Book Review: Why Nation Fail, the origin of power, prosperity, and poverty by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson

• Preface Why Egyptians filled Tahrir Square to bring down Hosni Mubarak and what it means for our understanding of the causes of prosperity and poverty
• 1. So close and yet so different, Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, have the same people, culture, and geography. Why is one rich and one poor?
• The economics of the Rio Grande
• The founding of Buenos Aires
• From Cajamarca ...
• .... to Jamestown
• A tale of two constitutions
• Having an idea, starting a firm, and getting a loan
• Path-dependent change
• Making a billion or two
• Toward a theory of world inequality
• 2. Theories that don't work, poor countries are poor not because of their geographies or cultures, or because their leaders do not know which policies will enrich their citizens
• The lay of the land
• The geography hypothesis
• The culture hypothesis
• The ignorance hypothesis
• 
  
• 3. The making of prosperity and poverty, how prosperity and poverty are determined by the incentives created by institutions, and how politics determines what institutions a nation has
• The economics of the 38th parallel
• Extractive and inclusive economic institutions
• Engines of prosperity
• Extractive and inclusive political institutions
• Why not always choose prosperity?
• The long agony of the Congo
• Growth under extractive political institutions
• 4. Small differences and critical junctures: the weight of history, how institutions change through political conflict and how the past shapes the present
• The world the plague created
• The making of inclusive institutions
• Small difference that matter
• The contigent path of history
• Understanding lay of the land
• 5. "I've seen the future, and it works": Growth under extractive institutions, what Stalin, King Shyaam, the Neolithic Revolution, and the Maya city-states all had in common and how this explains why China's current economic growth cannot last
• I've seen the future
• On the banks of the Kasai
• The long summer
• The unstable extraction
• What goes wrong?
• 6.Difting apart, how institutions evolve over time, often slowly difting apart
• How Venice became a museum
• Roman virtues...
• ... Roman vices
• No one writes from Vindolanda
• Diverging paths
• Consequencess of early growth
• 7.The turning point, how a political revolution in 1688 changed institutions in England and led to the Industrial Revolution
• Trouble with stockings, William Lee's stocking knitting Tmachine
• The glorious revolution
• The industrial revolution
• Why in England
• 8. Not on our turf: barriers to development, why the politically powerful in many nations opposed the industrial revolution
• No printing allowed
• A small difference that mattered, Spain vs England
• Fear of industry, Habsburg empire
• No shipping allowed, Ming and Qing dynasties in China
• The absolutism of Prester John, Ehiopia
• The children of samaale, Somalia
• 9.Reversing developmen, how European colonialism impoverished large parts of the world
• Spice and genocide, Southeast Asia
• The all-to-usual institution, Slave trade and slavery 
• Making dual economy. South Africa
• Development reversed 
• 10 The diffusion of prosperity, how some parts of the world took different paths to prosperity from that of Britain
• Hornor among thieves, Australia
• Breaking the barriers: The French revolution
• Exporting the revolution, Europe
• Seeking modernity, Japan
• Roots of world inequality
• 11. The virtuous circle, how institutions that encourage prosperity create positive feedback loops that prevent the efforts by elites to undermine them
• The black act ,UK
• The slow march of democracy, UK
• Busting trusts, USA
• Packing the court, FDR in USA
• Positive feedback and virtuous circles
• 12. The vicious circle, How institutions that create poverty generate negative feedback loops and endure
• You can't take the train to Bo anymore Sierra Leone
• From Encomienda to land grab Guatemala
• From slavery to Jim Crow US South
• The iron law of Oligarchy Ethiopia
• Negative feeback and vicious circles
• 13. Why nations fail today, institutions, institutions, institutions
• How to win the lottery in Zimbabwe
• A children's crusade? Siere Leone and sub-Sahara Africa's child soldiers
• Who is the state? Colombia
• El Corralito, Argentina
• The new absolutism, North Korea
• King cotton, Uzbekistan
• Keeping the playing field at an angle, Egypt
• Why nations fail
• 14. Breaking the mold, how a few countries changed their economic trajectory by changing their institution
• Three African Chiefs, Botswana
• The end of the southern extraction, US
• Rebirth in China, China under Deng 
• 15. Understanding prosperity and povery, how the world could have been different and how understanding this can explain why most attempts to combat poverty have failed
• Historical Origins
• The irresistible charm of authoritarian growth
• You can't engineer prosperity
• The failure of foreign aid
• Empowerment

Chinese economy: It is structural issue, stupid!

