Graeme Newell

Smart book and tangible solutions

Revisado: 01-02-20

This book really helped me to better understand the history and opportunities of tax policy.

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 tax revolt was intended to free Americans from burdensome taxation. Those policies dramatically reduced taxes, but unfortunately, just for one group of Americans - the rich. The author tells a fascinating story of how the most anticipated tax reform movement in recent history transferred a big tax burden on to middle and lower class Americans.

Reagan’s vilification of all forms of taxation transformed tax avoidance into an patriotic act. Paying taxes was no longer an uncomfortable but necessary act of civic duty; it was now a great evil oppressing the nation. It was every American’s duty to fight any form of taxation.

This new narrative marked the beginning of an explosion of tax cheating and tax avoidance. Prior to this time, most of the rich begrudgingly paid the high tax rates demanded of them. It was considered every American’s obligation. But Reagan’s tax revolution marked the birth of an accounting metamorphosis and the take-no-prisoners tax avoidance insurrection. Offshore tax sheltering, corporate shell companies and other forms of gymnastic accounting soared to prominence. Paying taxes was for suckers.

The first part of Saez’s book chronicles this perfidious transformation. He reveals the ingenious playbook used by accounting rockstars, CFOs and lobbyist to quietly morph America’s tax policy, moving the burden on to the less financially sophisticated - middle and working class people. He chronicles the story of this “greed is good” devolution and how it has shaped the taxation policies we live with today. In the 19th century the super rich (Getty, Carnegie, etc) were seen as robber barons. Today they’re rock stars.

Saez does a great job of explaining the whack-a-mole tax avoidance strategies of corporate offshoring and the deviously clever ways gigantic profits are safely harbored in a few poor countries desperate for economic relief.

The second part of the book was even more interesting. Saez provides a wonderfully approachable explanation on who foots the bill on different forms of taxation. He lays out who pays what on capital gains, labor taxes, flat taxes and all the myriad forms of taxation that have been tried throughout the ages and around the world.

Finally, he lays out a pretty solid plan of action for tax reform. It actually seems like something that might work.

This book gave me some real hope that intractable problems like tax reform might be solvable. No question, it will take tremendous political will to achieve but the good news is there appears to be a way forward.

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Great production and wonderful story

Revisado: 01-02-20

This fantastic book told the story of the 2002 DC sniper case.

What I enjoyed most about this book was the format. This wasn’t a written book. It wasn’t an audio book. It was an audio documentary. The authors did audio recordings with all the real people who lived this dreadful drama. The first-hand accounts were amazing.

It was masterfully edited to create a captivating tale that captured just how frightening it was to live in the DC area while all of this was going on. I also admired they way the author structured the story. The book had cliffhanger after cliffhanger and it really kept me engaged and on the edge of my seat.

Solid writing, full characters and a real-life crime drama. So glad I read this book.

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Solid production but light on content

Revisado: 01-02-20

This short audio documentary book tells the story of the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme and features one of the few interviews with Madoff since he went to prison.

I really enjoy the audio documentary format of these books. It makes them so much more entertaining. This audio production is particularly compelling, complete with sound effects, music and skilled narration.

The salacious title reflects the overall tone of this book. There is some very interesting information in here, but its tabloid, speculative tone got a bit tiring. This is a very short work, so there’s not much depth here. I was disappointed it didn’t provide more information.

Still, it was an entertaining, short read and I learned a few new things.

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Solid production but light on content

Revisado: 01-02-20

This short audio documentary book tells the story of the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme and features one of the few interviews with Madoff since he went to prison.

I really enjoy the audio documentary format of these books. It makes them so much more entertaining. This audio production is particularly compelling, complete with sound effects, music and skilled narration.

The salacious title reflects the overall tone of this book. There is some very interesting information in here, but its tabloid, speculative tone got a bit tiring. This is a very short work, so there’s not much depth here. I was disappointed it didn’t provide more information.

Still, it was an entertaining, short read and I learned a few new things.

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The power of sociality to supercharge evolution

Revisado: 09-27-19

This is an interesting book on cultural anthropology and how our very social brains influenced human evolution. We tend to think of evolution as a primarily biological process, but the authors do a good job of showing how social interaction had a profound impact on the transformation of our bodies and brains.

The authors are two very smart people and the book explains some of the most interesting research being done in evolutionary science.

Humanity’s killer app was not so much our big brains, it was the development of social systems that allowed important knowledge to be stored and shared within a tribe and over time. One person could come up with a game changing survival tactic. Sociality allowed that innovation to promulgate. Thus the tactic didn’t disappear when that person died. Physical evolution takes a very long time. Human cultural evolution can happen in a single generation.

Social and cultural evolution lead the way to important physical changes. Domestication of animals literally changed our human bodies. Adults quickly developed the ability to digest dairy. Social hunting techniques drove changes in our bodies that facilitated the ability to throw projectiles, run faster, and sweat.

The authors show how adherence to social norms was (and continues to be) a powerful driver that’s now hardwired into our brains. New research shows that infants will punish a wrongdoer and reward those who follow the rules.

