I have 2. The People's Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I'm a little familiar with central planning techniques... but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just "Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it's possible" without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning... I just didn't get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.

And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn't even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn't a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.

  • DoubleShot [he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's not unreasonable to think that a lot of the founding slaveowners were worried that the British would eventually outlaw slavery. The issue is we don't have any hard evidence that they actually thought this, so all we can do is make a supposition, not a book about it.

    • RedQuestionAsker2 [he/him, she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, I went in to the book thinking it would be a slam dunk because it seems so on it's face obvious.

      But the substance just really isn't there.