American taxation, American Slavery, Robin Einhorn

“I know that some readers will be wary about delving into the arcane world of tax history,” Einhorn admits, before assuring readers, “All I can say is I learned a lot about American history by studying the history of taxation.”

If the phrase “arcane world of tax history” doesn’t scare you away, you’re in for a treat. This is the rare book on U.S. history that comes to a genuinely novel insight, that whether or not a colonial (or state) government was dominated by slaveholders had profound implications on government competence. In other words, states run by slaveholders had worse governments by design, and the anti-government rhetoric that continues to this day can be traced back to slaveholders wanting government to be too incompetent to take their slaves away from them.

I read this book before I undertook a project involving filing more than 100 public records requests with local police departments around the country. I am very much seeing that patterns of that thesis in my work.

Aside from learning a lot, I found this book mesmerizing in its detail. It’s revealing to think about the American colonies (and then states) less as a debate society for political science eggheads and more as a cabal of self-interested men determining how much the tax rate for a pig or a slave or an estate should be. By examining the details—and the utterly ridiculous things they said and did—we must begin to regard these men with less than total awe. [Buy on Bookshop.]

Related: The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, Joanne Freeman // These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore

How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going, Vaclav Smil

Smil’s whole deal can’t be separated from the fact his biggest fan is Bill Gates. Smil has written something like 40 books over his long academic career, but this one, by his own admission, is the product of his agent and/or publisher asking him to write something most people can understand. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gates encouraged him to do it, too, since the one downside Gates consistently notes regarding Smil’s works is that they’re long, dense with numbers and calculations, and “academic.”

Some of the best books I ever read were "academic," in that they didn't attempt to have a taut narrative gussied up with flowery prose. But any good book stuffed with valuable information has its own addictive momentum. Sometimes the facts alone regarding our crazy, complicated world is enough.

In any event, Gates has found Smil’s work influential. Since Gates is one of the world’s richest people and sets the agenda for one of the most well-funded foundations in the world, then indeed, Smil’s work is influential. And, as an introduction to that work, this book serves the need.

However, there is no requirement to read past the first three chapters. Smil’s most valuable insights about energy, food production, and “the four pillars of modern civilization”—cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia—are each summaries of one of his previous books. At his best, Smil looks at the world in a way few else do, but also a way that contains much truth. His rejection of ideology as a valid lens is refreshing. Unfortunately, the rest of the book involves long pontifications on risk, yielding such not-so-shocking conclusions like basejumping is extremely risky, but getting struck by lightning is not likely.

I will probably get around to Smil’s more detailed works at some point, but I also suspect banging out the first three chapters of this book will be more than enough for people who want to get a sense of his deal without committing to 600-page books on cement production. [Buy on Bookshop.]

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy As We Know It, Kashmir Hill

I generally stay away from new books about how some emerging technology is going to alter or destroy our way of life as we know it for the simple reason that they're almost always wrong. But I picked up a copy of Hill’s book because we know this is, to some degree, happening already, and due to her sterling reputation in the industry as a brilliant and intellectually responsible reporter.

Based on her landmark stories in the New York Times about Clearview, the facial recognition company that was selling—and giving away—its software to police and random celebrities like Joe Montana (???), Hill doesn’t have to bash our heads in with hypotheticals. The final third of the book is, to me, the most compelling, a series of stories about people who have already been caught in the facial recognition dragnet or use facial recognition against others.

I'm not convinced facial recognition will fundamentally alter the relationship between citizens and police in the U.S., nor do I think Hill is necessarily trying to convince us of that; to her credit, she reports how police also seem to be utilizing it lazily and ineffectively. Any cogent reading of modern American history will reveal that the police have never lacked for tools or excuses to wrongfully arrest and detain people in huge numbers.

Instead, Hill's examples of facial recognition being used in private spheres, by companies and individuals, are much more terrifying to me. I gather that less from anything Hill says and instead from what she shows.

Others may well take away different yet perfectly legitimate fears from the book, a sign it's a story well told. But I don't doubt everyone will come away from it afraid of something or other. [Buy on Bookshop.]

Related: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Margaret O'Mara // None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age, Lawrence Cappello

Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government, Evan McKenzie

The rise of homeowner associations is one of the most important trends of postwar American life. Tens of millions of Americans—perhaps 40 million housing units and 53 percent of all homeowners in the country—live under the rules of a private volunteer government subject to its own case law and legal standards. The author notes the people who volunteer for such boards likely have control freak tendencies. They are also, as McKenzie convincingly argues, anti-democratic, and maybe even fascist. It makes a mockery of the idea that private property rights are among the most sacred values Americans treasure most.

The fundamental argument of the book is a bit more modest than "HOAs are fascism" even though I'm pretty much there. The book argues the rise of HOAs mean homeowners are primarily concerned with property values above all other civic concerns, which results in all kinds of profoundly fucked up priorities. I think the last few decades have validated this take.

An adapted dissertation, Privatopia has some sections on political theory and government structure that one could easily skip. But it’s worth picking up if only for the introduction, which tells a series of anecdotes of absurd HOA rules that went to court at one time or another. One memorable example involves a dog being weighed in court to determine if it is over the HOA-mandated 30-pound limit, perplexingly to indeterminate results. Another, which occurs later in the book, summarizes a protracted legal fight over a woman's right to keep her three cats Muffin, Puffin, and Ruffin. I would read an entire book about these kinds of stories if one exists.

Given everything that has happened to American politics since the book came out 1996, I found the following quote particularly chilling: “A city whose sense of politics never gets beyond selfish defensiveness, and an obsessive concern for property values, is a sick city.” [Buy on Bookshop or if you have a JSTOR login it is available for free.]

Related: Many of the titles in the Urbanist Gems list, but if I had to pick one: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth Jackson