Below is a list of my favourite non-fiction books I’ve read
over the years, roughly arranged by theme. This was supposed to be a Top 10 but
quickly became a Top 15. My current list includes:
- Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond
- Why Nations Fail – Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson
- The Bottom Billion – Paul Collier
- The Anti-Politics Machine – James Ferguson
- Peaceland – Severine Autesserre
- Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
- The Better Angels of Our Nature – Steven Pinker
- My Friend the Mercenary – James Brabazon
- Thinking Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
- The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- The Undoing Project – Michael Lewis
- Seeing Like a State – James Scott
- States and Power in Africa – Jeffrey Herbst
- The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming – David
Wallace-Wells
- Homo Deus – Yuval Noah Harari
Brief synopses and commentaries of these books are provided
below. I plan to update this list as and when I read other books worthy of a
mention. I hope you find it useful!
Development
Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond & Why Nations
Fail – Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson
What is the most important geographic and historical fact of
human history?
For Jared Diamond, the answer is simple: it is the rise
and
subsequent dominance of Europeans in the modern world. If this seems
short-sighted and Euro-centric, consider for a moment the sheer scale of the
European colonial project. In North America, British colonialists bullied and
forcibly removed Native Americans; in Latin America, Spanish conquistadors
eviscerated indigenous populations via unfamiliar weaponry and disease; in
Africa, an entire continent was divided and divvied up by French, British,
Belgian and German colonialists with breath-taking indifference; and in
Australia, aboriginal Australians were literally exterminated by the British colonial
regime. In each of these places, European colonialists imposed their language, religion, technology and institutions, almost all of which have persisted in some way up to the present day.
These facts give rise to one of the Really Big Questions of
Development Economics: why did Europeans come to dominate the globe, and not
Africans, Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians?
Until not long ago, a fairly common and uncontroversial
response to this question would be to appeal to Europeans greater intelligence,
or their stronger work-ethic instilled by their Judeo-Christian values. According
to Diamond, the pervasiveness of this view was not due to there being any
evidence that either of these things were true (there wasn’t), but
because Economists, Historians and Geographers had collectively
failed to put forward a convincing alternative explanation.
This changed with his publication of Guns, Germs & Steel
in 1997. In it, he put forward a new explanation that emphasised the importance
of historic geographic and ecological endowments in determining a nation’s
wealth – not the underlying characteristics of its people.
For example, people in areas with an historic abundance of
domesticable animals such as cows, oxen and pigs were able to transition from a
hunter-gatherer to an agrarian society more quickly. Control of crops and
livestock generated food surpluses, enabling people to specialise in activities
other than subsistence farming. Increased specialisation brought about
additional technological advancements, enabling early societies to support
ever-larger populations. This, in turn, sufficiently incentivised the build-up
of primitive state apparatus – a crucial precursor to modern industrial
development.
Despite significant fanfare when the book was published,
Guns, Germs and Steel left a number of unanswered questions. Geography is
remarkably unchanging: yet human history is characterised by the rise and fall of
different civilisations. The Aksum, The Angkor and The Mayans were all once
among the most advanced societies of their time, yet their descendants now all
reside in countries towards the bottom of the global income distribution. Why
is this? The geography of these places has not changed in thousands of years; there must be another piece of the puzzle.
Acemoglu & Robinson largely pick up the baton of this
question in Why Nations Fail. In it, they argue that institutions – the
rules of the game of society – are the most crucial determinant of a country’s
success. Institutions are deep-rooted but not immovable, which allows for the
numerous ‘Reversal of Fortunes’ that punctuate human history. It
also explains how two neighbouring cities with identical geographies and the same name –
Nogales – can have such divergent economic, health and education outcomes
today. The answer, they argue, lies in the the different institutional quality of the different countries they inhabit: Nogales Sonara lies in Mexico; Nogales Arizona lies in the United States.
Guns, Germs & Steel and Why Nations Fail are often
viewed as two books antithetical to each other: you are either in the geography
camp, or the institutions camp, but not in both. I think this is wrong – both
books contain important insights and much can be gained from a synthesis of the
two. For this reason, I include them together in my list.
