Recent Reading - 11/23/21

Recent Reading - 11/23/2021

Pick of the week: How China Avoided Soviet-Style Collapse by Adam Tooze

The question of why the Soviet Union collapsed, both politically and economically, and why the PRC did not, is undoubtedly complex.  Likewise, this article/book review is equally complex (I needed to read it twice to really understand some of the arguments) but well worth a careful read.  As a bonus, it has lots of interest jumping-off points, so be prepared to fall down the rabbit-hole.  

One big takeaway for me is that much of the argument here (and elsewhere) for the USSR's collapse was due to Gorbachev's response to an entrenched and sclerotic bureaucracy, which would necessarily have come to power during the Brezhnev era.  I can't recall any notable biographies of Brezhnev though, or any significant analyses of his time in power.  Most of what I remember from my Soviet history class ran up through Khrushchev, and then seemed to gloss over the subsequent decades.  Maybe there's more to be learned from the book I recently started, but this is definitely a tangent I plan on following.

Other notables:

• What it's Like to Fight a Megafire - M. R. O'Connor: An interesting article, but for the New Yorker it felt lacking.  I was hoping for a bit more substance.  Still, worth a read.
• The Weirdness of Government Variation in COVID-19 Responses - Richard Hanania: "What does this tell us about democracy more generally? As the political reaction to COVID-19 has surprised me, I’m still trying to figure it out. But for now I can say it’s shifted my priors in a few ways."  Quick and thought-provoking
• Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know - Scott Alexander: Don't think of this as an article about whether or not Ivermectin is effective against Covid (conclusion: it might be, but for completely different reasons than most people think.) Rather, this is a great example of how to read and think skeptically about scientific papers, and how statistics can be misused to convince the unwary.  The last section is also interesting from a sociological aspect, and dovetails nicely with the previous article.  This one is long, and can get very technical in spots, but is worth a read.
  
• Power Without Purpose: The Crisis of Japan’s Global Financial Dominance - R. Taggart Murphy: An old Harvard Business Review article from 1989 that warns of the dangers of Japan's economic dominance. I found this while reading a brief twitter thread from Michael Pettis about a recent McKinsey report about global wealth, and how China's current wealth levels (particularly driven by real estate valuations) compared to late 1980's Japan.  Only read this if you're interested to see a very bad, very racist take on Japan from 30 years ago. Key takeaways:
  
• I should probably read that McKinsey report, even if it is 196 pages
• It's still hard to find good writeups of Japan's bubble burst (I'm always on the lookout - all suggestions welcome!)
• Yes, mainstream American culture really was that blatantly anti-Japanese. (Remember the Michael Crichton book Rising Sun?  Hard to believe that was both a best-seller and made into a movie.  In retrospect, both were downright awful
• I wish I still had my copy of The Machine that Changed the World.

Videos:

• Process of Making Bowling Balls - I love a good How It's Made video, especially when there's lots of factory automation and robotics involved.  This one was especially interesting to me because there were some clear instances when tasks could have been automated, but weren't.  I can't help but wonder why human intervention was needed for certain parts of the process but not for others.
  
•  Disney's Fast Pass: A Complicated History - Did I just spend 1 hour and 45 minutes watching a video about Disney's queue technology?  Yes.  Yes I did.  And you should too if you're interested in things like optimization of complex systems.