Books read: 8 (4 Fiction, 4 Non-Fiction)

Unique Authors: 8 (8 Men, 0 Women)

Average Rating: 4.19 (4.38 Fiction, 4 Non-Fiction)

warning: some spoilers may be contained in the following reviews

Islam and the Future of Tolerance - Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz

This past week I got sucked into the story surrounding the gang rapes that were happening in the U.K. The perpetrators were predominantly Muslim men, and there continues to be a lot of discourse on whether Islam and western ideals like liberalism and secularism are compatible. This book is a dialogue between and atheist and a Muslim about the nature of Islam and its ability to coexist in societies that practice a plurality of religions.

Nawaz is a former Islamist (he spent five years in an Egyptian prison for his participation in a fundamentalist group) who now practices and preaches a liberal flavor of Islam. His core argument is that a literal interpretation of the Qur’an is vacuous. There are a multitude of ways to read it, and there exist interpretations that allow for tolerance of the other. Harris’s role in the discussion is to push back on him, and while he shares some optimism in the reformist work Nawaz does, he thinks there is an inherent intolerance and prescribed violence in the doctrine that makes it damn near impossible .

I liked this dialectic. This is a conversation that is difficult to have because of its taboo nature (the left mislabels Harris as an “Islamophobe” and many practitioners of Islam obviously hate his vocal criticism). We need more civil discussions like this broadly circulated. 4/5

Land is a Big Deal - Lars Doucet

I listened to Doucet on the Dwarkesh podcast and that conversation convinced me to read this book. I think my week-long rabbit hold into Georgism will shape many of my economic and political views moving forward.

Henry George was a late 19th century economist that coined this movement. The philosophy is simple: people should own the value they produce from land, but not the land itself. Land is a common good. The way to create a society where this is true is by taxing the land.

Production is composed of three components: Land, Labor, and Capital. Out of the three, we predominantly tax the latter two. The only tax that somewhat touches land is property tax, but that is a combo tax because the base is on the assessed value of the property, only some of which is attributed to land.

Taxing labor and capital puts a drag on their supply - e.g. people are less incentivized to work because they pay income taxes (there is empirically a slight labor supply elasticity) and sales taxes reduce consumption.

However, land is of fixed supply. The supply of land will not change no matter how much you tax it. In fact, you will see more productive use of land when it is taxed because land owners can not just speculate on the price of land and hope it goes up - they have to do something productive on it to make money. A tax on land would also allow us to reduce taxes in other areas.

It’s crazy that it’s been pretty much known in the economic community that this tax is the most efficient with the smallest deadweight loss. Milton Friedman once referred to it as the “least bad tax”.

Some of the difficulties involved with getting a land value tax implemented are (1) accurate land appraisals and (2) building up the political firepower to get this passed, but empirics from other countries show promise so I’m optimistic. 5/5

Madonna in a Fur Coat - Sabahattin Ali

The narrator of the story is a listless aspiring author who takes up a job as a clerk in a Turkish city. There he meets his colleague Raif, an older man who while being an expert German translator, lives life bereft of any vigor. He clocks in an out on a meager salary and supports a family he doesn’t seem to particularly care for. The narrator is intrigued by him though and slowly starts to develop a relationship with Raif. Raif slowly lets his guard down, but there is still this gnawing sense that he is hiding large parts of himself.

Raif falls perilously ill one day and has the narrator obtain his personal items from his office. One of these items is a thick envelope that contains a notebook. Raif reluctantly allows the narrator to read through the notebook, so he does so over the course of a night. The remainder of the novel is the content of the notebook.

In it, Raif recounts a period of two years he spent in Berlin in his 20s, where he falls in love with a beautiful but tortured and manic artist. She is a painter whose self-portrait transfixes Raif at a museum one day. They meet in real life and begin a passionate affair, one in which they unravel their souls like they have to nobody else before. They are able to escape their loneliness through each other’s company. Tragedy ultimately draws them apart and Raif is tortured by his memories of her for the rest of his life.