Freedom Is an Endless Meeting offers vivid portraits of American experiments in participatory democracy throughout …
Review of 'Freedom Is an Endless Meeting' on 'Goodreads'
4 stelle
A classic of the genre and a must read. However it has left me deeply perplexed, both for the method and for the content. As a story about a few political movements of the 1960s it's interesting and very captivating, but as a source for learnings about self-organisation it has me constantly confused about its definition of "participatory democracy" and a number of other things.
Review of 'Regulation and Its Reform.' on 'Goodreads'
5 stelle
40 years later, this book by Stephen Breyer is unfortunately more relevant than ever, as many countries and sectors are jumping from decades of deregulation to a sudden revival of haphazard regulation. Not to mention the problem of climate change...
Breyer manages to handle very technical examples with admirable clarity and understandable prose. The proper role of the legislative, executive and judicial branches becomes much clearer. Unfortunately in the USA any trace of reason is being eliminated from the system by the Supreme Court, but we can still learn in the rest of the world.
Review of 'Understanding institutional diversity' on 'Goodreads'
5 stelle
Not the most accessible of Elinor Ostrom's books, but if you've already been convinced by "Governing the Commons" or one of the others then this is what you need to get to the next step. We get not just additional evidence and reasoning but also pragmatic criteria to recognize or build a well-governed commons.
Review of 'Successful Internet collaboration' on 'Goodreads'
2 stelle
A seminal work which has done what nobody had dared before, in studying the real data about Free Software projects in bulk, but I can't say I felt enlightened. Perhaps I was expecting too much. We need more such research!
This short book is a goldmine. If you're interested in the issues of (in)equality and (in)equity, it's a must read. Every single day I encounter so many people who waste everybody's time because they failed to digest their essential Amartya Sen.
"Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or ""Fake news"" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining …
Review of 'Network Propaganda' on 'Goodreads'
4 stelle
The method is relatively simple and the findings are hardly revolutionary, but thanks to their data collection and analysis the authors have finally provided an evidence-based answer to the question: what role did social media and the internet have in the radicalization of politics? Turns out, the most likely correct answer was also the most obvious one: mass (broadcast) media had the most impact.
Paul Goldstein has the best history of copyright law in the USA right here, with all its bizarre twists. It's less laser-focused than the views by others like Jessica Litman or David Lange who are really driving home a point, but I still learnt very interesting aspects like the birth of ASCAP.
Writing this book famously turned Elizabeth Warren into a Democrat when she was previously a Republican. That's the main interest for me.
The basic thesis is well-known: women with children are increasingly exposed to financial ruin because the middle class was tricked into locking the income from two jobs into long-term commitments like cars and mortgages in expensive neighbourhoods. The entire book tries to convince us that such expenses are not cases of "over-consumption", an expression which in my book is linked to excessive carbon emissions, but that in this case must be understood as a word from the Republican moralist dictionary. Eventually Congress accepted Warren's argument that these people are victim of fraud and created the CFPB.
Apart from the data, which is very convincing, it's fun to see the contortionism required to carry Warren's argument in a Republican-friendly way. Spending a million dollars on a house in a …
Writing this book famously turned Elizabeth Warren into a Democrat when she was previously a Republican. That's the main interest for me.
The basic thesis is well-known: women with children are increasingly exposed to financial ruin because the middle class was tricked into locking the income from two jobs into long-term commitments like cars and mortgages in expensive neighbourhoods. The entire book tries to convince us that such expenses are not cases of "over-consumption", an expression which in my book is linked to excessive carbon emissions, but that in this case must be understood as a word from the Republican moralist dictionary. Eventually Congress accepted Warren's argument that these people are victim of fraud and created the CFPB.
Apart from the data, which is very convincing, it's fun to see the contortionism required to carry Warren's argument in a Republican-friendly way. Spending a million dollars on a house in a fancy neighbourhood is deemed a "necessity" because otherwise your kids have no chance to get into the Ivy League. Owning two cars is "necessary" because commute distances have increased from 14 to 17 km or something over 30 years. And so on. The specific policy proposals are also ridiculously bad "market-friendly" non-solutions which have catastrophically failed already: private insurance for losing your job has never worked; freedom to apply for school anywhere in your county has only made things worse in NYC ("The Paradox of Choice: How School Choice Divides New York City Elementary Schools", Center for New York City Affairs at The New School).
It's also clear Warren didn't believe in those things herself back then, because when she tells the story of how she got out of financial ruin she casually explains she did without her car, despite having a commute that few pages before was described as one that makes two cares "necessary". Tracking all those contradictions while reading was fun for a Warren-watcher like me, but I it's probably not what most people are looking for.
Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) is a collection of essays written by Emma Goldman, first …
Review of 'Anarchism and Other Essays' on 'Goodreads'
5 stelle
Emma Goldman offers no easy recipes, but this collection of essays is very short and still very modern, especially for its feminist view. Probably a good read for anyone who has never read a book about anarchism.
L'opera, scritta nel 1873, fu composta e stampata in russo a Zurigo da un gruppo …
Review of 'Stato e anarchia' on 'Goodreads'
4 stelle
Libro fondamentale, che però è molto legato al contesto storico del dibattito nell'internazionale del tempo. Può risultare una lettura meno fruttuosa per chi lo leggesse senza tali premesse.
Review of 'Io sono il potere. Confessioni di un capo di gabinetto' on 'Goodreads'
4 stelle
Lettura divertente e veloce. Non ci sono grandi rivelazioni ma anche chi conosce abbastanza bene il mondo romano potrà imparare alcune curiosità sui processi burocratici.
