Recent Books -- Empire of Pain, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, We Are Legion, Factory Girls

• Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. I did not realize how much this was a story of a marketing dynasty. A triumph of marketing and business development over morality and good sense.
• This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth. The entire internet is compromised and we better get cracking to fix it. Our software and internet industries were created by optimists and enthusiasts, but increasingly are inhabited by bad actors.

A thread across both these books – it is a great strength of our free market economy that we allow new companies to easily create new offerings and enter the market – but we don’t have great mechanisms for assigning responsibility for the societal problems they may create. The innovators get rich and move on, society is left with the huge costs of opioid addictions or the huge costs of easily hackable software systems. The innovators should bear more responsibility, but this is a hard problem to fix.

After these two books, I needed some lighter fare:

• We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. A lighthearted tale of galaxy exploration by an idiosyncratic post-human AI and its clones. There are many more books in the series and I enjoyed, but probably won’t continue as I have too many other books on the pile:

And then a transition back to more serious fare:

• Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang. Deep dive into the lives of migrant workers in modern China. A real “wild wild west” economic scene, inside of a very traditional hierarchical society. Interesting.