United Neverlands

So, I think this might be a first for me: I've actually officially finished a Paradox Grand Strategy Game! I've been playing these games for well over a decade, and feel like I've "won" quite a few of them; but typically you get to a point where you're the Undisputed Lord Of Everything, and it gets too tedious to just run out the clock until you reach the artificial end date.

 

Victoria 3 has a few advantages in this regard. It is objectively a "shorter" game, "only" covering the 100 years from 1836 to 1936 as opposed to the centuries of Europa Universalis or Stellaris. My total Steam time on the game is currently 150 hours; that includes my training Sweden runs, an early aborted Belgium run and some time left idling on the pause screen. I'm pretty sure this game ended up north of 100 hours, but that's still much less time than a completionist Europa Universalis campaign would take.

 

Besides the shortness, I think some of the mechanics of Victoria 3 keep things feeling more engaging in the end-game. Stellaris kind of does this with the Crisis, but once you beat the Crisis there's even less motivation than before to keep going. Victoria 3 doesn't necessarily pull you into a Great War (although that's certainly a possibility), but the dynamism of the game meant that, at least for me, I had to keep on my toes and not get too complacent. Smaller powers are still at the mercy of larger powers. If you are a large power, you're extremely unlikely to have actually conquered a large chunk of the map: rather, you may have grown your direct territory somewhat, but most of your influence is in the form of "soft power" through political alliances, power blocs, economic imperialism, control of markets, and so on. You do not directly control all of these things. So, for example, in my game I might see, say, France trying to conquer Madagascar, which is an independent nation but a part of my Trade League. I could decide to just let that slide, or threaten to escalate that conflict into a major war to keep the nation and its natural resources available for my own capitalist enterprises.

 

Internal dissension is also a compelling factor. For me, early in the game these felt more fraught, as when monarchists threatened a civil war or when the labor unions organized against our adoption of a laissez-faire economy. Later in the game I was mostly facing indigenous uprisings by native Africans in my colonies. These are far less of a threat to the nation as a whole, because they are tiny; but it does still require a response. In the short term this means marshaling troops, in the longer term checking the causes of the uprisings to try and prevent future ones. In my case, while these populations were doing extremely well by indigenous standards, they were also significantly poorer than the average standard of living in my country, which fed immense discontent. So the solution is to make them richer - not just employing people in rubber plantations and oil fields, but also making automotive factories, art academies and glassworks.

 

This particular mechanic was really interesting to me. For much of the game I used Colonial Exploitation in my African colonies, and for many decades the situation seemed fairly stable. I reached a point where I was having a hard time increasing my extraction industries' productivity: these states had a ready supply of laborers, but too few mechanics and engineers. As colonial wages were low, people in the metropole were reluctant to migrate there for jobs. So I started constructing local Universities to increase the Qualifications of the locals so they could take those jobs. That seemed to gradually help a bit. I eventually realized that as these (completed) colonies were all Unincorporated States, they didn't actually get any of the advantages from my Institutions, particularly Public Education. So I started the process of incorporating them. This increased education access, which increases their literacy... and literacy, in turn, increases their expected standard of living. So, basically, they were learning more about the world, and realizing how much better they could have it. Anyways, I just love this kind of dynamism in the game. More education and literacy is good - it increases innovation and qualifications, helping your technology spread and productivity - but it also potentially increases social unrest, which can destabilize a region or entire country. It's complex, just like history! I love it!

 

For a long time I thought I was way ahead in tech and worried that I would run out of things to research, maintaining expensive universities for little purpose, so I stopped building additional universities once I maxed out a stack of 50 in my capital and had an additional one per state for qualifications. I ended up getting nearly all the techs but not quite, with I think 5 undiscovered at the end, 1 which I was researching and 2 which were spreading to me. From some light online research, it sounds like the meta-strategy is to accept the "ahead of time" penalty and omit researching tech from earlier tiers while you focus on later tiers. This helps you avoid getting into the situation I encountered, where I would go for long stretches without any Tech Spread because I already knew everything everyone else did.

 

This does raise a recurring issue I've encountered with playing Paradox grand strategy games: the core mechanics for these games change significantly over time, so any time I Google for strategy advice or mechanics explanations, even if I find something that was accurate at the time it was written, it's very likely to have changed by now. This ended up being particularly impactful for this game because they had just released a brand-new update, "The Great Wave", that includes a DLC (which I haven't bought) but also a major reworking of naval combat and minor updates for many other things. Even when reading contemporary information on Reddit about, say, the ideal composition of ships in a fleet, that information would be based on bugs in the current game, which were patched during the course of my playthrough, tossing that initial analysis out the window.

