Reading Map: further books, essays and thinkers
Why government cannot build or deliver
| Work | Why it fits | Pillar |
|---|---|---|
| Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense | Rules that remove the official’s judgment, so nobody can fix the obvious | |
| Pressman and Wildavsky, Implementation | Classic study of how a funded programme still fails in the chain of clearances | |
| James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy | What agencies do and why, by type of task and what is observable | |
| Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, How Big Things Get Done | Why megaprojects overrun, and what the few good ones do differently | |
| Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities | Cities as systems of small, visible feedback, against top-down plans | |
| Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital | Property that exists on paper vs in practice: legibility again | |
| Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation | Argument that easy gains ran out; useful counter to ‘just fix government’ | |
| Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking Like an Economist | How a way of measuring policy changed what US government does | |
| Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay | Why institutions rot after they are built | |
| Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States | War and revenue as the engine of early states; contrast with today’s feedback |
Institutions and political economy
| Work | Why it fits | Pillar |
|---|---|---|
| Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations | Special-interest coalitions slow stable societies: a theory of decay | |
| Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action | Why large groups with shared interests still do not act | |
| Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty | What people do when an organisation worsens; maps onto apathy vs leaving | |
| Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons | Communities that manage shared resources without state or market | |
| Robert Michels, Political Parties (iron law of oligarchy) | Organisations are captured by their leaders: the classic of this argument | |
| Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ and bureaucracy essays | Roots of the modern civil service, and what a calling vs a career does | |
| Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. | How autocrats cooperate and share tools: state capture in practice | |
| Tom Burgis, Kleptopia | Private fortunes bought through weak institutions; link to banana-republic |
Economics, incentives and complexity
| Work | Why it fits | Pillar |
|---|---|---|
| Friedrich Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ | The classic case that prices carry information no planner sees: this argument’s best opposing argument | |
| Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems | Plain introduction to feedback loops and leverage points | |
| Geoffrey West, Scale | Claims about how cities and firms scale; useful and contested | |
| Charles Goodhart / Marilyn Strathern on ‘Goodhart’s law’ | When a measure becomes a target it stops working; see Gosplan note | |
| Donald Campbell, ‘Campbell’s law’ papers | Social-science twin of Goodhart: metrics corrupt what they measure | |
| Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior | Individual choices that sum to outcomes no one wanted | |
| Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth | Economy as an evolving system, not an equilibrium | |
| Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World | Culture and institutions evolve together; partner to Putnam |
Cities
| Work | Why it fits | Pillar |
|---|---|---|
| Jeff Speck, Walkable City | Practical rules for walkability, cited by planners | |
| Charles Montgomery, Happy City | Links urban form to wellbeing; Bogota’s Penalosa appears | |
| Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight | A transport commissioner’s account of fighting for bike lanes | |
| Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World | The case that cities cooperate better than nations | |
| Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis | A critic of his own earlier creative-class thesis; failures of success | |
| Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance papers | Many overlapping local centres of authority as a design |
AI and power
| Work | Why it fits | Pillar |
|---|---|---|
| Marietje Schaake, The Tech Coup | How tech firms took over public functions | |
| Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality | Algorithmic welfare systems that punish the poor | |
| Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction | Opaque scoring models that cannot be appealed | |
| Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI | The material and labour cost behind AI systems | |
| Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire | How chokepoints in networks become instruments of state power | |
| Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl, Plurality | A constructive vision of digital democracy from Taiwan’s former digital minister | |
| Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas | How networked protest is strong at starting and weak at lasting | |
| Chris Bail, Breaking the Social Media Prism | Evidence that exposing people to opponents can polarise further | |
| Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind | Moral tribes, relevant to the internet tribe-war topic |
Gaps to fill next: a Croatian or Balkan political-economy reading list (names to be supplied by Petar), and Petar’s 2-3 titles on why government cannot build.