I publish unusually thorough book summaries on this site. It takes me an average of 20 hours to distil a book’s core insights into a summary you can read in just 20 minutes.
Find all my past summaries here, and my thoughts and criticisms of books and other musings on my blog.
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Latest Book Summaries
- Book Summary: Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson
- Book Summary: Seeing Like A State by James C Scott
- Book Summary: Essentialism by Greg McKeown
Latest Blog Posts and Other (Non-Book) Summaries
- Criticisms of Why Nations Fail[Estimated time: 12 mins] Table of Contents Slippery definitions Ideological bias towards Western classical liberalism Suspicion of state interference in the economy… Read more: Criticisms of Why Nations Fail
- Fact-checking an AI optimist article in The Economist[Estimated time: 6 mins] On 26 January 2026, The Economist published an optimistic article arguing that AI won’t displace white collar jobs.… Read more: Fact-checking an AI optimist article in The Economist
- 2025 Round-up[Estimated time: 4 minutes] Here’s the 2025 round-up of my favourite books for the year, as well as an update on the… Read more: 2025 Round-up
- How Asia Works with causal diagrams[Estimated time: 5 mins] Some people have pointed out that it’s hard to test the theory of development put forward by Joe… Read more: How Asia Works with causal diagrams
- How AI might cause GDP and well-being to (further) decouple[Estimated time: 12 mins] This is my third post for this series. It refers to concepts ideas in my previous two posts,… Read more: How AI might cause GDP and well-being to (further) decouple