 Export decline (Geopolitical tension +misstep in diplomacy) and consumption slump(due to China's authoritarian driven and cronysm economy)

  =>

GDP growth slowdonw (China needs to maintain 6%+ growth to create jobs)

=>

Youth unemployment rise

Book Review: The New China Playbook, Beyond Socialism and Capitalism By Keyu Jin

 A book from a China raised scholar who is currently living in London. Her viewpoint would be a gentle introduction to westerners deeply ingrained in Western thinking, the way to look at new China from Chinese perspective. [updated 10/21/2024] She thought an extractive political system(One party rule and authoratarian system) such as China has won't hinder China's ecnomic uprising, as long as China maintains an inclusive ecnomic system.

A little light in academic, greatly enlived by interjecting her own upbringing and life experience.

[Updated on 10/21/2024] Newly minted Nobel Economy Prize winner Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson in their book Why Nations Fail had predicted an extractive political system will undermine ecnomic development.

Book review: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zuner

• Notable quotes from the book

My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line-generational, cultural, linguistic-we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other's expectations.

I remembered these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it. She remembered if you liked your stews with extra broth, if you were sensitive to spice, if you hated tomatoes, if you didn't eat seafood, if you have a large appetite. She remembered which banchan side dish you emptied first so the next time you were over it'd be set with a heaping double portion, served alongside the various other preferences that made you, you.

"Stop crying! Save your tears for when your mother dies。” This was a common proverb in my household. In place of the English idioms my mother never learned, she coined a few of her own. "Mommy is the only one who will tell you the truth, because Mommy is the only one who ever truely love you." Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always "save ten percent of yourself." What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. "Even from Daddy, I save," she would add.

....She felt Americans were overly cautions and overly medicated and had instilled this belief in me from a young age, so much so that when Peter got food poisoning from a bad can of tuna and his mother suggested I take him to urgent care, I actually had to stifle a laugh. In my household, there was nothing to do for food poisoning except threw it up. Food poisoning was a rite of passage. You couldn't expect to eat well without taking a few risks, and we suffered the consequences twice a year.

Book Review: The death of money, The coming collapse of the international monetary system by James Rcikards

•  Money illusion : The lag of comprehension of inflation by central bank. It is an opportunity for bankers and smart investors to capture the wealth while general public are left with devalued savings and pensions. 
• Question: How does investor achieve this? 
• Possible causes for dollar collapse and global financial system collapse outlined in the introduction chapter:
• Financial war
• Inflation
• Deflation
• Chapter 1 Prophesy
• john mulheren
• allen m. poteshman
• signal amplication
• randy tauss
• steve levitt
• dave davos nolan
• red teaming
• chris ray
• lenny raymond
• mike morell
• Chapter 2 The war god's face
• Mirror imaging
• Andy Marshall
• Chapter 3 Ruin of the market
• Adam Smith, The theory of moral sentiments
• Friedrich Hayek, The use of knowledge in society
• Charles Goodheart, Goodheart law
• Wealth effect
• George Akerloft, information asymmetry
• Ben S. Bernanke, Irreversibility, uncertainty and cyclical investment
• Regime uncertainty, by Charles Kindleberger
• Chapter 4 China's new financial warlords
• Chapter 5 The new German Reich
• Downward norminal wage rigidity
• Internal adjustment through lower wages vs external adjustment through cheap currency and inflation
• sticky wage theory by Keynes
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• 3 views on money: Monetarism, Chatalism, Creditism

Book Review: End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation by Barry C Lynn

 The book is a bit old, published in 2006. It was referred to as a must-read for understanding globalization.

And it fits the bill. Considering current de-globalization or globalization without China and Russia, it is as relevant as ever.

Xi Jinping stated that we are in the period of change that only occurs every one hundred years. There is a main driver behind this seismic change: USA. The book illustrated how globalization came into being during Reagan era, it is US driving initiative to throw off Japan from dominating global manufacturing. And China became the winner in this US-driven initiative. 

Now US is trying to throw off China by de-globalization, will it succeed again?