2019 | Adam Fuller

2019 Recap

This is a follow-up to see how I did on the big 2019 to-do list I laid out back in January.

“Order without Design” by Alain Bertaud

Highly recommend the book, “Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities” by Alain Bertaud.

Especially recommended for professional urban planners, armchair urban planners, people looking to better understand how their cities work, and nerds looking for healthy doses of graphs, statistics, and analysis to inform their municipal commentary and priorities.

For me, this book fed my confirmation bias that it’s all about mobility, and also challenged and changed my views on sprawl and density constraints. It also introduced me to some next-level ways of thinking about housing affordability and cities as labor markets.

Here are some of my notes, comments and favorite excerpts. I put direct excerpts in quotations, and delineate my personal commentary using AF Comment. Everything else is pretty much me picking out takeaways, summarizing and paraphrasing to varying degrees.

For more on these topics, be sure to listen to interviews with author Alain Bertaud on Conversations with Tyler (Tyler Cowen) and EconTalk (Russ Roberts).

Red Nation: The NBA, China, Hong Kong, and the sounds of silence

I have been absolutely glued to this story over the past couple weeks.

It feels like an immense moment that is underappreciated.

A complex issue that is really quite simple.

A terrifying wake-up call and a breath of fresh air.

A cultural reckoning and a crisis communications case study.

An attack on American soil and an opportunity to bridge divides.

Admittedly, I’m primed to gobble this story up and overreact thanks to a few pre-existing conditions.

Mythology mobility

Narrative, context and how to think about free will

In 2017 two excellent books — Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari, and Behave, by Robert Sapolsky — convinced me that free will is a myth.

Let’s suppose Harari, Sapolsky and all the other free-will deniers are right, and that every human behavior is dictated by a complex array of scientific and environmental variables (e.g. genes, neurobiology, geography, peer pressure, how much sleep you had last night), some of which remain obscure, abstract and possibly incomprehensible.

“The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell is a powerful, classic book, not for the faint of heart.

Mythology is a huge part of our lives for better and for worse. This book helps make sense and better use of it all — also for better or worse.