I don’t think there’s a correlation between how much I admire someone and how good their book recommendations are. For example, I frequently got annoyed by Shilo Brooks’s podcast Old School until I finally cancelled it. The reason I had subscribed in the first place was that we seem to have the same taste in books, even though the reasons for those tastes differ wildly.
It’s different with statistician Cosma Shalizi: I admire him, and I like his book recommendations. Here are his most recent ones on his blog, Three Toes Sloth. Liking Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing is a marker of good taste.
Shalizi also recommends The Blueprint by Bhaskar Sunkara, Ben Burgis0 and, Mike Beggs. The subtitle is How Socialism Can Work in the Real World. According to Shalizi’s review, a big part of what they proposing is market socialism, in which firms are owned by their workers.
I like the idea of worker-owned businesses. We should experiment with this and other ways of organizing society more. What I don’t understand is what stops us from doing this right now. We can set up a company almost any way we like already. This includes employee-owned firms, of which there are many already. Doing so doesn’t require any change in government.
If your objection is that those firms can’t compete against traditional, sharholder-owned companies without the government banning those, I think that’s an indictment of the entire concept. I’d be opposed to introducing a mandatory firm structure that cannot compete against existing firms.
Not yet having read the Blueprint myself and instead basing my thoughts on Shalizi’s blog post, I don’t know if this issue has been covered by the authors. Apologies if it is.
Nehaveigur 