enjoy is a sucker's path.
These hypotheses are ridiculous. Next to books like Herbstmilch, but also given just any general insight into how different live stories come to be (think of sicknesses, family support, poverty and so on), it does seem to be a good idea to treat this book with caution when reading. It could make you feel worse and send you down a path that actually leads away from the happiness which is possible for you.
Other people are more harsh in their opinion :)
Der Klappentext ist etwas reisserisch ("Vielweiberei! Sie essen Fledermaushirn!"). Der Inhalt aber ist leicht erzählt und sehr lehrreich.
Was macht das Leben der Kohl- und Blaumeisen aus, wenn man ein ganzes Jahr betrachtet? Balz (Gesang!), Nestbau, Paarung, Aufzucht. Essen finden und Überleben.
Was unterscheidet Meisen von anderen Vögeln? Was erzählt uns die Meisenforschung über das Leben, und wie geht sie vor? Wovon stammen eigentlich Meisen ab (Dinosaurier)? Wie reagieren Vögel auf den Klimawandel?
2019
Unser Held ist 36, als er sich endlich damit befasst, warum er mit 19 seine vier besten Freunde verloren hat. Sein Erwachsenendasein hat er damit verbracht, sich farblos und letztlich unliebbar zu fühlen.
Es ist ein modernes Thema, dass man mit Mitte/Ende 30 nochmal den Zeitpunkt reflektiert, an dem man in die Erwachsenenwelt hinüber und sich eine Erwachsenenidentität zulegen musste. Vieles geht dann vielleicht etwas zu schnell und verläuft zu unbedacht. So schien es mir, und im Klappentext fand sich dann auch das Jahr - 2013. Könnte also passen, dass es ein eher modernes Thema ist.
Murakami ist wieder ein gutes Buch gelungen. Besonders die letzte Szene in Finnland, in der unser Held die letzte seiner vier Freunde aufsucht, ist wunderbar. Und wieder lohnt es sich, die Musik, die Murakami erwähnt, auch beim Lesen aufzulegen. Hier: "Le mal du pays" auf "Années de pèlerinage I" von Liszt. Ein paar der eingewobenen Geschichten, von denen Murakami ja immer einige dabei hat, haben sich mir für den Gesamterzählstrang allerdings nicht erschlossen.
Nine visits to places in which the local economic circumstances are extreme. By an economist, who acknowledges that his profession tends to ignore these places as they do not fit into the neat economic models in one way or the other.
But as Davies explains, other professions, having the same tendency, visit extreme cases as a tool to find out things they otherwise couldn't. Medicine, for example learns a lot from the fate of freak accidents like brain injuries. Material scienists study how structures break, in order to build robust ones. Chemists learn about elements from extremely hot, cold or dense places in the universe.
Davies chose the following nine economies, and he labelled them in three ways, which inidcate what we can learn from them for our own situations:
- [Survival] Aceh, Indonesia (how an economy re-builds, after a catastrophe like the 2004 tsunami wipes everything away)
- [Survival] Zaatari refugee camp (how markets appear within and work around restrictions)
- [Survival] Louisiana State Prison (how markets appear even where money is forbidden)
- [Failure] Darien, Panama (how the tragedy of the commons stands in the way of markets properly valuating externalities)
- [Failure] Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (economic life inside extreme and long-lasting corruption)
- [Failure] Glasgow, Scotland (erosion of public wealth after the death of the main industry)
- [Future] Japan (economics inside a rapidly aging society)
- [Future] Estonia (a society betting it all on digitization)
- [Future] Santiago de Chile (inequality and its consequences inside ecomomic growth)
So this book is a little trip around the world and to gain some new perspectives. That is great value.
In terms of economics, there is something for everybody to like or to critizise. Who or what is responsible for these situations, in good or in bad sense? Governments or markets? I've seen people trying to interprete this book in only one way (ignoring or arguing against certain parts of it) but Davies isn't one-sided.
Gekauft weil es für den deutschen Buchpreis 2019 nominiert war - und ich verstehe warum.
Das Tagebuchformat erscheint erstmal einfach, aber ab der Hälfte begreift man, was Scheuer zeigt. Das Warten auf den Einmarsch der Allierten in West-Deutschland 1944 besteht aus den Geschichten einzelner. Aber es ist auch ein Naturereignis. Menschen sind Natur.
Die Bomber fliegen nachts nach Osten. Tags ziehen die Soldaten nach Westen zur letzten Offensive. Jeder tut das, was er oder sie denkt tun zu müssen. Durchhalteparolen. Trinken. Oder Imkern, damit es auch nach dem Krieg noch Bienen und Honig gibt. Oder miteinander schlafen. Oder Juden über die Grenze bringen.
Es gibt hier eine Heldengeschichte der wir folgen können (obwohl der Held nicht nur aus lauteren Grunden im Widerstand ist). Aber wahrend seine spannende Geschichte dem Ende zu geht, fühlte ich mich beim Lesen, als ob Scheuer auszoomt - als ob der Held und seine Bühne kleiner werden, und die Wogen der Geschichte sie mitnehmen. Allerdings ist das nicht der Fall, der zoom war meine Perspektive, von Scheuer im Mittelteil durch Detailbeobachtungen Stück für Stück verstellt.
A very good and experienced storyteller takes on modern topics for a short storiy collection.
- The main story has a new technology (a console) with which you can relive any moment in your life, which becomes an addiction, which cripples one's relstionship to the present.
- Boyle also tackles climate change: A couple in California lives through an unprecedented drought, which slowly eats away at their garden, and then at neighbor relationships. Pretty illustrative how climate change might creep in our lives, and how our social relationships might get strained.
- A teenage boy on an island which is overrun by a storm (which happens more often every year) leaves the village's shelter in the local school on the hill and wades through waste-deep water to get his mother's medication. Just a scene to illuminate a community in which the extreme has become normal, and the end (of life on the island) is an accepted future.
These are just three examples, which I picked because the topics are modern. Boyle is simply very good at what he does and the other stories are really good, as well.
Dirk Rossmann über sich selbst.
Ich finde Autobiographien lesenswert, wenn mich interessiert unter welchen Umständen sich etwas entwickelt hat. Wie Drogeriemärkte eigentlich vom Laden an der Ecke zu zu grossen Ketten wurden, oder eher: Warum das in den 70er Jahren losging. Alles vor dem Hintegrund der Stadt Hannover, meiner Heimatstadt.
Was fur ein toller Typ Dirk Rossmann ist, einer der immer querdenkt, auch bei der Bundeswehr (daher der Titel), gibts natürlich in einer Autobiographie mit dazu. Und was für tolle Hilfsprojekte er in der ganzen Welt anzettelt. Ein bisschen Selbstkritik auch, weil er sich an der Börse verzockt hat.
Wenig gibts über kritikwürdige Praktiken in diesem hart umkämpften Markt (z.B. Preisabsprachen und Lohndumping, siehe diesen Leserkommentar fur ein paar Ideen). Nein, es wird einmal der DM Gründer erwähnt, mit viel personlichem Respekt. Fast sportlich, so sehen sich die Unternehmer ja, als Spitzensportler.
Dieser Roman im Warschau der 1930er Jahre ist sehr lebhaft und sehr lesbar. Und geschichtsverbunden. Twardoch will das Bild vom "Paris des Ostens" korrigieren, das viele verwenden, um das Warschau vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg zu charakterisieren. Die rechten Kräfte Polens bemächtigten sich der Stadt um 1937 (und ein paar der echten Namen tauchen hier im Roman auf), und so ist in dieser Geschichte vieles zu finden, was auch in anderen europäischen Städten gang und gäbe war. Leider. Nur das Warschau noch viel ärmlicher war als andere Städte.
Was ein bisschen aufstösst: Es ist eine Mafia-Geschichte - und in denen wird Gewalt leider immer verherrlicht. Es gibt ein paar weibliche Charaktere, doch die sind eher Randfiguren. Am Hamburger Theater führt man das Stück jetzt dennoch aus der weiblichen Sicht auf.
Es sei noch gesagt, dass es einen interessanten Twist gibt gegen Ende. Das ist wirklich gut gemacht.
Kurzgeschichten die irgendwas mit Musik zu tun haben. Entweder durchgängig oder am Rande. Kann man lesen!
Erfrischend finde ich den Mix von Autoren. Es gibt einige junge Deutsche Autoren, aber auch etablierte Schreiber wie T. C. Boyle (gibt es einen Hardrock-Himmel?) und Haruki Murakami (Von Männern, die keine Frauen haben).
Letzterer hat mich mal wieder eingenommen. Seine Geschichte hallt einfach wider. Ein Mann erinnert sich an eine Ex-Freundin, weil er von ihrem Selbstmord gehört hat. Auf so wenig Seiten schafft Murakami es, zwei Riesenthemen zu illustrieren: Das Ich der unschuldigen Jugend (hier: im Alter von 14) wird von der Zeit ausradiert, am meisten durch die Auflösung von relevanten Liebesbeziehungen. Männer, die einmal so eine Frau verloren haben, sind danach nie mehr die Gleichen, im Grunde formen sie den Klub der Männer, die keine Frauen haben, denn sie werden auch ihre wunderbaren neuen Frauen auf irgendeine Weise verlieren, wie sie nun wissen.
Musik kommt in dieser Geschichte vor, weil der Erzähler sich an den Musikgeschmack seiner Ex-Freundin erinnert (Fahrstuhlmusik).
I bought this book because of a HackerNews thread about favourite non-fiction books of 2018. "Why we sleeep" was mentioned several times and also several people described it as life-changing. That's intriguing...
I have to say that is true. I hope it is. I hope I will sleep more regularly and also more in general as a consequence of having read it. Walker is so convincing that it would be disappointing of me not to follow up with changing my habits a bit.
I know for sure that the knowledge of sleep's inner workings and the damage the lack of it does to brain and body functions will stay with me forever.
What a great non-fiction book.
“Lean impact” by Ann Mei Chang takes lessons from the Lean Startup methodology and applies them to impact-making, which is a bit more complex than the traditional startup. She has some new approaches and many examples about social entrepreneurship and impact funding.
The main question is this: How to optimise the impact on the world, when we give our time and money? We could also ask: How can we make this sector more effective and less wasteful?
The first step is to take lessons from the Lean Startup approach, which essentially is about creating a successful product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty (sounds familiar?):
- Dream big, start small.
- Evaluate and test hypotheses – most risky/crucial first.
- Build, measure, learn – fast!
The three pillars in this book are (customer) value, growth & impact. If you cannot satisfy all three, maybe your time and money should go elsewhere.
The first two pillars are from the Lean Startup methodology, where also important tools like MVP or A/B testing were popularized. The third though, impact, is novel. It creates a new game:
“Of course, making the world a better place is far more complicated than buiding an app. It involves more listening, more care, and more stakeholders to ensure solutions are fully embraced, address root causes, and include an engine that will drive growth.”
So in the impact sector, there are a bunch of extra difficulties, for example:
- Funding is restricted and funders require exact planning
- Impact is hard to measure
- Responsible innovation is difficult to get right
And Lean Impact is not only about starting out. Here is Mei’s idea for thinking about what you’ve done so far: Don’t fall in love with your solution – stay focused on the problem and pivot, if needed to truly increase impact. In fact, don’t be satisfied with vanity metrics – report unit and marginal metrics to understand where you are and could be going. Don’t wait until the next grant proposal deadline to evaluate your work – be data-driven, so you can learn and pivot, if needed.
So far, this has all been about the entrepreneurial side of things. How to innovate impact in a lean way. But a huge part of impact entrepreneurship is how impact funding works. How the funders frame their conditions incentivises the entrepreneurs to write certain proposals and do things a certain way – it might even repel certain kind of innovators.
The book thus closes strongly with examining the funding side of things. There are really innovative ideas like paying for outcomes (e.g. for poor pregnant women to regularly visit their doctor, or business reducing their plastic packaging), no matter what method is used to get there (within constraints to do no harm, of course). The funding angle is also quite helpful to understand why the two traditional models of social entrepreneurship – non-profit and for-profit – should both be considered essential building blocks and often be merged.
Another helpful overview is Ann’s keynote presentation.
2018
Der erste von zwei "near-fiction" Romanen den ich dieses Jahr gelesen habe. Deutschland wurde in Qualityland umbenannnt und Konzerne wie TheShop organisieren den Grossteil des täglichen Lebens. Die Story ist nicht das Beste an diesem Buch, aber okay. Aber die vielen kleinen interessanten Ideen/Vorhersagen und die bissigen Werbeblöcke (ich hatte die dunkle Ausgabe, die etwas zynischere Werbung hat) sind grossartig.
Gene editing is taking huge steps right now. The CRISPR technology is what really drove down costs and sped up experimentations. CRISPR will have huge effects on human health, our food system (both animals and plants) and numerous other fields (if that isn't already enough).
And these effects will already arrive within five to ten years. In fact, the first genetically tailored human might have been born a few weeks ago in China.
One of the people who were awarded a Nobel prize for CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna, is telling two stories in this book:
- How did CRISPR come to be? This story is very educational, as it first lays the foundation for what genes are and how we might edit them. Then it explains the discovery of CRISPR (in a bacterium) and how it was engineered to be a tool that can cheaply do almost any alterations to genes you could think of, in a cheap and rather precise manner (more researcgh on preciseness would be good, but preciseness also depends on how well you can describe the change you want to make).
- What happened or might happen afterwards in scientific discoveries and public discussion? Doudna believes that change is coming so fast now, that the public needs to be informed as fast as possible, so that it can weigh in at all.
According to Doudna, we are on the verge to "human-directed evolution".
That we are unprepared for such a colossal responsibility, I have no doubt. But we cannot avoid it. If controlling our own genetic destiny is a terrifying thought, then consider the consequences of having this power, but not managing to control it. That would be truly terrifying - truly unthinkable.
There are some incredible opportunities in gene editing, for instance w.r.t. to huge tasks as feeding the world, avoiding desease or climate change, But being able to change the human genome, especially so soon and with the economic inequality we are facing, can really change societal fabric in a novel dimension.
It's worthwhile to be aware of this, and this book does a good job at it.
Entertaining guide to negotiating by a former FBI hostage negotiator. I think he did a great job telling stories from his past job, which entail how the field of negotiation (and Voss with it) modernised and allowed empathy to become a powerful tool. He goes through a few other important tools, each combined with a story, and in the end gives two examples and a cheatsheet for combining them.
In the end, negotiation is a constant discovery process, not a fixed zero-sum game. As one needs to do with hostage negotiation, Voss argues one should not necessarily shoot for compromises (you can't split the difference on hostages). He says the most successful negotiators have the mindset that there is sometimes a great deal hidden, waiting to be found, if one pays attention and stays open-minded.
Dystopie von Deutschland nach noch mehr Rechtsruck und Politikverdrossenheit in ca. 10 Jahren mit einer interessanten Geschäftsidee der Protagonistin. Danke für die Szenarien und den lesbaren Plot. Aber genau wie Qualityland bin ich nicht ganz sicher, ob man den Raum zwischen den near-fiction Ideen nicht besser hätte füllen können. Aber ich glaube, das ist auch schwierig. Juli Zeh weiss schon, was sie tut.
Keine Story mehr als drei Seiten, sowas muss man können. Ein gutes Buch, wenn man immer mal wieder kurz Zeit hat, aber nicht wirklich schmökern kann. Schöne Gesellschaftsbeobachtungen der deutschen/schweizerischen Geschäftswelt, der Geschäftsmann im Besonderen. Deshalb will ich nicht fest in grossen Firmen arbeiten, so dachte ich immer mal wieder.
This book is a plaidoyer for modern progressive economic ideas for the (near) future of humankind, paired with stories from our recent past which illustrate them. It is based on several essays in the Dutch constructive journalism project De Correspondent. After Dutch publication, it was translated and fitted for the U.S./international audience and there became a real hit.
