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Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets --- Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain PoorBook

by John Kay

1 person

Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
Statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who writes the long-running blog Three-Toed Sloth and the Bactra Review of books.
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For the most part, the content is quite good, but at times Kay's style really got on my nerves. There seemed to be a lot of places where he could and should have gone into topics more deeply, but contented himself with just dipping into them and then going on to the next section. (Perhaps this is due to writing a weekly newspaper column for several years.) Also, there are some errors.

His monthly "Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur" post for January 2005 — the books he read that month and feels he can recommend.

bactra.org ↗·2005-01-31

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The small bar beside a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The bar shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Full and green is recent. It drains, and turns amber and then grey, as the post gets older.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The bar is empty after about:

A striped bar means the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no bar.