Continuing with my tradition of quarterly book summaries, here are my reflections on the books I’ve read between January and March this year.

Politics

📚 Tyranny of the Minority

👉 Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

At the beginning the title seemed very strange to me since my first thought was: “How can a minority overrule the majority?” As the authors put it:

Majorities must also be constrained in a second area: the rules of democracy itself. Elected governments must not be able to use their temporary majorities to entrench themselves in power by changing the rules of the game in ways that weaken their opponents or undermine fair competition.

In a “liberal” democracy you need both: protect minority rights but allow the majority to rule:

And so the form of democracy that emerged in the West between the late eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, which today we call “liberal” democracy, is based on two pillars: collective self-rule (majority rule) and civil liberties (minority rights). Although liberal democracy cannot exist without free and fair elections, not everything can or should be up for grabs in elections.

“Tyranny of the Minority” is the analysis of the political system in the USA and describes how the minority rule seems to have led to a breaking point in the American democracy. The authors argue that the US constitution (which is one the of the oldest one, and designed in a pre-democratic era) allows minorities to thwart majorities and sometimes even govern them. Institutions that empower these minorities can become instruments of minority rule, which is especially dangerous when these minorities are extremist or antidemocratic.

Several specific counter-majoritarian institutions are highlighted as contributing to this problem:

The authors suggest the following democratic reforms:

  1. Uphold the right to vote

    • Establish a right to vote for all citizens
    • Register all citizens automatically when they turn eighteen
    • Accompany this with the automatic distribution of national voting ID cards to all citizens
    • Offer easy options for early voting and mail-in voting across all states
    • Make voting obligatory (similar to paying taxes) like in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Uruguay

  2. Ensure election outcomes reflect majority preferences

    • Abolish the Electoral College: Replace it with a national popular vote system, ensuring the winner of the most votes becomes president
    • Reform the Senate: Make the number of senators elected per state more proportional to each state’s population

  3. Empower governing majorities

    • Abolish the Senate Filibuster: Eliminate the ability of minorities to repeatedly and permanently thwart legislative majorities
    • Establish Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices: Implement term limits (e.g., twelve or eighteen years) to regularize the Supreme Court appointment process
    • Regularize Supreme Court Appointments: Ensure that every president has an equal number of appointments per term, similar to other established democracies

👉 Check out my notes.

📚 Brave New World

👉 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Continuing the “totalitarian path” I also read “Brave New World” which was written in 1932, before Orwell’s 1984 which was published in 1949. Both are considered two of the most influential dystopian novels of the 20th century, each presenting different aspects of totalitarian features:

Both books give political warnings and complementary concerns about the future of human society and freedom. Reading these two influential 20th-century dystopian novels as complementary warnings provides a more complete picture of the potential threats to human freedom. Orwell feared those who would ban books; Huxley feared there would be no reason to ban books because no one would want to read them. Orwell feared a population controlled by pain; Huxley feared a population controlled by pleasure and distraction.

I found myself particularly struck by how Huxley anticipated the use of sophisticated biological technology to control populations. His vision of humans engineered from conception to fit predetermined social roles feels disturbingly plausible in an era of advancing genetic technology. The novel’s exploration of how pleasure and constant distraction can serve as effective means of control also resonates with our current attention economy.

So, read for yourself, I really liked it!

👉 Check out my notes.

Philosophy

📚 Jäger, Hirten, Kritiker

👉 Jäger, Hirten, Kritiker by Richard David Precht

The author was recommended to me from a friend Thanks Basti! (this is my first book by Precht), and while I didn’t particularly like his writing style, overall I got interesting new insights from the book. Given that this book was written in 2018 (when AI wasn’t yet available to the masses, and authoritarian regimes hadn’t partnered with technocrats in democratic countries), I was struck to realize that what Precht was foreseeing seems to be becoming reality.

One of the main ideas is that the concept of work (as we’ve defined it until now) will change:

People have forgotten how to drive cars, read maps, and navigate the world on their own. They no longer need to remember anything because electronic devices remind us of everything, and they store less and less knowledge about the world because devices take over this function for us. Most people have reverted to toddlers in their knowledge about the world, their dependence on (technical) care, and their lack of courage to leave the house without assistive devices (or soon, a chip in their head). They communicate through stone-age pictograms, and infantilely divide the world into likes and dislikes.

People want to be independent, yet we’re increasingly becoming “prosumers” (producing consumers):

What used to be trained occupations are now handled by robots. And much of what skilled workers once did, customers now do themselves on their flat screens. The development toward the prosumer, the producing consumer, predates digitalization. Remember how supermarkets replaced grocery retailers in Germany since the 1960s. The discounter was not only cheaper because it was larger, but also because customers now served themselves, thereby saving personnel. The same applies to coffee and ticket machines in the eighties and nineties and to the self-assembly skills of IKEA buyers. The principle of the working customer in the digital age is nothing but the consistent continuation of this self-service: booking trips, checking in at the airport, ordering clothes and books, executing transfers, and so on.

Without noticing it, people blindly trust solutions from Palo Alto meant to make their lives easier, however:

Most people have reverted to toddlers in their knowledge about the world, their dependence on (technical) care, and their lack of courage to leave the house without assistive devices (or soon, a chip in their head). They communicate through stone-age pictograms, and infantilely divide the world into likes and dislikes.

Technocrats also want to optimize our lives, but to what degree?

Our craftsmanship is dying out, our linguistic expression is being reduced, our memory, outsourced to memory functions, is declining, our imagination consists of prefabricated images, our creativity follows exclusively technical patterns, our curiosity gives way to convenience, our patience to permanent impatience; we can no longer endure the state of non-entertainment. If this is what the superman looks like—who would want to be one?