The Bottom Billion – Paul Collier
I first read The Bottom Billion when I was 17 years old on a
voluntourism trip to Bolivia (I know). At the risk of sounding sentimental, this
was the first Economics book I ever read in the first developing country I ever
visited – at a time when I was still planning to study History at University. Reading
this book in this setting made me confront questions I hadn’t given much
thought to before: why are some countries so much poorer than other? And is
there anything we can do about it? By and large, these remain the questions I
find most interesting today.
Collier has his own answers to these questions which he lays
out thematically in separate chapters. He argues that countries are poor
because they fall into one or more of four development ‘traps’:
the conflict trap, the natural resource trap, being landlocked with
bad neighbours and the bad governance trap. Once there, a confluence of
self-reinforcing factors makes escape especially difficult. The net result of
this is a ‘Bottom Billion’ – a billion or so people that are poor; and stuck in
countries that are going nowhere.
To remedy this, Collier proposes four solutions. First, the
aid industry should take on more risk and increasingly concentrate itself in
the most difficult and desperate environments. Second, appropriate military
interventions (such as the British in Sierra Leone) should be encouraged,
particularly to guarantee democratic governments against coups. Third,
international charters are needed to encourage good governance and provide
prototypes. Finally, trade policy in both developed and developing countries
needs to encourage free trade and give preferential access to Bottom Billion
exports.
Did this book save me from being a loquacious Arts student?
Possibly. Are the methodologies Collier uses now out-dated? Probably. Has he
said some pretty stupid stuff since? Definitely. But is this book still one of
the most accessible and engaging introductions to Development Economics?
Absolutely. Read it!
The Anti-Politics Machine – James Ferguson
The Anti-Politics Machine is an excruciating post-mortem of
an almost
unbelievably ill-conceived World Bank project that took place in Lesotho from
1975-84. The project, dubbed the Thaba-Tseka Development project, sought to
‘modernise’ the Basotho economy by encouraging a switch to cash crops, introducing
sustainable livestock practices and building roads to connect rural farmers to
markets. The project was woefully unsuccessful: by 1984, crop output remained
low, new livestock practices were completely ignored and agricultural exports
remained largely unchanged. On top of this, the project’s tree-planting project
was sabotaged, fences delineating the project area were torn up, and a project
manager’s car was set on fire.
How did it go so wrong? Ferguson argues that it all stemmed
from a fundamental misconception of the Basotho economy, epitomised by the project’s
laughably inaccurate inception report. The report portrays Lesotho as a
backwards, isolated, and predominantly agrarian society whose development had
been thwarted by lack of reform efforts by both colonial and post-independence
leaders.
About 5 minutes of research shows this to be completely false. Lesotho was not, and has never been, a predominantly agrarian society:
at the time the report was written, less than 10% of household income came from
farming. Instead, over 60% of Basotho men were employed in industrial jobs
in neighbouring South Africa – which formed by far the biggest contribution to
Basotho GDP. This reliance meant that Lesotho was – and always had been – deeply
embedded in the regional economy, and not the aboriginal ‘island’ economy the
report sought to portray.
This misrepresentation was no accident. A truthful portrayal
of Lesotho’s situation would reveal that nearly all determinants of economic
life in Lesotho relied on factors outside the nation’s borders. However,
such a representation would leave no role for the World Bank. Instead, by
emphasising the importance of agriculture and obsessing over government policy
as the most crucial variable in Lesotho’s success, World Bank economists had
carved a role for themselves as indispensable gatekeepers in Lesotho’s road to
prosperity.
I find this book so interesting not least because I see
similar dynamics at play in Zanzibar. Here, ‘underdevelopment’ often seems
attributed to people doing things wrong – things that more learned, or
more capable people simply would not do. Accordingly, government non-compliance
is put down to a lack of understanding or capacity, rather as a strategic
reaction by individual agents with wide-ranging and often incongruous
incentives. The result is to fundamentally misconstrue the state as an
apolitical entity – an ‘Anti-Politics Machine’. This reduces ‘development’ from
a social and political problem to a largely technical problem – one in which
consultancies, aid agencies and international organisations are perfectly
poised to help solve.