Here, I'll very briefly summarise each chapter. I'm not going to give my opinion on the contained ideas here, as there is actually a lot of them, which you could discuss one by one (universal basic income takes up the most part of the text btw). But I'll mention that this book is well-sourced (as articles in De Correspondent tend to be). And let me add that personally, I enjoy historical examples and sources to support an argument.
1. The return of Utopia
We have an utopia on our hands - if we only want it. We are quite rich these days, but a re caught up in weird psychological distresses of our time. To get back the big picture and realise our potential, it might pay to listen to so-called "dreamers".
2. Why we should give free money to everyone
The case for a basic universal income. Reports from several trials of the last deecades, e.g. London 2009, Winnipeg 1973 and multiple small experiments in Africa.
3. The end of poverty
Fighting poverty has high returns for taxpayers: Poor people become much more constructive and productive with a small financial relief, when they do not need to fear health or rent problems. Even inequality in general is bad for the economy and well-being of everyone (yes, even rich people).
4. The bizarre tale of President Nixon and his Basic Income Bill
Nixon almost signed a basic income into law. One of his advisors managed to steer him away by finding a negative report about a basic income project in England from 1795 (which is really from a different time and falsely got a bad reputation once historians looked closer). In the years after Nixon, the sentiment turned against the poor personally (Reagan/Thatcher years specifically) and until now basic income never was on the agenda of U.S. politics again.
5. New figures for a new era
The story how GDP was born and why it is out of date as a useful indicator for how a country is really doing. But also alternatives like "Gross National Happiness" are flawed. We'll have to reconsider what we mean with "growth" and "progress".
6. A fifteen-hour workweek
The case for less work and more leisure. Economists at the beginning of the 20th century predicted that we'd be working much less, due to technological progress. While we do work less personally (a trend which in several Western countries stopped since the 1980s) families are more stressed since most often there are now two adults in the workforce.
It is difficult to bring up that people should work less due to a cult around who works hardest. Bregman can think of the following list of topics, where more leisure would benefit society: Stress, climate change, accidents, unemployment, emancipation (of women), aging populations and economic inequality.
7. Why it doesn't pay to be a banker
A short rant against "bullshit jobs". Too much appreciation (in fame and money) is given to jobs which contribute less to society than others. The financial and legal professions aer good examples. Nice historical case-in-point: Once, Ireland's banks closed for months due to striking personnel. The economy did not collapse. Banks are nice to have. When New York's garbage men striked in 1968, they got their way after nine days.
8. Race against the machine
Here, Bregman explains the ongoing disruption by computers. This technological advance is unlike others before - increases in productivity are not coupled to increases in jobs anymore (since about 15+ years). Many humans will not be useful as workers anymore. Inequality will skyrocket. More education is not the easy answer here, either.
Rage against progress might become a trend. Bregman takes us back to the Luddites, an uprising against weaving automation in England 1812.
But in the end, the question to answer is probably not about progress, but about capitalism and how to deal with inequality. Enter Pickety.
9. Beyond the gates of the land of the plenty
We don't really know which development aid is actually helping. Randomised trials and doing away with modeling people as homo economicus is showing a way out.
Then, Bregman describes the case for open borders. because immigrants are industrious, the world economy could be boasted by 65 trillion dollars. Passports are a relatively new invention. We globalised everything but people. Immigrants are not (more likely to be) terrorists, criminals or undermining social cohesion. They are not taking our jobs. Lots of them return.
10. How ideas change the world
As we now know, people have difficulties letting go of their convictions - even when faced with convincing evidence to do so. How do new ideas win, then? Bregman tells the story how neoliberalism won. The story begins in 1947, when government-led interventions were all the rage and is still ongoing though it should have ended after the 2008 crisis. Bregman tells this story not without admiration for the early thinkers (Hayek and Friedman), but does paint Friedman as rather fundamentalist after 1970, when he became a mouthpiece for markets being the best solution for every problem.
11. Epilogue
Bregman calls for the Left to become brave and constructive again. He says they should "reclaim the language of progress": "reform" the financial sector. Spur "innovation" by putting talent where it helps societal outcomes. Be "efficient" - investing in poor people saves a lot of costs. "Cut the nanny state" by paying universal basic income and reducing bureaucracy. Promote "freedom" - spend time on meaningful work, where we choose more wwhat we value.
2017
- "In Haifa, at six day care centes, a fine was imposed on parents who were late in picking up their children at the end of the day. It did not work. Parents responded to the fine by doubling the fraction of time they arrived late." (p.4)
- "Kids less than two years old avidly helped an adult retrieve an out-of-reach toy in the absence of rewards. But after they were rewarded with a toy for helping the adult, the helping rate fell off by 40 percent." (p. 5)
- "The small tax on plastic grocery bags enacted in Ireland in 2002 resembled the fine for lateness at the Haifa day care centers (...), but its effects could not have been more different: In just two weeks following its introduction, the use of the plastic bags dropped by 94 percent. (...) The monetary incentive was combined with a message of explicit social obligation" (p. 202f)
- The Athenian citizens' assembly, in 325 BCE, devised an incentive scheme in order to get a fleet for a major and risky naval adventure set up in a short amount of time, in a decentralised fashion (a subset of rich citizens each setting up a ship with everything needed). A mixture of prizes, praises, drastic fines and some smart mechanism design tricks did the job - the expedition got enough ships together in time and the rest is history. (from p. 187f)
"So it is no surprise that except on the whiteboards of economics classrooms, people try to avoid dealing with Homeo economicus. Employers prefer to hire workers with a strong work ethic; banks prefer to lend to people whome they trust (...) - handshakes matter; and where they do not, the economy underperforms." (p. 34)
"Alan Page Fiske provides (...) four psychological models (...): authoritarian, communal, egalitarian and market, each with culturally prescribed pattern of appropriate behaviour" (p.91)
"Tangible rewards may be framed as "bribes and bonuses, incentives and salaries" as Lepper [et al] say, and one might add "and as prizes, fines and punishments"". (p.96f)
"Rural Missourians tend to vote Republican; but from this experimental evidence, they appear to be more concerned about economic inequality than the Hazda hunter-gatherers, whose practices of food sharing and lack of political hierarchy were the inspiration for James Woodburn's classic paper "Egalitarian Societies". Recall that the Hazda subjects offered a quarter of the pie on average in the Dictator game, and their MAO in the Ultimatum game was less than half of the Missourians." (p. 134)
"Boston subjects may have read the fine as disapproval by fellow citizens, while those in Dnipropetrovs'k may have seen it as an insult." (p.142)
"[this hypothesis] has yet to be tested empirically, but if it were borne out, it would direct attention not to the cultural consequences of markets but rather to liberal political, judicial, and other nonmarket institutions as the key to liberal civic culture." (p.142)
"explicit economic incentives may be counterproductive because they induce people to adopt a "market mentality" and such policies thus compromise preexisting values that lead people to act in socially beneficial ways."
"Economists were coming to see why prices alone could not always do the work of morals." (p. 153)
"any change in policy will systematically alter the structure of econometric models."
"Incomplete contracts cause market failures, as economists know, but they also encourage trust, which as Arrows says, may be essential to attenuating market failures. This (...) could be the basis of a kind of virtuous circle: the trust that is essential to mutually beneficial exchange when contracts are incomplete appears to be learned in precisely the kinds of trading relationships that evolve when contracts are incomplete. The virtuous cycle's vicious cousin also exists, of course." (p. 179)
- Incentives are essential to a well-governed society.
- Incentives cannot singlehandedly implement a fully efficient use of economic resources if people are entirely self-interested and amoral.
- Ethical and other social preferences are therefore essential.
- Unless designed to at least "do no harm", incentives may stand in the way of "creating better people".
- As a result, public policy must be concerned about the nature of individual preferences and the possibility that incentives may affect them adversely.
- First, incentives are probably not actually the problem, but the context is: "The problem of crowding out may arise from the relationship between the person imposing the incentive and its target, or from the meaning of the incentive." (p.191)
- Second, self-image is crucial: People engaging in exchange of goods and services "are attempting not only to get things, but also to be someone" (p.192).
- Finally, experiments show that fines do have a moral effect on potential free-riders, not only a purely calculated one. The fines with the best effect are the ones given out by peers, and constraints most likely to be accepted are from third parties with no own stake. (p.200)
- Do not blame individuals. Moral engagement is reached when "inspiring public aversion not of the transgressors, but of the habits and dispositions accounting for the transgressions" (p.201, citing Jeremy Bentham)
- Incentives need to be paired with a justification or "moral lesson", in order to "make it each man's interest to observe that conduct which it is his duty to observe" (p.200, also Bentham).
"Good policies and constitutions are those that support socially valued ends not only by harnessing self-interest but also by evoking, cultivating, and empowering public-spirited motives." (p.222)
"design rules (...) allowing the civic-minded, not the self-interested, to determine the outcome." (p.214)
- Externalities are becoming more apparent in the current decade, as climate change becomes accepted and economic inequality rises to levels unseen since before the two world wars. Since externalities can be framed in the moral realm in a powerful way, maybe there is reason to welcome a strong role for morals in economic policy.
- In addition, we are also seeing a strong moral theme in public discussion, especially in the novel alt-right influence to politics, which is taking a strong tribal stance. These are already influencing economic schemes, e.g. leaving international cooperation frameworks like the climate deal or the EU. However, a strong influence of moral themes might actually revive the public policy debate, and next to harmful discussions, there might be room for discussions as the ones described in this book.
- Automation might also soon be taking hold in economic decision making, e.g. when we let automated agents do decisions on our behalf. The computer might be introducing a Homo economicus into our societies here, because when we defer economic actions to automated agents, it seems easier to detach our moral sentiments. We'd claim that we ourselves are not Homo economicus, but our automated software agents may very well be. In this scenario, we'll have to go through another learning process. However, there is a slightly different scenario, in which this is not a problem worth mentioning, because very few *economic* decisions are automated, or only ones which really should be done in a rational way (like waiting for a low electricity price to charge your car). I plan to think about examples for these two scenarios some more in the future.
Eine sehr leserliche Unterhaltung zweier sehr unterschiedlicher Männer, die dann noch einen erzählerischen Twist bekommt. Ich war jedich nicht ganz mit der Schlüssigkeit des Plots zufrieden.
A great read on a camping trip. Because this is what you might call this - camping on Mars, with lots of difficulties. The stranded astronaut is required to think hard about the solutions to his hardships before he tries them. I'm told that the problems and solutions are very-well researched. A thriller with lots of engineering and physics lessons built in!
Erich Kästner fasst seinen Familienintergrund und seine ersten Lebensjahre zusammen (rund 1900-1910). Man kann hier viel lernen über
- Dresden vor dem ersten Weltkrieg. Eine Welt die es so nicht mehr gibt.
- Fortschritt. Was Kästners Mutter 1890 an Möglichkeiten hatte, kann man im Gegensatz zu den Möglichkeiten von Frauen betrachten, die Kästner aus seinem Blickwinkel in den 60er Jahren beschriebt, und dann erst im Gegensatz zu heute. Vortrefflich.
- wie ein guter Schriftsteller ein Buch an Kinder richtet, es aber auch für Erwachsene ein absoluter Lesegenuss ist. Die Figuren in Kästners Familie sind mit starker Hand gezeichnet, so dass ein Kind sie wohl verstehen wird, aber jedes Jahrzehnt an Lebenserfahrung wird hier das Verständnis der Situationen potentieren. Beeindruckend, wie Kästner selbst Themen wie die Depression seiner Mutter anzusprechen vermag, ohne zu urteilen, nur seinen Zielgruppen gerecht zu beschreiben.
- wie ein guter Schriftsteller sich kurz fasst.
Ein packender Psycho-Thriller für gefühlte Intellektuelle und insbesondere für Leser, die den akademischen Betrieb selbst erlebt haben. Denn der Druck, den die Hauptperson Philip Perlmann verspürt, ist nur zu verstehen, wenn man weiss, wie gross der innere Druck bei Teilnehmern dieser Welten ist.
Perlmann sitzt einem sprachwissenschaftlichen Workshop im schönen Ligurien vor, und da er (insgeheim) jegliches Interesse an wissenschaftlicher Arbeit verloren hat, er sich aber mit Koryphäen des Faches auseinandersetzen muss, erleidet er hier eine interessante Version des Hochstapler Syndroms. Nur wer dieses Syndrom selber etwas kennt, weiss, warum es an den Rand eines Mordes führen kann.
Der Roman ist lang, doch liest sich sehr schnell. Manchmal dachte ich an Homo Faber, als die Kulisse Liguriens benutzt wird, um den deutschen und welterfahrenen (mehrsprachigen) Intellektuellen Perlmann in dem südländischen Kontext herumtapern und anecken zu lassen, was in dessen Not und intellektueller Panik zu einer Art Slapstick wird.
Dieses Buch findet weitesgehend im Kopf der Hauptperson statt. Man fiebert mit Perlmann mit, man kann sich mit ihm identifizieren (als Leidender des Hochstapler Syndroms ebenso wie als jemand, der Probleme hat, sich mit anderen Menschen und deren Erwartungen zwanglos auseinderzusetzen) - aber ihn mögen, das mag nicht gelingen. Schade natürlich, da man sich ja mit ihm identifiziert hat. Eine prickelnde kognitive Dissonanz. Es ist sicher kein neues stilistisches Mittel, aber gerade in den zwei Jahrzehnten seit dem Erscheinen dieses Buches wurde diese Dissonanz des Öfteren in Film und Fernsehen verwendet. Ich nenne als Beispiel einmal Don Draper (aus Mad Men), den man mögen will und ihm Gelingen wünscht, doch mehr und mehr fragt man sich, warum eigentlich.
Mercier hat viele Aspekte in den Hintergrund der Handlung gelegt, die jedem Deutsch Leistungskurs genug Arbeit für Monate geben würden. Da wären Perlmanns akademische Gegenspieler (und ihre jeweilige Art intellektuell zu sein) zu nennen, aber insbesondere der russische Text, den Perlmann übersetzt um sich abzulenken. Seitenlang geht es manchmal um die Verbindung zwischen Sprache und Erinnerung, während auch Perlmann sich zu erinnern versucht, wie sein Leben eigentlich verlief. Am Schluss wird auch noch das Thema Schuld eingebracht, mit einem Verweis auf Maxim Gorki. Ich gestehe, hier die Interpretationsarbeit vernachlässigt zu haben, die sich Mercier vielleicht von mir gewünscht hätte. Aber es ist zum Glück nicht notwendig, alles mitzudenken, was man mitdenken könnte,um das Buch zu geniessen. Ich habe es deshalb mehr genossen als Homo Faber, damals im Deutsch Leistungskurs ;-)
This book can be read in 2 to 3 hours, without being mentally challenging. Its main goal is to give you an idea of what Scrum means - by the tool of storytelling. It is really just a 110-page story of a CTO who embraces Scrum in a time of desparation and turns things around within a few months. It is well-written and relatable. The main points of Scrum are repeated in a short bullet list after each chapter. This is really useful.
A good whodunit novel which is narrated by several (mostly) female protagonists. I felt like taking mental rides both into female trains of thought and also into memory lane, because british cities have a unique architectural flair to me. I guess this has to be counted as complements to the author :)
2016
A thriller taking place in the Swiss world of finance (but it could be any Western country). Very readable and the background facts check out, as is to be expected from this author (I praise his book "Small World"). I don't mind the ending, which seems a bit fantastic, but it might actually be plausible. I can't forgive the beginning though, where the protagonist stumbles upon the evil mystery per random chance - which is okay, once. He stumbles into two coincidences, both of which are highly unlikely. For one of them, someone even mentions it's one in millions. I can't believe that there wasn't a better solution for this plot to get started.
