I'm pretty back to back with meetings this week, but in the early evening I was able to go out for a short run and listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great session on technology and economic development at VoxDev with Julieta Caunedo and Tommaso Porzio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7zQq5aOA1Q

Next was “The Cherokees” by David Narrett. This is an expensive dive into the evolution of the relationship between the Cherokee nation, colonists, and European powers. By pulling together a wide variety of sources, Narrett demonstrates how the deft political maneuvering of the Cherokees, combined with strategic military interventions, fundamentally shaped the developments of all parties enmeshed in North America. The big knock against this book is the glaring absence of any insight into the Cherokee tribe itself except through their interactions with Western parties. From this perspective I think the book is mistitled, but viewed as an international military and political history it's still insightful. Highly recommend https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674258204

Next was “When Old Technologies Were New” by Carolyn Marvin. This is a timeless classic, revealing how common the narratives of new technologies are and how difficult it is to predict the actual transformative scale of innovations, with people both wildly over and under estimating these effects. The focus here on the late 19th century is particularly insightful, since there's enough distance where we know the outcome of, for example, telephony and electric lighting, but they're still close enough where we experience their effects. People thought, for example, that there would be electric power deliverymen, and didn't appreciate the social effects of telephone access until after much broader adoption. I can only imagine what people reading about 2020s technology in 100 years will think about our current predictions. Highly recommend https://academic.oup.com/book/40937 

Last was “How Luck Changes the Way We View the World” by Daniel Breyer. This is a great tour of philosophical thinking around the concept of luck, and particularly how it's understood in society. Breyer follows different debates through the centuries, teasing apart the different schools of thought as well as revealing the issue with black and white thinking in categorizations and concepts in this tradition. There was less engagement with probability than I would've liked, as well as the probabilistic nature of causality, however in a short introductory, primarily philosophical work this is probably asking too much. Highly recommend https://www.audible.com/pd/How-Luck-Changes-the-Way-We-View-the-World-Audiobook/B09MR4KMLG