Peaceland – Severine Autesserre
Why do aid and peace interventions so often go awry? James
Ferguson provides one answer to this question; Severine Autesserre provides
another. Peacekeepers, aid workers and diplomats occupy a different social
space to the places in which they work – a space she dubs ‘Peaceland’. This
space is characterised by its own distinct beliefs, behaviours and rituals. Examples
of these include socialising exclusively in expat circles, not speaking the
local dialect, upping sticks every few years, favouring technical know-how over
regional expertise and abiding by unnecessarily stringent security procedures.
These practices often seem innocuous at face value – but together they create a
distinct sense of ‘otherness’ that hinders contextual understanding and often exacerbates
tensions between interveners and local populations.
I read this whilst in ‘Aidland’ in Zanzibar – not quite the
same as ‘Peaceland’, granted, but a social space with striking resemblances. I
read it with a mixture of intrigue and embarrassment as I realised I conformed
to almost all the stereotypes of the boujie aid worker in Tanzania: not
speaking Swahili ✔; drinking at the 6 Degrees and the Slow Leopard ✔; subsisting on a diet of sushi and Huel ✔.
I don’t think there’s a problem with this per se – but when it comes at the
expense of all other social and cultural engagements then it begins to produce the
consequences that Autesserre so expertly outlines.
Since reading Peaceland I’ve definitely tried harder to
escape the ex-pat bubble. I’ve joined a local football team; I’ve visited local
colleagues’ homes and invited them to my own; I’ve doubled-down on my shaky
Swahili. So yeh – I’m still a boujie aid worker – but at least now I’m trying
harder.
Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
I remember getting the District line from Earls Court in
2015 and
there being about 10 people in my carriage all with their noses in
this book. While suit-clad commuters are hardly a representative sample, this
book seemed to strike a chord with almost everyone: from University Professors
to Love Island contestants. I think this is mostly to do with the book just
being
so damn readable: I remember buying this in Delhi airport and then having almost finished it by the time I touched down in Heathrow.
This is not marketed as a book about development, but in my
mind it’s about human development in the really, really long-run. In charting
the rise of the human race, Harari sets himself an even deeper question than
Diamond, Acemoglu & Robinson: not just why Europeans came to
dominate other humans, but why Homo Sapiens came to dominate
other species.
Harari’s answer to this question rests not on our ability to
stand upright, use tools or communicate via language, but on our unique ability
to believe in things which don’t really exist – that is, things with no
direct correspondence to the physical world. For example, chimpanzees are able
to tell each other if there is an eagle circling them overhead – a very real
phenomena in the physical world – but are unable to discuss abstract concepts
like God, democracy or monkey rights.
Humans, of course, can imagine these things – and our
capacity to do so enables our uniquely human ability to cooperate flexibly
and in large numbers. Chimpanzees are able to cooperate flexibly but not
in large numbers, as all cooperation must be underpinned by personal
relationships. This sets an upper limit on chimpanzee troops of about 150 members.
Ants and bees can cooperate in large numbers but not
flexibly. Their social relations are defined by their DNA – not by their
shared beliefs. For worker ants to rise up and overthrow their queen, this
would take millions of years of evolution. By contrast, humans in 18th
century France were able to transition from a monarchy to a democracy virtually
overnight, as their shared myths about the natural and just social order were
quickly and violently rewritten.
All human accomplishments can eventually be traced to this
ability for large-scale and flexible cooperation. The fruits of this are hard
to overstate: the ability to walk on the moon; to eradicate deadly disease; to
create weapons powerful enough to destroy civilisations. By the end, you are
left to marvel at our voyage from insignificant apes in the corner of East
Africa to the undisputed masters of Planet Earth. Very humbling indeed.
War &
Conflict
The Better Angels of Our Nature – Steven Pinker
Like Sapiens, this was another book that littered
bookshelves, conversations and coffee tables upon its release in 2011. Pinker’s central thesis is that – despite the seemingly incessant stream of bad news that fills our TV screens – the prevalence of violence has unambiguously
declined
throughout human history. This decrease has been universal in scope: wars
have declined; genocides are less frequent; homicides have decreased; the
acceptability of torture has fallen; sexual violence has decreased; even
terrorism – so often perceived as the defining feature of the post-9/11 world –
has remained at barely perceptible levels as far as the entire species is
concerned.