2015
Why would I, a German, read an autobiography by a German which he wrote in English? Because I am not Neumann's indended audience. He wrote it for his fellow Americans, his countrymen since he arrived there in 1954, to answer their questions about life in East Prussia, being a member of the Hitler Youth, digging trenches on the Eastern Front in WW2 and of being stuck in the newly-Sowjet part of Germany in the years following WW2.
Claus Neumann (born 1929) lived in Germany for 21 years, across Europe as a travelling apprentice and then in the U.S. for 55 years (as of completion if this book).
His countrymen expect him to acknowledge the incomparable guilt which the Germans put on themselves. But they also expect him to spend most of his words on his story - his personal circuumstances and his transformation. Neumann does not speak about racism and fascism in each chapter, but when he does, he puts weight on his words. He mentions hearing about and discussing concentration camps, for instance. One can argue about whether he dealt enough with his families' shortcomings, besides giving some hints, but I won't. Otherwise, he is telling his story to the point, and one can tell that his storytelling is of American nature: picturesque, without unnecessary detours.
This is, for the most part, a fascinating view into a world that is basically dead - the Germans living in East Prussia. Of course there are many people who wrote down a lot of facts and stories. But this account can do without most of those dramatic layers which many who still yearn for their lost home use when they talk about it. This is what I believe makes this a rare and valuable document of history.
2014
2013
Kurzgeschichten, vielleicht teilweise wahr, aus dem Repertoire eines Strafverteidigers. Klar erzählt, immer nah am Menschen für Menschen (Täter), mit Einwürfen über das deutsche Rechtssystem über das man immer ein bisschen mehr wissen kann. Bei Weitem kein Drei-Groschen Heft, aber eine gute Lektüre wenn der Geist mal Erholung braucht.
Fast-paced drug dealing drama, placed in Southern California. A quick read, also due to the unique style of narration, much like a movie script, with much weight on dialogue and short descriptions of actions. Characters are interestingly described (on the "good" as well as the "bad" side), but remain a bit shallow. Refreshing, however.
This book is about things that gain from uncertainty or volatility. For instance, a candle is extinguished by a random wind blow, but a fire might just thrive from it. The candle light is fragile. Taleb says that a fire is not just robust against the volatile wind - it does not stay the same, but becomes better. So he proposes the term "antifragile" for such things.
Another example of his: being an employee at a big corporation for decades is fragile, being a taxi driver is antifragile. The employee may have stable income, but he gets complacent and an unforseeable "Black Swan" event (the book that made Taleb famous) could get him fired. The taxi driver constantly needs to reevaluate himself and adapt. He is constantly antifragile, the (average) employee is constantly fragile.
One more: Scientists or corporate executives are fragile with respect to reputation. A majority of people being dismissive could be fatal for their career. Artists and writers on the other hand thrive on criticism, all they need is a few followers as well.
In essence: Big successes in the world can, according to Taleb, be explained by the antifragility in which the actors were (be it that they were by accident or not). A lot of it comes down to not having complex models and strategies in this complex world. We are better at doing than thinking, if doing is done right: A mix of small-error-tolerating tinkering and experience-based heuristics, instead of complex theories which need to be correct about what happens when. The choice to be a free, independent actor instead of joining large complex structures. Keeping options open to yourself that will do less harm than good in the long run, whatever happens.
This is an especially strong message in a civilisation that is building more and more complex structures. Taleb is coming from the financial world (he was a quantitative trader), so he's seen all the needless and hurtful complexities that make up our economies.
Two telling quotes:
"In a complex domain, only time - a long time - is evidence." (p. 337)
"The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations." (p. 423)
In the course of the book, Taleb explores the idea in various ways, among them:
1. A more mathematical (but readable for everyone) look at the issue. He introduces convex and concave payoffs to events. In essence: We might not have a good idea of the event x's distribution, but to be prepared for the payoff f(x), we can at least look at the function f.
2. Less is more. Substracting things from models and strategies is more often than not enriching. He uses medicine as an extended example.
3. Ethics of being antifragile. Many people can be antifragile to the cost of others who have to be fragile. Most currently, and in Talebs, experience, bankers are still anti-fragile as they're being bailed out by fragile tax payers. He argues that only of you have put value into y (time or work of building it, or money betting on it) you can be taken serious in your opinion about y - this is what he calls "having skin in the game".
Now, how is this book written? It is a wild ride of opinions, personal and biographic stories (all in favour of the author), many little tidbits and example from classic literature, repitions and also dialogues between more or less made-up characters. Honestly, I was close to giving up on it because the author thinks he is insightful and helpful but really isn't. It is mostly the overly creative chapter names and little chapter summaries that throw the reader out of the flow and make him forget where he is.
That's what you get if you refuse to accept an editor - a luxury Taleb can afford after his two best-selling books beforehand. However, this previous success (and experiences in the media world after that) also allowed him to be refreshingly harsh. Several professions, such as my current one (research), are not treated well and even specific persons are put in the spotlight. I was delighted that Taleb shares my refusal to like Thomas ("the world is flat") Friedman and Ray ("the singularity is near") Kurzweil for the simplistic visions they have about our complex world. He also picked Nobel price winner Joseph Stiglitz as his preferred target of critique, for being seriously wrong about the crisis, during the crisis, and having cherry-picked his past statements afterwards (this cherry-picking is currently too easy for all experts who have no skin in the game, I wonder if there is a future technology to make cherry-picking harder, given that lots of statements are actually published, as this is how economic commentators like Stiglitz or, more general, scientists, operate).
Several reviews have focused on Taleb's self-centeredness, favourably or not. I agree to a lot of what they have to say. However, the metaphor he proposes seems useful and, sometimes, the messenger is important:
1. Taleb rode around in the complex world (of finance) for decades so if he argues in favour of substracting complexities from the world, he is more believable than someone who comes from the outside.
2. He actually bet on the system failing (for years losing money) and in the end won big. It's debatable if that is ethically what you want your messenger to have done, but he can say that he not only said something was going to happen (many people did actually) but he had "skin in the game". Again, this is helping believability in most circles, especially inside the complex modern ones.
At their core, the models of the human economy have always been sketches of the real thing, at best. And economic practice (i.e. government policy) has always even further simplified these sketches when reasoning about what to do.
So why the heck shouldn't someone make a comic to explain the history of economics?
What this book delivers is highly enjoyable education. It has many gaps, but who would expect no emissions has no respect for the multi-dimensionality of the topic. Everyone always cuts it their own way, so let's leave Goodwin to his cuts. He tells a good story which must have been hard to carve out, with very nice illustrations from Dan Burr. I think the book does work as an introduction as well as a reference to come back to. Though it proceeds chronologically, I think the book is in essence two parts:
- An overview over economic thought and models ca. 1600 - 1850 (which leaves out a couple thousand years from the history of economics, actually)
- A brief US-centric history of market development and governmental tinkering with markets (and the corruption in between) ca. 1850 - 2012 (the viewpoint is always economic, but that actually serves as a pretty good viewpoint for actual history of mankind, just ask Marx, who gets around two pages)
The second part is much bigger than the first. Goodwin also has a strong anti-cooperation, anti-corruption, (U.S.) liberal view on recent history, but at least he is up-front about it.
A sidenote: It was interesting to get a new view on how the U.S. and U.S.S.R. economies are/were not only both "mixed economies" (not purely capitalist/communist), but the concentration of economic power, a very important dimension, was actually very comparable. I didn't know that it was (republican) president Eisenhower who coined the term military-industrial complex. It is amazing to think it still runs roughly like that 60 years later - just look at the current revelations how the NSA and its predecessors have always been using/abusing/creating corporations to connect economic goals to goverment goals which are heavily driven by war-speak.
Den Untertitel des Buches finde ich eigentlich passender: "52 Denkfehler, die Sie besser anderen überlassen". Denn klares Denken ist doch ein bisschen höher gegriffen - dieses Buch erklärt lediglich auf unterhaltsame Weise Fehler, die dem menschlichen Gehirn immer wieder passieren, wenn es Einschätzungen über eine gegebene Situation macht.
Zum Beispiel:
- Warum wir unser eigenes Wissen überschätzen und das anderer unterschätzen
- Warum etwas nicht richtiger wird, wenn Millionen anderer es für richtig halten
- Warum wir Theorien nachhängen, selbst wenn sie nachweislich falsch sind
- Warum wir die Vergangenheit ignorieren sollten
Dieses Buch ist die Kollektion von 52 wöchentlichen Beiträgen, die Rolf Dobelli 2010/2011 in der FAZ veröffentlicht hat. Die Denkfehler hat er selbst zusammengetragen, sagt uns aber auch den gebräuchlichen (meist englischen) Namen, z.B. "The Survivorship Bias", "The Conjunction Fallacy" oder "Die Kontrollillusion". Erheblich beeinflusst war Dobelli dabei aus dem Feld der "Heuristics-and-Bias" Literatur, wie sie derzeit von ehemaligen Investmanagern wie Nassim Nicholas Taleb ins Rampenlicht getragen werden. Gut, daß er jedes Kapitel auch mit relevanten Studien hinterlegt, die in der Psychologie oder Cognitive Science Forschung Denkfehler bestätigen. Vieles war mir natürlich dann auch nicht neu, aber eine mit einem passenden Beispiel unterlegte knackige Erklärung hat doch seinen Sinn.
Abschliessend sagt Dobelli, man könne eben nicht bei jeder Entscheidung "klar" denken, dafür ist das zu anstrengend. Unsere Intuition ist effizient. Wenn die Entscheidung aber sehr wichtig ist, sollte man sich eben kurz Zeit nehmen und die möglichen Denkfehler durchgehen.
Die Einschränkung finde ich wichtig, weil ich mich beim Lesen manchmal unwohl fühlte, da der Evolutionärpsychologie und dem Diktat des rationalen Denkens doch viel das wort geredet wird. Aber - mit Vorsicht genossen - ist dieses Büchlein einigermaßen lehrreich, recht unterhaltsam und könnte sogar als Nachschlagewerk im Bücherschrank von Nutzen sein.
2012
Eine Kindheit in den ländlichen Niederlanden, überschattet davon, Augenzeuge bei einem Mord gewesen zu sein, der einen irgendwie immer begleitet, bis ins Studium. Eine spannender, atmosphärisch-dichter und interessanter Roman, der wahrscheinlich (was die Beobachtungen der zeitgenössischen Niederlande betrifft) auch quasi-autobiographisch ist.
Der Autor ist in den Niederlanden sehr bekannt. Das Original hätte ich wahrscheinlich auch halbwegs verstanden, aber man gab mir die deutsche Übersetzung als Geschenk in die Hand.
Ein guter, kleiner Roman für eine Zugfahrt. Ein junger Anwalt bekommt einen Mordfall zur Verteidigung, bei dem der Reichtum des Opfers Medienpräsenz garantiert. Sein Mandant ist ein alter Mann, das Opfer auch, beide schienen sich nicht zu kennen. Während der Anwalt Licht ins Dunkel der Vergangenheit bringt, steigt der Druck, den Prozess mit einer gütlichen Einigung, aber ohne die Wahrheit zu beenden.
Erinnerungen eines Europäers lautet der Untertitel diese Autobiographie, die der österreichische Schriftsteller 1941, kurz vor seinem Freitod im brasilianischen Exil, fertigstellte. Mein lieber Freund Jan gab mir das Buch, das ich mir nicht selbst gekauft hätte, aber welches mir gut tat.
Wieder mal (ein bisschen zu oft) las ich Urlaubslektüre in deutscher Übersetzung (weil ich sie geschenkt bekam). Beckett schreibt sehr dichte Thriller, die beiden die ich las, spielten in ländlichen regionen Englands, sehr schön geschildert. In dieser Reihe ist der Held ein Autopsie-Experte. Dafür hat Beckett viel recherchiert und das hilft ihm bei der Dichte der Story. Er hat auch am Ende immer einen Twist in der Story übrig, also kann ich seine Werke für den Urlaub warm empfehlen :)
Ein älterer Herr muss feststellen, daß er Alzheimer hat, und dieses Buch begleitet ihn durch die Krankheit. Nebenher ist das Buch ein Krimi, denn eine reiche alte Dame will verhindern, daß eine alte Kindheitserinnerung des Herren ihren Weg nach oben findet.
Dieser Krimi ist sehr lesbar (kostete mich ca. 2 Ferientage) und ausserdem lehrreich. Weltführende Alzheimer-Experten attestieren Suter, daß er die Krankheit sehr realistisch beschreibt. Sogar das Leitmotiv, das Bewußtwerden von subtilen Kindheitserinnerungen, ist ein typisches Symptom.
Ich las die Ausgabe der ZEIT, an welche die Wissenschaftsredaktion noch einige wissenswerte Fakten über Alzheimer und ein Interview mit einem Experten angehängt hat.
Nooteboom war 21, als er diese Erzählung 1954 schrieb. Sie ist zum Teil autobiographisch und portraitiert junge Menschen, die im Europa der 50er Jahre einen eigenen Zugang zu ihrem Leben suchen. Damals reisten viele junge Menschen per Anhalter durch Europa, und anhand der Menschen, die sie treffen (Autofahrer, Bewohner lokaler Orte und nicht zuletzt andere Hitchhiker), lernen sie, was ihnen selbst wichtig ist.
Das Buch ist eigentlich eine Aneinanderreihung von Metaphern und kleinen, völlig verträumten Geschichten, die meiner Meinung nach nur als Gesamteindruck Sinn ergeben. Sie scheinen mir als Stream Of Consiousness niedergeschrieben. Selbst Nooteboom selbst sagt in einem Nachwort, daß er den direkten Zugang verloren hatte, als er den Roman als älterer Mensch wieder las.
Das macht den Roman nicht einfach zu lesen, besonders nicht, wenn man jeder Metapher eine Bedeutung zurechnen will oder erwartet, daß Nooteboom noch einmal auf sie Bezug nehmen wird. Nur einige Bilder kommen wieder zurück, wie das chinesische Mädchen, nach dem Philip durch ganz Nord- und Westeuropa sucht.
Vielleicht ist das aber auch eine sehr geeignete Methode, die Verwirrtheit der Jugend während dem Aufbruch ins Leben darzustellen. Diese Verwirrtheit war sicher besonders groß in der Zeit nach dem Krieg (für die, die sich wie Philip ihre Zeit nahmen, um ihren eigenen Weg zu finden).
Ein detaillreich erzählter Krimi, der im nord-holländischen Den Helder spielt, aber auch in Amsterdam und Köln. Der Krimi ist nett erzählt und versucht, den akribischen und manchmal frustrierenden Alltag von alltäglicher Polizeiarbeit realistisch zu erfassen. Keller legt außerdem viel Wert darauf, seine holländischen Beobachtungen einzubringen, was mir auch sehr gefiel als Deutscher in Holland.
Es leidet dann aber ein wenig die Spannung unter all dem Realismus. Dies könnte durchaus als Tatort-Film durchgehen, aber in dem Fall ist mir das Lesen eines Buches wie diesem doch viel lieber als ein spannungsarmer Sonntagabend.
This book has a lot of insight to offer about the background on which we should lead current discussions about debt and money. I found a lot of things to think about in here and very much enjoyed reading it.
However, it is maybe too rich. It is so full of anthropological evidence as well as Graebers own interpretation of circumstances that it is not easy to keep all of them in mind, much less to make out the big picture that Graeber wants to paint. In fact, I only got a feeling of the big picture of Graebers line of thought by compiling this post. I decided therefore to write neither a review nor a complete summary.