 

But one silver lining is that in 2026 it does seem like it's easier to find info in text-based venues like Reddit, the Steam Community and the Paradox Plaza forums. A few years ago when researching EU or Stellaris it seemed like most information was buried in YouTube videos, which I am never going to watch. 

 

Going into my actual campaign:

 

I think my last post ended in the early 1900s. The last few decades generally felt a bit slower than the start of the game, as I was larger and had my finger in more pies, but as noted above it did generally feel "faster" than EU or Stellaris. After forming the United Netherlands I mostly focused on expanding my African colonies, picking up a few minor powers in Europe to join my Trade League but for the most part ignoring continental politics.

 

I had a couple of dust-ups with the United States. They declared on me to seize the Panama Canal, and there were multiple wars where they would declare on Mexico; Mexico would then call in Great Britain and myself and absolutely mop the floor with them. During our last war, a Proletarian Revolt broke out in the US so they were fighting (a second) civil war while also fighting the entirety of Central America, South America and Europe. The Proletarians were able to win the civil war, whereupon they immediately capitulated in the world war so they could focus on their new worker-oriented nation. So it ended up being almost exactly like Russia turning into the Soviet Union during World War 1, just with America this time. I thought that was pretty neat! We stayed friendly after that. 

Near the end of the game I started taking subjects in Africa from diplomatic plays. Typically I would oppose a European power that was trying to subjugate an Unrecognized power in my Trade Union, and as a condition for joining the Play I would demand their colony or transferring an African subject. I also did this with the United States and Liberia. The colony transfers (like taking the rest of Angola from the Portuguese) went smoothly and let me get some complete states. Subject transfers proved trickier: subjects seem to be pretty terrible at managing internal revolutionary movements, secessions and uprisings, so every few years you're dragged into putting down a rebellion. The AI might be able to handle it on its own, but not always, and it's always fastest to send your own army to the front. 

In, say, Europa Universalis it's almost always better to let subjects manage their own affairs, as they accept local cultures and will face fewer uprisings. That may be true at the start of Victoria 3 as well, but by the end-game I had secured hard-won legislative victories to enact Multiculturalism and Total Separation, which respectively significantly lower the cultural acceptance maluses from different ethnic backgrounds and religions. If you combine that with my significantly richer economy, welfare, and being a human being who knows how to play the game, I now think that I should have tried to integrate those late-game subjects ASAP instead of playing whack-a-mole for them. 

 

 

I've mentioned in previous posts that I had shifted from always promoting left-wing parties to instead alternating between the Socialist and Conservative parties in power. This helped with getting the specific laws passed that I wanted, like Laissez-Faire from the Conservative union; I also made a multi-party alliance with the Intelligentsia specifically to pass Total Separation. But by the end of the game I had settled back into just pumping the Socialist party as much as I could and keeping them in power. Single-interest-group parties have a big advantage by not having ideological differences. Even if, say, the Conservatives got 50% of the vote and the Socialists got 40%, the Socialists would inevitably have much higher Legitimacy, so I'd rather the Socialists get 45% than the Conservatives get 55% since I end up with a higher Legitimacy at single-IG 45%. Even if a multi-interest-group party manages to align on ideology, there's a very high chance that a new leader will take over an interest group during their term, which causes your Legitimacy to instantly drop.

 

Other than the occasional Diplomatic Play and even more occasional shooting war, my gameplay in the last few decades was entirely focused on construction and economic expansion: I had all the laws I wanted, was diplomatically secure and only used diplomacy to try and finagle independent nations into my Trade League. My rough (government) building priority level looks like:

1. Expand Construction Sectors if the Private Investment Pool has untapped capacity.
2. Addressing Market Access issues - building at-capacity Railroads and Ports, or making cheaper goods that are inputs to those.
3. Expanding Government Administration to collect available taxes.
4. Expanding at-capacity industries that produce Government or Military goods that are currently expensive; or making cheaper the input goods to these that keep those buildings from hiring.
5. "Starter Package" for new colonies: Trade Center, University, Railroad, Power Plant, Art Academy, one food-producing Arable Resource. 
6. Addressing starvation or low standard of living by building food or job-producing buildings. 
7. Only if running a consistent surplus: More construction sectors or military or universities.
8. Strategic investing in specific foreign nations that I am trying to coerce into my Trade League.
9. Expanding the highest-Productivity at-capacity buildings, up to size 50.
10. Expanding lower-Productivity at-capacity buildings or starting new industries if all domestic ones are at 50+ size already. 

