3 Favorite Books of 2020
I met my goal of reading 12 books this past year! To be fair, the bar isn’t that high and we all had additional free time, but I’ll take it. I continue to enjoy reading nonfiction as it’s an avenue for me to learn about the world and how it works. I spent the year learning a lot about our healthcare systems, human behavior, and wrapped it up with a series on human history. These are my favorites from the year and why they’re impactful.
1. An American Sickness, Elizabeth Rosenthal
This was an incredible book from Rosenthal that unpacks the dynamics of a healthcare industry that we all can agree is dysfunctional. Why does the US spend so much money on healthcare without the outcomes to show for it? Why do we as patients have so little visibility in how much we pay? Despite politicians talking about reform, nothing much changes. Rosenthal attempts to contextualize these questions by weaving the history and stories of the main stakeholders of healthcare into a set of market conditions that differ from a traditional free market. It’s through this does Rosenthal makes her main point — that businesses have exploited these market conditions in which there is more concern about growing profits than care for Americans. The challenging realization is that no one stakeholder is to blame. Every stakeholder has identified a business opportunity, seek to address a problem, and fights to protect its interests. However, when it’s all pieced together, it results in a flawed system.
I feel like this book put me much more progressive on the healthcare reform scale where I don’t believe that incremental change is sufficient. It’s difficult to regulate an industry when it makes more business sense to keep patients less informed, give them more treatment, and the self-regulating levers of competition do not hold true. Whether or not you believe in a government run or single payer healthcare system, I would recommend this book as a glimpse into why Adam Smith’s invisible hand doesn’t apply in healthcare, but also what we as consumers can do to stay rational and not be taken advantage of.
2. The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
One topic I’ve been starting to explore is our political divide today. We’re at a point where each side demonizes the other and sincerely believes there is something fundamentally wrong about the other side. This is not productive as people don’t change their minds when they are being shouted and preached at. Haidt, a social psychologist, explains our political leanings with the moral foundations theory, or the basis of which we construct their morals. Individuals differ on the spectrum of these five moral foundations: care/harm, fairness/proportionality, loyalty/ingroup, authority/respect, sanctity/purity. His research shows that liberals weigh much more significantly harm and fairness, whereas conservatives weigh fairly equally all foundations. What’s interesting is also how quickly we identify with a one side and make decisions consistent with the group that we can’t sometimes support with reason.
My takeaways from this book are twofold. First, whether or not liberals agree to the dimensions of loyalty, authority, and sanctity, they at least need to acknowledge they exist. This means being understanding that the ‘Western progressive’ moral compass is not the only one. This means liberals need to better appeal to a broader spectrum of voters by addressing additional dimensions. Secondly, that we are hive-minded individuals. People typically have a gut response which aligns to how our experiences teach us to react before we process information. This means that we need to actively challenge our own responses and also be willing to extend an ear to those that disagree with us. If you’re interested in learning how our moral foundations shape our political leanings, versus branding one political side as good or evil, this is a great read.
3. Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens is a masterful story of human history. What’s particularly captivating is how Harari sets the stage on the conditions that led to homo sapiens taking over the continent, to the agricultural revolution, to the scientific revolution. He weaves improved abilities of transmitting information, being able to form wider social relationships, and shared institutions to how we grew from small circles to a global vision. Harari conceptualizes an imagined order of our institutions and beliefs that shapes our desires, our material world, and hold the fabric of our communities together as the number of people grow.
One of such imagined orders that Harari explores is religion. Besides money, it was one of the best ways to maintain an imagined order for such a large amount of people because it forces people to abide by a shared moral standard. It gets into an interesting question of how our morality has formed, to which, I can imagine Harari’s position is evolution. I’m not entirely convinced that we can extend evolution beyond biological changes yet, but it was certainly interesting to see how religion’s role throughout our history. Harari ends the book by reflecting on this journey and where we want to go from here. This becomes a critical question throughout his next two books — in the midst of genetic manipulation, AI and automation, and ecological disaster, to name a few — what do we as humans want to achieve? Is it happiness? To find meaning?
