A few new books I read recently

I have not written since Jan 22 and now it is May 11! Soon, June will be upon us and before you know it, we will have finished more than half a year of 2021. It does not feel too long because I have been busy. 

Anyway, today, I want to write about books I read since the last one I finished. First of all, I must say that I have been on a tear! Here is the entire list at first and below it I will review briefly.

1. The Culture Map - Erin Meyer

2. No Filter: Instagram - Sarah Frier

3. Invent and Wander - Jeff Bezos 

4. This is Marketing - Seth Godin

5. I am afraid, Debbie from Marketing has left for the day - Morten Munster

6. Drug use for grown-ups - Dr. Carl L Hart

7. How to avoid a climate disaster - Bill Gates

8. Power of Habits - Charles Duhigg

9. Checklist Manifesto - Atul Gawande

10. Talking to Goats - Jim Gray

11. Mentors - Russell Brand

12. Hard Crowd - Rachel Kushner

13. A Runner's High - Dean Karnazes

14. Educated - Dr. Tara Westover.

Educated

I must start with the last book first. Today, I finished "Educated" by Dr. Tara Westover. When the book finished, I found myself holding back tears and walking to the bathroom to hide. I connected to Tara Westover in some ways. While Westover's case is extreme - meaning she suffered violent abuse at the hands of her own Father and Brother and then got out of it to go to Cambridge and Harvard - I also suffered mild abuse growing up. She writes in detail about her experience living in a remote Idaho town under the omni-present shadow of her abusive, mentally ill and survivalist father. The father is so deeply mired in conjured conspiracy theories that he does not allow medicine, science, schools, police, telephone, tv in his house. The first thought I had as I got through the first few pages was about economic inequality - how can one part of Idaho be so far behind the rest of the world in today's day and age? She writes how her father, due to his deep distrust in humanity and utterly blind faith in the Mormon God, leads his children down a dangerous path. Reading through this part of the book, I felt like "I've been here". I did not suffer anywhere nearly as much as she did. However, I am now convinced for a few years that any trauma in childhood is too much trauma. It takes years for an adult human being to shed poor experiences when growing up. In the middle of the book, she describes her unlikely journey through college in Brigham Young University, Utah. She writes about her introduction to the real world and how she starts to deal with her own feelings about her family. Here, again, I felt a connection to how I felt when I first left home, then my birth-country to come to the United States. I cannot say I had the same experiences as her, but, I had similar feelings about myself as she had about herself. I felt guilt, sympathy, excitement, fear, loneliness and fatigue, all at the same time for many  years. By the time I got to the third part of the book, I was deeply curious about what she did next. I wanted to read the rest non-stop so I could learn what she did to get out of her funk and blossom into the life that she wanted for herself. So, I did read non-stop and shed a tear at the end of the book just because it was so overwhelming, so truthful, so visceral to me. I imagine that to many readers, this book is about poverty, stupidity turned into a success story through individual perseverance and some therapeutic experiences. I can see how some will draw parallels to another similar book titled Hillbilly Elegy. In my opinion, this is different. This is about her education about herself. Something I sorely need for myself.

A Runner's High, Hard Crowd and Mentors

I had watched a news interview of Dean Karnazes very long ago. I was amazed! Now, reading his book for the first time, I am not that amazed! I mean, he is definitely a beast and deserves everything he has. My objection is to his superlative way of thinking about running and runners. It is facetious at best and dishonest at worst. Ultra running is an industry and he is part of it. Boy got bored, boy started running and boy made money. That is it. Of course, I am doing myself a disservice by judging him so harshly after reading only one book and watching a 30 second clip 10 years ago. Just not my type of a book. Full disclosure: I have high blood pressure, I am always stressed and I need to run. I am running these days, but, I am not even one quarter of the healthy person I used to be 10 years ago. I hope to get back on track!

Hard Crowd was in the Sunday NYT book review. I was looking for something different, possibly even fiction. Rachel Kushner wrote mostly fiction and this was a collection of non-fiction essays. That seemed like a good break from my usual fare. I am thrilled to report that I loved this book. First of all, the writing style was novel to me. I am accustomed to reading non-fiction, with facts, figures, evidence and experiments. This was just a story book of real things. Plus, some of these essays were shockingly good.

