Your Call is Important to Us: the Truth About Bullshit - Laura Penny

Brilliant social analysis in a very witty and irreverent style.  Well-researched, both from a historical perspective and a social trend perspective.  No naive suggestions about how to deal with this, as it is a social problem ie. social trends at large underlie it.
Worth rereading.

Capital - Rana Dasgupta

A look at the rapacious capitalism of Delhi, and the dysfunctional, inhumane society it has created.  A look at capitalism and private sector services and where they end up without government regulation with a corrupt power elite.  You can see how government and private capital work hand in hand to disenfranchise and exploit citizens for their endless greed and profit.  Book is well-structured into specific sectors - property, health care, infrastructure etc. 
Built around research and interviews with people involved in the various sectors examined. 
Kind of an examination of the pure capitalist model carried to an extreme.

Lot in there.  Worth rereading.

Welcome to the Poison Chalice - James K. Galbraith

A collection of essays by Galbraith on the Greek financial crisis.  He comes at the issues from the same perspective as Yannis Varoufakis.  A bit repetiive, as the is essays and articles are addressing the same issues for different publications.
The best point he makes (apart from the total economic nonsense of Bruxelles approach to the crisis) is the true concern of the leading EU and IMF politicians and leaders:  #1 political survival and career  #2 protect the banks  #3 maintenance of EU system status quo  #4 populations of countries in crisis

Worth at least dipping in to.

Journey Into the Whirlwind - Eugenia Ginzburg

A book referenced in Masha Gessen's "The Future is History".

An account by a woman who lived through Stalin's Great Terror.  She begins as a staunch and well-respected member of the Communist party, working in academia.  She recounts her personal experience with the quota arrest system that led to her spending two years in solitary confinement and then sixteen years in the work camps around Kolyma.  She explores the insanity, the double-think, the sadism of Stalin's system.  (Though she never really gets to thinking about the underlying point of it all.)  She describes the mind-wrenching logic of the justice system and trial, the types of torture used to get confessions, the daily details of life in the sub-human conditions of both the prisons and the work camps.  She describes people who sell out dozens of others in a useless attempt to save themselves from the Terror.   The sadistic interrogators who themselves later turn up as goners in the camps. 

Strangely, when you read about her on Wikipedia, she never seems to have given up on Lenin and Communism in general, seeing the whole Stalin period as a "Cult of Personality" problem... 

The book gives a good sense of the difficulty of trying to understand such an experience when reason, logic, social values and politics don't explain it.  What was the point of all that suffering and death?  This is what is so hard to get your mind around.

Also, makes it even more frightening or disturbing when you see how Stalin is again becoming a hero, a model, in Russia....

And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Yanis Varoufakis

An excellent look at the current crisis situation in the EU.  Varoufakis discusses some complex economic models but he explains them clearly, so it is possible to learn quite a bit about macroeconomics.  The goes over the Bretton Woods agreement, then the financialization structure that took its place after the Nixon Shock (when the US stopped backing European currencies at a fixed rate convertible to gold).  He also traces the history of the EU idea from its earliest stages as a heavy industry cartel centred in France and Germany.  He sees this origin as a corporate cartel as a major shadow hanging over the further development of the EU as primarily a regulatory economic block for large corporate interests - rules based, technocratic and essentially apolitical, asocial and antidemocratic.
He also looks at some of the shady practices of the EU bank in Frankfort leading up to the collapse of Greece and several other smaller EU countries in 2009.  Predatory loan practices similar to the subprime mortgage crisis in the US.  Banks pushing loans to high risk businesses and countries that could never pay them back, and then cutting the loans up to make derivatives of "shared risk" that were then sold to other EU national banks - who of course threatened to collapse when the true value of the derivatives emerged in the 2009 crisis.
He sees the EU technocrats and governing bodies as suffering from dogmatism which keeps them from seeing both the real nature of the economic problems and also the possible solutions which could be enacted (except that they come from outside accepted dogmatic thinking).
The German political and banking elite comes off quite badly in his analysis.
A complex book, worth rereading.

