#AcademicRunPlaylist - 8/11/25

Today I got to see the Yakult Swallows tune up the Yokohama BayStars, and while getting to the stadium I listened to books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "The Problem with Work" by Kathi Weeks. This is a fairly unremarkable work of feminist and Marxist philosophy - reasoning about work and society more broadly from first principles and neglecting to bring in any supporting empirical data, quoting luminaries in the field as if they have proved some immutable fact about Western society, etc. Most of this book is at least vaguely focused on work, but it's mostly the idea of work - it becomes clear extremely quickly that Weeks has not engaged in either deep qualitative or quantitative investigation on the topic, and she does not bring in any research in those areas. There is also a mostly out of nowhere digression on the concept of utopia that takes up an entire chapter. If you are really looking for a book in this philosophical vein that is nominally about work it might be worth skimming, otherwise it's not very compelling https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-problem-with-work

Next was "The Profit Paradox" by Jan Eeckhout. This book is a great look at the societal costs of extremely powerful, large firms. Importantly, Eeckhout examines this from the perspective of other companies, workers, and consumers, demonstrating how it costs every actor except those that have entrenched market power. The story becomes shakier when the book examines talent markets, and Eeckhout brings an economist's understanding of performance of executives (i.e. higher pay means higher performance) to the discussion, undercutting his larger argument. There's also a strange digression on labor mobility, which is also probably wrong (I rechecked after reading because the argument strains credulity) - Eeckhout claims that people change jobs less than they did prior to 1980, which is demonstrably false if you use most normal metrics (e.g. average tenure at current firm). I'm guessing he slices the data in a particular way to show something that's statistically significant in some of his papers, but IMO if you have to slice the data that closely to make a point it's probably not that important. He also weirdly ignores taxes as part of a toolbox of fixes to some of the problems he outlines. All that being said, this is still an excellent book that cuts to the heart of issues with market power. Highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691214474/the-profit-paradox

Last was "Evolution" by Robin Dunbar. I might have had unreasonable expectations for this book, which is clearly geared towards complete neophytes to the field. It's also a bit dated, which is a surprise given that the second edition was only recently released. Very little of Dunbar's research makes an appearance here, and if you're at all familiar with evolutionary theory you probably won't get anything until the chapters on humans, which are still fairly straightforward https://global.oup.com/academic/product/evolution-9780190922894