Russell Brand is awesome, Mentors is his book. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is one of my favorite comedies. He married Katy Perry! Then he had issues and went to rehab. Now, he is a new age podcast guru. I have heard him talk and I love his talks. He tackles many topics with aplomb. When his book came out, I wanted to read - just because it was from him. I don't remember any of it. Having a book by him reminds me of the evening when I dragged my wife to an auditorium to hear Cameron Diaz talk about her book and sign a copy. I have the book, I have no idea what is in it. :)

Talking to Goats

If you know who Jim Gray is, then you probably should read this book. I did not know who he was, but, I felt like it would be great to read an outsider's perspective on all these GOAT (Greatest Of All Times) athletes. I liked the book, I liked to read about all those stories from 80s and 90s. However, this book, like many others written in twilight of career was an explanation of Jim Gray's life. It just so happens that Jim Gray had a great life among some of the best people, events and stories of his lifetime. Good for him and good for anyone into sports. 

Books about "Habits"

I read a series of books about habit forming. These I read to affect some much needed change in my personal life as well as my work. It started with a quest to distill my work around digital marketing. I wanted to learn how to effectively persuade prospects to buy my services. I am well versed with the process and the technology. However, the question I had (I still have), is "What exactly should I do day to day to become a good salesperson". At first I read This is Marketing by Seth Godin. In many was Seth Godin is the proto digital marketer. He started in 1984 before it was a thing. He has a different way to look at it compared to most street friendly folks. It is easy to dismiss him as an idealist. I think "This is Marketing" was an eye opening book for me. To me it cut through the crap and defined what marketing means today. What does social media mean to marketing? How do ads help (or not)? Why should there be content? And what should be the driving goal behind all of this? These are fundamental questions and Seth's book covers some potential answers. 

From This is Marketing, I found "I am afraid Debbie from Marketing has left for the day". This is a very nice book. Morten Munster has done a great job of defining the marketing problem and providing a real, powerful process to solve the problem. In essence, he defines the problem as "a need to make change". For example, you need your customers to change their habit and instead buy your product. Then, he goes on to postulate that this is a System 1 problem. System 1 and System 2 thinking or "Fast and Slow" are behavioral science concepts from a Nobel prize winning scientist Daniel Kahneman. System 1 is fast, impulsive decision making. Most people make decisions based on such sort of thinking. To affect change the marketer (or any change agent) must analyze barriers, then design a "cue-response-reward" cycle that causes lasting change. I truly liked this book and wished I had purchased a physical copy to read and annotate instead of my audible book. I probably will do that some day soon.

Another book on the same topic is Power of Habits. This book does away with theory and measurement of any kind and focusses on the cue-response-reward cycle. I found the basic concepts similar to Morten Munsters book, but, the difference is that Munster's book is a lot more fun to read and has better examples from real, practical life. I think I may read this book again in paper form.

Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto is another one about habits. He has described how a simple change to standard procedures leads to a series of actions by humans that lead to better outcomes. Even though he is a cancer surgeon and his major success is in applying checklists to hospitals, he goes into some detail about how checklists are used in a myriad of situations. For example, flying a plane, constructing a high rise building and running war operations. Before reading the book, I felt like why would a cancer surgeon write a whole book about something as mundane as a checklist? He goes into that. Checklists are not just a guard rail, in fact, in critical, high stress, life-or-death situations, checklists lead to better chance of survival and success. Among many other real examples, he goes into the famous Hudson bay water landing and talks about pilot training in its context. For laypersons, it is easy to miss the power of checklists. This book brings it home!

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

Bill Gates is a brilliant man and is well read. He has decided to apply his brain and his fortune to the worlds toughest human problems. One such problem is climate change. In this book, he splits the problem down arithmetic lines. What are the 7 or so biggest contributors to climate change and what are the capitalist industrial life forces of those contributors. For example, cement, concrete and steel used in construction contribute a certain percentage to climate change. So, what are the factors here? How can we replace cement? What materials exist? Another example is much more obvious - fossil fuels. How do we replace that? He has gone into a business like analyses of these topics and described some potential ways to tackle the problem. He is so business like in this book that he side steps some issues such as animal farming, social habits and public opinion. On the contrary, I feel like he somewhat trivializes the activism that calls for massive changes in the human diet. He may be right from a dollar arithmetic point of view, but I think he is being unfair to simply dismiss the idea that changing the human diet from meat to plant based or lab grown meat 100% could be great for the climate.