Instead, I provide here the shortest summary I can come up with in three minutes and then leave the reader with a chronological collection of notes I made while reading. Sometimes I summarized the gist of an idea, sometimes I simply cited important or well-written paragraphs that capture the gist well by themselves. I do not make any claim to completeness or having picked all the cherries.
The (too) short summary:
The book first looks for the foundations of money and debt, both in human morality and culture (Chapters 2 through 7). Graeber finds a deep tie in the anthropological evidence between debt and violence and dishonor and reminds us that being in debt is a social construction (much more than a mathematical fact) and thus can mean different things. Then, it provides a compelling history of four known and very long world-stretching ages of markets and money (Chapters 8 through 12). This history of ages seems to be cyclic and in fact, we entered a new age in the last decades. The effects of this transition may become more understandable in this big picture.
Chronological note-collection:
Chapter 1: On the Experience of Moral Confusion
Graeber relates a story how he got confused by a statement in a discussion about the IMF and the World Bank. "Surely, one has to pay one's debt". Is that really true? And in the light of the 2008 financial crisis, this question has been asked many times - even if the conversation everyone was expecting has never really taken place:
“The reason that people were ready for such a conversation was that the story everyone had been told for the last decade or so had just been revealed to be a colossal lie. There's really no nicer way to say this.”
Chapter 2: The Myth of Barter
Graeber takes some time to take a stab at the myth from page one in every text book of economics: that money had to be invented, because otherwise (before the "invention" of money), people were left to barter (simply exchanging items like shoes or bread directly between one another).
According to Graeber (who also cites other anthropologists, by the way), this image is based on no evidence at all: no society using only barter has ever been recorded or found. in fact, humans have always used some kind of money, be it precious metals or clay tablets or tally sticks (sticks broken in half, one half goes to the debtor, one to the creditor). In later chapters, Graeber notes that “some of the earliest works of moral philosophy (…) are reflections on what it means to imagine morality as debt - that is, in terms of money.”
In fact, Graeber thinks that this purely imaginary exercise of economists (how money came to be) serves simply to make the argument that our current monetary systems are without alternative. In particular, it can serve as an argument against the notion that money is created by and belongs to the government. This argument, e.g. by Smith, has mostly been made in times when coinage (money directly valued in precious metals) was on the rise or already prevalent and the author wanted to make a case for money (coins) being an emergent feature of civilisation. In fact, Graeber makes clear later in the book that governments are actually always crucial in markets that use coinage.
Chapter 3: Primordial Debts
Societies have had to deal with overbearing of debt for thousands of years - and the evidence tells us that most of the time, they cancelled most of the debt at some point, be it through revolution or to avert a revolution. Often, it was a newly installed king (e.g. one of the early Jewish ones) who preferred to start with a blank slate and could afford to clean the table.
Chapter 5: A brief treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic relations
Graeber identifies three main moral principles of economic relations among humans. In our lives, we often switch back and forth between them.
Communism: Graeber says a kind of "base communism" is basis of a lot of our daily lives, mostly in small, but numerous interactions. The summarizing motto could be framed as “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. Graeber: “A lot of us act like communists a good deal of the time.”
Exchange: Here, economic relations are all about equivalence between the actors. It can either be exchange with the goal of profit maximization, within impersonal interactions (which in reality, is almost never 100% true) or exchange of gifts. Gift exchange economies often insist on inexact retribution of gifts, in order to keep the system out of equilibrium (and in motion). With gifts, honor enters the picture and with it, the third moral principle:
Hierarchy: here, one party is the superior (e.g. king & peasant, the king gets a large share of the harvest, the peasant gets "protection"). This relation is often built on precedent rather than actual value of the goods/services. Precedents often happen not with the actual intent to create this durable relation - examples are violent acts (e.g. conquering) or giving one-time gifts for appeasement, which actually sets a precedent for a hierarchy relation.
Graeber concludes that often, there is no definition of which type an economic relation actually is, which creates conceptual confusion in economics. Mathematical models of markets certainly do not cover all of these aspects.
What, then, is debt? A debt creates relationships. Not being able to pay off a debt creates hierarchy (subordination). Wealthy debtors on the other hand, get leverage over their creditors (if you owe the bank 100000 dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe 100 million dollars, you own the bank).
Chapter 6: Games with Sex and Death
Graeber makes a distinction between "Human Economies" and commercial economies. In human economies, “humans can never be equivalent to anything.” Money is only used to create and maintain relationships between humans. Graeber shows examples from African societies, where a human can not even be exchanged with another human, even if the cultural laws do something very similar (e.g. if a member of one clan is murdered the clan of the murderer has to send a replacement human to live in the new clan, also the “profound truth” of the famous blood-feud shows that this equivalence is attained, but never fully implemented or reached).
commercial economies can treat humans exchangeable and measure their worth exactly, which can only happen if humans are ripped from their social relations by use of violence. in the most extreme and rapid case, it has meant to be captured and become a slave, a person with no social context at all. Less extreme cases are for instance societies that establish that certain forms of violence, e.g. against women, are accepted.
Chapter 7: Honor and Degradation, or, On the Foundation of Contemporary Civilisation
Graeber paints an image from ancient times that seems familiar today: The prospering cities with free expression and choice of life, surrounded by evangelising nomads, the latter growing stronger as debt-ridden citizens, victims of the city's ruthless accounting, having often lost their families, join their ranks - founding and deepening the nomad's hatred of the city and its way of life. This image comes up again and again in the history of civilization.
p.179
“Historically, war, states and markets all tend to feed off one another. Conquest leads to taxes. Taxes tend to be ways to create markets, which are convenient for soldiers and administrators.”
The cultural icon of the undead, the Zombie, can be found in Africa and Haiti, in regions where only recently slavery was rampant. It is fitting to think of a living human who is completely owned by other humans as undead - and by those who own him as having unnatural powers. But this theory is one of the wilder ones in the book.
Chapter 8: Credit versus Bullion, and the Cycles of History
Graeber notes how 5000 years of human economic history seems to be cyclic, to some extent. Two types of economic age interchange. the first type are ages with money defined strictly to the value of precious metals, with much cruelty and slavery in huge power regimes (e.g. Rome, or The East India Company). The second type are ages of paper (virtual credit) money, with smaller empires, less production and slower innovation, where religious preachers try to tame economic effects on humans (e.g. slavery became often outlawed in these ages).
He only shortly visits the First Agrarian Empires (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China - which had virtual credit money) of which we don't know much and then explains the next four great ages in detail (see next chapters), where the last one (again one of virtual credit money) is only 40 years old.
Chapter 9: The Axial Age (800 BC - 600 AD)
p.209f
About roman law and how it may have shaped our image of property today:
“At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedom, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty - (…) as the kind of absolute power of 'use' and 'abuse' (…) - to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke and Smith, about the origin of human society in some collection of (…) males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully-formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or to begin to swap beaver pelts.”
p.223f
Two seemingly connected, but unsolved puzzles of history:
- Pythagoras, Confucius and Buddha lived at the same time, unaware of each other (at the beginning of the "Axial Age").
- During their lifetimes, coinage was invented three times, independently, at the very places where these first major philosophers lived.
As a sidenote, the emergence of the main philosophical ideas is why Karl Jaspers called it the "Axial Age".
p.244ff:
”Axial Age spirituality, then, is built on a bedrock of materialism. This is its secret; one might almost say, the thing that has become invisible to us. (…) In India and China, the debate took different forms, but materialism was always the starting point.”
p.249:
“The ultimate effect was a kind of ideal division of spheres of human activity that endures to this day: on the one hand the market, on the other, religion. (…) Pure greed and pure generosity are complementary concepts.”
Then, Graeber also notes that he would not write off religion as purely escapist movements - they brought overall positive effects, e.g. less brutality, less slavery.
Chapter 10: The Middle Ages (600AD - 1450AD)
p.251f
“If the axial age saw the emergence of complementary ideals of commodity markets and universal world religions, the Middle Ages were the period in which those two institutions began to merge. (…) Cities shriveled, and many were abandoned, but even this was something of a mixed blessing. Certainly, it had terrible effects on literacy; but one must also bear in mind that ancient cities could only be maintained by extracting resources from the countryside.”
p.265
In China: “Buddhistic Treasuries themselves became (…) the world's first genuine forms of concentrated finance capital. They were, after all, enormous concentrations of wealth managed by what were in effect monastic corporations, which were constantly seeking new opportunities for profitable investment.” Monks had to live off interest for religious reasons. Also, they had the vision of continuous growth, since “genuine liberation would not be possible until the whole world embraced the Dharma”. Regularly, when they were in dangerous shortage of precious metals, Confucian regimes had to break down monasteries, in order to melt the giant Buddha statues that had once been coins.
Commerce in the Islamic world was very flourishing and some islamic thinkers formulated foundational ideas about money centuries before Adam Smith did. Islamic commerce forbade usury (no interest on loans), and as a result there was much more emphasis on trust
p. 303: Two factors are
- actual free market without control of governments, “honor and credit became largely indistinguishable”.
- actual notion of profits being a reward for risk. “Financial mechanisms designed to avoid risk were considered impious. (…) This made most of the forms of finance and insurance that were later to develop in Europe impossible.”
p.297:
“Our image of the Middle Ages as an "age of faith" - and hence, the blind obedience to authority - is a legacy of the French Enlightenment. (…) It's hard to find many medevial Chinese, Indian or Islamic parallels, for example, to the burning of "witches" or the massacre of heretics. (…) If there is an essence to Medevial thought, it lies (…) in a dogged insistence that the values that govern our daily affairs (…) are confused, mistaken, illusory or perverse. True value lay elsewhere.”
Chapter 11: The Age of the great capitalistic empires (1450 - 1971)
Without exploding population and market activity in China, as well as a government which had recently switched from paper money to silver and gold as currencies, the extraction of precious metals from the New World by Europeans could not have gone on profitably for as long as it did (three centuries) - and who knows how different the outcomes would have been for Native Americans? The Ming dynasty, after regaining power from Mongol rule, had returned to the silver standard around 1450 and abandoned paper money. Also in that time, the Chinese population strived and thus the Chinese were in dire need of silver to keep their domestic commerce flowing. The European merchants accumulated world trade in these times. They imported a lot of Chinese goods and thus all currency made from gold and silver actually never really reached the European people.
p. 314:
“Any number of civilizations have probably been in a position to wreak havoc on the scale that the European powers did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Ming China itself was an obvious candidate), but almost none actually did so.”
p.319:
“Scholars have long been fascinated by Spanish debates about the humanity of the Indians. (…) The real point is that at the key moments of decision, none of this mattered. Those making the decision did not feel they were in control anyway; those who were did not particularly care to know the details. (…) Charles V himself was deeply in debt to banking firms in Florence, Genoa, and Naples. (…) Despite a lot of initial noise and morel outrage (…) such decrees were either ignored or, at best, enforced for a year or two before being allowed to slip into abeyance.”
In a footnote, Graeber notes how this reminds him of today's politics, with the UN being the moral high ground (i.e. demanding free education in poor countries), while the IMF (legally a part of the UN) will enforce brutal free market leasers (i.e. imposing school fees for "economic reforms").
p. 332:
“The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of [personal] credit [among people] was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal -and often vindictive- power of the state.”
p. 347f:
Graeber shares stories from the first bubbles in early modern western capitalism. (early 1700). Of course, we all know the Dutch tulip bubble. In Britain, there was also the "South Sea Bubble" of 1710, where the South Sea company very quickly became too big too fail (as big as national debt). If that doesn't already relate well enough to our modern times (keyword: silicon valley investment frenzies), there is also documentation about start-up bubbles in the dawn of high promises, fueled by inspiring stories of technological innovation:
“'Innumerable joint-stock companies started up everywhere. (…) Some of them lasted a week of a fortnight. (…) Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill.' (…) The author lists eighty-six schemes, raining from the manufacture of soap or sailcloth, the provision of insurance for horses, to a method to 'make deal-boards out of sawdust'”.
p.360:
Graeber wonders why capitalistic regimes are constantly overshadowed by a fear of impending doom (social revolution, nuclear holocaust, global warming). “Perhaps the reason is because (…) presented with its own eternity, capitalism -or anyway, financial capitalism- simply explodes. Because if there's no end to it, there's absolutely no reason not to generate credit -that is, future money- infinitely.” He then adds that right after capitalism seemed to have "won" over socialism in the 1990s, several reckless bubbles happened soon thereafter.
Chapter 12: The beginning of something yet to be determined (1971 - ?)
In 1971, U.S. President Nixon abolished the international gold standard - an age of credit money began. We don't know much about the effect on the coming time yet - the early decades showed the opposite of what one might expect in terms of moral institutions and even stronger U.S. hegemony. But the latter seems to be on the decline, maybe the former observation is bound to change, as well.
p.367:
“American imperial power is based on a debt that will never -can never- be repaid. Its national debt has become a promise, not just to its own people, but to the nations of the entire world, that everyone knows will not be kept.”
“Since Nixon's time, the most significant overseas buyers of U.S. treasury bonds have tended to be banks in countries that were effectively under U.S. military occupation.”
p.368:
“If history holds true, an age of virtual money should mean a movement away from war, empire-building, slavery and debt peonage (waged or otherwise), and toward the creation of some sort of overarching institutions, global in scale, to protect debtors. What we have seen so far is the opposite [but elsewhere he says that four decades are a very short time in history]. (…) Insofar as overarching grand cosmic institutions have been created that might be considered in any way parallel to the divine kings of the ancient Middle East or the religious authorities of the Middle Ages, they have not been created to protect debtors, but to enforce the rights of creditors. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is only the most dramatic case in point here.”
p.376:
About neo-liberalism: “As an ideology, it meant that not just the market, but capitalism (I must continually remind the reader that these are not the same thing) became the organizing principle of almost everything. We were all to think of ourselves as tiny corporations, organized around the same relationship of investor and executive: between the cold, calculating math of the banker, and the warrior, who, indebted, has abandoned any sense of personal honor (…).”
p.382f:
“My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have been the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense os possible alternative futures.”
“To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is to see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in the course of world events. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away.”
p.388ff:
Graeber notes that the banking system is often justified as democratic in two ways. 1) It funnels resource from the "idle rich" to the "industrious poor". 2) Recently, the situation was reversed: the middle class have become creditors (e.g. through pensions) and the rich, via their leveraged shareholder companies, the debtors. (He cites Ludwig von Mises and Niall Ferguson) Both seemingly contradictory arguments are used, whenever the situation requires it. Graeber thinks this approach asks the wrong questions. What about the "non-industrious poor"? They are completely left out here, as if they do not deserve not to live in poverty. And do the industrious people really help us as society, given that we now see that the assumption of endless economic growth is destroying our resources?
p.391:
“In the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.”
Manna is a short SciFi novel that you can read in a couple hours. It's the classic setup of portaying a doom scenario versus an utopia scenario.
The first part is the doom scenario, in which the narrator explains how the U.S. economy got taken over by robots. This part is very plausible, with the simple beginning assumption that it is not the low-wage work that gets automatised first, but middle management. Through innovations in the fast food industry, the management software "Manna" quickly makes low-skilled workers so efficient, that all middle-management gets replaced by it. Soon, all air travel gets automatised and when robot vision is finally good enough, all transportation and all general low-skilled work is also replaced. The giant out-of-work population is put in welfare homes out of sight, supervised (and being kept hidden) in the most efficient manner by robots. This development is explained in a very plausible manner and serves as an example of the perils of automisation in the name of profit-making. I often see people on the internet linking to this story when they want to make that point and now I finally read it.
The second part deals with the narrator being flown out of his welfare housing to Australia, where his dad had, years ago, bought him a place in a novel society, which was built with technology that is open-source, transparent and centered around human needs, not profit (everyone has the same budget of credits to spend, it is a zero-waste system run by robots). It deals less with a scenario how it developed. Instead, it spends almost all pages with descriptions of the coolest technologies which the author could think of.
