In keeping with our tradition at Adam Smith, Esq. of publishing a summertime diversion in the form of a selective list of what we’ve been reading lately, herewith the 2025 installment: Fiction, nonfiction, and one millennia-old classic. Our hope is that you might find one or more of these volumes entertaining, something you might not have otherwise run across, or a volume that deepens or broadens your familiar reading horizons.
So, alphabetically by author:
- Capitalism and Its Critics: A History From the Industrial Revolution to AI, John Cassidy (Farrar Straus, New York: 2025). Cassidy is a British-American financial journalist and a New Yorker staff writer who has published two previous books, “Dot.Con, the greatest story ever sold” (2003) and “How Markets Fail: The logic of economic calamities” (2021). I have read neither of these earlier two books, but it seems a safe assumption that Cassidy has a dominant skeptical gene when it comes to free markets. Fortunately, “Capitalism and its Critics” takes no editorial view, but simply retells in thoroughly researched and quite engaging detail (28 chapters) the stories of leading proponents and detractors of capitalism. Many figures are familiar, even obligatory: Adam Smith himself, of course, along with Marx, Engels, Keynes, and Thomas Carlyle and Thorstein Veblen. Others are more obscure to us in the early 21st Century: A standout example in this category is William Bolts, who published a notorious tell-all denunciation of the British East India Company in the 1730’s. (Bolts was not so far wrong, BTW.) The virtue and value of the book to me is that it shines a light on the leading analysts, cheerleaders, and foes of capitalism over the three centuries or so since its de facto creation by Adam Smith. Like it or not, we have been living in a capitalist world. John Ruskin wrote in 1866 that “our true monarch is not Victoria but Victor Mammon,” and more recently it’s been fairly accurately characterized as “an economic system, [‘yes,] but so much more than that, a sort of ideology, this all-encompassing force that rules over our lives and our minds.” As for myself, an unabashed capitalism fan boy, this book’s appeal was in revealing the intellectual and sociological pedigrees and analytic foundations of capitalism itself, a protean and ever-changing societal framework and ideology. Caveat lector: The book weighs in at just over 500 pages, so I would advise you to be genuinely curious before you pick it up.
- Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti series. In what is a first here at Adam Smith, Esq. , we are recommending not a single book but a (quite extensive) series; this is also unorthodox hereabouts in that we have never been fans of “mysteries,” which is how the simplifying/reductionist view of book series would categorize Leon’s work. Don’t make that mistake; these are well crafted, ingeniously plotted, psychologically nuanced, and stylistically engaging portrayals of murders committed in Venice–Leon’s home for decades and a character in its own right. The books follow a pattern in terms of plot–opening with a murder–and, engagingly, each features a rotating cast of idiosyncratic but essential supporting characters–potential suspects, detectives from other jurisdictions (not just Venice) of widely varying trustworthiness, reliability, and candor, and the occasional quirky oddball sprinkled in for color and verve if nothing else. And the lead, Brunetti himself, is a complicated but engaging and sympathetic soul–profoundly in love with his wife, fond of ancient classics (Plato, Seneca, & Co.), and endowed with preternatural intuition about human motivation.
If I haven’t persuaded you, so be it. But dip your toe into just one–whatever’s cheapest on Abe’s Books can be your selection criterion; be my guest. And let me know what you think. - How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, Robin Dunbar (Oxford University Press: 2022). Dunbar, a new author to me, is a professor of evolution who here turns his attention to the adaptive benefits of spiritual thinking and ritual (be it Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many more). What is religion’s social function, its effects on our brains and bodies, and its place in our modern era? Critically, this is not “ideological” in the sense that it endorses or critiques religious belief; it’s historically descriptive, starting with the earliest quasi-shamanic rituals to today’s highly organized and formally structured leading schools of belief. This book is not designed to, and I can’t imagine it would, reinforce or undercut your own personal faith (if any), That’s not its point and I suspect you already knew that. (Full disclosure: I’m a loosely observant Episcopalian.) A topic I never gave any real thought to. As a piece of intellectual human history, fascinating. Widespread religious belief–differentially suited to time, place, and culture– would appear to be intrinsic to human nature.
- How to Have a Life, An Ancient Guide to Using Our Time Wisely, Seneca (Princeton University Press: Princeton 2022: De Brevitate Vita). Short–barely 100 small pages of generously large type–but as you ponder his thoughts and advice, you could easily be working on this volume for a year. How much time do you waste? Do you wish you could have back? Do you devote to the unworthy or the merely distracting, or attention-grabbing but vacuous, pursuits? Seneca, who lived in the first century AD and was counselor to Nero, as well as the author of the tragedies Medea, Thyestes, and Phaedra, died by his own hand at age 65, falsely accused of belonging to a conspiracy to assassinate Nero. Life is not too short; what we do with it makes it seem so. [Note to readers with crackerjack memories: Yes, I indeed listed this book a year ago at this time, but I told you it’s worth studying.]
- Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie, and Eric Schmidt (Little Brown: 2024). For my money, the most wide-ranging, probing, and deeply thoughtful discussions/analyses of what AI will do to us that I have yet seen. It can’t have hurt that the authors’ pedigrees are in the stratosphere: Kissinger (who had just died when this was published) needs no introduction, Mundie was the chief strategy and research officer for Microsoft, and Schmidt was Chairman and CEO of Google. At the moment we have not even begun to understand the implications of AI for our economies, careers, lifestyles, and dare I say our souls. Given where we are on this unfolding timeline, the best a book can offer is intelligent and non-hysterical discussion from the perspective of history, human nature, and technology. Near the conclusion of the book is a generously long quote from Einstein, part of his response to being asked about his religious beliefs:
We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects. That it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God.
This strikes me as one of the more probing discussions of where GAI may be taking us; for starters, it admits that we don’t really know right now. I find this a breath of fresh air and a welcome change from the cacophony of those celebrating GAI’s promise and those predicting imminent doom for the social structure as we know it.
Enjoy!
Back to the beach and still reading.