Pinker identifies five historical forces that have facilitated
this decline. First, the rise of the modern nation-state has enabled the
monopolisation of the legitimate use of force, reducing the temptation for
individuals to enact extra-judicial revenge. Second, the forces of
globalisation have enabled the
trading of goods over longer distances, bringing distant societies
into contact with each other and making each, in the eyes of the other, “more
valuable alive than dead”. Third, women have become more emancipated in both
political and domestic spheres, and have tended to be more doveish in both their
voting patterns and social behaviour. Four, the rise in literacy, mobility and
mass media has led to the State being fundamentally reconceptualised as a protector
against violence to a guarantor of human rights. Finally, Pinker points to the
Escalation of Reason in exposing the sheer pointlessness of war and in reframing
violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.
Of course, there is a lot to disagree with. I think his
basic argument is essentially correct – violence has declined over the
course of history, and any far-reaching historical, political or social theory
of human history has to somehow take this into account. However, what bothers
me about Pinker – and indeed the New Optimist crowd in general – is the sleight
of hand deployed in moving from the empirical claim that violence has
declined to the subjective claim that the world is now more secure.
It is perfectly consistent to claim that the world is both much less
violent and much less secure – and hence hardly the stuff to be celebrating.
For example, our success in stymying ancient forms of
violence does nothing to assure us against the relatively new threats
posed by nuclear war, environment degradation, artificial intelligence and
bio-hacking. If things go wrong now, they go really, really wrong – a
fact that Pinker largely dances past in his follow-up book, Enlightenment Now. This
makes me reluctant to join Pinker in his New Optimist camp – no matter how
compelling his argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature may be.
My Friend the Mercenary – James Brabazon
My Friend the Mercenary is the captivating memoir of James
Brabazon,
a war journalist who was the only person to film the LURD rebel group inside
Liberia during the Second Liberian Civil War (1999 – 2003).
The first half of the memoir recounts Brabazon’s friendship
with Nick du Toit – a South African mercenary-cum-arms dealer who Brabazon
hires to be his bodyguard for his tour of Liberia. Together, the two make
contact with LURD rebels at the Guinean border and join them on their
subsequent march to Monrovia. Their journey is marred by severe illness,
near-impenetrable rainforest and frequent encounters with government soldiers –
some of which end in execution, torture and ritual cannibalism. Much like
Marlow’s journey to the Heart of Darkness, Brabazon’s journey to Monrovia reflects
a journey to the depths of the human
soul – and the depravity of what it’s capable of.
For all this vividness, Brabazon – to his credit –
frequently cautions against the stereotype of the blood-thirsty African rebel.
He makes an admirable attempt to form close bonds with the soldiers and allow their
personal stories to echo through his pages. In doing so, Brabazon helps
‘humanise’ the conflict, helping the reader appreciate the sheer depth of
circumstances that turns otherwise ordinary citizens into such desperate acts
of violence.
After the Liberian War ends, du Toit invites Brabazon to
film ‘regime change’ in Equatorial Guinea: an outrageous coup attempt financed
by extremely shady British establishment figures including Mark Thatcher,
Margaret Thatcher’s son. By an amazing fluke, Brabazon misses his flight to
Equatorial Guinea and is forced to watch on the news as the plot is uncovered
and defused. Du Toit gets arrested and accused of high treason, culminating to
a life sentence at Black Beach prison, notoriously known as the most brutal
prison in the world.
Brabazon began writing his memoir largely as a testimony to
his friend and former bodyguard, whom he safely assumed he would never see
again. However, in another extraordinary twist of fate, du Toit is released just
5 years into his sentence. This book concludes with the pairs’ rendezvous, with
du Toit recounting further gruesome tales of survival in Black Beach.
