Utopia for Realists

When you think of the Dutch, mountain ranges are rarely the first thing that comes to mind. Yet that was the image I was left with at the end of Utopia for Realists, a policy manifesto by the Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman. A vast alpine landscape, plummeting ravines and soaring…

Innovative State

Like too many public policy books, Innovative State suffers the problem of simultaneously being both too long, and too short. Too long because, once the scaffold of Chopra's case is laid out, much of the book consists of filling it with examples that don't actually drive new insights. Too short…

The Box

First of all, yes. This is a book about shipping containers. Niche choice, I know. I came across this one on Gates Notes, the non-fiction book review website run by Bill Gates (in a way, this puts me in competition with Bill Gates. Hopefully it doesn't end too poorly). The…

The Tyranny of Experts

In the words of Nobel laureate and fellow development scholar Amartya Sen, Bill Easterly is "The Man Without a Plan". If there's one thing you need to know about Easterly, it's that he considers this a great compliment. Bill Easterly burst out of academia and onto the broader…