Meandering home

Wealth redistribution?

During a walk in the forest, I listened to a recent episode of the Oxford-style debate series of Intelligence2. Oxford-style means that the position of the audience is registered before and after the debate, and the side that has gained the most percentage points, wins the debate.) The proposition was simple: Is it time for ...

20 October, 2020

debate, intelligence2, redistribution, Reich, Summers, Varoufakis, wealth

Activism, Reviews

Review: Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Seven years after his The Better Angels of our Nature, the book in which he presented abundant statistics and reasons why violence has declined, Steven Pinker has published an even more ambitious tome defending the idea and ideals of Enlightenment. The controversy that arose from the 'cautiously optimist' view he presented in 2011 might have ...

16 January, 2019

Enlightenment, materialism, Nietzsche, positivity, religion, Steven Pinker, violence

Philosophy, Reviews

Review: Spent by Geoffrey Miller

Geoffrey Miller's 2008 book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior about conspicuous consumption uses the relatively new science of evolutionary psychology to analyse modern humans' consumerist behavior. The bottom line is that we engage in conspicuous consumption to show potential mates, like animals, that we have desirable traits. Through countless examples, some of which are ...

27 August, 2018

Consumerism, Geoffrey Miller, signalling, spent

Reviews

Review: Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz

Being Wrong is a well-written account of our understanding of error. The author points out how central error is for all aspects of cultural proress. It is not an academic treatise, but still gives the history of thinking about scientific and religious truth a fair treatment, by mentioning for example St. Augustine's fallor ergo sum, ...

20 August, 2018

error, Kathryn Schulz, knowledge, science, wrongness

Philosophy, Reviews

Review: Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

Status anxiety is "the price we pay for acknowledging that there is a public distinction between a successful and an unsuccesful life." In this book, de Botton explores our social lives from the perspective of status, and arrives at a remarkably comprehensive account of human society, that is erudite as it is entertaining. Essentially, the ...

10 August, 2018

Alain de Botton, anxiety, status

Philosophy, Reviews

Review: Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall has been a very exciting read for me, and many readers on Goodreads agree (there are 1400 reviews available). It is the best book on geopolitics that I have read so far and it has helped me consolidate what I already knew and taught me a lot of new things as well. ...

16 July, 2018

geography, geopolitics, history, Tim Marshall

Reviews

Review: Capitalism by Jürgen Kocka

This is the first of some short book reviews here on creativechoice. I love reading and will share my thoughts about the books that I are think are worth my readers' while. The short book Capitalism: A Short History begins with a concise discussion of the most important figures in the history of the concept ...

15 June, 2018

book, capitalism, history, Kocka

Reviews

Some notes on Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism

In reply to a noteworthy article in the Guardian about the book "Postcapitalism" that is published on July 30. 1 Mason interprets the transition from capitalism to postcapitalism as a parallel to the one from feudalism to capitalism. This serves to explain that such a societal transformation takes many decades and gives rise to 'a ...

22 July, 2015

Consumerism, Cuba, Guardian, Paul Mason, postcapitalism

Philosophy, Reviews

Magic in the Moonlight – Woody Allen

I like this film precisely because Woody Allen is repeating himself. I have seen this film many times already. The Purple Rose of Cairo, Scoop, Midnight in Paris. There are a number of lovely reviews on IMDB so I'll skip the remarks about scenery, acting, and storyline (just this much: I think all these aspects ...

15 June, 2015

appearance, Colin Firth, magic, Nietzsche, Woody Allen

Reviews

Ex machina

This is one of the better science fiction films made in recent years. The main idea, that the brilliant mind behind the fictitious "Google" called Blue Book harnesses the intelligence of humankind and feeds it to a neuronal network to create strong AI comes across convincingly. There is a modest amount of techno talk, the ...

30 May, 2015

AI, Alex Garland, sci-fi

Reviews

Reading of Jeremy Rifkin: The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

When a very experienced author like Rifkin presents his ideas on how the Internet of Things changes everything, we can expect an abundance of beautifully crafted sentences. Since the mind of a budding reviewer might suffer from scarcity thereof, I have decided to quote a lot from the book. Explorations of the topic of abundance ...

29 December, 2014

Adam Smith, communications internet, Economic growth, Economic ideologies, Empathic Society, Jeremy Rifkin, peer-to-peer, The Empathic Civilization

Philosophy, Reviews