What I'd Like to Know

This is an updating list of things I’d like to learn.

History

China

• Patrick Collison’s bookshelf has some China books he considers "particularly great": Evan Osnos’ Age of Ambition, and Philip Pan’s Out of Mao’s Shadow. He also considers Peter Hessler’s River Town, and James Fallow’s China Airborne "substantially above average".

• Shenzen is probably the most intriguing example of an city-turned-SEZ. It's also a major reason for China's technological and industrial success. To that end, The Shenzen Experiment would be interesting to read

• Kyle Chan recommends a bunch of books:

  • "China as an Innovation Nation" as "one of the best edited volumes" where each chapter is an industry

  •  "A Chinese Bureaucracy for Innovation-Driven Development?" on Chinese semiconductors and EVs

  • Lan Xiaohuan's "How China Works" which offers a broader view of state-led development in China with lots of great case studies, like the rise of BOE

• House of Huawei seems worth reading to understand the story of one of China's leading tech companies, Huawei.

• Breakneck by Dan Wang has been doing the rounds on Twitter and has an intriguing central thesis.

• Basil Halperin considers Yasheng Huang’s The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline great "applied political economy theory".

Bureaucracy

• The bureaucracy, especially in India, is very interesting. Unfortunately, it's also an area that's not written about often and is generally opaque. A couple of good books seem to be "The Steel Frame: A History of the IAS" and "Red Tape"

India

• On India's adoption of technology, the best resources seem to be Nilekani's books "Rebooting India" and "Imagining India" 

• Considering the scale and heterogeneity of it's population, as well as the fragmented nature of systems, India seems to be doing a good job at collecting data and using it to plan the economy. But how did we get here? I think it's worth reading "Mahalanobis: A Biography" to understand this

Math

Probability

• 3Blue1Brown is great for building intuition as always. 3Blue1Brown also recommends The Art Of Probability by Richard Hamming