Drug Use for Grown Ups

This was a phenomenal book. First of all, I had no idea (until I read this book) that the US Government has an entire agency dedicated to drug abuse named NIDA (National Institute of Drug Abuse). How we had a national crisis on opioid addiction despite having this agency is beyond me. When I picked up this book, I thought this was going to be a fringe book filled with opinions and anecdotes. I thought so because there is no way to get evidence based literature on an illegal activity. I was pleased to find out that NIDA existed and this author was a senior scientist there. The book itself is great! He has written about all drug types from Marijuana, Meth, MDMA (Molly/Ecstasy), Opioids (Oxy, Heroine), Acid/PCP and many others that I have now forgotten. Not only has he conducted scientific research on subjects in his lab, but also on his own body. He asks all drug users to not only come out of the "closet" but also proudly claim actively that they do drugs. He is himself an active drug user and is telling everyone about it. The book assumes that everyone knows how many problems we have today due to unjust drug laws and Nancy Regan policies. It just goes into a great, in-depth explanation of each drug type and how or why none of these drugs are truly unsafe. One caveat is that Drug Use is only for "Grown Ups". That means, the consumer should be in good physical and emotional health, should be using drugs for recreational purposes only. Kids are not included! I should mention that this book is deep and broad, please read it. You will be surprised.

Invent and Wander

Have you read all of Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters since 1997? Me neither! So, this book contains all those letters and a few of his important speeches. What stood out to me is that Jeff Bezos did not just build a website, he has invented a new way of doing business. It is surprising to see how much business innovation he produced and how he defined his metrics over time. Other than being a single unconstrained dump of all his letters, this books is not much else. I don't mean it is insignificant - far from it - instead I am saying it is a book worth reading for any student of 21st century digital businesses.

No Filter: Instagram

This was a great book. Mainly, it is very well written as a narrative non fiction. It reminded me of a book I read long ago about Anheuser Busch titled Dethroning the King. It was unputdownable. It starts from Kevin Systrom's dorm days and ends with how Instagram influencers now rule the digital marketing world. The authoress takes the reader deep into the minds of Instagram founders, employees, their community leaders, moderators, early artists and then leads the reader deep into how Facebook and Zuckerberg think of Instagram. I found the book fascinating.

Culture Map

Culture Map is a deep dive into the background of a book I read last year. That one was about netflix - co-authored by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer. This book is by Erin Meyer and it describes in detail how cultures across the globe differ and what a global manager must do to make a multi-national organization effective. I have seen first hand how multi-national organizations work. I always felt that there is just no way to plan for cultural differences other than simply wing it or stumble through it. This book provides a great framework to thinking about this problem. This book applies mainly to work culture and productivity. In some chapters, I found the authoress digressing into longs anecdotes or stories of personal experience, but, it all makes the point that she has written about. I cannot imagine how thick and slow the book would have been without her anecdotes and experiences.

Enjoy reading!

Book Review: The Deficit Myth

I first read about Stephanie Kelton in the Financial Times in their "Lunch with the FT" series. In that series, FT reporters meet their quarry at a restaurant, eat great food, talk about stuff and then the reporter writes their article in the FT. The idea is that readers, such as yours truly, get to vicariously eat lunch with the subject. The article describes the food eaten and the itemized bill as well! At any rate, that article was eye opening for me. That was the first time I read about a contrarian idea that Money (aka, cash, aka moolah) was invented as means of credit and not as a means of barter as is widely believed. Per popular wisdom, long ago, humans started bartering goods to receive things they needed in return for things they had but did not need. Soon, they were using sticks, shells and stones as currency in open markets and that lead to standardization into Money. Stephanie Kelton's ilk posit that, in fact, Money was first invented as a form of credit. Meaning, people took things from others and in return gave them tokens of credit (such as sticks, shells, stones) that could later be called in for return favors. The first recipient of the token could then pass that token to someone else with the same rights of an expected return favor. What they posit is more an economic theory than a scientific fact. They call this theory "Modern Monetary Theory". 

Understanding money is important to public policy that in turn affects everything in our life. You and I can only earn money, but, only Government can print money. How money is distributed across the economy and who earns how much money can sometimes be taken for granted and other times be questioned with equal fervor. Some people are willing to kill for money and others find ways to give it up completely. I can write a pretty long dramatic prose just on this topic of understanding money only because it is such an enigma to me. Out of consideration for you, my dear reader, I decided not to do that. However, I did decide to read the book and write about it here. That book is Stephanie Kelton's June 2020 book named "The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the birth of the people's Economy". 

