God delusion

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I stumbled in this book while in India, I’m not really into religion related books but I’ve heard about Richard Dawkins for his better known “The Selfish Gene” (which I haven’t read yet) and so I gave it a try.

Dawkins is an atheist who tries, in this book, to confute both existence of God (or Gods, depending on the religion) and the usefulness of religion as a moral standpoint. The topic is huge and delicate and Dawkins does nothing to smooth his neat position against religion; since I already shared most of the author’s thoughts this approach didn’t bother me but I figure that most of believing people reading this book would likely be irritated by that.

That said I think the arguments are compelling; for example, when dealing with the origin of life, the author opposes the evolutionary explanation (ever more complicated beings built upon previous ones) to intelligent design (complex beings created from scratch by an even more complex supernatural one, creating though an explanation loop). There is also a section in which the moral value of religion is taken into account and Dawkins analyze both Bible’s Old and New Testment; the author’s writing style describing some of Bible’s episodes is simply hilarious!

One of the last chapters is also dedicated to religion’s role in children education (worrying the examples Dawkins cites about creationists schools) and its influence in the perspective of this young “believers” (the book in fact states that there are no muslim/catholic/jewish children, there are only children son of muslim/catholic /jewish parents).

To sum up I consider it a well written book raising several, well supported issues, even though Dawkin’s style will be hardly digested by the most religious readers (assuming there will be!).

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In Asia

During my Indian adventure my greatest companion was surely this book of Tiziano Terzani. He was a correspondent for the German journal Der Spiegel who spent most of his life living and traveling around Asia.

The book is a collection of the articles written by Terzani in his 30+ years stay in this continent. The articles are arranged chronologically and divided into sets talking regarding the different countries visited (China, Japan, Sri Lanka, India, …) and each of them concerns a particular event (Tiananmen square’s demonstration in China) or facet (the Yakuzas in Japan) of an Asian country

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Terzani’s style is really neat and elegant; every article is beautifully written, pleasant to read and at the same time thought provoking; being in India and living myself an infinitesimal part of Terzani’s experiences made this lecture perfect.
This book covers most of the important events happened in Asia during the years 1970-200 and my only regret about this lecture concerns my ignorance about history. The context provided before every text is very short and I somehow lacked the background to fully appreciate the pieces and place them in a wider frame. If anyone knows a well written book about modern history (not necessarily regarding only Asia) let me know!

To conclude I give to this book my most unreserved recommendation and suggest to everyone wants to know more about this far.

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Travel’s lectures

Tomorrow I’ll fly to India, where I plan to spend a month volunteering near Dharamsala and backpacking a little around north India.

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I wanted to have with me a suitable book for the coming month,  I then rushed to finish Sophie’s World, which is a suggested lecture if you don’t commit my mistakes:

1. Read this book after 15 (let’s say 20 if you didn’t study Philosophy at secondary school) years old
2. Read this book after having read  ”History of Western Philosophy” of Bertrand Russell

So I ended up with Tiziano Terzani’s “In Asia”, it’s my first book by Terzani; I hope it’s well written and it will do something for my ignorance about Asia’s history. Quite a challenge…

I’m not sure I’ll be able to update this blog during the next 30 days but sooner or later I’ll post pics and anecdotes of this travel.

I’ll see you soon!

Francesco

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Small is Beautiful (Economics as if people mattered)

I don’t remember who suggested me to read “Small is beautiful“, but the second title “Economics as if people mattered” gained my attention.  E.F. Schumacher, an ecomist who worked also for the British National Coal Board, wrote this book in the early 70s and I believe he would be disappointed by seeing that what he has written is still very actual.

SIB discuss about the foundations of the modern economics (growth, production, greed, …) and how its activites have gone beyond human scale, resulting in issues as pollution, resource explotation, unemployment and others. The author’s opinions regarding these aspects is made clear by his quotes: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed” (Gandhi) and “What where luxuries for our fathers have become necessities for us”.

The fourth chapter “Buddhist Economics“, is my favourite. This theory, developed by Schumacher during his job as economic advisor in Burma, supports not only a sober lifestyle, but dignify the work as a necessity of life, to express human skills and creativity.  Consequently he is against all the tecnologies which make human work “meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking” (remember the Charlot’s movie “Modern Times”?).

This viewpoint finds application in the book when the argument of poverty is faced; technology should serve people at a human scale, allowing

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the poors to improve their conditions by giving them tools. This is not accomplished by the developed countries that spend money in capital intensive activities in developing countries which have, instead, a lot of labour to employ. From this idea stems the concept of “intermediate

technology“, the development of tools cheap, simple, easy to produce and mantain for developing countries. This technology is “gentle” and not revolutionary (or shocking) as, for instance, the introduction of a cutting edge production plant. With “intermediate tools” individuals are able to be immediately productive, while in the case of a capital intensive plant the change would only involve a small subset of highly trained workers (leading to an even more marked divide between rich and poors).

These themes are those that, in my opinion, are more powerful. The other chapters, which treat different topics as the book is a collection of essay, are less effective.  My suggestion is: go straight for Buddhist Economics and Intermediate Technology.

P.S. I just accepted the MIT Sloan offer! How many days until August 28th?

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Creation

While waiting for the responses of my mba applications (finger crossed!) I tried to distract my mind with greater things. Creation is a novel by Gore Vidal which deals with some of the most ancient and difficult human questions: “How was the universe created? Why was evil created with good?”.

