Wait, this is the social scientist who wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, whom a Danish Science committee found to be "scientifically dishonest through misrepresentation of scientific facts, but Lomborg himself not guilty due to his lack of expertise in the fields in question." [1]
And now he's written a book about another topic he doesn't have a deep understanding of. Forgive me if I give it a miss.
Did you read the rest of the link you provided? The committees decision was overturned:
"the Ministry annulled the DCSD decision, citing procedural errors, including lack of documentation of errors in the book, and asked the DCSD to re-examine the case. In March 2004, the DCSD formally decided not to act further"
Great article although I'm not sure this is the case for this book list
> PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.
This was written in April 2005. Turns out they figured out how, we call them influencers and firms pay them. Easy peasy. Also these mostly moved on social media instead of maintaining blogs.
Readers of Private Eye regularly get to read about what the magazine calls "log rolling".
It turns out in a lot of christmas book lists - especially lists that solicit book recommendations from famous writers and journalists - are absolutely crammed with recommendations for their friends' books, their co-workers' books, their boss's wife's books, books by authors they share a literary agent or publisher with, and so on.
Are you suggesting all these books’ publishers or authors might have paid to be on the list? It’s such a vast and varied list that it seems like a bizarre conclusion. Or do you think they’re paid to raise awareness of books in general? Is The Economist in the pocket of Big Book?
So how would we distinguish a paid-for article about best books of 2023 from a non-paid one? Would we conclude everything is above board only if there’s no such article at all?
Seems like a claim that’s bordering on unfalsifiable…
A pro-free market book but also a few critical of climate change and Big Tech; an anti-Evangelical but also an anti-woke one. Some critical of China but others critical of Japan and South Korea, etc. I’d argue that there’s at least an attempt to cover a variety of viewpoints.
But your argument is different from the OP’s. Their argument seems to be that the article is paid for by the publishing industry, while yours is that the newspaper in question has a political bent.
yeah the political bent isn't a dealbreaker for me, they're not kidding about it, have what I'd call a painfully plain mainstream view on most things, and at least attempt to, most of the time, examine both sides of an issue before picking a side (which will obviously be the free market one). fairly deep looks with standard UK middlebrow takes
I don't understand on what you base this accusation / whataboutism. The Economist is widely considered a very balanced (though opinionated), high quality source of news and coverage. FWIW throughout its coverage it is very careful to disclose any potential conflict of interest, as also in the book list (for example where a recommended book is written by a current or former writer for the Economist or published by an affiliated company). For myself, and I guess many readers of HN, the Economist's annual book list is one of the best sources available for learning about new books. No wonder this made it to the front page.
> A brilliant examination of South Korean feminists’ struggle for equality with global resonance. It describes how many South Koreans still see women only as cooks, cleaners and “baby-making machines” and tells tales of misogyny, from spycams in public toilets to bigots in public office.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that this book probably isn't a great idea. The birth-rate in S.Korea is now, by far, the lowest in the World -- TFR 0.7 for the nation [1], and Seoul itself might be as low as a stunning 0.3 -- with many asserting that a "cold war" between traditionalist men and feminist women is the culprit.
Really seems to me that we might want cooler heads to prevail, and that promoting books demonizing Korean men and claiming that they see women as "baby making machines" (lmao) is a step in the wrong direction.
This doesn't appear to be a sober outline of the causes, but a partisan book full of cherry-picked anecdotes. And even if it describes true trends, it does so only from one side.
As such, it's probably best ignored, yeah. What's more, I think that, in a word, the most appropriate thing one can say about its publication and promotion is that it is unwise.
A wise book would probably strive to reconcile both viewpoints to the fullest extent of their compatibility, and seek commonalities rather than complaints. One should hope for détente, not more airing of grievances.
The economist is known to have an extreme liberal bent. So a book like that is expected.
A lot of classical liberal values are going extremist. Way back when I was liberal I couldn't see it coming.
Now the two big movements within liberalism are pretty extremist: identity politics and feminism.
The weird thing about this list is although the economist is very liberal they have a book on there that is against identity politics that essentially against liberalism.
However, on the feminism side they still have a lot of books on the "patriarchy" and blaming and attacking men for traditional gender roles that dominated the anthropological landscape for eons.
It's not a coincidence that feminism is on the rise this century. It's almost a universal thing that crosses cultural lines... Unilaterally we see women in most 1st world counties gaining more power than they ever have before in human history. We would assume that culture evolves randomly so random cultures would have random perspectives on gender roles, but the fact that the rise of feminism is so universal among first world countries points to a single factor: technology. One book in that list is about the rise of females in outdoor sports. That book likely blames men for not allowing women to be in said sports (which plays a small role in the whole situation) while also likely doesn't mention how tampons basically are the main technological enabler that allowed women to even entertain the concept in the last century.
This divide among men and women does partly lead to the low birth rate you see not just in Korea. But internationally among all 1st world countries.
They've been liberal since they were founded.
They defend free-market economy, self determination of individuals, open societies, free global movement of capital, men and information.
However, they might not be liberal in the sense that the word has taken in the US in recent years.
No it's not. It's true. The economist is really liberal. It's readership is majority liberal at 59 percent. The rest are a combination of moderate and conservatives, I think conservatives are 18 percent.
In general with more power women are able to be more selective of their mates. By default women are hypergamous. They rather share an alpha male. This changes dating culture into hookup culture where thousands of young women hook up with a few top tier men. Coupled with birth control and disdain for polygamy it lowers the population overall as women seek polygamy, but culture doesn't allow it so they are sort of stuck in this hookup mode as there are "no good men" willing to settled down from their point of view.
