March-April 2025 Favorite Reads

90+% value comes from 10% of what we read. Here’s my March & April favorites

Books 

Two books exploring my Catholic Faith particularly resonated with me

1. Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
   • Explains why he believes in God & Christianity 
   • I found his points about belief in God well laid out, but he delves less into why Christianity in a way I found convincing.
     1. You can see God because of the right vs wrong we all inherently have… ie our conscience. 
     2. Everything in your life you believe on authority so that’s not a good counter argument to faith
   • Other parts I particularly enjoyed
     • One of the most fulfilling portions of life is by enjoying the portion of life you’re currently in instead of chasing anything else
       1. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy. (p 108)
     • Good (or bad) deeds you do today will be compound interest on your life
       • Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible. (p127) 
     • Forgive the person and say the sin is wrong is actually true for how you should approach parenting or yourself
       • they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. (p114) 
     • Finishes with how you must fully submit to Christ and give yourself up and then will you be truly free
       • Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. (p 210) 
2. Believe by Ross Douthat
   • The more you dive into science, the stronger the case for God
     • Watchmaker idea of if you stumble on a watch made in the forest, you have to believe there’s a watchmaker out there still holds (p23). Critically if you believe in the Big Bang, that’s the strongest evidence for God as He would have created it 
     • Our world lives in insane mix of “chances” in the physical world ( The cosmological constant, which governs the speed at which our universe expands, sits in a range that has roughly a 1 in 10 to the 120th power chance of occurring randomly. (p23)
     • This is also mirrored in neuroscience as the more we learn about the brain, the more that is unexplained by science (we don’t really know why thoughts occur, but just where in the brain) 
   • Goes through his experience with the supernatural which he believes should cause us to question disbelief in God
     • Near death experiences is the strongest sample of these and shows quite a few people having these experiences even if they didn’t believe in God beforehand (p73). These experiences are shaped by people’s knowledge beforehand, but I find it pretty compelling
     • The Catholic church’s examples systematically documenting miracles shows that things like curing an illness thought to be incurable systematically do happen.
       • People can question the church’s motives, but there is rigor in this process
       • His whole idea though that as we’ve moved into a more understood world, the fact that miracles haven’t decreased with the increase in science does call into question the idea of “anything not sufficiently understood = magic” 
   • Does a good job addressing common issues
     1. What religion is right/what if I am wrong? → If you choose the wrong religion, you still want to get closer to the truth vs not at all close to it
     2. Why have religious institutions committed atrocities? → any institution around along enough has done this unfortunately 
     3. Why does God care about sex? → sex is a huge portion of life so goes into morality. Also if this is what is stumbling block, there’s many religions out there for you that are sexually open 
     4. Most religion is inherited → this is true of most beliefs and not something people complain about with politics 
   • Why he chose Catholicism I found very compelling and helped me a lot
     • There’s actually a lot of historical consistency in the gospels and verifiable against many other records 
     • If you believe God exists then you have to believe He’s trying to reveal himself to us and he finds the Catholic tradition the most credible

And then in a different vein, I loved Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. As a millennial looking at extremely high apartments/housing, modern society’s scarcity is apparent:

• Core idea is supply side progressivism (it’s written for a liberal audience)
  • If you subsidize just demand like vouchers, etc. then you’ll just raise prices
  • You need to develop policies to increase the supply of critical things
  • The critical areas in particular are housing, energy, transportation, healthcare. In each of these areas we want abundance 
• Housing resonated with me as not only is it a basic necessity, but people living in most productive areas (cities) determine so much else of US economic prosperity. The stats are startling
  • In 1950, the median home was 2.2x average annual income and in 2020 its 6x
  • US has less housing than other developed economies (470 per 1000 people vs Italy and France which have 600) p 23
  • The major cities are incredibly economically productive and we should develop them
    • A poor child born in San Jose has 3 times more likelihood of ending up wealthy than a child born in Charlotte (p 31)
    • In 1950/1960s California built more than 200K houses yearly, but hasn’t permitted even more than 150K once since 2007 despite way more people now
  • Homelessness is best explained by availability/cost of housing (p40)
    • It’s not drugs or mental health, but just that people on fringes end up homeless
    • Example is not a lot of homelessness in West Virginia despite big drug issues there
• Biggest problem slowing the US growth in major areas is lawsuits and negotiating
  • It costs twice as much in US as in Europe for kilometer of rail and not because of lack of labor unions there (p 77)
  • Ability to file lawsuits in CA requiring environmental reviews at individual level slows down everything (p54)
  • Houston has no zoning and lowest rate of homelessness of any major metro. Building there costs $17-19K to house a homeless resident vs $40-47K in SF
• To reach abundance, you need to figure out how to deploy things at scale and get rid of every bottleneck
  • Everything bagel liberalism accomplishes nothing by pouring on all goals (p113)
    • This adds more bottlenecks so projects fail
    • Every requirement like must be diverse workers, childcare provided, etc. burdens a project with things that make it more likely to fail
  • Instead in US healthcare you should fund more doctors (191)
  • Do this through pull funding saying we will pay if you get to this target (192)
    • Great idea I like is the idea of advanced market commitments (p 192) which was part of what Operation Warp Speed did so well