Cyrus Spitama, the protagonist, is the grandson of Zoroaster and lives at the court of Darius, the great king of Persia. There Cyrus becomes friend of the king’s son Xerxes, future king of Persia, and start a long travel as persian ambassador. In his travels Cyrus visits India, where he meets the Buddha and learn about the nirvana, and Cathay (modern China) where he fishes with Confucius on a riverbank while discussing of creation and the way of the nobleman.

I have to say that although I enjoy books about philosophy, I had some initial difficulties. The numerous characters and facts presented at the beginning (don’t forget it’s an historical novel) somehow confused me, maybe just because it’s my first novel of this kind. However after some pages I started to enjoy the narration. Vidal narrates, very vividly, the context of the fifth century BC, the persian court, the war with greeks and the scenario in India and Cathay. The political and cultural’s picture resulting is very intense and realistic, making look the characters and the facts absolutely actual. Also the direct and sarcastic style of Cyrus is worth of the reading.

Suggested to everyone who wants a break from economy/science/… books and looks for a well written history merging travels, philosophy and politics.

Design like you give a damn

Cameron Sinclair is one of the founders of Architecture for Humanity, an organization aimed at providing low cost/impact/maintenance solutions for humanitarian crises, as displaced populations.

In his book, “Design like you give a damn”, he describes the main humanitarian crises of the last century or so, along with the solutions devised to approach the issues arisen from these disasters. Then he talks about his work and the activity of his organization.

I particularly appreciated the history of architectural responses to calamities and the solutions devised by his organization, connecting architects worldwide with initiatives as architectural contests or the definition of a license for the development of open source architecture. The book is very interesting and full of clarifying pictures; it is also focused on issues different from that of the shelter as energy, sanitation and clean water.

You can have an idea of book’s content by viewing Sinclair’s talk at TED.

Financial Statements: A step-by-step guide to understanding and creating financial reports

Consistently wih my background of old-style, rock-solid engineer I’m very weak on economy and finance topics. Trying to filling these gaps I’ve stumbled upon this book, “Financial Statements” by Thomas Ittelson (ISBN: 1564143414), a businessman with a scientific biomedical backgroud. I definitely can understand them too I thought.

In fact I understood them, the text is a very (very) basic one, but it gives all the main principles needed to interpret financial reports. The book brings also a complete case which illustrates main transactions and how evaluate performance basing on ratio analysis. 

The book is perfect for a newbie who wants to approach these topic, even if he’ll have to look somewere else to complete his competences with some real world concepts (for example EBIT and EBITDA are not cited, not with these acronyms at least). Worth of the 10$.

Irrational Exuberance

“Irrational Exuberance” is a quote which Alan Greenspan used during the stock market boom of the 1990s. The homonymous book, written by Yale’s professor Robert Shiller, goes against the theory of efficient market and explains that the stock market can be overpriced because of hype triggered by different factors such as media promotions, technology innovations and so on.

Shiller describes common investors’ behavior by showing main speculative bubbles’ bursts happened during stock market history and he reports some interesting quantitative data. In my opinion this is the most valuable part of the book, stock prices and dividends are compared through almost a century (the 1st edition of this book was published before 2001 dot-com bubble’s burst) and price/earning ratio charts show clearly overpricing phenomena before market crashes (interesting also the “negative bubbles”, referring to underpiced phases of stock market).

The chapters in which the author warns about the risks of investing, especially the retirement contributions, in stock market are, in my opinion, interesting but somewhat messy and not strongly argumented. I also had the feeling that sometimes Shiller has been over-catastrophic to impress the reader.

In conclusion I’d say that this book is really worth the reading and very easy to understand also for people with no economical background as me, however I think that a more structured framework in which assess this theory would have made this book more effective.

P.S. A collegue of mine with whom I had a discussion about investing in stock market suggested me “A random walk down Wall Street“, a book which supports the theory of efficient markets. I wanted to stop with economic books for a while but this will be the very next one when I’ll start back.

Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance

This book was promising, from the Amazon’s description:

“Using game theory and examples of actual games people play, Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler show how the elements of chance and rules underlie all that happens in the universe, from genetic behavior through economic growth to the composition of music.”

Despite the appealing introduction LotG was a delusion. I wasn’t able to find a main theme and not even a common approach in describing different arguments (sometimes games are brought as example and some time not, randomly). 
When I don’t like a book a feel (at least a little) guilty but, in my opinion, this one is very weak…

The Long Tail (How endless choice is creating unlimited demand)

Keeping on reading border-line economic books, I’ve tried this one from Chris Anderson, the editor in of Wired Magazine.

The Long Tail is about market niches and how they can be profitable in a scenario with low distribution costs (as iTunes, Netflix and so on…).

Typical long-tailed graph (ex. x-> products and y->sales)

Longtail image refers to the sales trend in which high sales (on the y-axis) are concentrated into top sellers (the green-coloured part) which are the ”Hits” or the “Blockbusters” but a relevant part of sales’ volume (which corresponds to the area) is present also in the long tail going rightward (yellow coloured). Usually these niche’s products cannot be sold by classic bricks-and-mortars shop but they can be sold by online store (as niche music for iTunes or whatever products for eBay) where handling cost tend to zero and you have no shelving costs. The book relates this effect also to democratization of production’s tools (as cameras or recording equipment) and of distribution (as eBay, self-publishing tools or YouTube).Suggested, also for the chapter about Wikipedia, where Long Tail applies on the supplier side rather than on the demand side.