2025 Books of the Year

As I do every year, here are the books I read and enjoyed this year. Non-fiction. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler. This is probably not the most ‘fun’ book I read for the year, but it is the one that is likely to have the biggest…

Book Summary: Why Nations Fail

Recently I read the book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Why nations fail is of course is a very important question, but one economists often shy away from because it is so multifaceted. In this book, however, the authors argue that one sufficient…

Why is Affordable housing so expensive?

From Coby Lefkowitz in Building Optimism: In Los Angeles, “luxury” units in non-high-rises can be delivered for around $300,000 to $400,000 per unit. Non-“luxury” market rate units can be completed for half of that, conditional on their size and location. Capital “A” Affordable units, on the other hand, can cost more than $850,000 for what…

2024 Books of the year

Below are my favorite books of the year. These are my favorite books that I read this year, not necessarily books that came out this year. On to the list! BOOK OF THE YEAR Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon. I learned so much from this book. It discusses the development…

Links

UK medicines regulator needs more resources. Big money for biosimilars. Fixing liberalism. 2024 scientific breakthroughs. The Economist: Best books of 2024.

Quotation of the Day: On travel

Such are the prosaic problems of the modern traveller. The transport part takes no time at all these days; it is the bureaucracy that is interminable. We are constantly being told that we live in a world without borders, in a globalized age, but only if you have the right passport and the right papers.…