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. 4.5/5

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

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy