Antara Haldar, Stephen S. Roach, and more for PS Read More

The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich; Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman; and more The PS Say More Newsletter | [View this message in a web browser]( [PS Read More]( In this week's edition of PS Read More, we share recommendations from Antara Haldar, a lecturer at Harvard University and senior economist at Deutsche Bank Research. We also highlight one of our most recommended works – a top suggestion from Yale's Stephen S. Roach, the University of Michigan's Yuen Yuen Ang, and more. And don't miss recommendations from Nobel laureate Edmund S. Phelps and Françoise Girard, former president of the International Women’s Health Coalition. Antara Haldar Recommends... [The Remains of the Day]( By Kazuo Ishiguro I am currently rereading this, having first read it while at university. Without giving too much away, it’s about a butler serving an English lord who earnestly believed in appeasement in the inter-war period. Apart from the fact that the setting reminds me of my college(s) in Cambridge, this is a beautiful and touching ode to the Old World and the sometimes-flawed values that defined it. The book’s genius stems from its inversion of foreground and background: cataclysmic global events are viewed through a lens of a butler whose role it is, even in the midst of tremendous global anxiety, to make sure that the silver is polished and the table is set for dinner. In this manner, Ishiguro reminds readers that the developments that are so astutely analyzed in the pages of PS – the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, an endless series of financial crises – are canvasses against which everyday human lives are playing out. The sublime and the ridiculous are always living cheek by jowl. [The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Particular and Particularly Prosperous]( By Joseph Henrich Joseph Henrich is a truly inspiring scholar whose research agenda is profoundly – and unpretentiously – transforming our understanding of our evolutionary story, with significant consequences for how we chart our future course. Henrich’s work marks a distinctive shift from treating cultural diversity as a subaltern agenda to recognizing it as an object of serious scientific study. His work on “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies captures this particularly well. These regions are in many ways the exception, rather than the norm, yet their experience is often canonized as universal. Henrich demonstrates that when the motivations are right and the questions astutely handled, many of the ideological, racial, and other divisive battles that can impede social-science scholarship can be avoided. Thanks to the work of scholars like Henrich, psychology is far ahead of disciplines like law and economics in acknowledging cultural difference as vital to understanding our world. [Thinking, Fast and Slow]( By Daniel Kahneman Having sold well over two million copies, this is obviously not an esoteric gem of which PS readers have never heard. But the fact is that I almost always have a copy around, and I learn more with every reading. Indeed, the book has fundamentally affected my thinking about institutions, and has been more effective than any single other intervention in paving the way for an epistemic revolution in economics. As Kahneman points out, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics without having taken a single economics course. Perhaps that kind of outsider perspective is precisely what is needed to catalyze real epistemic change in a discipline that is otherwise highly homogenous. In Haldar's recent [Say More interview]( she highlights a potential institutional advantage of developing countries, shows how the hesitation to appeal to voters’ emotions is putting progressives at a disadvantage, considers where the economics discipline is headed, and more. [Click here to read](. Recommended Over and Over Again [AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order]( By [Kai-Fu Lee]( Lee's book – which Yuen Yuen Ang [describes]( as a "provocative page-turner" – is among PS contributors' most recommended works. In it, one of the world's leading experts on artificial intelligence "walks the reader through the genesis, evolution, and geopolitics" of "the most consequential technology of the twenty-first century," as Brahima Coulibaly [puts it](. This includes, Stephen Roach [notes]( "taking us under the hood of the new wave of Chinese innovation and competition," at a time when "China is being vilified in the West for cutting corners on technology." Readers, Shang Jin-Wei [points out]( end up with a better understanding of "why China may take the lead" in AI – and "what it would take for the US to reclaim dominance." Read Kai-Fu Lee's [2020 interview]( with Project Syndicate, in which he examined current developments in AI and predicted where the field was headed. [Click here to read](. More Contributor Recommendations From Edmund S. Phelps: [Willful: How We Choose What We Do]( By Richard Robb I very much admire this recent work by Robb, who is a great friend of mine. The book’s thesis is that many, if not most, of our actions are simply things we feel like doing, rather than attempts to maximize some abstract metric of “utility.” It’s full of insights into the choices we make in a great range of areas. An economist will see the book as being 180 degrees from the behavioral science preached at the University of Chicago. [Read more](. --------------------------------------------------------------- From Françoise Girard: [The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness]( By Michelle Alexander As relevant today as it was when it was published ten years ago, this book shows how the war on drugs was created from whole cloth to reverse the progress of African-Americans that the civil-rights movement had made possible. Alexander shows how the war on drugs enabled and encouraged mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, the militarization of police, overpolicing of communities of color, and the disenfranchisement of felons. And she demonstrates the catastrophic impact this has had on African-American families and communities. She thus makes clear that addressing racist policing requires ending the war on drugs. [Read more](. 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