gosh, hard pick.
For understanding our world/changing pov? A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century The War on the West Superabundance
lets make it an even 5
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well OKA, I'll ignore the money stuff (Goetzmann, Sumner, Selgin, Parker Lewis, Lyn Alden, and other stuff like that I assume you'd be at least a little familiar with).
Hard.
I'll pick Vaclav Smil's Grand Transitions and Caplan's The Case Against Education
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Vaclav Smil and Bryan Caplan are two of my most favorite authors, both university professors. How come we read and understand them clearly so differently?
Btw, if you read these guys, you “touch a university”, don’t you?
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ah yes, good point. I guess I got carried away with giving titles that "changed my views" rather than giving evidence to the point that academia needs to go.
(both, in my defense, as far as I can interpret them, are pretty anti/lukewarm on much of what's wrong with their institutions)
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Thanks!
Interesting that they are all 2021-22 books except the last one (2018).
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hm... didn't think about that. Not sure what to make of that, any ideas?
"I only started thinking deeply, bigly, critically about institutions and (woke) beliefs fairly recently"?
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two other candidates.
Maybe this reflects time of my life? (I read and wrote an astonishing amount in 2020-2022 -- something like 50-60 books a year, publishing about 120 articles a year iirc).
Also, covid years really darkened my views of things, something I've descripted in longer form for Bitcoin Magazine https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/asset-bubbles-covid-19-make-bitcoin-case
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