An interesting thought experiment, but it is only the first part, which makes this little novel/essay really worth reading.
2011
Der Satiriker Kreisler schreibt (leider diesen November 89-jährig verstorben) hier unerwarteterweise sehr humorlos. Die Hauptfigur (John) ist nicht wirklich Deutscher, aber auch niemals wirklich Engländer. Er wird des Mordes verdächtigt, aber man sieht ein, daß er wohl unschuldig ist. Er ist ein passabler Autor, aber entweder über- oder unterbewertet. Er steht zwischen Frauen und lässt sich auf keine wirklich ein. Jetzt, nach der Lektüre, da ich mir Kreislers Lebenslauf kurz angesehen habe, ist mir klar, wie autobiographisch dieser kleine Roman ist, den er mit 73 geschrieben hat. Kreisler ist auch herumgekommen. Er musste Wien verlassen und durfte mit Chaplin arbeiten. Weder in Amerika noch in Österreich hat er sich je ganz angenommen oder verstanden gefühlt. Schön finde ich, daß der Roman trotzdem die meiste Aufmerksamkeit auf die Nebenpersonen legt, die John kennenlernen und seinen Weg beeinflussen. Schön, aber auch scheint mir Kreisler dadurch der Meinung, daß John eigentlich die meiste Zeit keine Gelegenheit gehabt hat, selbst herauszufinden, was er will, daß immer die entscheidende Kraft von außen kam.
Einer der allerersten Science Fiction Romane, geschrieben um 1900 (konnte ich grad nicht genauer rausfinden). Hätte ich gerne im Original gelesen, hat man mir aber in deutscher Übersetzung geschenkt. Auch schön. Das erste wichtige Thema ist die Verstädterung. Ein junges Liebespaar findet nach Umwegen entgegen gesellschaftlichen Konventionen zusammen. Um der feindlichen sozialen Welt zu entkommen, ziehen sie aufs Land, Nur um festzustellen, daß dort nichts mehr geht, außer räudigen Hunden und Schafen. Nichts für Stadtkinder. Sie ziehen zurück in die Stadt und fangen dort ganz von unten an. Sehr gut geschrieben und interessant - gerade auch aus der Perspektive der Welt um 1900 herum. Man konnte damals als aufmerksamer Beobachter viele Schlüsse ziehen, die heute auch in einem zeitgenössischen Roman so passieren könnten.
Gleich wieder ein Science Fiktion in der deutschen nicht-originalen Übersetzung. Aber polnisch kann ich nun eh nicht. Der phantasievolle Lem zeigt hier ganz hohe Qualität als Vorhersager kommender Technologietrends. Denn was die Besatzung des "Unbesiegbaren" (eines riesigen Raumschiffs für mehrjährige Raumreisen) auf dem fernen Planeten vorfindet, wird heute als Zukunftstechnologie tatsächlich diskutiert. Ich möchte hier nicht verraten, was die Besatzung der vorherigen Mission zu diesem entlegenen Planten ausgeschaltet hat. Aber auch, wie diese neue Bedrohung im Laufe der Millionen Jahre dort durch eine interessante Variante der Evolution von Maschinen entstanden ist, hat sich Lem wirklich überzeugend überlegt. Hut ab.
Bei all den möglichen Szenerien, die sich für unsere nähere Zukunft abzeichnen (Stichwort Energieknappheit), war mir nach einem Vertreter des neuen Genre "Near-Future Science Fiktion". Ein solches Werk spielt normalerweise in den nächsten 20 Jahren, anstatt irgendwann in den nächsten 200 bis 1000 Jahren.
'Ausgebrannt' folgt einem jungen Deutschen in die USA, wo er Karriere macht, indem er ein Startup mit dem Versprechen gründet, überall neues Öl finden zu können. Hat sein Partner, ein österreichischer Veteran der Ölindustrie, mit seiner Behauptung Recht? Unterdessen entpuppen sich die saudischen Ölreserven als nicht-existent, was die Ökonomie der Welt ins Taumeln bringt.
Mir gefiel der zweite Teil des Buches am Besten. Hier werden die Folgen einer energiearmen westlichen Welt in den USA und in Deutschland erzählt, und Eschbach hat versucht, die möglichen Unterschiede im täglichen Leben deutlich zu machen. Das Buch ist sehr lesbar - Eschbach ist ein sehr erfahrener Bestseller-Autor. Hätte man mehr aus diesem Buch machen können? Ich habe das Gefühl. Aber ich glaube, das Genre des Near-Future Science Fiction ist nicht einfach zu handhaben, da man sich ja nicht völlig aus der Realität schreiben darf. Ich empfehle das Buch also trotzdem. Werde sicher noch versuchen, einen anderen Near-Future Sciencefiction mit diesem Thema zu finden.
2010
Nah an der Grenze zu Jugoslawien, im örtlichen Hühnchengriller und Dorffussballverein spielt dieser Klassekrimi von Wolf Haas. Privatdetektiv Simon Brenner taucht mal wieder tief in den österreichischen Nachbarschaftssumpf, um herauszufinden, wem die Knochen gehören, die inmitten der Abermillionen Hühnchenknochen gefunden wurden.
A Cambridge physicist derives systematically if and how Britain could live on locally generated renewable energy. And in which cases nuclear power or external renewables (think Desertec) need to be part of the equation.
He describes every source of energy that is worth mentioning (wind, solar, hydro, offshore wind, wave, tide, geothermal). Next to that, he looks at consumption (cars, planes, heating/cooling, light, gadgets, food, stuff, public serving). He conveniently uses one unit of measurement everywhere: kWh/day. Currently, the outlook is bleak: we consume way more than we would be able to generate. Then, he describes what he thinks are ways to narrow that gap. Finally he sketches 5 energy plans that would even out.
It is partly estimation and partly prognosis, both seem mostly reasonable and I learned a lot. I bet that he is wrong here or there, but at least it is a documented process (it also has an extended technical appendix).
And entertaining: My recommendation is the new indicator he introduces to compare security of generation technologies (deaths per Megawatt) and when he notes how house-cats kill many many more birds than windmills.
Als ich damals die "Kleines Arschloch"-Comics las, hätte ich nie gedacht, dass Walter Moers nicht nur schwarzen Humor hat, sondern auch ein respektabler Autor sein würde. Selbst als Käpt'n Blaubär - Episoden im Kinderfernsehen zu sehen waren, obwohl man dort schon sah, dass Moers offensichtlich Kreativität im Erfinden von netten Lügengeschichten aufwies wie kaum in Zweiter. Nun hat er doch tatsächlich eine Käpt'n Blaubär Biographie verfasst, die nicht nur ein sehr dickes Buch ist, sondern auch ein kreativer und augenzwinkernder Fantasy-Roman. Hommage und ein bisschen Satire für das Genre zwischen Herr der Ringe und Harry Potter zugleich. Vieleicht ein kleiner Vergleich: Kiss haben Rock'n'Roll satirisch aufs Korn genommen mit ihrem Auftreten, machten aber zugleich auch noch selbst wirklich guten Rock'n'Roll. Ein Genre kann gut gemacht werden, auch während es sich selbst nicht zu ernst nimmt.
Aber: Dieser Roman ist nicht nur gut, durch die leichte Satire (die Vorannahme, dass der Käpt'n vielleicht die eigentliche Wahrheit etwas überzogen erzählt), ist der Weg frei für soviel Kreativität, wie es nur geht. Und Moers zeigt hier wirklich viel davon. Alleine schon die Zeit, die der Käpt'n in einem Wirbelsturm gefangen ist, indem die Zeit unglaublich langsam vergeht und lauter genfangene alte Männer trifft - oder die wahrscheinlich erlogene Geschichte, wie er der erfolgreichste Lügengladiator aller Zeiten in Atlantis war ...
There is organisational concept that many of you would might find intriguing: Sociocracy. It is a method of organising people on the basis of consent, while maintaining a form of collaboration that is looking out for its own effectiveness, such that it can actually be used for modern businesses. It is based on the ideas of a dutch Quaker from the early 1900s. It then was further transformed by a dutch entrepreneur who inherited a large electrician company and was looking for a humane way to manage it (and this company is still large and successful after several decades of employing sociocratical concepts).
This book is one of the only newer ones I could find which is not written by one of the original main figures. It was written by two American consultants who fell in love with the concept and are using and promoting it. The authors do three things in this book: First, they give a readable introduction to the history of sociology so far, which is very interesting. Then, they describe the basics of the method, which turns out to be a rather short exercise. The last part is a set of tools and practices for someone looking to introduce Sociocracy to an organisation (e.g. how to do a workshop with employees or partners).
To conclude, the book helped me to learn and understand what this concept is about, though not in too much depth. But as far as it gives an explanation, this book is very readable. I had no use at this point for the third part (applying Sociocracy), so I will not judge on it here.
A very readable exploration of a british journalist, who researches the true history of humor under communism. Said humor is known to be the funniest and most cynical humor created by oppressed humans that we know of ('Why, despite all shortages, was the toilet paper in East Germany always 2-ply? Because they had to send a copy of everything they did to Russia.'). Many argue that it helped bring communism to its end. Lewis put this hypothesis to a test and this book is the well-written tale of this test, in which he speaks to many interesting old people all over Eastern Europe (and his eastern-german ex-girlfriend), sprinkled with many jokes. I learned even more about communism history on the way. Maybe not a coincidence that it works well when a resident of one great humor-culture (Britain) researches another great humor-culture.
2009
Gelesen im Budapest Urlaub. Dalos beschreibt einige Wochen aus seiner Jugend in den 60er Jahren, als er in Budapest als naiver Parteigaenger aufwuchs und sich zum ersten Mal verliebte. Waehrend eines Schulfestes kommt es zu einem Eifersuchtsdrama, wegen dem er zum ersten Mal Kontakt mit der polizei bekommt. Wenig spaeter wanderte Dalos nach Wien aus.
Wieder kramt ein beruehmter Autor nochmal in seinen Kindheitserinnerungen. Heeresma wuchs in Sued-Amsterdam auf waehrend der deutschen Besatzungszeit. Sein Vater gab ihm Halt waehrend dieser Zeit, in der viele seiner juedischen Freunde ploetzlich verschwanden. Sie versteckten sogar jem anden in ihrer Wohnung.
Fuer mich war es nicht nur sinnvoll, um die Besatzungzeit dieser Stadt besser zu verstehen, sondern auch interessant, bekannte Strassennamen mit 60 Jahre alten Eindruecken zu verbinden.
Wenn man schon mal was zum Schmökern hernimmt, dann kann es ruhig mal etwas deftiges sein. Haasens Krimis lesen sich, als ob der Erzähler schon mit 2 Promille neben einem auf der Theke liegt, Grammatik daneben, quasi sagenhaft.
Neben dem Erzähler ist auch die Hauptfigur, Detektiv Brenner, eher so ein Drum-Herum-Typ, so daß es schon eine Kunst ist, wie dann später immer alles wieder zusammenkommt.
Dieser Roman spielt in Wien (schön, daß ich nun ein paar Ecken dort schon kannte), und zwar im testosterongeladenen Rettungsdienstmilieu. Da stecken sicher ein paar Wahrheiten drin...
Jared Diamond's take on collapsing societies is widely praised and a lot has been written. I don't want to add to much to that, other than a few notes:
- One important message is that societies are actually fragile and often collapse. Many seem to neglect that. Civilisation is not a one-way street uphill.
- It is actually filled with interesting facts about collapsing (Easter Island, Mayas, Greenland Norse, Rwanda, etc.) and successful (e.g. Japan) societies, as well as currently endangered (e.g Australia)
- Diamond has a 5-point framework to address the problems of societies, but here is an even shorter take-home message: Two types of choices have been crucial [for societies]: Whether they employed long-term planning and if they had the willingness to reconsider their core values.
- This book spent some time on the shelf because I found the introduction about Montana to fact-filled. If you read this, skip what you find boring. That's ok.
- Diamond gave a 16-minute TED-talk on this. Disregard the combover and that he didn't bring slides, he is a 70-year old-school professor :)
I read this book in order to learn more about the transition movement, which is the idea that communities prepare for the challenges of Peak Oil*, Global Warming on a local scale. It basically consists of four parts **:
1. Visions
This is the actual "timeline" part. Throughout several workshops held in english transition communities, four scenarios were developed, running from now, 2009, to 2029. In the first two, we continue business as usual and ignore (1) or acknowledge (2) the evidence, respectively. In the third and fourth scenario we make cultural shifts s, but fail to really acknowledge the challenge (3) or acknowledge them and start to transition early on (4). All four timelines are described in text and make up several events that could happen in such a scenario with title and year.
2. Challenges in transition
This chapter details some topics that pose quests for our society in transition to post-peak-oil. It covers demographics, food and water, energy, travel and transport and health.
3. The road to energy descend plans
what could be the steps to make and the tools to use when preparing for energy descend? An energy descend plan is made by the people in order to imagine what their lives could be like and prepare. A timeline is one of the first tools that come to mind and this chapter introduces some more that could be used in practice, like planning the 2030 high school reunion, visualisation techniques or finding indicators of resilience.
4. Peak Oil and Climate Change
This section surprised me by being a short, but highly informative primer on these two topics. For instance, I learned what the most basic indicators for climate change are plus what the likely sources of confusion in discussions are. Also, it was explained how the reports of the IPCC come about and what they say. There are a lot of numbers to back up certain claims and the whole point seems to be made pretty objectively. I might give this chapter some people I know to read.
The challenges we face are likely to be threatening our economic growth model at its core. ...
The transition movement has some clear messages and a solid concept (I am anticipating the video of Rob Hopkins TED talk - notes are already here). This book, however, has several ingredients. Every chapter has its own message. It is more of a handbook for people who are about to start a transition movement in their community or, like me, just want to learn what they might expect from these people***.
* The time point where oil production peaks is hard to measure, even if its already over. In this book, they assume it will be 2010.
** The fifth only deals with UK-specific discussions, so I'm leaving that out here.
*** There is a transition initiative in De Pijp, Amsterdam. The question to me is: Will we be able to feed cities at all in the future? I should look at this book.
I already mentioned some of the thoughts of this book here when I started it. Though it is pretty long, it was a rewarding read and I came back after a break from it to finish it.
Beinhocker claims (and who would argue with him about it) that economics as we have it develops models that seldom relate to reality and leads to false predictions, false hopes and false politics. He argues for a new kind of economics, which he calls "Complexity Economics", in which it is acknowlegded that the human economy is one of the most complex systems imaginable and in a constant state of unrest (as opposed to the equillibrium view of traditional economics). He puts his case forward on the shoulders of many advancements in science: physics, psychology, sociology, computer science and systems research (of course, there have also been some economists who understood the problem).
The books proceeds in four parts:
- Beinhocker first explains how, when and by who the traditional economic models were first developed.
- He then explains several concepts which have been on the radar of other sciences in the last decades (and that, he is convinced, all show how the traditional models of economics is flawed): dynamics, agents, networks, emergence, evolution and cooperation. This part didn't contain too much new things for me, but was written well, I must say.
- Then, he goes on to define several design spaces that a new science, Complexity Economics, could make use of to formalise things. He says we should think about Physical Technologies, Social Technologies and Business Plans as three distinct ingredients. Then, Business Plans would make a good unit to be put under a selection pressure in an economic sense. Furthermore, the conditions of what constitutes economic activity should be discussed. In the new light of complexity, he proposes as a starting point that every activity should be irreversible and entropy-lowering in order to be counted as an economic activity.
