Greg

Worthwhile read, absolutely critical topic, but pretty repetitive and ultimately doesn't really transcend its nature as an academic artifact.

makes the case that the whole current mode of insurance ends up individualizing risk, which will actually accelerate inequality in a climate-changing world, whereas a different paradigm for insurance could be an opportunity to establish new forms of solidarity amid chaos.

The book is a history / case study of the National Flood Insruance Program as-is, and there are important lessons to learn in that all within the individualizing paradigm (and some lessons to learn about the possibility of alternative solidaristic paradigm) so it's not really fair to expect it to do more work to venture in the direction of what could be rather than what has been. but that's what I wanted as a reader, and I got a taste of it only at the very end. so. three stars.

read this maybe 30+ years ago, remembered a single paragraph very vividly— turned out to be the one hinge of action in this, so it clearly left an impression. but i cant imagine i could have properly appreciated the rest of this spectacular story, the master at her peak.

interesting reflection from her in the documentary, Worlds of Ursula K LeGuin, about how she did not realize until later that she was unable to conceive of a hero as female, even in this story, saddled even as she was with the literary inheritance of patriarchy. but Tenar is a triumph. a story about the cost of freedom.

Trifling, but fine for an airplane or something

Not all that much to it, but I enjoyed the popcorn.

overall i think I'm mostly in agreeance with Davies' perspective on economics and economists, and I appreciated the critical application of systems thinking to questions of accountability in institutional design. but this is still a book written by an economist toward an audience of people who are primarily concerned about economics; it remains subject to its own critique.

Ultimately, he did briefly touch down where I expected this to go: an assessment of widespread institutional failure that has resulted from the flood of information. Organizations as they were conceived in the 20th century are simply not able to learn and adapt amid the information landscape of the 21st century. But he really only takes this wide view in passing; the bulk of the text is focused on the question of largescale businesses and the entwined fiduciary and managerial paradoxes that result in various forms of foolishness and harm. Which might be fine as a lense for the broader phenomenon of endemic institutional failure, but then the book’s main proposed solution (”any entity taking control of an operating company should have to guarantee its debts” ) drops with a meep; very well may be good and fine on the merits but it's laughably small beans given the scale of our crises.

and his concluding idea about LLMs as democratic input processing machines is sorta interesting – and especially given that he wrote it just as the current era of popular LLM use is dawning, I actually don't totally hate it as a possible use case. it's just neither necessary nor sufficient to be a good idea without a broader theory of power. which he's a bit too reflexively dismissive of collective action to ever quite take the time to think through and develop such a framework. (at several points he refers to Allende or Marx half-approvingly, in like an ironical way?)

Still I appreciated the walkthrough of cybernetics (it wasn't quite thorough enough to be truly useful, but he gives pointers to deeper readings) and the framing of the Ricardian Vice. not sure i fully followed the description of business accounting hallucinations; i might need to reread that section.

we do need a treatment of all institutional failure in the Age of Information Flood (which as far as I can tell is effectively ubiquitous) and a look into what kinds of institutional design might not fail. Layer this with Laloux and run it through David Harvey is what i'm saying.