This book needed to be edited a bit more astutely. Quite a few times it wandered off into the weeds. The authors have so much knowledge that it’s just hard for them not to reveal everything they know. It was a bit of a bipolar read - either delightfully engrossing or annoyingly tangential. Had the book been 25% shorter, it would have been stronger.

Still, I learned a lot. It revolutionized my opinion on the power of sociality to accelerate human evolution. Humanity’s ability to work as a team is our greatest superpower. We bicker, fight and kill each other, but underneath all that bluster are powerfully effective social systems that continue to allow homos sapiens to learn, survive catastrophes, and care for each other.

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Thoroughly researched. Full of information.

Revisado: 07-20-19

I sought out this book hoping to learn more about how blockchain technology works. The author did a good job of expounding on the opportunities this technology offers. I have a much clearer understanding of how blockchain works and some of the drawbacks. The author has a vast knowledge of the history and current state of blockchain and I really appreciated getting an insider’s viewpoint.

This book was exhaustively researched and has a huge amount of information in it. I was mightily impressed with his thoroughness.

I especially enjoyed his discussion of how blockchain could be used to keep any information (not just currency) safe. The potential for uncrackable privacy is exciting. I’m really hopeful that the world may have found a solution that will help reduce theft and disruption through dispersal of information. It’s an ingenious solution: make the data so hard to find and collect that it becomes cost prohibitive to steal.

There are so many uses for this technology and I was mightily impressed with the author’s thorough research of all the players and all the different incubator projects and companies working in the blockchain world. He really plumbed the depths of all the work going on right now.

Casey did a fine job of showing all the many different ways blockchain could be implemented. I never knew there were so many uses for this technology or that it is being utilized for non-financial purposes in industries such as shipping, manufacturing, construction, retail, government and dozens of other sectors. He waxes on endlessly about how blockchain technology is the cure for all that ails the world. It gets a bit tiring at times, but I do find his pie-eyed enthusiasm somewhat endearing.

I particularly enjoyed his discussion on how blockchain could be used to improve the problem of personal identification. This is a huge problem in the developing world and there are some fascinating new ideas for detaching the system of identification from governments and big business.

There was so much good about this book, but unfortunately, the author is such a fanboy that he tends to gloss over criticisms of the technology. He continually makes summary judgments on the nefariousness of the major institutions of the world: all governments are out to control us, all corporations are evil, all those with power are greedy, etc. There are good and bad things about these entities and his heavy-handed dismissal of these institutions got a bit tiring.

I can appreciate his libertarian mindset but it tends to blind him to the finer points of the opportunities and drawbacks of blockchain. The characters and institutions in the book tend to be portrayed as either heroes or villains. Casey pays less attention to the gray areas that are the most interesting components of this debate.

Case in point: he dismisses the entire advertising industry as a greedy manipulator hellbent on mind control. Sure, there’s a lot of annoying advertising, but that advertising bankrolls free access to content. He’s so busy blasting authority that he neglects to explain how average people will pay for content if advertising goes away.

He touched on this briefly, but I wish he had spent more time explaining the downside of blockchain, for example: crime. It seems as though cryptocurrency has been a catalyst for scammers, drug dealers, oligarchs and all the evildoers in the world.

Blockchain cuts out middlemen, distributes power and increases efficiency. This is fantastic as long as the people using the system have upright intentions. But what happens when those with nefarious purposes are given an uncrackable, highly flexible tool that can effortlessly move funds and resources across borders without a trace? It’s going to bring a whole new level of creativity and efficiency to activities such as extortion, bribery, corruption, drugs and a spate of other crimes.

Our current financial system has a lot of downside, but it does attempt to curtail the villains of the world. I was hoping for a more balanced discussion of this issue. His rose-colored glasses kept him from a frank analysis of some very thorny problems we’ll need to work out. I get it, free markets are great, but there’s a real downside to them too. I felt as though a deeper understanding of this issue conflicted with his worldview.

Unfortunately, the reader's performance was quite wooden. I think this book would have been better had a different reader been used.

I’m really glad I read this book. It was a bit tedious to get through, but I learned so much.

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Wonderful book on how to improve prediction

Revisado: 03-10-19

I really loved this book. The author ran a multi-year study for the government agency DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) attempting to find ways to make predictions of future world events more accurate. The agency recruited thousands and thousands of ordinary people, then asked them to predict events of major importance.

Examples included:
•Political leaders that might fall from power
•The prices of important commodities such as oil, precious metals and food stocks
•Major economic occurrences such as recessions and stock market growth.

Dozens and dozens of “super forecasters” quickly rose to the top prediction ranks. DARPA then conducted a long-term study of the specific techniques these prediction geniuses used to create their startlingly accurate prognostications.

Tetlock’s book skillfully explains the shared best-practices used by these prescient champions. Predicting world events and even important events in personal life is more achievable than you might think - but you must learn to minimize the sabotaging innate biases that taint the average person’s prediction abilities.

Over thousand of years of evolution, our human judgments were optimized for evolutionary survival in small hunter-gatherer tribes. Unfortunately, humanity has not had time to evolve a brain that’s great at solving problems in modern society.