- In the end, Beinhocker lines out what the effects of such a new way of looking at our main activities could have on several parts of our doings. How businesses develop their strategies should evolve to a more adaptive mind-set. The structure of organisations should be affected on all levels and be less rigid in order to tap more of the brainpower of employees. This way, he claims, a company could have the advantage to emerge better abilities to tackle complexity and enable endurance and growth (though this claim is not made very clear). Maybe we could even come to smarte financial indices than we have today. Lastly, politics could finally set their left-right divide aside, as Complexitiy Economics wouldn't be "owned" by any side.
It is always interesting to see when someone tries to put pieces together. Then, of course, he mixes facts with wishful thinking and it can be hard to set those apart. Then again, this book is meant to provoke discussion and in addition, he cites a lot of serious research so it's not just him talking. Actually, he cites some really interesting papers, some of which I had a closer look on.
Let's close with Beinhockers first sentences in the book:
"As I write this, the field of economics is going through its most profound change in over a hundred years. (...) I also believe that just as biology became a true science in the twentieth century, so too will economics come into its own as a science in the twenty-first century."
We'll see about that but I hope he's right.
Ein Kurzkrimi, unverkennlich für Wahlöös Arbeiten aus den 60er Jahren im political Science Fiction Stil gehalten.
Typisch für Wahlöö ist ein gesellschaftlichs Endzeit/Stillstandszenario, in dem ein völlig abgestumpfter, aber dennoch brillianter Ermittler (Komissar Jensen) dem Verbrechen auf die Spur kommen muss. Typisch auch die Magenbeschwerden und der Schnapskonsum des Ermittlers, aber hier reiht sich Wahlöö ja in die Detektivromantradition der Jahrzehnte zuvor ein.
In diesem Szenario wurden die Medien gleichgeschaltet, stetig und folgerichtig im kapitalistischen System, zur Gewinnmaximierung. Es maximiert den Gewinn, wenn die Leute sich nicht wirklich aufregen, und somit gewinnt am Ende der Verlag alles, der konfliktloses Schreiben meistert. Der Verlag engagiert sogar die konfliktsuchenden Autoren, nur um durch ihre Arbeit herauszufinden, worüber man auf keinen Fall veröffentlichen sollte.
Das ist das Geheimnis der Sonderabteilung im 31. Stock, doch bis Kommissar Jensen das herausfindet, muss er noch vieles anderes über den Verlag lernen. Und woher die Bombendrohungen kommen, berkommt er auch erst am Ende heraus.
Ich finde diese Art, Kurzkrimi und Gesellschaftsscenario zu vermischen, sehr interessant (und das Scenario selber sollte natürlich vor dem Hintergrund des 45 Jahre zurückliegenden Veröffentlichungsdatums interpretiert werden). Leider trifft Jensen desöfteren jemanden, der ganz weit ausholen muss, damit der Leser die Zusammenhänge einer langwierigen gesellschaftlichen mitbekommt. Das ist wohl kaum anders hinzubekommen, wenn man nur 130 Seiten Zeit hat, aber mitunter etwas offensichtlich. Wahlöö wollte aber auch nicht den Literaturnobelpreis, sondern Diskussionen anstossen. Gelungen.
Being a good scientist requires the ability to think in highly complex ways. Being a successful scientist requires even more: To wrap all this complexity up into a simple question/answer pair.
The reason behind this phenomena is that science has internal and an external aspect. Internally, things have to be sound and correct. New circumstances have to be modelled and put into numbers in a reasonable way. Some say there is even math and statistics involved. But externally, science has to communicate itself. It's about getting money and attention. But most importantly, it's about understanding. Why is this research important? Only if (s)he excels on both fronts will a researcher be really successful.
Take Stephen D. Levitt. He is one of the highest-praised young economists in the USA. He is doing sound work of course, but his greatest ability is to ask simple and appealing questions and then answer them with complex statistics. Then, he published the answers in a highly readible book: Freakonomics. He asks qwuestions like "Do real estate agents actually work in the interest of their clients? What makes successful parents? Should we make DNA sampe of dog poo to identify owners who don't clean up?
Levitt can alternate between thinking simple and thinking complex. And he is not afraid to be heard asking asking seemingly childish questions.
In reality, Levitts simpe questions may sometimes be the result. What triggers most ersearch he did is the availability of good data. He performs regression analysis (in which one controls for all variables but one to test for its effects) and thus needs big data sets.
Most of these data sets are extensive surveys or test/competition results, but there us even the occasional curiosity like the crack dealer gangs bookkeeping records, secured by a colleague of Levitt.
So this may be what makes a creative scientist. Whatever comes first, a good question or a promising tool - Levitt is able to find the other and then formulate a good story around it.
P.S. Another thing that makes a good scientist is also related to communication: Being able to put your work in the context of other researchers. Levitt doesn't provide a lot about this, but that can have two reasons: First, Freaconomics is popular science so readers generally don't care. Second, this context-provision is most important for young scientist to be accepted (as I currently experience) and maybe becomes less important when you climb the ladder.
2008
I have enjoyed Roald Dahls short stories as an adolescent, and I still do. The short stories in this collection are typical Dahls - brilliantly narrated (very english though) and slightly abnormal.
I really liked about this one that it is not like his really weird stories (which you would find in "Kiss, Kiss" for instance). These stories are a little more down to earth. They could just be real. And another great difference here is that in some of these stories, you just don't see the ending coming. Dahl is a brilliant storyteller, because he can manage to reveal his cards only in the last paragraph. That is really remarkable.
Dahl was indeed a person with some controversial opinions on some matters. But it is mostly controversial people who can write story arcs like the last one in "Someone like you", building up a hero over four short stories, making him very likable, following him in his quest minute by minute - only to let him fail most abruptly in the end, in the most injust manner. And in one paragraph.
Von Schönburg bereitet den Leser auf die kommende Rezession vor und will erklären, wie man ohne Geld ein stilvolles und glückliches Leben führt. Seine Adelsfamilie verarmt seit 500 Jahren, und somit ist er Experte. Er selbst war jahrelang arbeitslos und ist nun freier Schriftsteller.
Die Stil-Beratung klappt ganz gut und ist unterhaltsam. Besonders, wenn Anekdoten erzählt werden, wie zB. vom französichen Grafen, der in der Kutsche auf dem Weg zum Schafott noch ein Buch las, und sich vor dem Aussteigen die Stelle markierte, an der er aufhörte. Stilvol in der Niederlage zu sein kann man laut von Schönburg auch von Ungarn und England ganz allgemein lernen.
Wie man arm und gleichzeitig glücklich wird, erläutert von Schönburg allerdings in einer Ratgeber-Manier, die ich mir bei Carnegies "Sorge dich nicht, lebe!" bereits überlesen habe. Zum Glück kommt immer mal wieder eine Anekdote aus dem Leben eines Freunds von Schönburgs, um das Ganze aufzulockern und dann ist es auch sehr schnell vorbei.
Alles in allem kann es nicht schaden, das Volk darauf vorzubereiten, kein Geld zu haben, um Müll zu kaufen.
An author with something to say, but still only 60 pages. Refreshing. Vails main message is that hierarchy has come to be our form of organization as our societies grew in size and economic productivity. As growth is approaching is limits (e.g. oil), only breaking with hierarchy and restructuring into small, decentrally organized units will reassure us peace and a high standard of living.
Vail spans an arc over human evolution to explain how he thinks our hierarchical power structures came into place. His most important themes are genes and memes. Examples of the latter are the inventions of agriculture, economics and states.
One must not agree with everything Vail utilizes on his way of explanation, for instance the Selfish Gene metaphor or the image of memes controlling us. The important stance that draws me in here is looking at human society from a structural viewpoint and explaining structure by what we have learned about ourselves by science. That way, you can present anarchism to me.
Ein japanischer Roman aus den 80ern. Laut Wikipedia aus dem Genre Magical Realism.
Der Beruf des Helden ist, was den Roman in die Science Fiction Ecke stellt: Er verschluesselt Daten mit seinem Unterbewusstsein. Ohne sein Wissen hat man an ihm und anderen seines Fachs ein Experiment durchgefuehrt, welches er als einziger ueberlebt hat. Als Konsequenz ist sein Unterbewusstsein dabei, sich vom Bewusstsein zu trennen.
Das Buch spielt parallel in zwei Welten, die sich am Ende nahe kommen werden:
- Hard-boiled Wonderland (Tokio) - bewusst, schnell, brutal, geniesserisch, mit tausend Anekdoten an Whiskeymarken, Rocksongs, zivilatorische Eigenheiten (Bueroklammern), schoene Frauen und dergleichen, auf berauschende Weise sinnlos, endlich. Diese Welt ist das wahre Leben.
- Das Ende der Welt - unterbewusst, langsam, friedlich, seelenlos, musiklos, kalt, mit viel Zeit, das Wetter genau zu beobachten, mit nur einem Job fuer jeden, auf betaeubende Weise sinnlos, unendlich. Der Held ist neu hier. Seine Seele wird sterben und ihn unsterblich und in dieser Welt gefangen machen.
Waehrend das Thema des Buches die Gefahr ist, seine Seele zu verlieren, wenn man nur Beobachter ist (selbst ein guter), wird hier erfrischenderweise nicht verurteilt. Mit diesen zwei Welten blickt Murakami von zwei Seiten aus auf die gleiche Welt. Und ich habe beim Lesen beide geliebt. Das ist nicht einfach.
Als sie ihre Strumpfhose zu den Knoecheln rollte, wechselte die Musik; Ray Charles sang "Georgia on my Mind". Ich schloss die Augen und schwenkte, so wie man im Whiskeyglas die Eiswuerfel schwenkt, im Kopf die Zeit.
Der Waechter grinst breit und aendert die Position seiner Fuesse auf den Ofengriffen. "Aber das ist gut so. Die Menschen werden vorsichtig, wenn sie sich einmal die Finger verbrannt haben. Und wenn sie vorsichtig sind, verletzen sie sich nicht mehr. Die besten Holzfaeller sind die mit einer Narbe. Nur eine, nicht mehr und nicht weniger."Fun Fact: Die Geschichten beider Welten wurden von verschiedenen Uebersetzern ins Deutsche uebersetzt. Der Uebersetzer von Hard-Boiled Wonderland verzichtet auf Nennung seines Namens, weil er die Uebertragung in die neue deutsche Rechtschreibung nicht duldet. Nur in Deutschland...
2007
Vielleicht ist es aber auch nur eine Idee, die nur einmal originell ist (obwohl: Millionen gelanfweilter Katzenliebhaberinnen sähen es vielleicht anders).
Mit seinem Klugscheisser-Charakter erinnert der Held sehr treffend an einen Kater (wir Menschen sind schon furchtbar mit unseren menschlichen Beschreibungen von Dingen und Tieren jeder Art). In seiner neuen Umgebung gibt es eine grausame Mordserie einer Katze an anderen Katzen, die er nun aufklären will.
Es sei vermerkt, dass Verniedlichungen selten aufzufinden sind (kommt unter anderem darauf an, ob man es niedlich findet, wenn das Herrchen als "Dosenöffner" bezeichnet wird). "Felidae" ist eher gruselig und entwickelt eine dunkle Atmosphäre. Noch dazu ist es einfach ein gut entwickelter Krimi.
The novel describes a typical "American Idol"-clone-tvshow from behind the curtains. An entertaining view, really. I bought it when I had to kill time in Amsterdam one day.
I especially noticed how exact a clone of "American Idol" the german "Deutschland sucht den Superstar" is. For instance, all the emotional scenes seem so planned out, they feel all just like in the book. And, the "heroes" in this novel, the self-centered and cynical jurors, are the same characters in each of those shows in real life: The smart boss with the cruel put-off line, the guy who has some experience in the showbiz (but noone remembers which) and of course a woman to hug the poor but cute losers.
I think that maybe more of this book is actually true than most viewers think, even the ines who tune in for fun, knowing that it's all "a little" artificial.It might very well be casted and planned from A to Z...
So much to the show system in this book and in reality. Concerning the characters Elton exaggerates a bit for the sake of the fun and that's ok. A nice read for lonely afternoons in Amsterdam cafes, really.
Manche Bücher sind als Weckruf gedacht. Sie sind irgendetwas zwischen Sachbuch und Pamphlet. Sie enthalten keine grundlegende, durchdachte Theorie und auch keine eigenen Versuchsergebnisse. Das ist nicht schlimm, denn ihre eigentliche Intention ist es, Sichtweisen zu verändern.
Bauer versucht mit diesem Buch, die wissenschaftliche Sicht auf menschliches Kooperationsverhalten zu verändern. Seine Vita führte ihn sowohl in die Welt der Neurobiologie als auch der Psychologie, und Erkenntnisse der letzten Jahre machen ihm zufolge eine Korrektur, ein Umdenken des wissenschaftlichen Denkens über menschliche Kooperation notwendig.
Viele weigern sich, Altruismus als Phänomen anzuerkennen und begnügen sich lieber mit Darwins These vom stetigen Kampf ums Überleben als Mantra der Natur (genau wie Darwin schiessen sie damit über die Implikationen hinaus, die uns die Evolutionstheorie sachlich gesehen bieten kann).
Vielmehr zeigen neueste Einblicke in den Hormonapparat des Gehirns (hier besonders im Bezug auf Oxytocin, welches Bindungsverhalten abbildet und fördert) und die variabilität der Gensteuerung, dass Kooperation tief in unserem biologischen Apparat verwurzelt ist. Dass die Psychologie diese Meinung, auf ihr Gebiet bezogen, teilt, ist weniger neu, aber nicht weniger wichtig.
Dieses Buch will somit zeigen, dass es keinen Sinn macht, den Menschen weiterhin als rationalem Kampfmaschine zu betrachten. Es fällt auch mir manchmal schwer, zu glauben, dass solche Ansichten weite Verbreitung finden, aber bei der Vereinfachung, zu bder man in der Wissenschaft immer gezwungen ist, bleiben manchmal groteske Simplifizierungen für lange Zeit haften. Deswegen schreiben daraufhin Leute solche anregenden Bücher.
How do you spot a robot mimicking a human?
How do you recognize and deactivate a rebel servant robot?
How do you escape a murderous 'smart' house or evade a swarm of marauding robotic flies?
These are the kind of questions Wilson answers. He is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon and an aspiring roboticist, so you can call him an expert on the topic.
The book is written as a briefing for humans to be informed for the coming robot uprising. In a funny way.
And it is really well designed (did you ever see "King for a day, fool for a lifetime" by Faith No More? The same designer), with real cool drawings depicting the scenes described. It will look really well on your cupboard.
The only disappointing thing for me was that I knew almost all of the stuff in it. Wait... that's a good thing. But you (the layman) will have fun and learn a lot.
1. the movie mostly deals with stuff from another Asimov-Book called "The caves of steel"
2. Asimov is actually great to read, even if you heard about the three laws of robotics over and over
This book is a bunch of short stories that are told by Dr. Susan Calvin, the greatest robopsychologist of her time. She witnessed the great advances of U.S. Robotics in the 21st century, to the point where the fate of humanity lies in the hand of machines. Every short story has another robot as "hero".
The first story is actually located in 1996 and tells of "Robby", one of the first robot nursemaids. He can't speak yet but he's the best friend of a little girl.
Astonishing about Asimov is not only how precise a lot of his predictions are (think about that speech is no simple problem - thousands of scientists after him didn't get that).
He really had a feeling for the nature of the human-robotic relation. Most of the time, the humans in these stories are wondering why the robot would behave like it does. In a programmers term, they are debugging. Asimov saw that this would be how engineers would spend most of their time *before there were computer programs*.
That's really remarkable.
P.S.:
In related news, South Korea is working on a set of guiding principles for the use of robots. They will most likely reflect Asimovs three laws. We always suspected this ould happen.
So if you want to know about the future, read this book.
Und ich muss sagem ein extrem moderner und unterhaltsamer.
