{"id":14944,"date":"2026-02-11T20:18:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T19:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/?p=14944"},"modified":"2026-02-11T20:18:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T19:18:12","slug":"book-reviews-for-january-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/2026\/02\/book-reviews-for-january-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Book reviews for January 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

I tend to write 2 types of book reviews: 1) full length singular posts, and 2) short summaries for many books by year’s end. The trouble with the second approach is that it has been up to 12 months since I read some of the books involved. So I’ve decided on a new approach, which is to post once a month for books from the prior month. This also serves as a motivation to get some reading done. In January I read 6 books:<\/p>\n

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  1. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemo\u011flu<\/li>\n
  2. A Brief History of Equality, by Thomas Piketty<\/li>\n
  3. How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time, by Matt Ridley<\/li>\n
  4. Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, by Matt Ridley<\/li>\n
  5. The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, by Simon Winchester<\/li>\n
  6. Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, by Dambisa Moyo<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In an image:<\/p>\n

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    Why these books? Well, no reason in particular. I decided to read some mainstream stuff I had been avoiding. I set my Goodreads to-read list to sort by most reviews, and these were chosen from among the top. 3 of the books concern big inequality questions. Take Thomas Piketty. He’s a die-hard socialist of sorts. Some years ago he wrote a supposedly important book Capital in the Twenty-First Century<\/em><\/a> (2013). The problem with reading this is that it’s 700 pages long, and I was already expecting not to enjoy it too much. So I looked around for a more up to date book from him that was shorter. So let’s begin in that order too.<\/p>\n

    Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality<\/h2>\n

    First, Piketty on ‘social constructions’<\/p>\n

    Let us restate the point clearly: socioeconomic indicators, like the historical series presented in this work and all statistics in general, are nothing more than imperfect, temporary, and fragile constructions. They do not claim to establish \u201cthe\u201d truth of figures or the certainty of \u201cfacts.\u201d There are always several legitimate ways of combining the materials available to confer a specific social, economic, and historical intelligibility on the given information. The indicators seek above all to develop a language enabling us to establish orders of magnitude, and especially to compare in the most sensible way possible situations, historical moments, epochs, and societies that often consider themselves to be very distant from one another, but which it may nonetheless be useful to correlate in spite of their irreducible specificity and uniqueness. We cannot be content to say that each statistic is a social construction: that is, of course, always true, but it is insufficient because it amounts to abandoning the field. Used properly, moderately, and critically, the language of socioeconomic indicators is an indispensable complement to the natural language for fighting intellectual nationalism, escaping the manipulations of economic elites, and building a new egalitarian horizon.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    I am not sure why some people find the talk of social construction so important. It’s obvious that all concepts we use (think in terms of) are those made by us humans, and usually by building on existing concepts, thus they are in a sense social. One could have made some different concepts, and new concepts are constantly invented. This is not really related to whether they are useful or not, or whether they map well to nature or not. I take it as trivial that the correspondence theory of truth<\/a> is correct. Anyway, Piketty’s book is full of assumed statements along the highlighted one. Nowhere does he discuss why it is we should care about equality in itself, but it’s good that he doesn’t go for postmodernism about social construction. He is working with actual data, and some of it is quite interesting, so accepting some kind of social constructionism would undermine his own intellectual project. You can’t prove socialism is good\/capitalism is bad using statistics if statistics are just made up. To give you a flair of his standard opinions:<\/p>\n

    How did Europe and the United States attain such a dominant position on the global level, at least until recently? Although no single explanation exists, we shall see that slavery and colonialism played a central role in the Western world\u2019s acquisition of wealth.<\/strong> Today, the distribution of wealth among countries, as well as within them, is still deeply marked by this heritage. Therefore, it is particularly important to examine these historical episodes closely.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    I think if make a plot of the intensity of slavery measured in various ways you will find this is a very poor predictor of national wealth (per capita). Singapore and north Europe are rich but didn’t have much to do with slavery in any recent times. Slavery probably started with the advent of permanent large-scale settlements with farming, so the people who have been enslaving the longest are just those who started farming the earliest, thus we would expect the fertile crescent area to be very wealth from all this history of slavery, whereas we find this is not the case at all. In general, the places that originated farming and thus slavery are fairly average by modern standards. He continues:<\/p>\n

    For all that, it is very clear that reparations alone will not allow us to settle all the problems. To repair the damage done by racism and colonialism, we also have to change the economic system on a systematic basis, by reducing inequalities and ensuring that everyone has the most egalitarian access possible to education, employment, and property, independently of his or her origins. To fight discrimination, we must also pursue policies that are as ambitious, coherent, and verifiable as possible, but without rigidifying identities, which are always plural and multidimensional. We shall see to what extent it is possible, on the basis of the experience accumulated thus far, to find a balance between social criteria and criteria related to origins. For similar reasons, we have to go beyond the opposition between redistribution at the national level and redistribution at the international level. In particular, each country, each citizen on the planet, should have some part of the tax revenues derived from multinational companies and the world\u2019s billionaires: first, because each human being should have a minimal equal right to health care, education, and development; and second, because the rich countries\u2019 prosperity would not exist without the poor countries. The growth of wealth in the Western world, like that in Japan or China, has long been based on the international division of labor and the feverish exploitation of natural and human resources worldwide.<\/strong> All these accumulations of wealth that have taken place on our planet depend on a global economic system, and it is at that level that the question of justice should be raised and the march toward equality pursued. Before going further in these various directions, we must nonetheless arrive at a better understanding of how the inequalities of status and class have been transformed since the eighteenth century, on the global scale and in particular within Western countries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Naturally, some people a long time ago did slavery and colonialism, and that’s why you have to pay up. His policies are those of a dream world and he knows it. It’s curious that if exploitation is so wealth creating, then why did the UK first really start the modern economic miracle\u00a0after<\/em> they gave up slavery? And it was Spain and Portugal that stole the riches of the Americas, but they didn’t get wealthy for long. This theory is not great.<\/p>\n