Time to Start Thinking - Edward Luce

A very clear, sharp analysis of the many challenges America is facing as it slowly slips into decline.  A chapter on each of several issues - middle class decline, poor education system, dubious value of free trade, outdated ideologies, rise of other dynamic and innovative economic centres, bureaucracy, political dishonesty, entrenched special interest groups.
Luce is only moderately optimistic that the situation can be turned around.
Very well-done.  Doesn't seem too biased in any particular direction.

Pay Any Price - James Risen

A look at corruption and industry government collusion in post 9/11 U.S.  He discusses the profiteering that has gone on behind the closed doors of government secrecy.  He looks at how private industry had virtually taken over and profited from the war in Iraq at the expense of the U.S. taxpayers.  He looks at how the surveillance state came into being despite clear legal obstacles post 9/11. He also looks at how the government under Bush and still under Obama works to keep these facts from the public and squash any people and journalists who attempt to come forward about these issues.  Nothing new really (sadly) but it is interesting to see the details.

Saints of the Shadow Bible - Ian Ranking

A post-retirement Rebus novel.  Another meditation on the self-serving self-involvement of the members of society's leadership.  Also another look at how the vacuous, impersonal rights and respect babblings of modern corporate culture blind us and make us incapable of engaging with elements that endanger our social order.  There are crossovers in Rankin's view of the modern police force with the ideas in John Gray - this living in a mythical, fantasy world that in the end blinds us to the world around us, leaving us in a hollow echo chamber of our own babble.

Another great book by Rankin.

Kolyma Tales - Varlam Shalamov

Tales of the Siberian political convict camps created by Stalin.  Horribly wonderful tales.  Horrific lives recounted an indifferent and matter-of-fact voice that mirrors the indifference that overcomes the convicts in this inhuman environment.  No idealogical or political analysis, though there is an portrait of the bureaucratic and inhuman absurdity of the prison rules and environment.  In a sense it is the logical extension of the absurdity revealed in the biography of Stalin that I read recently.

The Naming of the Dead - Ian Rankin

Another exploration by Rankin of the structures of bureaucratic governmental power in the modern world - inflexible, inhuman, sterile - and the links to corporate power.  Also a look at links and crossovers between the private sector and the various levels of the police.  His crimes always explore the vagaries of human emotions and psychology in opposition to the sterility of the bureaucratic world - which indulges in a different, more cold-blooded type of crime.  Similarities here to Michael Dibdin.

More Money than Brains - Laura Penny

Full title:  More Money than Brains - Why School Sucks, College is Crap and Idiots Think They're Right

A great, albeit depressing, read.  One of those books that hits the nail smack on the head.  She has done the scholarly research on many of the social and institutional shifts that I shake my head over and discuss when I can find someone else who is interested.
One of the great things about the book is that it cuts across partisan political lines.  She talks about how both the left and the right, both the new media and the old, both the young and the not so young, both industry and your average Joe Blow have all contributed to create the new Idiocracy, as she calls it.

This book ties in with the message in the documentaries by Adam Curtis that I have been watching:  All Watched Over by Loving Machines, and others.

Lots of great quotes.
Some great creative names for social trends and deformed social institutions.
Her writing style is also quite witty in general.
Tellingly, she offers no solution, no grand way out.

A book you should own.

Also a great source for further reading.

Reread January 2019

Dark Age Ahead - Jane Jacobs

Jacobs is an interesting thinker in that she is writing about many of the key issues of the late 20th century, but not as an expert.  She writes as a knowledgeable, thinking person who is living and acting in the context of these issues:  family and social breakdown, the growing but dysfunctional urban environment more and more of us live in, perversion of public dialogue by self-seeking experts, domination of the social and political sphere by the interests of elites and the wealthy, the erosion of meaningful education.
The other think that makes her interesting is that she is writing within the context of Canada and Toronto, as well as the U.S.
While her style is at times a bit painful, the book is worth reading for its ideas.

