12 Books for New Grads
I’m often asked what I’m reading or for book recommendations. I decided to take some of my top recommendations and recent books read and put them into this post. I’ve focused on books that are relevant for my cohort — early 20s students looking towards future employment and the transition from university life.
I’ve split this into a few sections: Career, Other People, Morality, and Weird. The first two will likely have the broadest appeal, followed by Weird, and then Morality. I’ve included a brief synopsis of the book’s topic and some representative snippets when appropriate. Let me know if you end up reading any of these!
Category #1: Career
Or: How to scare yourself about full-time employment
Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber
What is a bullshit job? According to Graeber:
“a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
Bullshit jobs are everywhere. You’ve probably had one. You probably will have one in the future. Graeber tells the stories of employees at large corporations who have fallen through the cracks — often with so few responsibilities they can sit at home and collect a paycheck for 6 months before anyone notices. He analyzes anonymous letters from corporate lawyers who feel the world would be better off for their job no longer existing, and testimonials from managers who feel powerless in the face of bureaucratic processes.
Graeber contends these jobs cause great psychological harm to the individual, and also harm society by wasting everyone’s time. I think this book is valuable insofar as it gets you thinking about the dynamics he discusses, but goes overboard in extracting deep meaning from anecdotal data. Directionally correct, not gospel.
Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers — Robert Jackall
I’ll let the introductory paragraph speak for itself.
Corporate leaders often tell their charges that hard work will lead to success. Indeed, this theory of reward being commensurate with effort has been an enduring belief and a moral imperative in our society, one central to our self-image as a people, where the main chance is available to anyone of ability who has the gumption and persistence to seize it. Hard work, it is also frequently asserted, builds character. This notion carries less conviction because business people, and our society as a whole, have little patience with those who, even though they work hard, make a habit of finishing out of the money. In the end, it is success that matters, that legitimates striving, and that makes work worthwhile. What if, however, men and women in the corporation no longer see success as necessarily connected to hard work? What becomes of the social morality of the corporation — the everyday rules- in-use that people play by — when there is thought to be no fixed or, one might say, objective standard of excellence to explain how and why winners are separated from also-rans, how and why some people succeed and others fail? What rules do people fashion to interact with one another when they feel that, instead of ability, talent, and dedicated service to an organization, politics, adroit talk, luck, connections, and self-promotion are the real sorters of people into sheep and goats?
Moral Mazes is an incredibly depressing book. It details Robert Jackall’s in-depth interviews with managers and workers at all levels of an anonymized large conglomerate as he attempts to understand the web of connections that see some managers turn into rising stars and others fade into obscurity.
The level of political intrigue that precedes and follows a change in C-suite leadership is itself engaging to read, but also terrifying; If Jackall is correct, a substantial fraction of promotions and firings at high levels of managements are wholly disconnected from performance, and more closely track networks of alliances between ladder-climbers, built on careful edifices of feigned subservience and blame-passing. The most successful managers, in his estimation, are those who can get themselves promoted fast enough that their mistakes are only discovered when they are long gone and no longer accountable for their actions.
If you noticed I got really pretentious in writing that paragraph, don’t worry, I did too. This book turns mundane events like plant inspections into intense dramas, and at times I forgot I was reading a non-fiction book. Keep in mind this book is a product of the late 90s/early 2000s, so it may not generalize to the present day, but I suspect there’s something valuable to learn from the book regardless.
Good Work if You Can Get it: How to Succeed in Academia — Jason Brennan
If you’ve ever asked yourself if Academia is for you, read this book. If you haven’t, you should still read this book. We hold university professors in high esteem, and they have significant influence over the millions of students they teach. Understanding the incentive structures that lead one to become a successful professor is then important to understand the level of work and political manoeuvring that goes into becoming a professor, let alone an eminent one.
By the books own description:
This year, some 1.7 million students will enroll full time in graduate school in the United States. Almost 80,000 will be- gin pursuing a PhD. The United States will award around 65,000 new doctoral degrees. In the humanities and social sciences, at least, the majority of new PhD students say they want to get work as professors.