I have to say: this is by far the simplest and most interesting economics book that I have read. It begins with the meat of the topic in the very first few pages. I remember the aha moment I had when I was listening to chapter one, walking on a nature preserve trail near my house. I could not resist but look up to the sky, amused and awed at the same time about how simple the concept was. It starts with the idea that Government Income (Taxation) and Government Spending are two unrelated things and are not the same as Household Income and Household Spending that are highly related. In Econ 1, I studied that Governments should strive for a balanced budgets such that Tax income should equal Spending. Now, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) turns that on its head. It posits that Government Income (Taxation) is not really a means of Income in the sense of "Profit" or "Surplus". It is simply a number on a ledger that can be increased at will by Sovereign, Fiat Currency Governments. Let me try to say in a few lines what Kelton takes a whole chapter to say - forgive me for butchering this. MMT says that Tax was not invented as a means for Governments to collect money that can then be spent on public projects. Old world Rulers instead invented Tax as a means to coax their subjects into working for them. The Rulers decided that they would simply take a percentage of the Subject's Produce without giving them any Credit Tokens. Unless, of course, the subjects worked on the Ruler's Projects such as building roads, forts, and iron smithy. In that case, the Ruler would offer the Subject a Credit Token (a stick, shell, or a stone) and then, when the Tax Man came around, the Subject would simply offer up one of the shells to show that they had worked on the Ruler's project and hence are exempt from offering produce. Hence, there was always an incentive for the Subject to work for the Ruler as long as the Produce was dearer than the labor spent on the Ruler's Projects. That is how Money was first invented as a Credit Token that replaced domestic Produce for taxation. Then, a secondary economy sprouted around these credit tokens as people started trading these tokens for other kinds of work between each other. For example, a farmer could offer one of his hard earned Credit Tokens to a iron smith to produce an augur. Hence, by MMT, the Ruler could simply continue to offer as many Credit Tokens (a.k.a. dollars) as they wanted and as long as they wanted work done. The only limitation that the Rulers must be wary of is limitation of physical resources. Meaning, the Ruler cannot expect to purchase goods and services after all able men are already occupied and after all grains and water is already consumed. In the modern world such unbridled demand would lead to inflation. Inflation is the only real limit to Government Spending.

Now that I have butchered the whole thing for you - I suggest you go read the book!

At any rate. Kelton opens the book with some eye opening, mind blowing positions. After the first chapter, she goes on to refute other misgivings and fervent objections to an idea that Uncle Sam can spend spend spend. She addresses current thinking that each dollar spent in the US must be accounted for in taxes. She addresses trade deficits, national debts, balance of payments, entitlements (Social Security, Healthcare, Welfare) and all other so called budget deficit expenses that are going to doom our country. It is very clear to me (the reader) that MMT has in fact addressed these and it is almost a panacea to many of our problems today. I was surprised that this has not already been done in the US Government. I agree with her representation that politics and not economics is the driving factor in Washington DC and I am appalled that politicians do nothing to improve human conditions in spite of an easy way out. Human suffering, in this case, is a more easily reparable state than the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) would lead you to believe. All in all, MMT makes a important case for Governments to solve all human problems with a stroke of a pen (or a keystroke on a keyboard). 

I must admit, I got a million questions from people with whom I shared my thoughts. The first question was "But, isn't that simply socialism/communism". Communism or Socialism, which erstwhile USSR had, and today's China has, is Government Ownership of all resources in the nation. In communism, Government owns everything and allows Subjects to partake of those resources in "equal" parts. In Socialism, Government owns a master license to all resources and it allows private citizens to partake of the license to produce, consume such that all private activity affects social gain. Now, if I run my uneducated mind on high gear, I could reach the conclusion that eventually, the US Government, under the influence of MMT, could spend money to the point that they elbow out all private companies and all resources in the country would then be owned by the Government. Ergo, Communism. However, I do feel that is a big leap of imagination and nothing else. To keep it simple, I will only say that the US Constitution simply won't allow the Government to take over private sector. The more I think of the questions I got about this book, the more I feel that those questions are simply unfounded doubts and suspicions. I feel that the Ronald Reagan administration successfully screwed everyone's mind about how Governments work. I agree that there have been many political thoughts in US about "less government", but, Reagan administration turned a lot of those thoughts into policy. 401k (vs pension), social security delays (1983 amendments), tax cuts and many others turned the public spending conversation in the wrong direction. Today, Tens of millions of people are at best living an ordinary life and some, at worst, dying early in poverty, and I think Reaganomics has a role to play in it. MMT might be the anti-Reagan medicine to resolve many living condition issues for all of us. I do not mean to say that Kelton's book compares MMT to Reagan or any other past policies. This paragraph was just my thought process after having read the book.

I say that Kelton's book and the whole MMT concept can unleash human potential much like how torrential April rain can bring May flowers.

Today, that Lunch with the FT article is one of the top article on the "Lunch with the FT: Top 10 interviews of 2020" and Bernie Sanders is the Senate Budget Committee chairman. I cannot wait for Joseph Biden to apply some of these MMT principles to US public policy to bring it out of stupor.

All in all, I highly recommend reading this book.