It was a perfect day to hit some mountain roads up in New Hampshire, and while motoring uphill at a decent pace (unlike Sawe's otherworldly performance in London today!) I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "Canal Dreamers" by Jessica Lepler. This is a great addition to the criminally small canon of books dealing with failed industries/innovations, focusing on the small group of players from the US and Europe that jockeyed to build a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific in the 1820s. The rampant financial speculation in the space, the fantastical stories told by the "entrepreneurs" backing these efforts, and the appeals to poorly understood science should all be familiar to people today (*cough* AI cough), and from that perspective this book is extremely helpful for understanding how common these cycles are. I wish there were a lot more here on the Central American nations and players (probably instead of the sections on domestic US political machinations), and some more shipping and trade economic context would be appreciated. Still, this deep dive into a little-known but extremely representative era. Highly recommend https://uncpress.org/9781469690551/canal-dreamers/

Last was "Breaking the Mold" by Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba. This is a well-researched proposal for reshaping Indian development in the coming decades, with Rajan and Lamba laying out the case for why India should break with previous approaches for becoming a high income economy, combining an emphasis on services along with more economic openness. This is backed up with a good amount of research, although the large number of non-academic citations don't always inspire confidence. This proposal is at its best when it's focusing on issues that economists' methods are best suited for - namely trade, work, and long term predictors of positive outcomes. It mostly falls flat in advocating for some techno-solutionist approaches to health and education, and the less said about the sections on primary and secondary education the better. That being said, I'm not the primary audience for this book, and the vast majority of the proposals here deserve to be taken seriously. Highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691263632/breaking-the-mold