By the end of all this, you aren’t really sure what to make
of Brabazon. Despite his attempts otherwise, you can’t help but think that he is
perpetuating negative African stereotypes – at least in the minds of his more
lazy and prejudiced readers. He’s also a bit of a mercenary himself: barging
into conflict zones uninvited to harvest footage for his award-winning
documentaries. With this being said, Brabazon certainly has balls – what’s
more, his work undoubtedly shines a light on conflicts which may otherwise be forgotten.
Whatever the final judgment – I’d certainly like to go for a beer with him.
Risk,
Uncertainty and Behavioural Economics
Thinking Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
The unquestionable Bible of Behavioural Economics, Thinking
Fast and
Slow chronicles the most famous findings of Danny Kahneman’s extraordinary
research career. Along with Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler, Kahneman helped transform
Behavioural Economics from an eccentric, nagging, but ultimately ignorable
thorn in the side of mainstream Economic theory to one of the fast-growing and
important sub-fields of Economics today.
For a large part, Behaviour Economics is concerned with how
humans make decisions. Before the subject came to be, orthodox economic theory
was built on the assumption of Rational Economic Man: the cool, calculating
machine that abided by several axioms of rational choice. Sure – Rational
Economics Man occasionally made mistakes, but these mistakes were so random and
infrequent that they could be safely ignored for the purpose theory and public
policy.
Behavioural Economics essentially took a sledgehammer to
this assumption by showing that, in many contexts, humans make predictable and
systematic mistakes. Rather than axioms of rational choice, humans are
instead governed by two ‘Systems’ of thought: a fast, emotional and instinctive
System 1 and a more cool-headed, deliberative and logical System 2. While
traditional Economics would have you believe that System 2 was always in
control, Kahneman and his collaborators showed that System 1 often intervened
automatically. This gave rise to many ‘biases’ – behaviour at odds with
textbook rationality. Examples of these include the halo effect, loss aversion,
confirmation bias and the narrative fallacy.
What I like so much about this book is that it’s peppered
with actual thought experiments to test your own susceptibility to System 1
thinking (I fell for almost all of them). My favourite of all these experiments
involves estimating the odds that a car from either a Blue Cab Company or a Green
Cab Company was involved in an accident. I won’t spoil the punchline here – but
needless to say this example bamboozled me then and still bamboozles me today.
I know what the right answer is; I know the mathematics to get to the right
answer; but for some reason my brain still screams at me the wrong answer. The
power of System 1 thinking!
The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Next on this list is a book by loud-mouthed, Ferragamo-tie-hating,
former derivatives trader & Econ Twitter über-villain Nassim Nicholas Taleb
– or NNT, as he often abbreviates. The book focuses on Black Swans – unpredictable,
high impact events that we tend to ignore and downplay by applying simplistic
explanations retrospectively. Examples of Black Swans include 9/11, the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the internet. These events
dominate our world – yet by their very nature, were impossible to predict in
advance.
To cope with a world defined by these events, Taleb advocates
a number of strategies. First, forecasters are to be ignored – especially those
without Skin in The Game. Second, the Bell Curve – with its focus on
averages rather than extremes – should be abandoned, except in a few very
specific contexts (e.g. human height). Third, our entire epistemology must be
overhauled: focus should move from knowledge (the stuff that we know) towards anti-knowledge
(the stuff that we don’t). Fourth, we should become Anti-Fragile:
distributing our eggs across many baskets to ensure that no single event can
ruin us completely. Finally, we must make peace with the unavoidable chaotic of
the world and adopt a stoic, detached stance – like Buddhism, says Taleb, but
with a “F*** you!” to fate!
In making his case, Taleb takes us on a breath-taking voyage
through the history of scepticism and the philosophy of science and social
science. He devotes numerous pages eulogising the early purveyors of
anti-knowledge and unpredictability: David Hume, Karl Popper and Benoit
Mandelbrot. He also makes sure to slag off those who systematically
over-simplify and under-estimate the world – ‘fragilistas’, as he calls them.
Into this category falls Karl Marx, Carl Gauss and even Plato – no one, it
seems, is safe from his arrogance or ire.