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    Bad theories aside, the book contains a wealth of information like this figure. It is interesting to see how constant military spending has been, while states just kept adding more stuff on top of it. He’s also into basic income, of course:<\/p>\n

    A more ambitious tool that could be used along with basic income is the system of guaranteed employment recently proposed in the context of discussions of the Green New Deal. The idea is to make available to all a full-time job at a minimum salary set at a decent level ($15 an hour in the United States). The financing would be provided by the federal government, and the jobs would be offered by public employment agencies in the public and nonprofit sectors. Following in the footsteps of the Economic Bill of Rights proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at which Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in 1963, such a system could contribute powerfully to the process of decommercialization and to the provision of public services, the transition to alternative energies, and the renovation of infrastructure.5<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Yes, let’s ’employ’ every economically useless person in the public sector for even more bloat. No lessons learned from any communist history.<\/p>\n

    Piketty occasionally ventures into making statistical claims about my fields of research. Take this one about parental income:<\/p>\n

    We will begin with the question of educational justice: the diffusion of knowledge has always been the central tool enabling real equality, beyond origins. But the problem is that almost everywhere there is a monumental gap between official statements regarding equality of opportunities and the reality of the educational inequalities that the disadvantaged classes face. Access to elementary education, and then secondary school, was extended to the whole of the population in the course of the twentieth century, at least in the global North, and this constitutes considerable progress. But in reality, inequalities of access to the most advantageous courses of study and schools remain very deep, especially in higher education. In the United States, researchers have been able to correlate a student\u2019s educational path with parental tax information. The results are depressing: the parents\u2019 income predicts almost perfectly the child\u2019s chances of going to a university.<\/strong> Concretely, the probability of being admitted to an institution of higher learning is scarcely 30 percent among the 10 percent of young adults whose parents have the lowest income, increasing linearly to more than 90 percent for the young adults whose parents have the highest incomes (see Figure 31).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    As a matter of fact, parental income is a relatively\u00a0weak<\/em> predictor of educational attainment of children (and their IQs<\/a>), and it’s mostly non-causal<\/a>. The explanation is simple enough: parental measures that are more strongly related to the parents’ own human capital traits are those that predict offspring outcomes the best, mostly via genetic causation. Thus, educational attainment typically does the best, not income or wealth. One would think that some academic superstar like Piketty would at least be familiar with such basic results, but no. The entire book is written in socialist blank slate fashion, which is a bit tedious.<\/p>\n

    Concerning women in politics, it is not enough that there are more women than more (because male mortality higher) and that they vote more frequently, Piketty laments that even French quotas aren’t enough to achieve the dream scenario:<\/p>\n

    Quotas favoring women have multiplied over recent decades, not without arousing strong opposition. An initial law was adopted in France by the Socialist majority in 1982. The measure was modest, since it simply provided that no sex could occupy more than 75 percent of the seats in elections that follow a closed proportional list system, and in particular in municipal and regional elections. That would already have represented a significant advance for women, who at that time represented less than 10 percent of elected officials, but the law was struck by the Constitutional Council for violating the principle of equality, and could not be revisited until the constitutional revision of 1989. For elections based on lists, the law passed in 2000 established complete parity (that is, lists that include equal numbers of men and women and penalize parties that propose too few women in district elections\u2014penalties that have proven insufficient). The government at that time tried to require parity on admission panels as well, but was again overruled by the judges. A second constitutional revision adopted in 2008 extended parity to executive functions in regional and municipal councils. A series of laws adopted between 2011 and 2015 set quotas for women on companies\u2019 boards of directors (20 percent of the seats), and then on juries and the managerial organs of public institutions. In 2021 there are ongoing parliamentary discussions regarding possible extensions of quotas or incentivizing targets for all management positions in private enterprises (which could end up having a measurable impact on the share of women in the upper centile or upper decile of remunerations). Although it is too early to evaluate the complete effect of these measures, this sequence bears witness to the fact that it is possible to move toward real equality and, if necessary, to rewrite constitutional texts when the political will to do so exists.10<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    And of course, the Final Solution is world socialism:<\/p>\n

    The battle for equality is not over. It must be continued by pushing to its logical conclusion the movement toward the welfare state, progressive taxation, real equality, and the struggle against all kinds of discrimination. This battle also, and especially, involves a structural transformation of the global economic system. The end of colonialism has made it possible to begin a process of equalization, but the world-economy remains profoundly hierarchical and unequal in its workings. Our current economic organization, which is founded on the uncontrolled circulation of capital lacking either a social or an environmental objective, often resembles a form of neocolonialism that benefits the wealthiest persons. This model of development is politically and ecologically untenable. Moving beyond it requires the transformation of the national welfare state into a federal welfare state open to the global South, along with a profound revision of the rules and treaties that currently govern globalization.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    We can thus summarize Piketty’s political program:<\/p>\n