Most are destined for disappointment.
Roughly half will quit or otherwise fail to earn their doc- toral degree. Most graduates will not get a full-time academic job of any sort upon graduation.2 Only about 20% of students who start a PhD program will ever obtain a full-time faculty position, let alone a “good” professorship.
The kinds of people who pursue a PhD have good analytical skills. They know how to collect and process data. Despite that, many would-be professors are clueless, naïve, and misinformed about what graduate school and academia are really like.
This book aims to fix that. It is a no-punches-pulled, frank, data-driven book telling you what academic life is like and what it takes to succeed in academia. I aim to help you succeed and also help you decide whether success is worth pursuing.
By many metrics, the life of a professor is great. You’re paid to think deeply about a subject you love, teaching requirements are minimal and have little bearing on promotion or salary (for the Ivey people reading this, your professors are a slight exception), and you enjoy a hefty bit of social status. By the same token, if you aren’t passionate to a sufficient degree, you won’t succeed. If you can’t sit and write, you won’t succeed. If you can’t publish your work in good journals, you won’t succeed.
Grad school, in Brennan’s opinion, isn’t about education. Grad school is the longest audition of your life for the best job in the world. This book walks you through how to nail the audition.
On a side note, Brennan has another book: Cracks in the Ivory Tower. It details many of the same concepts in this book, but goes further and outlines the many ways in which our higher education system is broken.
Category #2: Other People
Or: How to deal with and understand others (yes, this is necessary).
The Righteous Mind — Jonathan Haidt
Think of any current, contentious political issue. You probably have an opinion about it. In fact, your opinion is so self-evidently true it’s stunning that so many people are wrong. Haidt’s book shows us why this reasoning is misguided. The political, religious, and moral beliefs of others primarily stem from intuitions — not rational argumentation and persuasion.
Some select quotes:
“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”
“If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.”
“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”
“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”
“[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.”
Haidt goes on to describe his research on the different factors that generate disparities in moral intuitions. One of the biggest factors is that we — and I mean the people reading this post — are WEIRD. This is a technical term, and stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Relative to the vast majority of people alive and who have ever lived, Canadians and Americans are WEIRD. Our moral intuitions don’t match up to that of other cultures, and this calls into question our notions of moral universality.
Haidt also describes his moral foundations theory. He hypothesizes that there are 6 principle foundations of human morality — Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression — and has empirical evidence that many of our political divides are the result of different weights that liberals and conservatives place on these different axes.
This book isn’t all doom and gloom. Our differences are strong, but not incommensurable:
“We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”
Elephant in the Brain — Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler
If you’re familiar with Robin Hanson, you’ll know his catchphrase: “X is not about Y.” Education is not about learning, medicine is not about health, politics is not about policy. This book is all about the hidden and unconcious motives in every day behaviour. These are the status motivations for our actions we don’t even admit to ourselves, which Hanson and Simler call signalling.
Some examples of signalling the book describes:
[Regarding art being wasteful]: “The waste is important. It’s only by doing something that serves no concrete survival function that artists are able to advertise their survival surplus. An underground bunker stocked with food, guns, and ammo may have been expensive and difficult to build (especially if it was built by hand), and it may well reflect the skills and resources of its maker. But it’s not attractive in the same way art is. The bunker reflects a kind of desperation of an animal worried about its survival, rather than the easy assurance of an animal with more resources than it knows what to do with. Thus impracticality is a feature of all art forms. But we can see it with special clarity in those art forms that need to distinguish themselves from closely related practical endeavors.”
“When we donate to a good cause, it “says” to our associates, “Look, I’m willing to spend my resources for the benefit of others. I’m playing a positive-sum, cooperative game with society.” This helps explain why generosity is so important for those who aspire to leadership. No one wants leaders who play zero-sum, competitive games with the rest of society. If their wins are our losses, why should we support them? Instead we want leaders with a prosocial orientation, people who will look out for us because we’re all in it together.”