So, if computers take over our jobs, what is the solution? The author (among others) suggests Universal Basic Income:

When advocating for the UBI, the unconditional basic income that every citizen should receive regardless of their need, the first reflexive question that comes up is: Who is going to pay for it? The question—so automated that apparently no one asks why it is immediately posed—is strange. Why shouldn’t the UBI be financeable? After all, we live in the richest Germany that has ever existed. And productivity is increasing rapidly through digitalization. Computers and robots don’t cost social security contributions, don’t draw pensions, holiday or maternity pay. They don’t sleep but work effortlessly day and night.

I’ll definitely check out his other books.

👉 Check out my notes.

Productivity

📚 Slow Productivity

👉 Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

If you read my blog posts regularly and have talked to me in person, you might already know I’m a big fan of Cal Newport. I also used to listen to his podcast regularly, so I got in-touch with the term “slow productivity” before he even published the book. He has always been a promoter of “doing less (shallow) work and instead doing more deep work.”

He defines “slow productivity” as follows:

SLOW PRODUCTIVITY A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

  1. Do fewer things.
  2. Work at a natural pace.
  3. Obsess over quality.

What I’ve found interesting was Newport’s mention of Carl Honoré’s book “In Praise of Slowness” which seemed to have coined the “slow movement”:

As the journalist Carl Honoré documents in his 2004 book, In Praise of Slowness, these second-wave movements include Slow Cities, which also started in Italy (where it’s called Cittaslow), and focuses on making cities more pedestrian-centric, supportive of local business, and, in a general sense, more neighborly. They also include Slow Medicine, which promotes the holistic care of people as opposed to focusing only on disease, and Slow Schooling, which attempts to free elementary school students from the pressures of high-stakes testing and competitive tracking. More recently, the Slow Media movement has emerged to promote more sustainable and higher-quality alternatives to digital clickbait, and the term Slow Cinema is increasingly used to describe realistic, largely nonnarrative movies that reward extended attention with deeper insight into the human condition. “The slow movement was first seen as an idea for a few people who liked to eat and drink well,” explained the mayor of Petrini’s hometown of Bra. “But now it has become a much broader cultural discussion about the benefits of doing things in a more human, less frenetic manner.”

So the goal of “slow productivity” is to create a more human and sustainable approach to work:

My goal is to offer a more humane and sustainable way to integrate professional efforts into a life well lived. To embrace slow productivity, in other words, is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output.

In order to achieve this, the author recommends 3 principles:

The author argues here that factory work is completely different from knowledge work:

In a factory, pushing employees to work longer shifts might be directly more profitable. In knowledge work, by contrast, pushing employees into larger workloads can decrease both the quantity and quality of what they produce.

The knowledge sector sets “productivity” = busyness, which is fundamentally misguided.

Newport gives some background how our working patterns have changed in the past:

This side-by-side comparison underscores the degree to which our experience of work has transformed during the recent past of our species. Our shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture—the Neolithic Revolution—only really picked up speed somewhere around twelve thousand years ago. By the time of the Roman Empire, foraging had almost completely disappeared from the human story. This reorientation toward agriculture threw most of humanity into a state similar to that of the rice-farming Agta, grappling with something new: the continuous monotony of unvarying work, all day long, day after day.

He also mentions we’re constantly grinding without relief:

The second principle of slow productivity argues that these famous scientists were onto something. Our exhausting tendency to grind without relief, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, is more arbitrary than we recognize. It’s true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules—it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness.

He also suggests working in cycles (which is a more natural approach):

Work in Cycles The software development company Basecamp is known for experimenting with innovative management practices. This is perhaps not surprising given that its cofounder and current CEO, Jason Fried, once published a book titled It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. One of Basecamp’s more striking policies is the consolidation of work into “cycles.” Each such cycle lasts from six to eight weeks. During those weeks, teams focus on clear and urgent goals. Crucially, each cycle is then followed by a two-week “cooldown” period in which employees can recharge while fixing small issues and deciding what to tackle next. “It’s sometimes tempting to simply extend the cycles into the cooldown period to fit in more work,” explains the Basecamp employee handbook. “But the goal is to resist this temptation.”

- Principle #3: Obsess over quality

The author shares examples of how obsessing over quality can provide leverage for greater control over one’s schedule, and how this doesn’t necessarily require becoming a superstar but rather developing rare and valuable skills:

Both Jewel and Paul Jarvis discovered a similar lesson in their careers. The marketplace doesn’t care about your personal interest in slowing down. If you want more control over your schedule, you need something to offer in return. More often than not, your best source of leverage will be your own abilities. What makes Jarvis’s story so heartening is its demonstration that these benefits of “obsessing” over quality don’t necessarily require that you dedicate your entire life to the blinkered pursuit of superstardom. Jarvis didn’t sell fifteen million records; he instead became, over time, good at core skills that were both rare and valuable in the particular field in which he worked. But this was enough, when leveraged properly, to enable significantly more simplicity in his professional life. We’ve become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income and increased responsibilities that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.

The author provides a strategy for balancing obsession and perfectionism: give yourself enough time to create something great but not unlimited time, and focus on making progress rather than perfection:

Your goal is instead reduced to knocking the metaphorical ball back over the net with enough force for the game to proceed. Here we find as good a general strategy for balancing obsession and perfectionism as I’ve seen: Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. Focus on creating something good enough to catch the attention of those whose taste you care about, but relieve yourself of the need to forge a masterpiece. Progress is what matters. Not perfection.

👉 Check out my notes.

Le Fin

As always: You can find my readings on Goodreads and my current to-be-read list of books her.