Our brains are fantastic at making decisions that keep us from starving to death, but pretty terrible at predicting modern problems such as currency fluctuations. Monetary policy just never seemed to be a major discussion point around the homo sapien campfire. Tetlock shows just how remarkably badly our out-of-date brains predict future events.

But there is hope! Tetlock dives into the simple yet effective techniques shared by these superstar predictors, then shows how we mere mortals can put these same practices to work on our own personal problems.

Tetlock’s writing is delightfully flowing and he weaves a fascinating story about a big government program that brought about a revelation in the intelligence gathering process. It is an inspirational story about how everyday people who practice some very simple mental disciplines were able to bring about some major good in the world.

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Good Book but a bit light on solutions

Revisado: 03-02-19

The author attempts to find exactly which players in the economy are productive and which are unproductive “rent collectors.” Specifically, she takes a hard look at the role of banks. Are banks providing a vital service by making capital easier to obtain or are they merely rent collectors that extract an unproductive toll for basic access to markets?

The first part of this book is what I enjoyed most. Mazzucato did a great job of clearly laying out the most important concepts of the classic economic theorists: Hume, Marx, etc. She showed how their venerable ideas have shaped the current economy.

What I didn’t like about this book was the author’s utopian expectations that the harsh realities of today’s economic problems can be solved through good intentions. Mazzucato spends a lot of time casting stones at the world’s economic troubles, but she provides few practical solutions. Too many of her solutions simply disregard the greed and selfishness inherent in free markets.

It would be great if misbehaving capitalist didn’t run much of the world economy. I’d love it if we had universal healthcare, fair elections and sustainable wages. We don’t. Those with the economic power will fight hard to keep it. So let’s be realistic and seek solutions that soberly and pragmatically acknowledge the current economy’s Machiavellian proclivities.

Mazzucato provides some fascinating insights into the “all government is bad” narrative started during the Reagan years. She shows how this message has transformed the world economy by transferring economic power to the business titans. We are returning to the economic model of the late 19th century.

In the past, government’s economic supremacy was guaranteed by the regionality of commerce. Those governments could easily control corporations in their region because moving goods and services to other regions was cost prohibitive.

But now the poorer nations of the world hunger for a piece of the international economic pie. It has forced them into a deal with the devil, offering tax breaks and lax regulations that turn corporate tax collecting into a shell game.

The author points out we are now in a transition period. If Apple doesn’t like the rules in America, it moves its profits to Ireland or any country that gives it the best deal. The G20 is a powerful start at creating equitable economic rules that might curtail the excesses of selfish capitalism, but it has a long way to go.

The everyday people who are excluded from the benefits of the world economy will continue to lose until all countries agree to a set of baseline economic rules that reign in selfish capitalism. Let’s all agree not to exploit child labor, pay workers a sustainable wage and provide basic safety conditions in the workplace.

Until we can guarantee a minimal set of standards where everyone in the world plays by the same rules, it is going to be a race to the bottom. Businesses will be free to flock to countries that give them a freehand to pay the lowest wages, pollute at will and do whatever they please.

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The Best of Behavior Economics

Revisado: 02-27-19

This book was a delightful whirlwind tour of the worst of human judgment. Pulling from major psychological studies of the past few decades, Dobelli runs us through the top 100 flaws in human decision making. Including:

-Why we forget the past
-The downside of groupthink
-Why we put too much trust in those in authority
-Why evil is more striking than good
-Why teams are lazy
-How rewards destroy productivity
-Why a good start often leads to disaster
-How first impressions sabotage us
-Why we are slaves to our emotions
-Why we take on too many tasks
-How checklists deceive us

The author has spent most of his career writing novels and thus brings a wonderfully lyrical writing style to this book, something typically missing from most non-fiction books.

The book is divided up into more than 100 super-short chapters. Each one features a quick story demonstrating a major finding from the world of behavioral economics. This is a fun book with lots of great insight into how evolutionary forces have molded our decision making process. It’s a hit parade of the judgment calls most likely to trip us up.

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Good Practical Advice

Revisado: 02-23-19

This book provides a refreshing new vantage point on the major turning points of adult life: marriage, children, career, wealth. It also shows new strategies for dealing with life’s failures: singlehood, divorce, financial problems, illness, etc. The author reveals some major misconceptions about the impact good and bad events will have on long-term well-being.

Lyubomirsky argues that the path-of-life narrative we all learned is simply not realistic. We’ve all been assured that happiness and fulfillment will be attained once we hit the culturally anointed markers of success.

The good news is that the research shows that things typically work out better than you might think. People who don’t find their soulmate, live on tight budgets, experience serious health challenges, and don’t attain career success still have pretty great lives. It’s usually our expectations that make us miserable, not the actual circumstances of the situation.

In the book she draws on research to reveal new insights on how the big events of life typically play out. The highs will not be as rapturous as we think and the lows will not be as disappointing.

I found this to be a very practical book with solid strategies and new insights into the best ways to make life’s disappointments less painful and life’s successes more long lasting.

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