For all his bluster, NNT can certainly walk the walk. Each
time I read one of his books I come away viewing the world through different
lenses. Some of his advice is undoubtedly wise (become Anti-Fragile; ignore
those without Skin in The Game); some of his advice is, well, eccentric (never
run for a train, never read the newspaper and never drink anything from the
past 4,000 years). He’s like a controversial uncle around the family Christmas
table: rude, obnoxious, but undoubtedly entertaining and at times mesmerising.
His online presence is also legendary: from posting videos of his deadlift sets
on Facebook to calling Steven Pinker a fraud on Twitter, NNT is truly the gift
that keeps on giving.
The Undoing Project – Michael Lewis
In 1969 two men met on a University campus.
They were different in
every way. But both were obsessed with the human mind – and both happened to be
geniuses.
So reads the blurb of The Undoing Project – the remarkable
biography of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In chronicling their lives and
careers, the book is ostensibly about the founding of Behavioural Economics – but
it’s also about so much more. It’s a tale of two types of genius: one
arrogant, unfettered and seemingly unlimited; the other measured, perfectionist
and wracked with self-doubt. It’s a tale of a young Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied
Paris, and his death-defying escape to Israel. It’s a tale of human fallibility;
and our inability or unwillingness to accept this fact. It’s a tale of
unorthodoxy triumphing over conventional wisdom. It’s a tale of friendship and
the love, laughter and envy that this encompasses. It’s a book about human
happiness, and how it can be misunderstood. Finally, it’s a tale of the
finitude of human life, and a reminder that even the brightest stars eventually
fade away.
Of all the books on this list, this one is undoubtedly the
most moving. Read it!
Political
Science
Seeing Like a State – James Scott
If you want to understand Politics, you need to understand the State.
And if you want to understand the State, you need to understand its modus
operandi.
For Scott, the central project of the State boils down
to
one thing: legibility. Any substantial state intervention in society –
vaccinating a population, mobilising labour, enforcing sanitation standards, taxing
people and their property, conducting literacy campaigns, catching criminals or
conscripting soldiers – requires the invention of units that are
visible.
To do this, primitive states had to demarcate and
standardise a rich and varied tapestry of localised norms and social
structures. Surnames were invented to make individuals identifiable and their
lineage traceable through time. Standardised weights and measurements were
introduced to make regional goods commensurate, and to ensure that their
production could be monitored and taxed. Universal languages were imposed to ensure
disparate groups could be understood, educated and instructed. Entire cities
were built around perpendicular axis and geometric squares to ensure their
populations could be counted, regulated, spied upon and organised.
This ‘high modernist’ planning gives States’ the unparalleled
ability to move and manipulate groups of people en masse, but it is not
without its costs. It becomes risky when it supersedes local practices that
have adapted to local contexts over several centuries. And it becomes downright
dangerous when it is combined with an authoritarian state and a weak civil
society.
Take, for example, the ‘ujamaa’ project of Julius Nyerere’s
Tanzania. Taking the reins of power in 1964, Nyerere was one of the foremost
champions of the high modernist belief that it was the state – and the state
alone – that knew how to organise a more satisfactory, rational and productive
life for its citizens. He embarked on a compulsory villagization programme:
smallholder farmers were forcibly relocated to massive collective farms that
could be readily monitored and dictated from above. The results were
disastrous: agricultural output collapsed and Tanzania became heavily reliant
on food imports between 1973-1975. The blunt, unvaried and clinical logic of
the State was no match for the nuanced local practices that had centuries of
adaptation to fall back on.
This book has notable overlaps with two others on this list:
The Anti-Politics Machine and The Black Swan. Like Scott, both Ferguson and
Taleb caution against blanketing a highly complex social world with crude, abstracted
and over-simplified explanations. Of course, as practitioners and students of
social science, it’s our job to understand this world – something
which can’t be done without simplification and abstraction. So how should we
proceed? Scott gives four pieces of advice: first, take small steps:
intervene moderately, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move.
Second, favour reversibility: prefer interventions that can easily be
undone if they turn out to be mistakes. Third, plan on surprises: choose
plans that allow the largest accommodation of the unseen. Finally, plan on human
inventiveness: always assume that those involved in the project will have or
develop insight to improve upon the design. I would add a final one: be humble
– acknowledge the limits of social science and that our world is often too
complex, chaotic and unpredictable for us to fully understand. But don’t let
that deter you from trying!