When building in foreign nations, I focus on raw goods (crops and resources) and local services (railroads, ports, trading centers and electricity). My thinking has been that once that nation is in my market, I want my own pops to be making the high-value finished manufactured goods, and I want their pops to be supplying cheap natural resources. I want to buy their cheap stuff and sell them my expensive stuff. I haven't crunched the numbers or researched that strategy, though. In particular, it is common for industry buildings to be significantly more profitable than resource buildings, so if my primary goal is to get enough influence to drag them into my trade league, it might make more sense to, say, build three factories instead of ten farms.

 

While dipping into the community, I've seen Victoria 3 repeatedly described as a "Line Go Up Simulator." I chuckle at that - it's very true! For me it's very satisfying to see wealth, population, literacy and more steadily ticking up in response to your gardening of the nation. I've also heard people say that the game is called Victoria because she is the final boss. Again, that's pretty apt. The game is named that for the Victorian Era, but also she is the monarch of Great Britain for most of the time, and Great Britain starts as the overwhelming #1 greatest power. Unlike Europa Universalis, where Ming starts off as #1 but is doomed to fall off, or Stellaris, where the Fallen Empires start off very powerful but are doomed to stagnation, in Victoria 3 Great Britain is almost certain to advance in power, expanding its influence even more around the globe. All that to say, while conquering the world in this game seems like a very tall and not-very-fun order, outperforming Great Britain is a fantastic goal.

 

And, I did it! In the last decade of the game I eventually surpassed Great Britain as the #1 Great Power in the world. We actually switched places back and forth a few times. I think this is because, when I was at war I would mobilize my armies, which would add to my Army Power Projection enough to push me above them, then drop back when when we demobilized. But I kept chugging along, eventually surpassing one BILLION pounds in GDP and permanently securing my position on top. 

 

So, yep! This game was a lot of fun. I don't have immediate plans to replay, but also the idea of replaying this feels far less daunting than Europa Universalis (or even Hearts of Iron). As with EU it could be fun to just set a specific achievement challenge, like turning the UK Anarchist or forming Yugoslavia. But I can also see myself doing another "completionist" campaign with a less easy start than Belgium - starting in Southeast Asia or South America or something could be pretty entertaining. We'll see if and when I revisit!

Dual Mandate

In the last couple of years I've enjoyed watching the YouTube videos of the annual Bogleheads conference. As I've blogged before, one thing I love about Bogleheads is how boring they (we?) are: the principles are very simple, and the whole point is to ignore the news and tune out the noise while staying the course. That said, the conference is good at reinforcing those simple rules; and, because a lot of the active members are very smart, curious and engaged, the second-order conversations they spark tend to be fascinating. In particular, in the last couple of years authors have joined the conference and presented on books that cover historical financial and economic topics.

 

 

I was intrigued by the presentation from Carola Binder, an economics professor, who spoke about the recent bout of high inflation in the US. I've since picked up her book "Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy". It's been a really gripping read. In some ways it reminds me of the other recent book I discovered through the Bogleheads, Mark Higgins' "Investing in US Financial History". Both of these books are primarily historical, starting in America shortly before independence, and chronologically walk through time up to the present day, examining long-run trends and specific incidents that shaped the economy.

 

 

Of course, Binder's book has a more particular focus on prices and inflation, which intersects with but doesn't always overlap with other economic developments. In addition to history, Binder also examines the legal, political, economic and social dimensions of prices, in roughly that order of focus. There's a particular focus on the evolving legal decisions around what powers the government does and does not have related to influencing prices; among other things, this demonstrated how big an impact Supreme Court appointments have had for our entire history, as in multiple incidents the court established a ruling in one direction, and then a few years later reversed it after new appointments were made.

One specific legal area that repeatedly receives focus is contracts. There's language in the Constitution that the federal government cannot interfere in private contracts, and the 14th Amendment extended that restriction to state governments as well. This covers more ground than you might assume. For example, if the government sets a minimum wage, that restricts the terms of contract that an employer can offer an employee, and it potentially interferes in existing employment contracts by forcing a higher wage than was previously agreed on. Today there is broad acceptance that this is a legitimate government power, but there was significant disagreement over it for much of history. Similarly, for a long time purchase contracts would specify that a buyer would need to pay their debt in gold specie currency, as opposed to paper money or other forms of money. The government had a strong desire to make paper currency equivalent with specie and force people to accept them equally, but again, that potentially changes existing contracts between private parties, which is arguably unconstitutional.