The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty - Nina Munk

A brilliant take-down of the modern concept of expert.  The book portrays all the failings of our current expert-worship culture, and why, with their advice, we just keep digging ourselves deeper and deeper.  A list:  huge egotism, self-interest, dismissal of experience and ideas of the people actually living the situation, reliance on large amounts of money to accomplish goals, top-down flow of ideas and structures, insulation from the effects of their recommendations and ideas, refusal to take responsibility when things go wrong (just change focus), claim success but blame failure on externals and the stupidity of others, culture-centrism,  class-centrism, narrow focus of viewpoint.

I just keep coming back to the image of Sachs sitting in his 8 million dollar condo built for him by one of the Ivy League universities as he pontificates about the situation of dirt-poor africans living in mud huts...  Makes me fee queasy (and a bit hysterical...)

Well-written.  Interesting read.  Funny in a black humour (unintended) kind of way.

Refer back in particular to the comments on Nial Ferguson and his book, The Great Degeneration.

A Most Wanted Man - John Le Carré

Another excellent novel by this great author - very hard to put down once you start.
Again, a focus on issues in modern behind-the-scenes international politics.  This time the plot is built around islamic terrorism and terrorist funding.
The real issue in the book is how misled we can be by being overly reliant, or exclusively reliant, on technology for our information and understanding of the world.  In a way it ties into a larger theme of how technology dehumanizes society and our relations with people.  How, without real human contact, without human sources (to use the spy analogy) it is much easier to fit the world into our preconceived notions of how things should be, into our stereotypes and self-serving, self-agrandizing and self-mythologizing narratives (hate that word).  And to trample others, miss opportunities, and lose all subtle shading.  Which ties into the theme of the other two books I have been reading lately, The Big Disconnect and Life Inc..  This is a theme that Ian Rankin has also begun to explore in some of his more recent work.

The Great Degeneration - Niall Ferguson

This is an interesting read on several different levels.
Ferguson raises a number of interesting points about the west's current difficulties and changes in society and culture over the past 30 or 40 years.  He references a number of other important thinkers - Krugman, Stiglitz.  He brings up some important current ideas - rent-seeking, lack of democratic participation, the erosion of civil society and the public space, deregulation/bad regulation in the banking sector, lack of punishment or consequences for the fraudsters responsible for the banking collapse of 2007 - and has intelligent things to say about them.

In the first chapter, he looks at the emergence of rule of law and property rights as the basis for the successful development of western european leaders over the past 300 years.

The central thesis of his book is the decline of western economic leadership due to an erosion of these basic rules (rule of law, property rights) in the most recent decades.  He may have a point but somehow the whole book comes off as just a bit too glib.  When you finish the book, you come out thinking the US is well on its way in a slide to 3rd world status, based on the statistics he sights.  One study he relies heavily on is the World Economic Forums annual report on doing business in countries around the world, so it is worth a side trip to check out this study.

When you look at this WEF study, the US does in fact fair middlingly in many areas evaluated, and poorly in some others, BUT it still retains its overall place of 5th in the whole scheme of things, which does not make it a country or economy in crisis.  Turns out Ferguson cherry picks his stats, possibly to develop his attention-getting theses - he's a bit of a media player, turns out.

It's also worth checking him out on the web.  Turns out he was involved in a dispute with Krugman regarding the US post crisis monetary policy - the subsequent events have proved him wrong on all counts.  He also gave a controversial speech criticizing Obama, heavily analyzed but several columnists and big papers - turns out much of his supporting evidence for the critique was partial truth, cherry-picked bits of studies, misrepresented conclusions and outright fabrication.  This speech also sounds a lot like the work of an apologist for big business and the Republican party - which there are whiffs of in his book, The Great Degeneration, without actually coming out and making it obvious.

Ferguson would be an interesting study to look at how an academic can trade on his credentials in support of a particular ideology.  How facts and statistics can be bent and manipulated in support of an ideology (which would seem to be the opposite of the role of academics.)

*The one idea Ferguson brings up that I consider worth looking at is the idea that many of our social institutions  (education, health, politics etc.) have lost the focus of providing a public service and have become largely focused on catering to the needs of the people working within the institution, rather than the needs of the groups the service focuses on.  I have certainly seen this in the education field...