“When we notice someone suffering and immediately decide to help them, it “says” to our associates, “See how easily I’m moved to help others? When people near me are suffering, I can’t help wanting to make their situation better; it’s just who I am.” This is a profoundly useful trait to advertise; it means you’ll make a great ally. The more time other people spend around you, the more they’ll get to partake of your spontaneous good will. It’s this function of charity that accounts for a lot of the puzzles we discussed earlier. For one, it explains why we donate so opportunistically. Most donors don’t sketch out a giving strategy and follow through as though it were a business plan.”
“A 22-year-old woman who spends six months backpacking across Asia sends a powerful message about her curiosity, open-mindedness, and even courage. Similar (if weaker) signals can be bought for less time and money simply by eating strange foods, watching foreign films, and reading widely.”
Hanson and Simler claim that for many of these behaviours, we invent plausible and convincing excuses that distract even ourselves from their underlying status benefits.
I’ve found this book very useful for introspective purposes. Understanding when you’re truly doing things for moral or rational reasons versus status signalling is valuable. I’ve given this book as a gift several times and will likely continue to do so.
Against Empathy — Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom argues that empathy, feeling what others feel, is a bad decision making tool. He draws on the work of health economists, moral psychologists, and philosophers of ethics to demonstrate that we would be better off with less empathy in our various social arrangements. To clarify, this does not mean we should stop caring about others — Bloom specifically endorses caring about others — but that making judgements based off our feelings rather than broadly generalizable principles is a mistake. You’ll note some disagreement’s with Haidt’s book, but I believe Bloom does a good job of reconciling this.
Some sample quotes:
“When empathy makes us feel pain, the reaction is often a desire to escape. Jonathan Glover tells of a woman who lived near the death camps in Nazi Germany and who could easily see atrocities from her house, such as prisoners being shot and left to die. She wrote an angry letter: “One is often an unwilling witness to such outrages. I am anyway sickly and such a sight makes such a demand on my nerves that in the long run I cannot bear this. I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else be done where one does not see it.” She was definitely suffering from seeing the treatment of the prisoners, but it didn’t motivate her to want to save them: She would be satisfied if she could have this suffering continue out of her sight.”
Translation: Feeling the suffering of others doesn’t necessarily lead to action that benefits them, only an easy removal of the feeling’s source.
“It might feel, at least to some of us, that our opinions about issues such as abortion and the death penalty are the products of careful deliberation and that our specific moral acts, such as deciding to give to charity or visit a friend in the hospital — or for that matter, deciding to shoplift or shout a racist insult out of a car window — are grounded in conscious decision-making. But this is said to be mistaken. As Jonathan Haidt argues, we are not judges; we are lawyers, making up explanations after the deeds have been done. Reason is impotent. “We celebrate rationality,” agrees de Waal, “but when push comes to shove we assign it little weight.”
Bloom claims that many seeming failures of empathy — shouting racist slurs out a car window, for example — are actually empathy applied poorly. A racist may selectively empathize with the plight of other white people, and ignore the experiences of other racial groups. This racist can then use that selective empathy to feel justified in a number of horrific acts.
“It is easy to see why so many people view empathy as a powerful force for goodness and moral change. It is easy to see why so many believe that the only problem with empathy is that too often we don’t have enough of it. I used to believe this as well. But now I don’t. Empathy has its merits. It can be a great source of pleasure, involved in art and fiction and sports, and it can be a valuable aspect of intimate relationships. And it can sometimes spark us to do good. But on the whole, it’s a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty. It can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions, it can corrode certain important relationships, such as between a doctor and a patient, and make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives.”
Overall, this book is contrarian enough to be interesting, and empirically supported enough that it doesn’t go overboard into polemic. For anyone with an interest in social impact or sustainability, this is a good book to read.
Category #3: Morality
Or: How to be a good person (but like, unrealistic)
Mortal Questions — Thomas Nagel
Unlike other books I’ve recommended, this is a compilation of essays by philosopher Thomas Nagel. In particular, I want to focus on Moral Luck.
