William H. Janeway, Vaclav Smil, Adriana Petryna, and more for PS Read More

Minding the Climate, by Ann-Christine Duhaime; The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, by Gary Gerstle; and more. The PS Say More Newsletter [PS Read More]( In this week's edition of PS Read More, we share recommendations from William H. Janeway, a special limited partner at the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus, and an affiliated lecturer in economics at the University of Cambridge. We also highlight three more of the extraordinary works – written by Ann-Christine Duhaime, Adriana Petryna, and Vaclav Smil – that were shortlisted for the 2023 Project Syndicate Sustainability Book Award. [The Individualists]( Sponsored by Princeton University Press [The Individualists]( By Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi A sweeping history of libertarian thought, from radical anarchists to conservative defenders of the status quo. “Zwolinski and Tomasi provide an indispensable guide to libertarian ideas and an invaluable map to where the movement – and thus the [United States], if not the globe – is likely to head over the next generation.” – Nick Gillespie, editor at large, Reason magazine William H. Janeway Recommends... [The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era]( By Gary Gerstle If you did not pick up this important book last September, when I wrote an [in-depth review]( of it for Project Syndicate, you should now. Gerstle provides the rich historical context – including its ideological and political dimensions – needed to understand how democratic capitalism reached a breaking point in the UK and the US, represented by the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election, respectively. The book’s central analytical theme is how a political program becomes a political “order” when the opposition accepts its terms as defining the available policy space. Just as Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration accepted the principal components of Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1950s, the administrations of Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama accepted many of the terms of Ronald Reagan’s “revolution” a generation later. The 2008 global financial crisis catalyzed the demise of the neoliberal order, which, as Gerstle puts it, has now “fallen apart,” leaving national governments challenged to find politically legitimate responses to the polarization and economic dysfunction left behind. [Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902-1980]( By David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Jr. This generation-old work by Hounshell and Smith dives deep into DuPont – one of the iconic corporations of the Second Industrial Revolution, when science became the basis of transformative technological innovation. The authors track in meticulous detail how tensions within the giant corporation evolved. Should we build the needed capabilities, such as polymer chemistry, internally or acquire them from the outside? Should we centralize R&D or distribute efforts to the product divisions? Should we invest in long-term, exploratory scientific inquiry or focus on short-term enhancement of existing product lines? Critical decisions in these and other areas were often reversed. In this comprehensive case study, Hounshell and Smith illuminate the omnipresent tension between overcoming technical challenges and identifying relevant markets for new products. They also trace DuPont’s decline under the combined effect of Schumpeterian creative destruction and active enforcement of antitrust laws. The result is a compelling view of a historical model that can help modern readers understand and assess the distributed-innovation economy, underpinned by state-funded, university-based research and venture-capital-funded commercial development. [From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World]( By Pamela H. Smith Smith, who directs Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society, is a historian of science who has gotten her hands dirty. This book is an exploration, first, of the efforts of artisans in early modern Europe to explain how they crafted their wares, from ships to gold ornaments. Through deep and wide-ranging scholarship, Smith demonstrates the inadequacy of written explanations and the primacy of hands-on learning, whether as an apprentice centuries ago or as an academic researcher today. Smith also directs the Center’s Making and Knowing Project, which invites graduate students and post-doctoral researchers to test hundreds of “recipes” – covering everything from casting lizards to creating artificial gemstones – set forth in an anonymous late-sixteenth-century French manuscript. Ultimately, by highlighting the value of direct physical engagement, Smith’s work challenges the central presumption of artificial intelligence: that knowledge can be captured and operationalized through algorithmic analysis of enormous stores of textual data without direct engagement with the material physicality of the real world. Don't miss Janeway's recent Say More interview, in which he proposes a better approach to innovation-boosting state procurement, explains why financial speculation is vital to technological progress, highlights three recent developments that could transform capitalism, and more. [Read now](. Sustainability Book Award Shortlist The Project Syndicate Sustainability Book Award, presented in partnership with La Banque Postale, recognizes one new book that offers uniquely valuable contributions to the public’s understanding of issues of global concern. Below we share some of the shortlisted works. [Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis]( By Ann-Christine Duhaime Duhaime says: “A fascination with brain design and function led me to a career in pediatric neurosurgery, which I have practiced for more than three decades. A concern about the future of the children we care for, as well as observations from my research on brain recovery and plasticity, led me to explore the relationship between evolutionary brain design and the difficult pro-environmental decisions we need to make as individuals and collectively in society. How does the human brain draw on the design of ancient organisms that use reward currencies to teach us what we need to know for short-term survival? What elements of life in the twenty-first century have amplified these tendencies, contributing to the acceleration of climate change? How malleable is our brain in changing its priorities and the equations it uses to make decisions? To help us face a crisis that evolution couldn’t have anticipated, knowledge of our inherited but interactive neural design can help equip us to work with the brains we have today to address this new kind of crisis. This understanding gives us hope that a better future is possible.” --------------------------------------------------------------- [Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change]( By Adriana Petryna Petryna says: “Climate-change trajectories are not immutable. In Horizon Work, I dive into the climate crisis as it disrupts our fundamental ability to project how environments will act over time based on established patterns. I focus on how rapidly faltering projections collide with the dangerous realities of emergency response, particularly to wildfires. Taking inspiration from climate and wildfire scientists, emergency responders, and Indigenous land stewards, I consider a manifold human struggle that is underway to safeguard desirable ecological conditions amid dangerous climate futures. I call this struggle ‘horizon work,’ a mode of thinking that considers unnatural disasters against a horizon of expectation in which people and societies can still act. Staying close to my interlocutors’ ways of understanding crisis when dominant tools fail, I focus readers’ attention on the power of coordinated acts of stabilization that can change climate trajectories.” --------------------------------------------------------------- [How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going]( By Vaclav Smil Smil says: “In software parlance, the book’s title is perfectly WYSIWYG: a brief but systematic, factual review of all basic factors – from food and commercial energies to the forces of globalization – that make the modern world work. Necessarily, this includes their interactions, historical perspectives, environmental impacts, and evaluations of associated risks. There are no long-range forecasts (these are bound to fail), no ideological perspectives, and no wishful thinking – just quantified realities.” [PS. 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