Do Llamas Fall in Love?
Peter Cave One World
There’s been a spate of these popular philosophy books recently. I guess it was just a matter of time before philosophers capitalised on this phenomenon. It makes me wonder, though, if the market for popular philosophy and popular maths (we have a review of a popular maths book coming out soon. True story) and popular sociology, etc. is even nearly as big as the market for popular science. Probably not. But never mind. As a philosophy student, I’m glad there are more and more philosophy books pitched at laypeople. And most of them seem pretty good, actually. Peter Cave’s series (beginning with Can a Robot be Human?, continuing with What’s Wrong with Eating People?, and now Do Llamas Fall in Love?) is no exception. Cave’s 33 Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles series is pretty much what it sounds like. Each book contains 33 short musings about some philosophical conundrum (only one of which directly corresponds to the book’s title). By design, the musings raise more questions than they answer, but in so doing, they serve to introduce the reader to various viewpoints on the matter and (hopefully) to dissolve their dogmatic opinions (insofar as they have such opinions). I’ve not had the privilege to read the previous two books in the series, but Do Llamas Fall in Love? is pretty fun. It’s very accessible and witty, and actually pretty fair. Cave’s own convictions (as presented in his other books; he’s very prolific) don’t spill out onto the page as much as you might expect if you’ve read similar books (e.g., A. C. Grayling’s stuff), and I found that a refreshing change. However, one possible side effect of this is that some readers might be left thinking that there are no correct answers to the questions he raises (and that’s not always true). Or perhaps that there are no easily obtained correct answers (which is probably true), and therefore that it’s a waste of time thinking about such things (which is, I say defending my discipline, not true at all). So, if you’re looking for something to guide your critical thinking on various interesting matters (the usual suspects: ethics, religion, politics, aesthetics), you could do much worse than Peter Cave’s 33 Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles series. However, I do recommend that you eventually move on to more sophisticated stuff. Like popular science, popular philosophy doesn’t quite do justice to the subject matter. Jonathan Jong
Economics for Everyone: A Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism
Jim Stanford Pluto Press
40
Let’s be honest: reading about economics is not really my idea of a leisurely Sunday afternoon activity. However, in an attempt to expand my horizons, I picked up Economics for Everyone: a Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism. Written by Jim Stanford, an economist for the Canadian Auto Workers union and columnist for the Globe and Mail newspaper in Canada, Economics for Everyone covers the fundamentals of capitalism in a relatively succinct but thorough way. In under 400 pages, Stanford manages to explain the basic concepts of capitalism, and describe its inception, how it currently works, and the complexity of its global effects. As a naive reader, I stood to learn a lot, and Stanford didn’t fail to deliver. I learnt, for example, that the ‘economy’ is simply all the work that human beings perform in order to produce the things we need and use in our lives. The economy is very social, in the sense that we rely on and interact with each other in order to reach our goals in the course of working. I also learnt that ‘capitalism’ is not synonymous to ‘economy’. Capitalism is just one of the ways to organise the economy. In a capitalist economy, the production of goods and services is usually done by private companies who want lots of profit, and most of the work done is by people hired to do it, not the owners themselves. Not all economies are like this. One more tidbit: About 85 percent of the population depend on wage labour they supply to employers for their income, while well over half of all wealth is owned by the richest 5-10 percent of society! The world’s richest 225 people have a combined annual income of $US50 billion, which is more than the combined annual incomes of the people in the world’s twelve poorest countries (around 385 million people). Incredible. For someone like me, who has negligible technical economic knowledge (although Stanford says that everyone has experience in the economy as we participate in it), I found it easy to understand the concepts being explained. As well as the in-text definitions, there is a companion online glossary on the book’s website. Tables and boxes highlighting important concepts, as well as cartoons and diagrams, all help Stanford’s explanations of the intricacies of capitalism. Economics for Everyone is an informative read to find out just why capitalism is such a dirty word, and that we could all get so much more if we pushed for action collectively instead of just accepting that the economy is “how it is.”