I did a whoopsie, but it’s fixed now.
Further Reading:
Who and what will rise and fall in status? - short blog post by Tyler Cowen from last March – I disagree on some of the specifics, but the basic premise is what inspired this post
Insight – Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci’s Substack – Tufekci has consistently been ahead of the curve on three of the major issues which have dominated public discourse for the last ten years: the role of social media in politics, the nature of Trump’s authoritarianism, and coronavirus. There are few better role models for thinking carefully about the modern world.
Austerity: The Story So Far – somewhat longer blog post by me from last October – another history-of-an-idea which I wish was relatively more widely read compared to some of my other posts
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: 500 page book by Naomi Klein – Of the books I have never read, this is probably the one which has influenced my thinking the most. The new zeitgeist might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing!
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women - Book by Susan Faludi – I feel like a lot of people don’t remember how fresh the feminist movement felt ten years ago. Here’s a great document of feminism’s dark ages. As in the actual dark ages, a lot of things were in fact happening, but they didn’t get that much mainstream attention.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need – 125 page book by Bill Gates – It’s good, actually. See also Bill McKibben’s negative review, which I think was unfair but which gives you a sense of the ideological conflicts at play
H. Res. 109: Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal – 14 page Resolution of the U.S. House of Representatives - Word-for-word, probably the most powerful document for understanding where the progressive movement stood in 2019.
Obama at the Hamilton Project, 2006: “This is not a bloodless process”- Textual analysis of a Barack Obama speech from Naked Capitalism – Great insight into what Obama represented at the time of his election
A Promised Land – 700 page book by Barack Obama – Clear-eyed document of the role of race and power in shaping the Obama presidency. Obama will likely prove to be a valuable historian of the 2010s.
Our 2021 Annual Letter: The Year Global Health Went Local – This year’s annual blog post from Bill and Melinda Gates – These things are always kind of a snooze fest, but if you’re interested in learning about how Gates sees the world, this and the various podcast interviews he’s been doing are a good source.
Republicans’ unhinged moderation – Blog post from Matthew Yglesias’s Substack – Behind a pay wall but I think you can get a free trial. The gist is that in becoming more interested in power for its own sake, the U.S. conservative movement has allowed its actual policy ambition to shrink. As you may have observed, I believe that trends from America tend to get exported throughout the West, and this is no exception. For more on economic policy shifts, see my austerity piece cited above.
[CORRECTED] PODCAST!: The Zeitgeist Matters