Suggestions & Recommendations General

"Is this shit any good?" Ask about books youre considering reading, or recommend books you've read

pic related: its a great book

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anyone read this? is it.... seemingly legit?

it's good. bloody longwinded and boring though...


for my own books I was wondering if I should read pic elated or if it's just a meme. I see you lot talking about it all the time but has anyone here any thoughts on it?

ok so i havent actually read it, but ive been in your exact position. i have read excerpts and reviews and spent a significant amount of time "researching" it, and it does appear to be.. NOT a meme. the author does appear to be an intellectually honest academic who takes his material seriously, and is not writing it with some "agenda" beyond what he himself atleast perceives to be honestly & objectivity

but, again, i havent read it, but thats the perception im getting. i do know that it is a bit negatively inclined, however, as opposed to earlier books he wrote on the same subject

*honesty

John Swartzwelder worked on The Simpsons for 15 years, retired and started writing books. I highly recommend his post-simpsons novels. They're short, easy to read and some of the funniest books I've ever read.

read walt and mearsheimer instead
it's the zionists
don't do the jew thing the whole way, nothing good will come of it
your power level would have to be quite high to see the bullshit in macdonald, i doubt you're ready to chew on it

>it's the zionists
Dropped

My econ prof seems to like it a lot.
I'll buy it soon, when i finish some books i'm reading right now.

This is probably the best "big history" book for the last 20 years and its conclusions are broadly correct. However, it is very repetitive and so I would borrow a copy from a library and read the first 200-300 pages rather than buy it outright. North's book is a good place for further reading on the same theme, as well as Acemoglu's papers which lead up to it, which are more interesting than the book itself if you already have a background in economics.

yeah it is a bit redundant, but im now highly curious about the other books you mentioned. North's book? who is North?

can you recommend anything similar to Why Nations Fail? or any other economy books, i guess

It's not and you lack critical thinking skills, OP. His whole idea is "extractive institutions make nations fail" but extractive institutions are defined in a hand-waving fashion without a semblance of rigor. He basically claims that extractive institutions are those of failing countries, which turns the whole argument into a self-referencing platitude without any predictive power. The causes behind certain countries developing extractive institutions are not explained either, so the whole book essentially says nothing beyond a tautology. The very first page already presents you with a spectacularly bad argument btw.

Just finished pic related, interesting book on IR THEORY, but stay far away if you just like international politics/events and aren't interested in the theory.

goodreads.com/list/show/16092.FSO_Reading_List

Thoughts on this tushy?

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the, like, 4 books there ive actually read are good, anyway. including "why nations fail", despite what this guy thinks also, you. the book clearly presents that extractive institutions are, put overtly simply, institutions where there is not equality of process. i.e. the law discriminates in some manner. everyone is not equal, and do not have equal access to opportunity

bump

this fucker is a great read

you can finish the whole thing in a few hours, and its basically the ultimate economics 101

I found it an awesome read chock a block full of interesting historical focus points.

What did ya'll think of this.

That and pic related are the basics. They are good

alright, thatll be the next book i read then. thanks

people on /pol/ keep telling me jared diamond is full of shit, but, yknow, theyre biased against him i guess?

ive been wondering what some books "equal" to Why Nations Fail are. if youre saying thats one of them, ill definitively read it

That book is sort of an academic work on financial crisis, their precedents. It is less about a story and more on constructing a theory and showing how past crisis came to be and lesssons learned in a palatable way.
It is the most basic and cited work on the subject.

A lot of farther right people like to shit on Diamond because he wrote some of the best-known works arguing that societies develop based on need rather than muh superior IQ genes. Guns Germs and Steel is really solid
He also has a pretty cool theory of societies collapse, he had a good short lecture on it on youtube at some point. Maybe it was a TED presentation I don't remember

How's Economics in one lesson?

>A lot of farther right people like to shit on Diamond
maybe because he cherrypicked his arguments. They seem logical, but if you give it some thoughts, the whole thing falls apart pretty quickly. Development of societies can’t be fully explained by geographic determinism, but rather by possibilism.
Btw, it’s not just the far right people who disagree with him. The majority of academia is against him, mostly because he demonstrated that his knowledge of anthropology is flawed.

Going to give this bad boy a go again. I remember reading it back in college and liking it, but I haven't retained much. Has anyone been reading it recently?

>Guns, Germs, and Steel is pretty solid

Thomas Sowell is 1000% my nigga. i gotta read more shit by him

Go to bed Thomas Shills Well

Bumping my question

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>macdonald
Well this thread was fun while it lasted.

only pundit i've ever read that cherrypicked data and was still wrong

whatd you read by him, and how is it wrong?

If any of you are interested in social morality, this book is fantastic. To get an idea of what its like, it draws heavily on Hellenic, Christian, and Wittgensteinian philosophies.

I don't speak jap.

Does anyone has any recommendations on liberalism books? I became really interested in the subject and wanted to learn more about it. I've heard some stuff about Ludwig von Mises and others authors, what should I read?

Thomas Paine

pretty much everything by thomas paine, but his more known works are, yknow, the most noteworthy.

also, "The Road to Serfdom" by Hayek is almost a must-read by anyone even remotely interested in politics

Thank you, will look for those.

i would recommend "road to serfdom" the strongest, desu, over thomas paine. but paine, alexander hamilton & especially john stuart mill are all legit

I've only just recently gotten into literature. I recently read Waiting for Godot, and I loved it. Is there anything else that's similar to it at all? I'm really just looking for something with the same sense of meaninglessness, lack of purpose, and absurd dialogue

Stranger by Camus

bump

Read more Beckett if that's what you want. Murphy by Beckett is good, as is Happy Days and many of his other plays which delve into surrealism, although many of these are better seen on stage or in video than read. Another great book in the vein you're asking for is The Third Policeman by O'Brien.

Already did, favorite novel
Sounds good, I'll watch them soon in that case

Books for faggots with ADD who are stupidly easily distracted? Preferably something that can balance existentialism with flashy entertaining metaphors that will keep me interested.

If you want to see what I mean about how some of Beckett's works are best watched than read, look at this short (12 min) play. Really interesting/disturbing play, and the version I linked was Beckett's personal favorite version (favorite actress playing the role).

youtube.com/watch?v=16rSsThMDiU

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