What I’ve been reading

Frances Spalding, The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between the Two Wars.  Wonderful text, quality images, and the whole subject area remains underrated, so this book was a big plus for me.  The history of modernism is not just cubist and abstract art on the continent.

Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.  I liked this book and found it useful, though I wished for more on Taiwan and more recent times, and for less on the earlier years.  Just my subjective preference.

Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford, How to be a Founder: How entrepreneurs can identify, fund and launch their best ideas.  Do you have it in you to be a founder?  If you are asking that question, this book is maybe the best place to start looking for some answers.

Thomas H. Davenport and Steven M. Miller, Working with AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration.  Actual examples!

There is also Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence, which I have not yet read.

Samuel Gregg, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World is a useful corrective to some recent attempts to overrate the import of industrial policy, especially in an American context.

Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen John I found a moving set of (imaginary) letters from one living female painter to another first-rate deceased female painter, both having lived through some similar situations.  Excellent color plates too.

Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise.  A good look at the essential continuity in Chinese history between the Maoist period and the “capitalist” period.  Of course the main thesis no longer seems so crazy as it might have ten years ago.