States and Power in Africa – Jeffrey Herbst
Why has effective state building proved to be so difficult in Africa?
To answer this question, Herbst makes an exhilarating
journey through African pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial history. The
answer begins, Herbst says, in the unique complexion of war in pre-colonial
Africa. Unlike in Europe and Asia, pre-colonial wars of territorial conquest
were extremely rare. The reason for this was two-fold: first, unlike in Europe,
land was extremely abundant – by 1975, Africa had only reached the level of
population density that occurred in Europe in 1500. Second, unlike in Asia,
land was extremely cheap – the plough never reached Africa, meaning that even
royal villages would move periodically as the soil became exhausted. This was
in stark contrast to Asia – where the painstaking labour that went into
constructing tiers of rice paddies meant that land was worth defending – and
conquering.
This different dynamic of war had a profound impact on early
state formation. In Europe and Asia, the allure of territorial conquest
prompted elites to secure their borders and develop extensive tax frameworks –
both of which required them to develop close connections with the hinterland.
In Africa, by contrast, rural populations remained virtually uncaptured by the
state apparatus.
The next part of Herbst’s explanation charters the
transformation of the African state under colonial rule. Colonialism
effectively grouped together previously disparate and transient populations
into arbitrary geographic blocs. Despite this new cosmetic, European occupiers
generally chose not to enhance the reach of the state much beyond the centre.
Doing so was expensive – particularly due to Africans vast geography and lack of
navigable rivers – and hence did not show up favourably in the cold
cost-benefit calculus of colonial rule. The exception, of course, was if an
area was abundant in natural resources – which could be extracted and then
funnelled through the centre.
At independence, this urban bias was perpetuated by
inaugural elites for largely pragmatic reasons. Urban workers could strike,
riot or concoct a coup d’état; rural peasants, by contrast, were a lot less
threatening to the regime. As a result, surveillance and spending were
disproportionately biased towards the centre – again leaving the countryside
relatively uncaptured.
However, while elites had little incentive to tighten their
grip over rural populations, they had little incentive to let them go, either.
Doing so would relinquish some of their newly found power: not only would they
lose land, resources and (albeit limited) tax revenues, they would also lose credibility
in the international arena.
By 1950, the principal of state sovereignty had become a
virtually unassailable juridical norm. This can be traced to the horrors of
WWII and the partition of the Indian sub-continent, both of which made vivid
the human cost of boundary change and territorial ambition. The New World responded
by a near-universal embrace of the nation state. Irredentist movements were
almost always condemned and new organisation like the World Bank, the UN and
the IMF identified nation states as the only legitimate actors they would do
business with. To access this New World, African states had to remain unified: even
if it meant holding on to bizarre and incoherent blocs handed to them by
colonial rule.
What I like so much about Herbst’s argument is that it makes
modern-day aberrations like state failure and civil war a lot less mysterious.
When you consider that many African states are characterised by illogical borders,
uncaptured rural populations and disparate ethnic and linguistic groups, the
lack of effective policymaking hardly seems surprising. And when you consider
the immense role that war played in state formation in Europe and Asia – and
the bizarre way in which most African states came into being – then civil war
doesn’t seem like such a stupid thing.
Climate
Change
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming – David Wallace-Wells
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If you’re unconvinced of this, the first 12 chapters of The Uninhabitable Earth should set the record straight. Vast swathes of the equatorial belt are set to become literally uninhabitable: reaching temperatures that the human body is not adapted to survive in. Global food chains will be eviscerated by unprecedented weather patterns and drought. The megacities of Jakarta, Shanghai and Mumbai are set to become underwater within my lifetime, while the nations of The Maldives and The Marshall Islands may entirely cease to exist. Devastating wildfires, floods and hurricanes will become the new normal. Entire
populations will be uprooted and dislocated, producing – according to median
estimates – 200 million climate refugees by 2050. This, coupled with heightened
competition over increasingly scarce resources (e.g. freshwater, cropland, forests),
will likely exacerbate local, regional and international conflict. As
Wallace-Wells says, it is probably worse –
much worse – than you think.