What does it mean to be morally lucky? Nagel provides a couple examples:
“If someone has had too much to drink and his car swerves on to the sidewalk, he can count himself morally lucky if there are no pedestrians in its path. If there were, he would be to blame for their deaths, and would probably be prosecuted for manslaughter. But if he hurts no one, although his recklessness is exactly the same, he is guilty of a far less serious legal offence and will certainly reproach himself and be reproached by others much less severely. To take another legal example, the penalty for attempted murder is less than that for successful murder — however similar the intentions and motives of the assailant may be in the two cases. His degree of culpability can depend, it would seem, on whether the victim happened to be wearing a bullet-proof vest, or whether a bird flew into the path of the bullet — matters beyond his control.”
Why is it that factors outside our control influence our moral condemnation of an act? It’s not clear, based on the examples Nagel provides. His essay is a very accessible exploration of this, and makes great use of Nagel and the reader’s own moral intuitions.
Other essays detail theories of personal identity, sexual perversion, and more. I highly recommend for those interested in philosophy.
Doing Good Better — William MacAskill
You might want to donate to charity in the future. This book asks why you aren’t spending more time evaluating the charities you give money to. This book serves as an introduction to the effective altruist movement — a group of people focused on maximizing their impact, not just having one:
“Effective altruism is about asking “How can I make the biggest difference I can?” and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good. Just as science consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s true, and a committment to believe the truth whatever that turns out to be. As the phrase suggests, effective altruism consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s best for the world, and a commitment to do what’s best, whatever that turns out to be.”
While written by a philosopher of ethics, this book is very data driven. There’s really interesting economic analyses of different donation options out there, and a framework proposed by MacAskill for evaluating their relative cost efficiency.
This book definitely veers into tone-deaf utilitarian territory; Regarding charitable foundations founded based on the death of a loved one:
“Responding to bereavement by trying to make a difference is certainly both understandable and admirable, but it doesn’t give you good reason to raise money for one specific cause of death rather than any other. If that person had died in different circumstances it would have been no less tragic. What we care about when we lose someone close to us is that they suffered or died, not that they died from a specific cause. By all means, the sadness we feel at the loss of a loved one should be harnessed in order to make the world a better place. But we should focus that motivation on preventing death and improving lives per se, rather than preventing death and improving lives in one very specific way. Any other decision would be unfair on those we could have helped more.”
I’m not 100% on board with the effective altruist perspective, but I do admire the level of selflessness it takes for these people to dedicate themselves to the eradication of suffering. The analytical approach they take to giving is also something I wish more people made use of in their own personal lives.
Morality, Competition, and the Firm — Joseph Heath
I’ve found this book to be an excellent introduction to business ethics. Heath asks: Can we justify certain ethical propositions, not based on notions of virtue or “the good”, but instead on cold market efficiency?
Heath has 10 “commandments” that he seeks to justify in this book:
- Minimize negative externalities
- Compete only through price and quality
- Reduce information asymmetries between firm and customers
- Do not exploit diffusion of ownership
- Avoid erecting barriers to entry
- Do not use cross-subsidization to eliminate competitors
- Do not oppose regulation aimed at correcting market imperfections
- Do not seek tariffs or other protectionist measures
- Treat price levels as exogenously determined
- Do not engage in opportunistic behaviour toward customers or others firms”
He justifies these on the basis of preserving market efficiency, and points out how unified agreements by managers to adhere to these principles would make everyone better off.
The book also has some good critiques of modern stakeholder theory, virtue ethics more broadly, and society’s current practice of treating managers as if they don’t need similar professional accreditation or ethical review as engineers or doctors.
Category #4: Weird Books
Or: How to look smart at a cocktail party
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed — James Scott
For those of you particularly interested in the history of taxation, forestry, and census records, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. James Scott has a primary thesis that governmental or state attempts to make nature “legible” — that is, quantifiable and interchangeable — have routinely failed in predictable ways.
Scott details the history of “scientific forestry” and its associated failures, brutalist architecture, China’s “Great Leap Forward”, and other utopian schemes to make life better. Most are met with disaster.