A Delicate Truth - John Le Carré

John Le Carré always manages to stay up to date in his exploring of the shady side of the states that govern us.  This book could be seen as his response to the Iraqi invasion, or the drone missile attacks, where the death of family members and bystanders is just seen as collateral damage.  He also looks at the dangers of handing over national security to private industry, and replacing national armed forces with contract security firms.  Intelligence will be manufactured, operations will go ahead in dubious circumstances - after all, there is money to be made, and it only happens when services are delivered, needed or not, justified or not.

On a larger scale, governments are such suckers for private sector exploitation - you see that in any kind of contract situation, from countries to cities to school boards.  You can say public service is wasteful and inefficient but I'm not sure it's any more expensive than being ripped off by shady public/private contract deals.  And with the public service, at least the wealth is spread around instead of just further adding to the wealth of the 1%, or even the 10%.

Yet again, I am reminded of a quote I read years ago that went something like, "When private business begins to use the public purse as a cash cow, democracy is finished."  

Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Like his other book, Antifragile:  Things that Gain from Disorder, this book is really too big and too complex to discuss in any kind of succinct way.  There are also far too many good quotes to even start transcribing them.  In fact, there are also too many leads to even note down.  Only thing to do is buy it, get a few highlighters, and then try to not just highlight the whole book...
As I digest his complex web of ideas, I'll try to add more here.

Waiting for the Barbarians - J. M. Coetzee

This book is an absolute must read.  Coetzee is a very interesting and subtle thinker and writer.  It is easy to see his writing in the context of his roots as a white man growing up in South Africa through the apartheid era.  But there is a lot more to him than that.  The apartheid experience may have been the catalyst to his thinking and world view but his reach extends far beyond that specific situation.  Coetzee is fundamentally a deep moral thinker, and a writer who explores the deep social structures, power relations and driving forces in modern western civilization.  
You can read him as an exploration of good and evil in the modern world.  You can read him as an exploration of empire, corporate culture and bureaucratic power structures and their effect of human relations and society' moral sense.  You can read him as an explorations of the clash or conflict between the modern western society's world view/values and other older cultures built on entirely different premises.  You can read him as an exploration of western social power structures and relations.  You can read him as an exploration of the dynamics of Empire  (and thus a history of the modern Western world).

The narrator's failed quest to truly understand the difference of the Other in the people that surround him is intriguing, and also quite possibly a critical look at the liberal left of Europe and North America.  There is a wonderful passage to the effect that he, the narrator, represents the face of Empire when times are good; the sadistic army officer, the face of Empire when times are bad.  Two faces, but the same Empire, the same dynamic, the same power structure.

A complex book worth rereading several times.

The Childhood of Jesus - J. M. Coetzee

A compelling read but very difficult to figure out the threads of the book.  It centres around the story of what seem to be two refugees arriving somewhere in a country that seems northern or Scandinavian in culture - a rather bloodless, unemotional but equitable society.  There is a thread of conflict between natural versus modern sanitized man; between the moral complaisance of bureaucratized social assistance and true human need.   There is another thread around the nature of work - the dock workers' view vs the new man's view.  There is the deconstruction of sex and sexual desire.  Centred around the child, there is a conflict of the development of the individual child vs socialization to societal norms.  Around the child there is even a certain deconstruction of the common language of reality when the man reflects on the child's unorthodox views of reality.  This nature of reality theme is also reflected in the discussion of the "new arrival's" state of being wiped clean, of starting anew, of the wiping of memory needed to accept and fit into the new society.  This could also be a reflection on the west's modern society of forgetting, of disappearance of history and the past.  All of this of course also ties to modern social issues around refugees, population displacement and cultural conflict, especially as seen in Europe.
Worth rereading at some future date.

To find:

Waiting for the Barbarians

The Bed of Procrustes - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

An entertaining and insightful collection of aphorisms.  Satirical, cutting but accurate - reminds me of The Devil's Dictionary.
A good combination with his other book, "Antifragility" - explores many of the same ideas but in a more succinct form, or in a form applied to different domains of life.

"An idea starts to be interesting when ou get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion."