The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce by Anupam Chander

I saw a caravan once, in Afghanistan. It was a little caravan: three camels and a small family. But it was enough of a caravan to invoke in my imagination the Old Silk Road. I wondered (until a French officer ordered me to leave the area) where the travelers came from and where they were headed. All I could take away was their direction of travel: East.

In the Electronic Silk Road, Anupam Chander describes digital trade routes. The new trade proceeds along electronic pathways; it is fiber and cable and not camels that transmits value across great distances. But the Electronic Silk Road Chander studies has a marked geography; place still matters. We find Silicon Valley and Bangalore and (as before) China, marking the major stops and starts along the way (Chander likes the word entrepôt).

And the poles of the Electronic Silk Road, like the Old Silk Road, have valency. Chinese goods seduced the West for centuries: spices and trade goods and the silk that gave name to the trading route. The problem for the West was China’s notorious indifference to Western goods -- the West did not produce much the Chinese wished to have. Money was only a partial solution. It could of course pay for Chinese goods, but money, even in the days of gold and silver, was effectively a future claim on the West held by China. The Old Silk Road did not fit the mercantilist design of offsetting streams of goods.

The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic by Patrick Weil

We each deploy an array of identities in forming our social selves -- we can be, say, a Methodist and also a Southerner, and black and a civil engineer and gay. And all of this and still an American. Each aspect distinguishes us; together they individuate us. No single identity -- even that of our nationality -- adequately describes who we are, how we see ourselves. In these times, we no longer see the possession of one nationality as excluding another; many have more than one nationality. We can be both French and American; one does not displace the other in the modern imagination. (A nod to the late Tom Franck here, who explored these themes, personally and in his writings on nationality.)

Yet certain identities have been viewed as inherently incompatible with the holding of the fullest form of American national identity: U.S. citizenship. At various times one could not be an anarchist or an Asian or a Nazi or a communist and become (or perhaps remain) an American. Patrick Weil examines these disabling identities in The Sovereign Citizen, a thorough history of U.S. naturalization law. His emphasis lies with denaturalization: that is, the legal reversal of the grant of U.S. citizenship to an alien. For much of the 20th century, the recourse to denaturalization expands in parallel with the stiffening of opportunities for immigration. The vulnerability to denaturalization marked the ‘second class’ nature of U.S. citizenship acquired through naturalization; the hold of U.S born citizens on their nationality was (and continues to be) more secure. Denaturalization as a broad practice then collapses: from the Warren Court onward denaturalization has become an exceptional act.

Our view of citizenship shifted during the 20th century. It began as an exclusive (if not jealous) relationship between the United States and its nationals, characterized by duty and loyalty. These understandings differ from today’s far more easygoing tolerance (if not encouragement) of multiple nationalities and distributed allegiance. Weil’s book explores and the targets and the techniques of denaturalization.

Talent Wants to be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free-Riding by Orly Lobel

Orly Lobel is not writing about love in Talent Wants to be Free, but she’s not terribly far off topic, for she writes about the suffocating attachments firms can form with their employees. The heart-sickened are told to let go -- and perhaps their beloveds will come back to them. This may be the better course, but it isn’t easy and it certainly isn’t what most of us do (with our insecurities and covetousness). Firms are jealously possessive of their key employees; this is a social fact. Lobel challenges these firms (and the responding legislatures) to consider whether they are indeed pursuing their own best interests by clinging.

Lobel usefully gathers a variety of legal doctrines and instruments into a basket she calls “human capital controls” -- and for this alone her book should be read. Human capital controls include IP and quasi-IP (trade secrets and know-how) rights, as well as a host of contractual features: non-competes, non-disclosure agreements, compensation arrangements (option grants and forfeitures) and post-termination obligations. Together, these elements bind the talented employee to her employer. The orthodox justification for these controls is that they promote firm investment in innovation, including investment in human capital -- that is, in forming the movable productivity of the employee herself. It is the workplace, and not the university, where most valuable human capital is created.

Lobel directly investigates the logic of control -- which is easily conflated with ownership. By controlling human capital, firms capture some of its produce. Creative workers create. In addition, firms withhold these assets from their competitors. According to the received view, employees are rivalrous goods. Lobel challenges this notion (though perhaps not explicitly) -- while we are not public goods, our creations often are.

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

In Scarcity, economist Sendhil Mullainathan and social psychologist Eldar Shafir introduce the study of scarcity as a ‘science in the making.’ One of their colleagues, perhaps a sceptic and certainly a joker, gibes: “There is already a science of scarcity. It’s called economics.” But the science of scarcity Mullainathan and Shafir have in mind is not familiar economics. Scarcity is much more the subjective experience (and hence a psychological phenomenon) occasioned by want. Scarcity, say Mullainathan and Shafir, ‘captures the mind.’

Scarcity is a condition that the authors easily recognize. They suffer the curse of the hyper-successful: they have insufficient time at hand to accomplish all they have committed to do. The lack of time preys on their minds (and promotes them to waste more time worrying and complaining about their lack of time) and sets off a cascade of real-life consequences: missed appointments, neglected family, unpaid bills. And perhaps more: a sense of helplessness, depression, despair. We wrote this book, the authors declare. "We were too busy not to."

And so the first scarcity -- the scarcity the authors experience -- is the shortage of time. But their field immediately widens to include debt and poverty, hunger and the dieter’s calorie-count, and loneliness. Scarcity collects these conditions and explores their dilemmas. While many will escape a particular form of scarcity (we are not all poor), all may experience some form of scarcity (as might a recipient of a MacArthur ‘genius grant,’ such as time-pressed Mullainathan). The authors assert the existence of essential commonalities across these states.

The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan

It feels odd to be composing this review of Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan’s The Org in the days following Ronald Coase’s passing. Coase was an unusually creative and influential thinker - one who identified some basic truths of organizational life that had not been generally recognized: the kind of simple things that, once pointed out, cannot fail to be seen.

Coase and the work that followed Coase form much of the subject matter of The Org, a book-length meditation by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan on the science of the organization. Indeed, Fisman and Sullivan launch the book with the story behind Coase’s posing of the grand question: “Why orgs?” Young Coase travels to Chicago, meets with managers, and reads the Chicago phone book. He is struck by the range of scale and activities pursued by the firms he finds. Why then, asks Coase (and ask Fisman and Sullivan), are some activities conducted within firms and others between firms (that is, via the market)? Coase’s answer (transaction costs) may or may not be correct (‘transaction costs’ always seemed to me to be a convenient label for a still elusive explanation, almost a tautology); what is important is the question.

Organizations are mysterious. We fit them on like suits of clothing - and instinctively know how to push and pull their levers. Fisman and Sullivan focus on what happens within the firm - how organizations compel human agents (because that’s what we are) to pursue organizational goals. The resort to organization is by and large a given. At this point, they collect the principal/agent mysteries that form much of the challenge to understanding how firms work. Fisman and Sullivan do not confine themselves to business organizations in The Org - indeed their best coverage involves organizations that are not business firms: the Baltimore police department, Methodist churches and the military.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier

So here’s my favorite quote from Big Data - from an interview with Mike Flowers, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ‘director of analytics’:

You know, we have real problems to solve. I can’t dick around, frankly, thinking about other things like causality right now.

We find ourselves in a new world, argue Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier. No longer need we grapple with the world by spinning theories and using them to make predictions. We now have Big Data and Big Data will speak to us, gifting us with insights that were never before accessible.

By Big Data, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier refer to the vastly greater amount of collected and stored data around us. Big Data also reflect a new economics - where the costs to acquire, store and manipulate data are increasingly negligible. Big Data is often collected mindlessly and incessantly: our continuous GPS coordinates, our Google searches.

Big Data presents new opportunities for prediction. Old prediction involved the collection of precise sample data, which would then be fitted into a theory. Theory was developed under causal lines - data confirmed theory and reflected a link between cause and result. If we collect data showing a large number of people diagnosed with the flu, we may infer the presence of an epidemic. 

The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition by Arjun Appadurai

In this collection of essays, Arjun Appadurai links his role as leading globalization scholar to his practice as activist on behalf of the slum dwellers in his native city of Mumbai (or Bombay, the abandoned name Appadurai seems to prefer). Appadurai redeploys globalization theory (and more generally modernization theory, of which globalization is a part) as an ethical practice. He calls for cultivating the capacity to aspire among the world's poor -- an unabashedly cultural project with political and developmental implications. Appadurai argues that the poor must be enabled to aspire -- these aspirations will, in turn, define new and different trajectories from those promised by the passé globalist.

Globalization has failed in its predictions -- and so has failed as science. Globalization, it was thought, would lead to convergence and homogenization, more democracy and tolerance and less nationalism and violence. Yet the world we now see displays strong (and growing stronger) national states and continued developmental disparities. Those enabled by knowledge migrate; their home countries capture disappointing returns from their educational investments. New digital capacities have been harnessed by jealous ethnic groups to reinforce local identities; they can encourage aggression and conflict.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is back, and in his new book he asserts that his signature idea was not The Black Swan (that was so last book), but rather Antifragility. This second idea shares a viral quality with the first; like the Black Swan, once you catch the notion of antifragility, it's hard to get rid of it.

Antifragility is the characteristic of certain systems to grow stronger when stressed; it is the mirror concept to fragility (where stress destroys). Exercise stresses our muscles, and so renders us stronger. As Taleb insists, antifragility is not robustness -- robustness is merely resistance to stress. Stress improves the antifragile. And in a world where stresses cannot be avoided, it is better to be antifragile.