Books Recommended by Balaji Srinivasan
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Seeing Like a State
How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
James C. Scott
Source: "There’s a sense in which the term 'real name' is a misnomer. A better term is a state name — a name which makes you legible to the state." - Balaji Srinivasan
2 recommenders
Catching Fire
How Cooking Made Us Human
Richard Wrangham
Source: "Talks about how the invention of fire allowed humans as species to outsource our metabolism to the fire and allocate more of our scarce calories to the brain." - Balaji Srinivasan
1 recommender
Schaum's Outline of Principles of Accounting I
Joel J. Lerner
Source: "It’s amazing how many people have studied accounting or something, but you just give them Schaums and ask them to do the first 10 problems in accounting, they struggle." - Balaji Srinivasan
1 recommender
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (3 books)
Richard P. Feynman
Source: "If you take all the people who could understand the Feynman Lectures, they could probably appreciate Hamlet. But not conversely." - Balaji Srinivasan
3 recommenders
Rules for Radicals
A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals
Saul D. Alinsky
Source: "The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away." - Balaji Srinivasan
2 recommenders
The Craft
How the Freemasons Made the Modern World
John Dickie
Source: "Anyone working on NFT collections should understand the history of the Freemasons. Many of their rituals could be usefully updated for the digital era." - Balaji Srinivasan
1 recommender
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
Carlota Perez
Source: "People get really amped about a technology, then you try to actually do it, you find it’s actually hard, most people get demoralized and they quit." - Balaji Srinivasan
2 recommenders
The Internet of Money (3 books)
Andreas Antonopoulos
Source: "One of the best books on Bitcoin for a broad audience." - Balaji Srinivasan
2 recommenders
History Has Begun
The Birth of a New America
Bruno Macaes
Source: "[The author's] thesis is that America is increasingly becoming a virtual society, focused on make-believe above all. I have to agree." - Balaji Srinivasan
2 recommenders
How the Internet Happened
From Netscape to the iPhone
Brian McCullough
Source: "Reminds us that the tech era is very new, only really about 10 years old, and only began in earnest with iPhone adoption." - Balaji Srinivasan
2 recommenders
Unelected Power
The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State
Paul Tucker
Source: "Decent book — by a central banker! — on the lack of legitimacy of central banking and the regulatory state writ large." - Balaji Srinivasan
1 recommender
The Gulag Archipelago (3 books)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Source: "What the Soviet Union was actually like." - Balaji Srinivasan
China Coup
The Great Leap to Freedom
Roger Garside
Source: "Makes the case that Xi could be felled by his internal enemies (possible!) and that this will lead to democratization (IMO implausible)." - Balaji Srinivasan
1 recommender
The Truth Machine
The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
Paul Vigna
Source: "An accessible explanation of how blockchains allow us to establish certain kinds of truths even in adversarial environments." - Balaji Srinivasan
1 recommender
Visual Complex Functions
An Introduction with Phase Portraits
Elias Wegert
Source: "Fun book proposes plotting all complex functions as colored contour plots. Kind of an obvious idea, but it's carried through systematically here." - Balaji Srinivasan
1 recommender
The Changing World Order
Why Nations Succeed and Fail
Ray Dalio
Source: "How today’s America resembles the Dutch and British empires of the past in terms of its monetary overextension." - Balaji Srinivasan
Netflixed
The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs
Gina Keating
Source: "Blockbuster tried to buy Hollywood Video, but the FTC called this off on antitrust (!) grounds. By 2010 Blockbuster was bankrupt and Netflix was soaring." - Balaji Srinivasan
1 recommender
Indistractable
How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
Nir Eyal
Source: "Tackles the problem of modern distraction by empowering us to break the bad habits at the root of the issue." - Balaji Srinivasan
3 recommenders
The Cold Start Problem
How to Start and Scale Network Effects
Andrew Chen
Source: "Useful for anyone trying to bootstrap a new community or network, which is virtually every founder these days." - Balaji Srinivasan
1 recommender
The Kill Chain
Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare
Christian Brose
Source: "The US military has a perfect record in its war games with China. China has won every round." - Balaji Srinivasan
1 recommender
100 books
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