As an aside, I was somewhat surprised to read a book that covers this country and time period and never mentions JP Morgan - I think that's a first for me. (But the book does frequently reference Bernard Baruch, which made me irrationally happy: I only knew that name as a punchline in Rocky & Bullwinkle.) While JP Morgan was a towering figure in finance and the economy, he didn't do much to influence prices. The biggest echo I see here has to do with the ongoing effort to get on, remain on or return to the Gold Standard during the 19th and early 20th century. In particular, this book describes how the US stretched itself during the interwar period between WW1 and WW2 to help the UK rebuild the gold reserves necessary to rejoin the standard. House of Morgan tells a great, more narrative story about the personal relationships and characters that drove that (mostly ill-advised) effort on both sides of the Atlantic.

On the other hand, this book had a lot more to say about farmers than any of the other economic books I've read covering this period. Which makes a sense: the US has primarily been a nation of farmers for most of its existence, and even up to the current day we continue to be a major exporter of food products; this was true even early in our history, when Europe was comparatively more industrialized and faced more frequent disruptive wars. I was fascinated to learn about the origins of the Grange Movement: I've been in a Grange Hall and vaguely associated it with rural agriculture, and loved learning about how it started, as a political force organizing against monopolistic price-fixing by railroads, and pushing for more accomodative monetary policy.

Zooming out for a moment: as I've learned from other books (most particularly Katarina Pistor's The Code of Capital), there's an inherent tension between debtors and creditors, and whatever helps one group necessarily harms the other. This includes topics like bankruptcy law and inflation. When inflation rises, it diminishes the real value of nominal debt and thus tends to benefit debtors and hurt creditors. For most of the US's history, while we were on the gold standard, deflation was a bigger specter, which harmed debtors and helped creditors. In general, farmers tend to be debtors: they borrow money to purchase land and buy seed, then pay back those debts after the harvest. So they are particularly sensitive to inflation. In fact, most of the major panics/depressions/recessions in our history have been triggered by economic pain in the farmland, to the extent that you could predict the month a recession would start based on the planting and harvesting schedule.

So this dynamic has played out many times, from the original Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian dynamic between Wall Street lenders and yeoman farmers, through the 1820s and 1840s land rush, through late-19th-century struggles against the railroads, and on into the modern day. Farming has shrunk as a share of the national GDP, but remains a huge business, and has retained an outsized influence thanks to our senatorial and electoral college representation, as well as an enduring cultural reverence towards farming as a profession.

In the 1910s people were surprised to discover that prices under the gold standard fluctuated based on the quantity of gold. But that's exactly what Adam Smith was writing about in The Wealth of Nations 150 years earlier! And Alexander Hamilton wrote about the impact of the quantity of precious metals in his first report as Treasury Secretary. As in Investing In US Financial History, I'm struck by how we as a society can learn stuff, and then even the experts forget it after a few generations and are amazed to rediscover these facts... which weren't even obscure facts but are in our foundational texts.

Somewhat similarly, there's been a lot of angst in the last two decades over the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program (QE), and the Bogleheads forums and other online financial spaces I follow have been aghast at how the Fed has abandoned its traditional tools of the discount rate. But from what I've read now in Shock Values, it sounds like historically the Fed used similar tactics when they were first founded: they initially managed the money supply by purchasing government securities and private bonds, even before they created the Discount Window and began the modern process of influencing inflation and prices via interest rates. The system used to be all based on the Fed regional banks choosing to buy up government debt or to sell it, and so you could say that QE is a return to the Fed's roots and not an unprecedented shift.

Throughout the book, Binder describes different high-level approaches that the government has taken to try and manage price stability. I mentally sort these into three buckets: monetary policy (controlling the amount of money in the economy), fiscal policy (taxing and spending), and controls (directly mandating prices). The forms have changed over the centuries, but there are lots of similarities between different attempts, which I think is a big part of why Binder was inspired to write this book, as the debates of the last few years have very strong echoes of actual experiments we've conducted in the past.

On the monetary policy side: back when we were a colony, Britain forbade trade in pounds, so the only hard currency Americans held were foreign coins, which we then sent to Britain to pay taxes. During the Revolutionary War and the Civil War the government deployed paper currency, Continentals and Greenbacks respectively, to expand the monetary supply. These days monetary policy is primarily conducted through the Federal Reserve, which is the main focus of the last third or so of the book. By requiring banks to keep a certain amount of money in reserve and encouraging or discouraging lending, the Fed can grow or shrink the amount of money in the economy.