While the first half of the book outlines our likely
trajectory absent an urgent response, the second half explores how the human
condition may change in the face of impending disaster. How will climate change
mould our collective conscience and the stories we tell our children? How will our
political, economic and moral systems adapt in the face of unprecedented
upheaval? How will death, ecological disaster and economic collapse affect our
perception of the journey we’ve taken on Planet Earth?
This is not a cheery read. No punches are pulled in
outlining the enormity of the crisis we face. There are very few silver
linings. The book does not end in a flurry of optimism about human ingenuity
and technological progress – something I find morbidly refreshing.
Despite this, The Uninhabitable Earth really is essential
reading. Millions of people have already been killed by climate change – whether
via wildfires in California, flooding in Bangladesh or conflict in the Sahel.
The impacts of climate change in the next 100 years are going to be bad –
but there is a massive degree of scope in terms of how bad things will be. It matters
whether we heat the Earth by 2°C or 3°C. It matters whether
millions or billions of people die. Wilful ignorance of the risks is not a
morally defensible strategy. If, like me, you’re not versed in the current
scientific consensus, The Uninhabitable Earth is a great place to start.
Technology
Homo Deus is the equally-hyped follow-up to Harari’s
ludicrously successful debut work, Sapiens. Sapiens ends with a wild prophesy:
that Sapiens, via our scientific advancement, are cooking up the next epochal
revolution – the technological revolution – that will overshadow the previous
three (the cognitive, the agricultural and the scientific). Homo Deus is the
full exploration of this prophesy.
Harari begins with a brief survey of human progress. Up
until now, human meaning and progress has been largely defined relative to an ongoing struggle
against the historic enemies of mankind: plague, famine and war. Now, for the
first time, these scourges are falling under our control. Diseases such as
smallpox, river blindness and polio have all but been eradicated. Famines have
become sensational, not routine. Major war has become seemingly obsolete.
As we elevate ourselves above beastly survival struggles,
Harari speculates that we will divert more time and energy towards upgrading
the base human condition. Indeed, this trend is already visible: we outsource
biological algorithms to our smartphones; we use aids to improve our hearing
and sight; we take anti-depressants to alter our brain chemistry; and we have plastic
surgery to makes us beautiful. Our ability to do this makes us already God-like,
at least by the standards of most of history. However, if we continue, even more God-like
abilities may be on the horizon: the ability to cheat death, customise embryos
or even create life itself.
However, just like the three revolutions that preceded it,
this revolution will come with a price. Sophisticated human upgrades will
likely only be available to those who can afford it. The implications this has
for global inequality may be unprecedented. Today, for the most part, the global superrich are
physiologically indistinguishable from the masses – we have the same size
brains, the same fleshy carcass and the same reliance on nutrients, water and
oxygen. What if this were no longer the case? What if the super-rich, via bodily upgrades, were able
to become faster, smarter and stronger than the rest? This is a scary prospect indeed – and one
which our current systems of politics, laws and ethics are not equipped to deal
with.
Things go from bad to worse. Even if we avoid this
threat and create a super-human future for everyone, we risk propelling
ourselves into a world devoid of any real meaning. How will we cope in a world
where any economic, political or cultural endeavour can be done by algorithms better than by ourselves? We will need a new religion to make sense of all this: the
powerful combination of science and humanism will not work in a world where the
sanctity of being Human has lost all meaning.
Homo Deus is, of course, extremely broad-brushed and speculative
in its treatment of the future, placing it in a broader category of books that
are seemingly in vogue at the minute. In my eyes, Homo Deus is the best of the bunch
– with an honourable mention to Future Politics by Jamie Susskind, which
narrowly misses out on this list.
Unlike other books I’ve read, Harari treads a careful line
between starry-eyed optimism and doom-mongering fatalism – probably the most
sensible stance, given both the scale and unpredictability of our technological
charge. He also sees the bigger picture better than most – teasing out the
implications of technological advancement on philosophical themes as broad as
human experience, individualism, human emotion and consciousness. If you’re interested
in where we might be headed – or simply in what it means to be human – this
book is for you.