"Der Schwarm" ist ein moderner Thriller über die Biologie der Tiefsee. Wir wissen sowenig darüber, dass man es fast einen "inner space" nennen könnte - nur dass wir den "outer space" nicht derart verschmutzen.
Hauptfiguren in diesem Buch sind Wissenschaftler, die merkwürdigen Phämomenen auf die Spur kommen, die ihren Ursprung tief im Meer zu haben scheinen. Fast scheint es, als sei dort unten eine Intelligenz am Werke, die Methanhänge zum Abrutsch bringt, Wale fernsteuert und Seuchen in Küstenstädten auslöst.
Und vielleicht ist es sogar der Fall: Der Mensch ist nicht die einzige intelligente Spezies auf dem Planeten und nun steht er selbst auf der Abschussliste.
Der Roman ist gekonnt geschrieben und hält einige Überraschungen parat, auf die ich nicht gekommen wäre. Zudem hat Schätzing sich wissenschaftlich fundiert beraten lassen, was besonders für mich sehr wichtig ist. Man kann also einige neue Einsichten über unserern Planeten gewinnen, sogar die, dass eine Intelligenz zu finden, nicht unbedingt bedeutet, sich unterhalten zu können (eine der Wissenschaflerinnen ist vom SETI-Projekt).
Abzüge gebe ich höchstens, weil natürlich viel erklärt wird, aber die Masche ist doch leider immer dieselbe: Es ist immer jemand im Raum, der alles noch mal von vorne hören muss, so wie ich, der Leser. Zugegeben, für sowas gibts nicht viele literarische Tricks...
2006
Chris Crawford is one of the few pioneers in the field who is thinking about this for 15 years. In 2004, he squeezed his results in this book (he also founded a company to develop his erasmatron-technology, a tool to build interactive storyworlds).
The book covers the following topics:
-From Story To Interactive Storytelling
-Styles Of Thinking
-Strategies For Interactive Storytelling
-Core Technologies For Interactive Storytelling
-Applications
This gives you a hint what to expect.
The first two chapters will introduce how to think about Interactive Storytelling in the first place: What is different about it? What level of abstraction do you need? How can Geeks and Storytellers work on this together? Also, it tells you what is so "hot" about this topic.
The third chapter lists some basic approaches (of which some won't work for sure, according to the author) and the fourth chapter goes through all the components you'll probably have to implement.
The fifth chapter is a devastating list of work in the field, all but one (Facade) dismissed by Crawford as no real progress.
I think this book is well-written and to the point. Speaking to people who actually try to implement something interesting in this area, it's always an inspiration to me when I pick it up. It is not one of those programming books that lies right beside you while you are working and whenever you have a problem, you look it up. This is due to the fact that this field is totally unexplored (I think everyone is saying this all the time, so I'll soon stop) and no one (or just half a dozen people) have done what you are trying to do. It explains the problem, you get a feeling for what you have to do, and you're basically on your own then.
If you lose inspiration though, pick it up and read a bit.
If you're a writer and for some reason about to conceptualize a storyworld, this book is really helpful for you also. The language is non-techy and you'll understand the medium your work is for.
1. Evolution is convergent (it tends to converge on specific traits rather than wander through all possibilities like a headless chicken) to the extent that human-like intelligence has not evolved by random chance. This is a fascinating idea on its own and therefore explored at length in this book, but it also has implications for the idea to find extraterrestrial intelligence.
2. The chemical, physical and astronomical constellations to create life on earth are unlikely in such a manner that we indeed might be alone in the universe.
To explore these premises, Simon Conway Morris goes through a wide variety of scientific topics: The chemicals that might lead to DNA and life, the computational elegance of the DNA code, astronomical considerations for life on planets and lots of paleoanthropological and biological examples from evolution that are convergent: camera and compound eyes, eusocial and/or agricultural life forms like certain ants or moles, dolphin intelligence and many more.
By reading this sentences, I get the feeling that I would not pick it up because it sounds like some heap of backdoor-arguments to darwinian evolution. It's not. This is no basic attack on Darwin, but rather scientific. Somewhere it deals with the topic of fundamental darwinism, though.
There's a lot in this book. I recommend it. The only thing I might object is that for the sake of getting the scientific argument founded, there are some examples of convergence too much, but it's not too bad and apparently, he rather added too much than too little.
No, you'd better go and look that stuff up yourself (that holds especially for Geekland). So now, here I went, I did it. I finally read the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. Now I can stop fakelaughing at all those insider jokes.
And I do have real reasons to laugh. The book is great. Really. All this maybe-existence-is-not-as-holy-as-we-thought humor... It feels good to laugh about people who claim to know the sense that the world is making.
Also, Adams really knows how to build big characters by only narrating the little meaningless streams of thoughts they have. You feel close to them, even if they have two heads. Or are made of metal. For instance, there is Marvin, the depressive robot... brilliant.
I will read the other three Hitchhiker-books. In fact, I am just now reading "The long dark tea-time of the soul" by Douglas Adams.
There were only two things bothering me:
First, I knew the computer would say "42". Dammit. And there were several such occasions. I felt like having read that book before, but only when I was drunk and on Parties, so I forgot all but the cheery parts.
Second, Adams is one of the proclaimers of atheism. I just read an interview with him on atheism.org or whereever. No misunderstanding, I am one myself, but the utter meaninglessness of our existence, which might actually be real - that is something you'd better be prepared for when you know such thoughts might stick in your head pretty well (that theme gets repeated quite a lot).
Well, after all, it's a long journey to accept the beauty of designlessness (yep, just coined that term!) and laugh about it - so of you're going there, this book might be a great help on the way.
Eventually he will solve his case, but never proceeds with any logical considerations. For example, he only drives his car following other cars that seem to know where they are going. A whole chapter is spent following our hero on a desperate search for a pack of cigarettes at one o' clock in the morning.
All these stuff leads him to encounters that help him solve the case. Call it chaos or coincidence, but don't be too sure that Adams is trying to say something important here, like, for example, everything is connected blah blah.
Well, Dirk Gently is saying that ("If I could interrogate this table-leg in a way that made sense to me, or the table leg, then it could provide me with the answer to any question about the universe."), but Adams MIGHT only be satirical here (admittedly, I chose a passage strongly suggesting that, but there are also others, like that old butterfly-causes-hurricane-theory which I don't want to repeat here).
There are even the ancient gods (Odin, Thor ...) appearing as main characters in the book and Adams is not trying to making a serious hint about his religious beliefs here, either.
But this the-universe-is-chaoticly-interconnected-theory might really attract a lot of esoteric believers.
I think, when a skilled, atheistic AND funny writer is being satirical, this is what you get. Adams just can't take anything serious. There might be people who will understand him the wrong way, though...
Let me end by sharing my favorite passage: "(...), and there emerged from the car a pair of the sort of legs which soundtrack editors are unable to see without needing to slap a smoky saxophone solo all over, for reasons which no one besides soundtrack editors has ever been able to understand."
That would fit right besides "the worst analogies ever in high school essays", starring " The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't. ". I love it, though.
Warum dieses Sujet nur den Science-Fiction Autoren überlassen, die sich mit Zukunft beschäftigen, fragte sich Stephen Fry und schrieb diesen Roman. Darin verändern der Geschichtsstudent Michael und sein Physikprofessor Leo, dessen Vater Arzt in Auschwitz war, die Geschichte: Sie verhindern Hitlers Geburt, indem sie seinen Vater Alois Hitler unfruchtbar machen.
Michael findet sich daraufhin in den USA wieder statt in England. Seine Eltern sind ausgewandert, da Deutschland den Krieg gewonnen hatte und sich jetzt mit den USA im Kalten Krieg befindet. Statt Hitler hatte Deutschland eben einen sympathischen Führer. Er war so schlau, die jüdischen Wissenschaftler nicht zu vergraulen, und direkt nachdem er 1937 den Friedensnobelpreis bekam, warf er die Atombombe auf Moskau. Während Michael ausserdem merkt, dass die USA in einer Welt mit Hitler doch liberaler geworden waren (Homosexualität ist dort illegal), muss Leo erkennen, dass sein Vater auch in der veränderten Welt in Auschwitz tätig war. Ein interessantes Gedankenexperiment: Manche Dinge hängen mit bestimmten Ereignissen oder Personen zusammen, andere würden sich vielleicht nie verändern lassen.
Schwachstellen: Gut, die Zeitmaschine ist recht unglaubwürdig, aber darum geht es ja hier auch nicht. Trotzdem wäre ein Dialog wie dieser (ungenau wiedergegeben) unnötig:
Michael: "Wenn man mit dem Apparat empfangen kann, dann können Sie doch sicher auch senden?"
Leo: "Klar, warum nicht?"
Auch dass manche Stellen im Buch als Drehbuch geschrieben sind und dass ich mich durch viele persönliche Details der Charaktere schleppen mußte, gibt leichte Abzüge.
Von Beginn an als Film über das von allen Alliierten verwaltete Wien der Nachkriegszeit geplant, ist dieser Roman "lediglich" ein Entwurf gewesen, um Stoff zu sammeln. Es spricht für Greene als Romancier, dass der Roman es dennoch in die jüngst von der Süddeutschen Zeitung zusammengestellte Reihe "50 große Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts" geschafft hat.
Hintergrund des Romans ist die Besatzungszeit nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg, in der tragische Schwarzmarktgeschäfte wie der Penicillinhandel blühen. Greene zeichnet vor dieser Kulisse einen wunderbar schnörkellosen Krimi. Dessen Hauptfigur Rollo Martins, ein drittklassiger Western-Autor kommt nach Wien, wo er feststellt, dass sein Freund aus Kindheitstagen des Penicillinhandels verdächtig und außerdem tot, vielleicht ermordet, ist.
Vorteile des Buchs gegenüber dem Film? Da wäre zunächst Greenes wirklich witziger Stil. Der Witz der Story reicht natürlich nicht an "Unser Mann in Havanna" heran, aber der Witz des Erzählers Greene kommt klar durch. Zudem fehlen dem Film (laut Greene) witzige Szenen, wie die Verwechslung Martins mit einem hochkulturell angesagten britischen Lyriker, die in einem Vortrag Martins vor des Lyrikers Anhängern mündet.
Und Vorteile des Films? Greene selbst sagt, dass er das Endprodukt sei, inszeniert von einem grossartigen Regisseur und Freund (Carol Reed).
Also sollte man sich wohl ruhig beides zu Gemüte führen, Film und Buch.
Es muss das erste Mal sein, dass ich ein Buch aus der aktuellen SPIEGEL-Bestsellerliste lese, naja musste wohl mal passieren. Mehr noch als der SPIEGEL verdiente dieses Buch das Prädikat "cultainment" - wenn es das denn gäbe.
Dieses Buch zu lesen kostete mich nur zwei Abende und die waren äußerst kurzweilig. Wir tauchen ein, per Kopfsprung, in das Leben zweier Größen der entstehenden deutschen/europäischen Wissenschaft Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts.
Das mathematische Genie Carl Friedrich Gauss und der rastlose Entdecker Alexander von Humboldt, einer der frühen deutschen Humanisten, imponieren in diesem Buch nicht nur durch ihre Taten. Sie faszinieren den Leser auch durch ihre offensichtliche Gegensätzlichkeit und amüsieren, ganz klar, mit ihrer typisch deutschen Verbissenheit, ja Sturheit und auch Arroganz. Kehlmann arrangiert es, zwei Biographien fantasievoll ausgeschmückt und augenzwinkernd nebeneinander laufen zu lassen. Er erzählt ausserdem mit lockerem Faden eine Geschichte dabei, indem er ein fiktives Treffen der beiden im jeweils hohen Alter vorkommen lässt.
Zurück bleibt ein griffigeres Verständnis der wissenschaftlichen Elite Deutschlands jener (und damit auch heutiger) Zeit. Es bleibt ausserdem die Verantwortung beim Leser, von Kehlmann erfundene Fakten nicht unbedingt für tatsächliche zu halten. Das ist der Preis für so manche gute Geschichte sein, trotzdem gibt es deswegen einen Punkt Abzug.
Ein feines Stilmittel sei noch erwähnt: Dass Kehlmann nie einen wirklichen Dialog, sondern nur indirekte Rede verwendet (z.B. "er sagte, das könne nicht sein"), erhält dem Leser die Freiheit, sich die Dialoge selbst auszuschmücken. Sehr elegant.
Maybe it's because I am in another stage of my life now, but maybe it is because it is more depressing. Miller always describes how he was yearning for something else than his ordinary life in the New York of 1900/1910. He is always miserable, cheating on people and his wife, but always insists of being good-hearded.
When, in "Tropic of cancer", he finally is in Paris, living the boheme, all that is positive and not negative. It's a whole other view on life.
Yes, I think, that is the reason I didn't make it through.
2005
This book deals with the future. The title sure is provoking, and some of the arguments in it indeed are, but I was surprised how neutral Garreau deals with different theories made in that book.
Garreau is a journalist. He wrote a column for a big newspaper on interesting findings concerning progress. The thesis underlying all of this progress talk is that technological change seems to be progrerssing exponentially (think of Moore's law concerning computer memory. It also holds for a lot of other inventions like railway miles in the 19th century). In our days, we are looking at the "GRIN"-technologies (Genetics, Robotics, Informatics, Nanotechnologies).
Therefore technological progress is always running faster than planning can go. That's why it seems overwhelming. If our grandparents couldn't imagine what we are experiencing now, what lies up ahead that we can't imagine right now? some people coined the term "singularity" to say that this time, at some point, maybe we'll lose control over the process (astronomically, singularity is the point where a black hole's gravity is inevitable). So, artifial intelligence that enhances its intelligence by itself and can no more be understood by humans would be such a thing.
Garreau got to talk to a lot of influential people along the way and this book is just mirroring his impressions of thisd meetings and explains how these people came to this point in their life where they think what they think now. Garreau tries to group all these visionaires into one of three szenarios: heaven, hell, prevail.
There is Ray Kurzweil, who invented Muisic Synthesizers decades ago and is a leading thinker in AI research. His visions of the next hundred years are stunning and are used by Garreau for the "heaven" scenario. People will be healthier, technologically enhanced (also in the mind) and create artificial intelligences that will be a part of themselves.
And there is Bill Joy, who was CEO at Sun years ago ("The network is the computer" was their slogan). His vision is the "hell" scenario. Nanotechnology, Biotechnology and Genetics will run out of hand.
For the third scenario, "prevail" Jaron Lanvier was interviewed by Garreau. He coined the term "virtual reality" and is my (and I think, also Garreau's) favourite thinker of the three. His views are always concerned with both sides of the picture and he sees the future as a struggle, but always with the human nature as the defining factor, not just the technology.
So, to conclude, there is really much more to this book, Garreau has also been at the DARPA laboratories (talk about human enhancements!), he considers what we can learn about human nature and future angst from the epic greeks etc etc. The good thing is that you can make your own mind about all the opinions therein - you don't get pushed somewhere.
A weak point surely is that most of the scenarios, at least the heaven scenario, take a relatively stable world into account. What if we have no oil and no replacement for that? What happens to progress then?
I'll definitely keep it in my shelf, be it a stupid title or not...
2004
Wie er den "erhabenen" Kulturbetrieb aufs Korn nimmt, ist eine wahre Freude. Titel wie "Ich schreibe nicht an einem Buch über Kafka" oder "Wie ich eine Eule nach Athen trug" sind Programm: Diese Titel beschreiben exakt worum es in der Geschichte geht.
Biografien haben es Hildesheimer angetan. So zeichnet er das Leben erfundener Figuren nach, wie jenes eines großen Verhinderers von kulturellen Werken aus dem 19. Jahrhundert oder des großen Künstlers, der, nachdem er alle Gebiete der Kunst beherrscht hatte, nur noch beim Tätowieren von Frauenrücken neue Erfüllung fand (was auch zu seinem Ende führte).
