What I Just Read

This book was profoundly useful, giving me a set of extraordinarily helpful lenses to better understand both the modern medical/healthcare industry, but also to better understand modernity itself. Although this book is primarily about healthcare, it is also prescient in identifying many of the alienating and atomizing aspects of modern civilization. This book may have been written in the early 1970s, but the author was decades ahead of his time. One of the foundational concepts of this book is iatrogenesis, which essentially means “harm done by the healer.” I was first exposed to this word thanks to Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile . In Medical Nemesis , Ivan Illich begins with a discussion of medical iatrogenics in the most basic sense, but then expands the concept into far broader terms, discussing three genres of iatrogenesis: 1) clinical iatrogenesis, 2) social iatrogenesis, and 3) cultural iatrogenesis:  1) Clinical iatrogenesis is the “plain vanilla form” of iatrogenesis...

A mixed bag of essays--some odd, some striking, some tremendously insightful--from an early 20th century libertarian author and thinker. The best of the collection is "Anarchist's Progress" where the author describes losing his innocence about the nature, purpose and ethics of the modern State--a journey and a loss of innocence that many of us are going through in this era. "Artemus Ward" * Artemus Ward (born 1983, died 1867 at age 33) as one of America's great early humorists.  * "Ward was a first-class critic of society; and he has lived for a century by precisely the same power that gave a more robust longevity to Cervantes and Rabelais." Nock urges readers "to reëxamine the work of a first-rate critic, who fifty years ago [from 1924, thus referring to the 1870s] drew a picture of our civilization that in all essential aspects is still accurate."  * Interesting references to Baldwinsville, NY, under the stresses of the American Civil ...

When something goes completely off the rails like the slow-motion, multi-decade collapse of GE, the pathetic finger pointing and blame-dodging that follows can be as hypnotizing as the train wreck itself. And years after hand-picking Jeff Immelt as his successor, here's what "legendary" GE CEO Jack Welch had to say about Immelt:  "I fucked up... He's full of shit. He's a bullshitter."   It's a quote that reveals much about both men. GE's collapse is a tale about hubris, about idolatry of the celebrity CEO, and about what happens when you run a company backwards by beating numbers and managing the stock price, rather than running the company well first--and then letting the stock price naturally follow. Power Failure isn't just a cautionary tale of modern American business, it's a metaphor for Fourth Turning-era American society. Welch and Immelt pioneered the art of financialization, using GE Capital to massage accounting results and l...