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If I may recommend a book that really will make most people change their perspectives it's "The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Eco
by ThomPete 9y ago
If I may recommend a book that really will make most people change their perspectives it's "The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy"
Rarely have I read a book which made me think about a subject I thought I had a pretty good understanding of completely different. And if that is not enough it's probably one of the few books which doesn't have a moral/ethical agenda but merely seeks to inform about how the crisis happened (and what money really is)
For me it's one now on my list of books about important fundamentals in this world.
https://www.amazon.com/End-Alchemy-Banking-Future-Economy/dp/0393247023 https://www.amazon.com/End-Alchemy-Banking-Future-Economy/dp...
- harigov 9y agoWhat other books do you consider as important fundamentals?
- filiwickers 9y agoHa-Joon Chang has very approachable books about capitalism and economics. * Twenty-Three Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism [1] * Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism [2] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1608193381 https://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986 https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capital...
- ThomPete 9y agoObviously these lists are subjective but a couple of examples would be: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (Evolution) MindStorms by Seymore Papert (Education) Structure of Scientific Revolution by Thomas Kuhn (Scientific Method/ Philosophy) Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Formal Systems) The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (Entrepreneurship) Innovation and Entrepreneurship Peter F Druckert (Entrepreneurship but most likely because I had a quite crazy experience while reading it) They are all books written by what I consider careful thinkers i.e. people who are able to avoid confusing what they want the world to be with what they actually observe. They don't have to be right and can be highly subjective as long as their premise is clear and they are aware of it.
- harigov 9y agoThanks! I would also consider "A brief history of time" and "Wealth of nations" to be part of fundamentals.
- ThomPete 9y agoAgree both great books.
- tgb 9y agoI took a philosophy of science course in college and still never got what it was that Kuhn was saying. My memory is the professor spent many lectures telling us what he was not saying, but I never figured out what he was saying beyond a "science goes through fads" simplistic interpretation. Is there a good short overview of it?
- axplusb 9y agoMy take from this book is that: - scientific knowledge is embedded in some intellectual ether made of underlying hypotheses often not explicitly stated called paradigms - paradigms follow a Darwinian evolutionary process, i.e. better paradigms evolve out of not-so-good previous paradigms - paradigm replacements start with an epistemological crisis , i.e. facts that the current paradigms don't explain well enough. Hope it helps !
- ThomPete 9y agoGreat summary but also important to note that Kuhn didn't believe (unlike Popper) that science moved towards some final destination or explanation. Instead he saw each paradigm as optimal for what it was trying to express.
- tgb 9y agoYeah, I think I was struggling with this aspect. I recall my professor saying something like "it's not that general relativity is correct and newtonian mechanics was wrong, it's that when a general relativist says 'mass' they are talking about something different than when a Newtonianist says 'mass' - after all, you have to measure mass differently in those two things, they behave differently, etc. It's more that general relativity doesn't say anything at all about Newtonian mass." But I never bought that (even if they were talking about different things, it seems like they were trying to talk about the same thing), so I figure I'm missing something from Kuhn's argument.