Prior to women gaining power we would have no choice but to marry a man because marriage was coupled with survival. Women in general couldn't work and even in prehistoric times we couldn't hunt. Thus before feminism, someone like me had to settle for a man that was at my level. So overall this imbalance is better for us and worse for men.
> This is the story of one of the world’s greatest (but least famous) con artists. Ghana’s John Ackah Blay-Miezah bilked investors on several continents by promising he knew where lost gold was hidden. Exhaustive reporting by the author makes this a riveting addition to the canon on great swindlers.
I think it fits right in. It can go along with the Crypto hypers, the AI evangelists. Maybe sub-prime securities. In fact for that matter big consultancy can go in there too.
It's a reference to The Economist's book #1's Murong Xuecun complaining about Chinese censors not allowing him to write "India-flavoured farts"[1] in his books.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murong_Xuecun In his acceptance speech for the Prize, Murong wrote a scathing commentary about his editor that he worked with for China: In the absence of a remedy. He also launched into a critique of the state of censorship in China in general. The speech was banned at the awards ceremony, but made its rounds across the internet. The draft of the speech was translated into English and delivered to the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club in February 2011, followed by a publication by The New York Times in November 2011. In the draft, Murong alluded to a wide array of censorship restrictions, including limits on discussing current affairs, contemporary personalities, and being forced to change the phrase "Chinese people" to "some people" in parts of his work. More obscure restrictions were also discussed, such as scrubbing the use of "Henan people" because it carries the air of regional discrimination, and removing references to "India-flavoured farts" because the editor was concerned about a diplomatic rift between China and India. Murong wrote that "The only truth is that we cannot speak the truth . The only acceptable viewpoint is that we cannot express a viewpoint. We cannot criticise the system, we cannot discuss current affairs, we cannot even mention distant Ethiopia."
The economist is known for it's heavy liberal bias. He could've set it in a more polite way but he's not wrong about the reputation of the economist. Ironically the list doesn't seem too liberal? There's a book against identity politics in there. The most liberal thing I see in this list is the excessive amount of books on the "patriarchy".
I don't really follow the media. And I've heard that the economist is essentially "neoliberal". But the fact that they have that book and even the review of that book makes me think they aren't that liberal?
And what do you mean by "china bad? " Are liberals supposed to hate China? I thought hate on china was party independent. Can you elucidate your perspective on the bias with the economist?
Neoliberalism is an economic theory advocating for privatization, deregulation, austerity, etc. Usually goes hand-in-hand with NATO "bringing freedom" to oppressed peoples around the world in the form of bombs.
Needless to say they don't like China, who is kind of the opposite of all that.
There's only a tenuous (conspiratorial) connection to liberalism as practiced on twitter.
I don't see any books on there critical of big tech, in fact it seems rather the opposite??
The Geek Way. By Andrew McAfee. Little, Brown; 336 pages; $30. Pan Macmillan; £22
A technology-and-business guru at mit explains how the mindset that inspires Silicon Valley could be usefully applied in life and in other fields of business, with a focus on teamwork, producing prototypes quickly and avoiding bureaucracy through individual accountability.
Scaling People. By Claire Hughes Johnson. Stripe Press; 480 pages; $30 and £21.99
Good books about the nuts and bolts of management are vanishingly rare. A former executive at Google and Stripe offers a practical guide to everything from giving feedback and delegating to running a meeting and building teams.
The Coming Wave. By Mustafa Suleyman, with Michael Bhaskar. Crown; 352 pages; $32.50. Bodley Head; $32.50
A cogent look at the potential of ai to transform the economy and society, along with the risks of misuse and surveillance. By a co-founder of DeepMind, a leading ai company, and board member of The Economist’s parent company.
Seems like the one book addresses responsibilities of Big Tech for risks of AI misuse and surveillance.
But even without that one, my point still stands. Do you think the China-related topics should not be addressed and, say, the ones on the U.S. left-wing culture war and religious right-wingers should stay?
I skimmed it, it does not appear to address that. From the author's own words:
What emerges will, I think, tend in two directions with a spectrum of outcomes in between. On one trajectory, some liberal democratic states will continue to be eroded from within, becoming a kind of zombie government. Trappings of liberal democracy and the traditional nation-state remain, but functionally they are hollowed out, the core services increasingly threadbare, the polity unstable and fractious. Lurching on in the absence of anything else, they become ever more degraded and dysfunctional. On another, unthinking adoption of some aspects of the coming wave opens pathways to domineering state control, creating supercharged Leviathans whose power goes beyond even history’s most extreme totalitarian governments. Authoritarian regimes may also tend toward zombie status, but equally they may double down, get boosted, become fully fledged techno-dictatorships. On either path, the delicate balance holding states together is tipped into chaos.
So, the usual neoliberal-hypetripe.
As for what should be addressed, it's a free country, you can address whatever you want. I just think that if I picked 55 books to read in 2023, I wouldn't pick 3 China Bad books.
Based on your quote, seems like there’s an expectation from the author that Western governments will become increasingly authoritarian. Doesn’t seem like an uncritical embrace of the tech, even if it is a clichéd formulation.
How many South Korea Bad books would you want to read? Or Japan Bad? There are more of those on the list than those about China when adjusting for population.
Wait, this is the social scientist who wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, whom a Danish Science committee found to be "scientifically dishonest through misrepresentation of scientific facts, but Lomborg himself not guilty due to his lack of expertise in the fields in question." [1]
And now he's written a book about another topic he doesn't have a deep understanding of. Forgive me if I give it a miss.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg#The_Skeptic...