Articles

1. Minimum Levels of Stress by Morgan Housel
   • The idea is there’s a minimum level of stress and if it’s not big problems, people will stress about smaller ones
     • Instead of worrying about food, now you worry about your retirement age
   • Like his lessons
     • In a way, the best definition of progress is when you’ve knocked out the major issues and are left dealing with lower, less-severe ones.
     • The dumber the disagreements, the better the world actually is.
2. Alex Danco: Have you ever seen a goth downtown?
   • Meta point
     • AI where you’re just repeating the same thing as other people leads to same outcomes
     • Serial tinkering in a small area is what leads to unique outcomes specific to you
   • Example is from a comedian of if you want to see a freak go to Albany (not downtown NY) as those are people who are putting on a show
     • “[The singer] Saint Vincent said something the other day… ‘I am so glad that I moved to New York City and met all the other freaks like me.’ Those aren’t freaks, Saint Vincent, okay? Those are attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncrasies. Every eccentric fashion choice has been run through a think tank of NYU undergrads that would blow your hair back. You want to see a freak? Go to Albany.”
   • His point is that AI is a version of this where there’s nothing truly “surprising”
     • But there is still a piece that bugs me: the feeling like it’s perpetually checking in with a hundred different NYU think tanks to make sure it hasn’t said anything actually surprising. And that’s what makes me wonder about this scaffolding getting set up everywhere, structuring how we learn and think and make things
3. John Gruber: Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino
   • Apple missed it’s Apple Intelligence launch and John/others were surprised as they had hit so many in a row
   • He talks about the change in the culture, but my favorite part was his definition of 4 levels of realness from a company
     1. Features that the company’s own product representatives will demo, themselves, in front of the media. Smaller, more personal demonstrations are more credible than on-stage demos. But the stakes for demo fail are higher in an auditorium full of observers.
     2. Features that the company will allow members of the media (or other invited outside observers and experts) to try themselves, for a limited time, under the company’s supervision and guidance. Vision Pro demos were like this at WWDC 2023. A bunch of us got to use pre-release hardware and in-progress software for 30 minutes. It wasn’t like free range “Do whatever you want” — it was a guided tour. But we were the ones actually using the product. Apple allowed hands-on demos for a handful of media (not me) at Macworld Expo back in 2007 with prototype original iPhones — some of the “apps” were just screenshots, but most of the iPhone actually worked.
     3. Features that are released as beta software for developers, enthusiasts, and the media to use on their own devices, without limitation or supervision.
     4. Features that actually ship to regular users, and hardware that regular users can just go out and buy.
   • The best features of Apple intelligence weren’t even level 1 (demoed in front of media) in March of last year and instead they were just vaporware (talked about as a concept)
   • Fiasco isn’t that Apple is late on AI, but that they lied about what they could do
4. Trade deficits do not make a country poorer by Noah Smith
   • Goes through basics of tariffs
     1. Tariffs don’t count against GDP (subtracted from net imports, but also added into consumption)
     2. Also makes point that if you stop importing, it’s not a guarantee it’ll be made in America. May just be situation where things aren’t consumed at all
     3. Talks about how imports are effectively US paying for things with a credit card
        • At some point when you hear economists discuss trade, you might hear them talk about the “current account” and the “capital account”. The current account is basically just the net flow of real goods and services,2 and the capital account is basically just the net flow of IOUs. If you give Ruimin an IOU in exchange for a washing machine, it means you’ve contributed to America’s current account deficit, and you’ve also contributed to its capital account surplus. Both of those things just mean “paying foreigners for stuff with IOUs”.
        • Does using your credit card to buy a washing machine from Target mean that Target has ripped you off? No. Does it make you poorer when you use your credit card to buy a washing machine from Target? Nope. You now have less money, but you have more stuff. In just the same way, a trade deficit means that the U.S. has less money and more stuff. It does not mean America is poorer, or that it has been ripped off by foreigners.
   • Trade deficits are good or bad based on what you buy
     • Trade that result in more capital goods used to produce other stuff in America are good (this is what south korea did when industrializing in 80s/90s)
   • Interesting point with current examples is how trade actually hurt the US Midwesterners
     • Bloom et al. (2024) find that Chinese import competition caused a big reallocation from manufacturing to service jobs on the West Coast and in big cities, but in the Midwest it mostly just caused wage declines and job losses.
   • Deindustrialization is what your afraid of with too many imports and it did actually occur with China
     1. However tariffs won’t necessarily fix this and likely make it worse
     2. Trump’s tariffs are weakening U.S. manufacturers — that’s why auto workers and steelworkers in the U.S. are being laid off right now, and why measures of manufacturing activity and sentiment are all heading down. Second of all, Trump’s tariffs will ultimately reduce America’s exports, not just its imports, both through exchange rate shifts, and through retaliation by other countries. That will hurt American manufacturing.
     3. Tariffs just make it harder to export