Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

"Economics is the big issue of the moment, and I was very grateful when Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times , agreed to recommend books to better understand what’s going wrong with the world economy . Since we spoke, there has been a new book by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson , Power and Progress , both economists who like to look at the lessons of history and the bigger picture (this book starts with a discussion of Jeremy Bentham and his panopticon ). Power and Progress is above all a call to action. As the authors write, “Today’s ‘progress’ is again enriching a small group of entrepreneurs and investors, whereas most people are disempowered and benefit little…Confronting the prevailing vision and wresting the direction of technology away from the control of a narrow elite may even be more difficult today than it was in nineteenth-century Britain and America. But it is no less essential.” There’s also a very readable, eye-opening book by British journalist Ed Conway called Material World , which looks at the mining and consumption of six commodities: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. It opens with him watching gold being mined and, having witnessed what’s involved, feeling a bit guilty about his wedding ring. This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, when his plays were first put together as a book, under the title Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. There’s a new edition of Emma Smith’s book about it, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book , which is well worth reading if you missed it first time round. Another new book about the Bard is Shakespeare Without a Life by Margreta de Grazia of the University of Pennsylvania, which looks at the 200 years when there was little interest in the life of William Shakespeare beyond the date of his death. After reading so much about quantum mechanics, multiverses and things that are beyond my brain, it was nice to get a straight up book about planets (both near and far), what we know about them, and how we know it. Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity is by Chris Impey , a professor (and public science enthusiast) at the University of Arizona. In his sober assessment, we’re like to find out if there is alien life out there in the next five to seven years, so keep your eyes on the headlines. Also in new science books is Cambridge physicist Athene Donald’s Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science , looking at why after decades of effort, the numbers of women pursuing careers in the physical sciences and engineering still remain low, and women aren’t adequately represented at the top of biomedical research either. In Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series there’s a new book on Pseudoscience (again, a popular subject subject on Five Books ) by Princeton historian of science Michael Gordin. One final—somewhat niche—book to mention: Peter Brown, the historian often credited with creating the field of ‘late antiquity’, has a memoir out, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History . Born in 1935 in Ireland, this is a snapshot of growing up in the last days of the British Empire (his father worked in Sudan) and what it was like as an Irish Protestant in the UK, as well as a lot of details on Brown’s intellectual formation and influences. The memoir is nearly 700 pages but Brown is a beautiful writer, and he has nice, wry observations about all sorts of things. If you know someone who enjoys intellectual memoirs, this is a rather lovely one."