Best books I never wrote
The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato
The private sector innovates, the public sector helps best by getting out of the way. This has been received wisdom for many decades. Mazzucato rigorously, disagrees. The apparently stodgy public sector is in fact behind all manner of innovations from GPS to the internet and touchscreens. The
Entrepreneurial State is that rare book which tackles a dominant narrative with enough evidence and clarity to truly shift the debate. A useful reminder that technological innovation doesn’t just happen to us – it is something we can influence.
Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth
Should we – and can we afford to – keep growing our economy forever? Economists tend not to ask those questions, let alone answer them. Kate Raworth’s very readable book tackles them head on, calling for us to live within the Earth’s ecological limits and to be
‘‘agnostic about growth’’. Thoughtprovoking and urgently needed, this book challenged my own thinking about what work could, and should, look like in Aotearoa.
City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence
Conflicts in Syria, Somalia, and South Sudan have sent refugees fleeing. They are often discussed as vast statistics: 2 million here, 800,000 there. Ben Rawlence takes a different approach. Written like fiction but all true, City of Thorns tells the tales of nine people in Dadaab in Kenya, the biggest refugee camp in the world, in their full humanity and complexity.
Their jobs (carting sacks of food aid), dreams (resettlement in Australia, escape to Europe), petty grudges, Facebook-inspired hopes, family troubles, and small wins. It is a gripping human tale of restlessness in the face of a life of poverty-stricken limbo.
Where the Re¯ kohu Bone Sings by Tina Makereti
Grappling with our complicated history is often the job of historians, yet novelists can sometimes paint a deeper picture.
Where the Re¯kohu Bone Sings is an inter-generational New Zealand narrative of love, family, and the weight of the past with a mystical
shadow. It also brings Ma¯ ori, Moriori and Pa¯ keha¯ history, with all its sharp contours and contradictions, into vivid focus.
Other People’s Money by John Kay
This is the book we needed, but didn’t have, before the global financial crisis of 2007-8. Finance can be dense, but Kay’s writing is lucid. He asks and answers big puzzling questions. For example, why is the financial sector so profitable if financial institutions are mostly exchanging bits of (virtual) paper? Kay also explains what the financial sector is actually meant to do and how it might work better in the future.
Kinley Salmon is the author of Jobs, Robots & Us (Bridget Williams Books, $40).