One big theme in Scott’s book is that systems of rules are never complete. They always rely on local knowledge to execute “well”, because so much of what we do is nearly impossible to formalize:
“Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticiously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functional social order, The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain.”
Scott also notes that we have a bias to prefer certain types of “order” over others:
“A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order. Most complex systems, on the contrary, do not display a surface regularity; their order must be sought at a deeper level. “To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn, the interior of an airplane engine, the entrails of a rabbit, the city desk of a newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension. Once they are seen as systems of order, they actually look different.”
This book is a great read if you’re interested in historical analyses of modern statecraft, and also if you have inclinations towards anarchism. Enjoy.
Note: Scott also has a second book called “Against the Grain” that expands on his theory of early agrarian states as a means of efficient tax collection. Also worth a read, but more niche.
Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own — David Friedman
This book is a comparative analysis of a wide range of legal systems across time and space. Some systems covered: talmudic law, sage-period norse torts, confucianism in ancient China, mennonite law, gypsy law, and more.
It’s difficult to extract a representative quote from this book. As an example, I’ll give you a passage from the ancient China section, where Friedman discusses the exacting standardized tests the empire had would-be public officials take. These tests were unique in that they did not deal with technical or substantive knowledge, but rather tenets of confucianism, a type of virtue ethics.
Why? Why require the ablest men in the society to spend an extended period of time, often decades, studying to pass the exams instead of applying their skills to running the empire? Why test a set of skills with little obvious connection to the jobs those men were expected to do?
One possible explanation is that the exams were the equivalent of IQ tests, designed to select the most intellectually able (and hardworking) members of the population for government service. But it is hard to believe that there was no less costly way of doing so or no approach along similar lines that would have tested more relevant abilities.
A more interesting explanation focuses on the content of what they were studying–Confucian literature and philosophy. There are two characteristics one would like officials to have. One is the ability to do a good job. The other is the desire to do a good job–instead of lining their pockets with bribes or neglecting public duties in favor of private pleasures. One might interpret the examination system as a massive exercise in indoctrination, training people in a set of beliefs that implied that the job of government officials was to take good care of the people they were set over while being suitably obedient to the people set over them. Those who had fully internalized that way of thinking would be better able to display it in the high-pressure context of the exams.
While data is sparse for many of the systems he looks at, Friedman is good at presenting cogent arguments that make you think seriously about what we might take away from these old systems. If there’s one through-line, it’s that legal systems are fashioned to solve important problems of the society in which they are implemented.
Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide — Sarah Perry
Suicide is an uncomfortable topic. So too is assisted suicide, anti-natalism, and a variety of other positions that are ostensibly pro-death. Perry acknowledges this:
I suspect that I have made more converts to the cause of questioning life’s value simply by being an adorable house- wife who makes a killer chanterelle risotto than by anyparticular argument I’ve constructed. Since I can’t make you risotto, I have tried to present my arguments in a calm and reasoned manner, with abiding respect for the human- ity that we all share. Perhaps I will come across as the sort of cartoon villain you should accept as an epistemic peer. But whether or not you allow me to influence you with my dangerous ideas, I hope you will believe me when I tell you that I am very much on your side. You are, after all, an aware being having experiences. This is true whether or not you have had or will have children, and this is true whether you want to live or want to die. Thank you for reading my book.
Perry has a detailed economic analysis of social dynamics of suicide, and how different environmental factors influence suicide rates. One argument she makes is that suicide is not easily substitutable by method — when a bridge has a suicide net put in place, the next nearest bridge does not see an increase in jumpers, and the area’s rate goes down. For many this would be a victory. Perry disagrees, claiming that the nets would constitute structural barriers to the ending of one’s life.
She also notes that our society has a variety of traditions and norms that increase the perceived “cost” of suicide — and that suicide is subject to cost sensitivity in the same way as many consumer goods.
The second section of the book deals with antinatalism, or the idea that having children is morally wrong. This is predicated on her arguments for suicide — that life is unpleasant for the vast majority of people and not worth living.
Overall, a very weird book, but an interesting read for sure.
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. Let me know if you end up reading any of these books!