Etwas anspruchsvoll geschrieben und einige wenige sind Geschichten etwas langatmig (z.B. "Warum ich mich in eine Nachtigall verwandelte") aber nichtsdestotrotz sehr erfrischend!
Einer meiner deutschen Lieblingsautoren neben Böll ist Lenz.
Diese Kurzgeschichten beschreiben seine masurische Heimat, die er als junger Mann nach dem Krieg verlassen musste. Der sonst so ernste Lenz (z.B. "Deutschstunde"), ist hier zum Brüllen komisch. Er überspitzt die Einwohner dieser teilweise aufgelösten Welt in urkomischer Weise.
"Der entzauberte Regenbogen" ist ein paar Jahre alt und richtet sich eher gegen Aberglauben im allgemeinen, z.B. Horoskope. Das Ziel des Buches ist, die Schönheit wissenschaftlichen Denkens zu vermitteln (welches ja im Allgemeinen als recht dröge wahrgenommen wird). Dabei zitiert er dauernd seinen Lieblingsdichter Yeats. Dieser war eher wissenschaftsfeindlich, und gerne hätte Dawkins ihm dieses Buch zu Lebzeiten in die Hand gedrückt.
Dawkins geht auf eine Tour durch viele Bereiche der Wissenschaft: Astronomie, Zoologie (natürlich) und vieles mehr. Er ist ein außerordentlich guter Schreiber und er hat excellente Beispiele parat. Beispielsweise sah er auf einer Afrika-Reise eine merkwürdig regelmäßige Wasserspur vor sich auf der Strasse. Man sagt ihm, es sein ein urinierender Elefant gewesen. Mithilfe eines Sinus-Algorhitmus gelang es Dawkins, die Penislänge aus den Schwingungen zu berechnen.
den Titel bekommt das Buch durch die sorgfältige Erklärung des Zustandekommens des Regenbogens. Dawkins' Argument ist, dass er nur schöner wird, wenn man weiß, wie das Phänomen ensteht. Er ist alles andere als "entzaubert".
Gerne entzaubert Dawkins aber Dinge wie Horoskope oder so manches "übernatürliches Erlebnis", das jeder schon gehabt haben mag. Er rechnet unterhaltsam vor, was uns Wahrscheinlichkeit lehrt. Sie hilft uns, so manchem rätselhaftem Phänomen seine Rätsel zu nehmen. Sie lehrt uns auch, welches Wunder es ist, am Leben zu sein, auf diesem Planeten, zu dieser Zeit.
Schade, dass Yeats nicht mein Lieblingsdichter ist und ich Dawkins nicht lese, um seine Meinung über Poesie zu erfahren. Aber der ganze Rest des Buches ist super. Ich würde es gerade Jugendlichen empfehlen, die von Wissenschaft noch nicht viel gehört haben und habe es deshalb meinem Bruder in die Hand gedrückt.
Man kann sie schnell im Zug lesen. Ich habe keinen Anlass, etwas Schlechtes darüber zu sagen, auch wenn man Hesse wohl sonst anders erwartet. Aber im ganzen Text findet man seine feine, liebevolle und etwas melancholische Erzählweise wieder. Ich habe mich etwas an "Unterm Rad" erinnert gefühlt, wenn man die Jugend und Orientierungslosigkeit eines begabten, aber doch auch ganz normalen jungen Menschens betrachtet. Schön, dass Hesse anscheinend einfach mal ein Happy End schreiben wollte :-)
Dann aber trifft man auf illustre Namen wie Susan Blackmore (Thema Evolutionspsychologie) oder Dietrich Dörner ("Seelen aus der Retorte?"). Man liest über Primatenforschung und wird über Daniel Dennets Theorie der vielen kleinen Homunculus unterrichtet.
Vielleicht etwas viel wenn man ganz am Anfang der Erforschung solcher Wissensbereiche steht, aber wenn man offen für neues ist und weiß, wann es besser ist, einen Aufsatz abzubrechen und zum nächsten überzugehen, eine sehr interessante Sache.
2003 or earlier
Eines der Bücher, die mich am meisten beeindruckt haben. Der Held Siggi ist kurz nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg in eine Anstalt für schwer erziehbare Jugendliche in Hamburg interniert. Die Aufgabe, einen kurzen Aufsatz zum Thema "Pflicht" zu schreiben, läßt ihn nicht los. Er taucht ein in seine Kinderjahre an der Nordseeküste.
Siggis Vater war der Dorfpolizist, der seine Pflichterfüllung über alles stellte und damit alle Familien- und Dorfangehörigen polarisiert. Siggis Freund, ein Maler, gerät zum Stein des Anstosses.
Lenz benutzt sehr beeindruckende Naturbilder und kann Konflikte gut auseinandernehmen. Eine tolle Beschäftigung mit dem Thema!
Ich glaube, das war mein erstes Böll-Buch. Jedenfalls das erste, wonach ich zum Böll-Verehrer wurde.
Dieses Buch bleibt mir in Erinnerung als, Böll- und rheinlandtypisch, Bibel für Katholikenhasser. Die Hauptfigur, ein Clown, hat gerade seine Frau, die katholisch erzogen wurde, an genau einen solchen verloren.
Ständig klopfen katholische Freunde des Ex-Paares an seiner Tür, um sich ihr Gewissen reinzuwaschen, nach ihm zu sehen, ein paar Fragen zu stellen usw. Er trinkt. Dass sie einen nicht in Ruhe lassen können...
Die Lektüre des Romans ist sicher 8 Jahre her, und doch ist mir die Atmosphäre noch allgegenwärtig. Sicher lebt nicht jeder in Bölls Rheinland der 60er Jahre, aber zutiefst deutsch ist die ja irgendwie eigentlich auch, diese katholische Art. Böll beobachtet sie noch in ihrer R(h)einform. Er ist wie der Archäologe, der dem heutigen Heranwachsenden zeigt, warum vieles so ist, wie es ist.
Wenn der will.
Ich wollte und habe nicht bereut. Danke, Herr Böll!
This is a quite entertaining read. Günter Wallraff is a kind of "left activist". His work somewhere undercover and then writes a book about it, mostly during the 70ies. So he once dressed a turkish immigrant in Germany and experienced from the first-person experience how it is like to be a part of this minority and work as a so-called "Gastarbeiter" (that book is called "Ganz Unten".
This time, he worked as a journalist at the "Bild-Zeitung", the prominent german yellow press paper.
One of the few Science Fiction - books I actually read (that is not really geeky I know...).
While Urras is a world that refers to ours, Annares is a moon of it where anarchists have settled after the big revolution years ago.
Shevek, a brilliant scientist living on Anarres, visits Urras for the first time. He is overwhelmed by the beauty of the nature on that world, but shocked by the ways people behave there. The story hops back and forth often, we follow Shevek back to his childhood, to the present on Anarres that reveals the problems that this society faces after several years (the subtitle of that book is " An Ambiguous Utopia") and back to his visit to Urras again.
I appreciate LeGuin's intent to compare those worlds with each other by switching the context often, though it confused me a bit. Speaking of confusion, maybe I was a little too young, but there is lots of scientific theories that Shevek develops on his journey. I did not understand too much of that and it made me a little tired.
I just read that to many people in the Sixties, Anarres seemed like an Utopia compared to the America of that time. Today, more people feel that Anarres would not be a place for them to live. ItäS too long ago for me, but it shows one thing: What you think while reading this ambiguous approach, depends on how you feel in your life today. That might be a goal LeGuin achieved without actively going for it.
The book is a fascinating read and because I think I couldn't really appreciate it back then I always thought I should read it again (maybe I understand a bit of the scientific blah today :-)
Ich habe im Weihnachtsurlaub 1992 ein ganz in rot eingebundenes Exemplar dieses Klassikers geschenkt bekommen (selbst die Seitenränder waren rot eingefärbt). Ich dachte erst, ich würde Monate brauchen, es zu lesen, doch als ich zu Hause war, hatte ich es schon halb durch. Ein toller Schmöker, muss man schon sagen!
Es ist wohl das berühmteste Märchen des 20. Jahrhunderts, diese Geschichte vom kleinen Hobbit Frodo, der den bösen Ring der Macht durch ganz Mittelerde tragen muss, um ihn zu verbrennen. Währendessen gibt es massig Schlachten, Schicksale und Tragödien. Menschen, Elfen, Orks, Zwerge, Zauberer - sie sind alle da.
Was dieses in den 40er Jahren geschriebene Märchen zu einem modernen Märchen macht ist sicherlich die Betonung auf die verheerenden Auswirkungen von Macht auf den Menschen. Mehrmals lässt sich der ein oder andere ansonsten edle König(ssohn) fast gänzlich von der bösen Macht einwickeln. Modern ist auch, dass ein kleiner, mit keinen besonderen Fähigkeiten ausgestatteter Hobbit der größte Held ist, ja, dass niemand anders diese Rolle hätte ausfüllen können. Fast ein amerikanischer Traum.
Wenn es um Macht geht, bedient dieses Märchen die gleichen Vorurteile wie die alten: Es gäbe eine böse Macht, aber auch eine gute Version davon. Man kann weise herrschen, oder brutal. Dazwischen ist immer eine klare Trennung (meistens Krieg). Oh, schon wieder ein amerikanischer Traum. Hoppla.
Eine erfrischend andere Sicht der deutschen Geschichte. Engelmann gibt einen Überblick über die letzten 1000 Jahre, wie man ihn wohl in kaum einem anderen Geschichtsbuch findet, der aber trotzdem seinen Platz hat.
Engelmann holt die Herrscher dieser Epochen demonstrativ von ihren Sockeln. Es ist von Missmanagement die Rede, von unfähigen und grausamen sogenannten Lichtgestalten der deutschen Geschichte, von Orgien, adligem Inzest und mächtigen Mätressen. Es ist die Rede von Dingen, die so nie in den Geschichtsbüchern stehen und den Verdacht (bzw die Gewissheit) nahe legen, dass Historiker eben gerne an den Bildern mitarbeiten, die die Mächtigen von sich selbst erstellt haben. Und es ist die Rede von der Unterdrückung, die die vielen Menschen, die auf diesem Stück Erde gelebt haben, zum Wohle dieser Potentaten erlitten haben.
Ein Buch, das möglicherweise (auch) seine Lücken hat, aber eins von den wenigen, das man zuklappt und danach die Welt mit anderen Augen betrachten kann (so man will).
Lewis Carrol hat "Alice im Wunderland" geschrieben. Es macht viel mehr Sinn, wenn man weiß, dass er eigentlich Professor für Logik war. Viele der Rätsel in Alice im Wunderland sind eigentlich Klassiker der Logik.
Dieses Buch sollte nicht für Kinder sein, sondern für seine Studenten, die sich im logischen Denken schulen sollten. Man bekommt ein Spielbrett und Steine mit dem Buch, und das ganze Buch ist nicht sehr lang. Der erste Teil führt in einfacher Sprache in die Logik und ihre verschiedenen Semantiken ein (z.B. "Einige" vs "Alle" vs "Keine"). Der zweite Teil besteht dann aus Übungsaufgaben.
highly readable as always, Joel Spolsky explains simple, but really important interface design guidelines.
I'm referring to the online version of the book here (the paper version is longer). I like the examples and his way of writing, but sometimes I couldn't escape the feeling of "come on, I knew that!". Maybe that's because I read Joel's articles before. As you can try out this book freely, I suggest peeking in there. It's great for the bus or as a gift!
2003
For the language: the book is 40 years old (which makes it one of the originals of a genre, only copied over and over). Especially the word "phoney" appears disturbingly often, but it's easy to get used to it.
Miller recapitulates his years in Paris somewhere in the 1930s. He chose to be a writer and to go to Paris after quitting his job in New York. What he chose was a life in poverty and hunger, but also in freedom and lust for life. Free of attachments, he was free to imagine everything there is. The book was illegal in the States for 30 years, because of several sexually explicit scenes. But that isn't the offending part in my eyes. Miller is constantly ranting against the people he hang out with, and is never in doubt about his own abilities, to become a great writer mostly.
He was living to the fullest, and reading his memoires reminded me of all the things I had let into my life, that were suppressing my freedom and my will to go where I wanted to go.
I can't say anything more than just recommend to get over the first 20 pages of this book. They are hard to get by, and that may be because you realize there is no story here. But maybe it's because you have to accept what Miller is about. He is not explaining it to you and he is not waiting for you. He doesn't need you. He became a true artist by starting to live to the fullest and never stopped believing in it. He is one of my heroes.
I recommend this book to MBA students...
The book introduces XML itself, explains what metadata is and explains a lot of XML standards, such as XML Schema or Relax NG. It also contains some case studies that deal with XML meta data. There, the book stops being really helpful. A number of the introduced standards have never again made it to come up anywhere I looked (and I don't mean Relax NG here, I can't even remember their names). I think they tried to cover a lot of promising approaches and made a few wrong picks. That's ok, but it isn't really helpful if you're picking up the latter half of the book any later than 2001.
But I must say, I did pick up the first half of the book a few weeks ago to learn XML Schemas again and have a few examples, so I'm glad I have it on the shelf.
If you don't really know what XML is, this book is too hard for you. If you do and you're sick of all the introductory books and tutorials, give this a try!
Was sind Komplexitätsklassen von Algorithmen und was bedeutet es, wenn ein Problem NP-hart ist?
Was bedeutet es, wenn ich nicht weiß, ob ein gegebenes Programm jemals anhalten wird?
Im späteren Teil wird es ziemlich komplex und am Ende diskutiert Harel Anwendungsprobleme für die Zukunft wie Sprachprogramme und dergleichen.
Man könnte es auch "Computerkomplexität für Dummies" nennen (wobei das nichts Schlechtes ist, Bücher der "... für Dummies" - Reihe hat auch mancher Experte im Schrank versteckt :-) ).
Es gibt ein bisschen Abzug für die etwas komische deutsche Übersetzung.
Dieses Buch ist umsonst als PDF im Netz erhältlich (allerdings auf Englisch). Ich habe es mir dann nochmal auf Deutsch gekauft (aber leider noch nicht gelesen), weil es mir auf Englisch gut gefallen hatte. Rothbart ist Schüler des berühmten von Mises. Beide sind meines Wissens Vertreter der sogenannten "Österreichischen Schule" der Wirtschaftswissenschaft. Diese geißelt den Einfluß, den Regierungen über Zentralbanken auf die Wirtschaft nehmen, indem sie den Zins künstlich beeinflussen und Scheingeld (sogenanntes Fiat-Geld) ausgeben. Sie fordert die Rückkehr zum Gold-Standard, die Bindung der Währung an ein wirkliches Konstrukt (anstelle eines unwirklichem wie Fiat-Geld).
Es ist sicher interessant, jetzt, da der Dollar an Kraft verliert und Yen und Euro an Bedeutung zunehmen, zu sehen, wie das System überhaupt entstanden ist. Rothbart geht auf die Geschichte der Geldwirtschaft ein, von der Steinzeit bis ins 20. Jahrhundert und der Abkehr vom Goldstandard. Nachdem er seine Theorie eines funktionierenden Systems erörtert hat, folgt abschliessend eine Übersicht über die großen Wirtschaftskrisen des 20. Jahrhunderts und Rothbarts Interpretation derselben.
Wenn man im Kopf behält, dass dies keine neutrale Sicht ist, sondern eine recht extreme Position, wird man viel mitnehmen können und dann vielleicht in Ruhe entscheiden, wie überzeugend man es findet. Vielleicht sind beim Thema Wirtschaft überhaupt nur stark vertretene Positionen lehrreich...