On the fiscal front, increasing government spending and cutting taxes tend to increase economic activity and are generally inflationary. Raising taxes and cutting spending does the opposite. The early US federal government had a very minimal footprint in the economy: it only raised revenues through tariffs and excise taxes, and outside of wartime it had very minimal spending. Over the years the scope of the government has steadily grown, and today it can make a major impact in the economy through its decisions. This drove one of the major recent debates, whether the spending in recent stimulus bills was responsible for the large rise in inflation.

Controls are regulations around acceptable prices that sellers can charge in the private market. Sometimes they are straightforward, like declaring that you can't charge more than $4 for a gallon of gas or pay a wage less than $7.25 per hour. Other times they have been more nuanced, like limiting the amount of profit a seller can make, pegging prices to the average or maximum in a historic range, or limiting the rate at which prices can increase.

All of these three levers have been used since the Revolutionary War. The various discussions on controls were probably the most interesting to me. As noted above, these are a form of the government "interfering" in private contracts, and thus have come under constitutional scrutiny. While various courts have ruled various ways in various cases, we've ended with a system where the government tends to have significant latitude in controls during emergency situations like wars or natural disasters: anti-gouging laws (which are state and not federal laws) punished people who jacked up gasoline prices after Hurricane Katrina or who overcharged for PPE in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as Binder writes, we've also come to increasingly rely on "emergencies" - the average "emergency" now lasts for 9.6 years - and this can have distorting effects on markets. In a laissez-faire system, high prices would send a signal for more sellers to enter the market, increasing production and lowering prices. If supply falls and prices can't rise, shortages almost always result, leading to long gas lines in the 1970s or empty supermarket shelves in 2020. As she notes in a grim aside, many people spent longer time in markets searching for N-95 masks, and thus were exposed to the virus and died. 

Price fixing was originally tried in the Revolutionary War but wasn't very effective - the state wasn't strong enough to enforce it. It wasn't even considered during the Civil War as the earlier memories were strong. There were some attempts at it in WW1, and a very strong push in WW2. It's interesting to see how it played out. Early on industry was on board with price controls a show of patriotism. But it's inherently hard to manage: different companies have different expenses, and you can either control profits or prices but not both. If you control prices then you will drive some companies out of business. The administrative state enabled enforcing prices, but the FDR administration also rolled out a broad-based distributed network of civilian volunteers, who monitored, educated and reported on pricing activities in their own community. It sounds a bit like the Gestapo, but benevolent.

The book also shows how the parties have grown less ideologically diverse over the years. Particularly during the stretch from the Civil War to the Roaring Twenties, party positions on topics like protectionism, tariffs, the gold standard, free silver, etc. tended to be driven much more by the biases of party leaders than the party membership, so it could radically swing from one election to the next, or have cases where a trifecta would disagree or a divided government would push something through. There's a quote along the lines of "People aren't Republican because they are protectionist, they are protectionist because they are Republican." Party loyalty was big, and (as in our time) economic issues, especially technical ones, tended to play second fiddle to social issues, so people would tend to go along with the direction of their party, even when it changed.

The Federal Reserve has what is called a "dual mandate", to maintain price stability and to pursue full employment. Price stability wasn't initially an explicit goal of the Fed, and over the years bills were proposed to make it an explicit or sole goal. In the short term there is a tension between these two goals, because tighter monetary policy will be deflationary but hurt economic growth and thus employment. However, over the long run the goals do align. As we learned during the Great Inflation, once inflation expectations become unanchored and it becomes self-reinforcing, inflation harms budgets (consumer, business and government) without giving any benefit to employment.

When there is a sudden change in the price level, it's usually due to either a supply shock or a demand shock, and Binder makes a nuanced point about the asymmetry of these types of shocks. If demand spikes, prices will tend to increase; if demand collapses, prices will decrease. Supply is more complex. If there's a shortage, that good will tend to be more expensive, but it can have ripple effects through the economy. If there's an oil shortage, then gas gets more expensive; but there may be less demand for cars, so those will get less expensive. Fed reserve actions are very effective at managing demand shocks, either cooling down overly enthusiastic growth or calming fears. But it's much less effective for supply shocks. Monetary policy is a powerful but very broad tool, and can't be targeted at a specific good. These days the Fed tries to "look through" supply shocks: they will do some damage but conditions will right themselves, because markets will signal sellers to enter or leave the industry. Trying to address a recession due to high oil prices might cause inflation elsewhere without really helping oil prices, for example. Actually addressing supply shocks is better handled by Congress or maybe the Executive: trade treaties, fiscal stimulus or taxation. 

In the last chapter covering the Greenspan years and beyond, Binder introduces the phrase "Techno-populism". I tend to think of a continuum from populism through representative democracy to technocracy. But recently the technocratic institutions and populism have become more aligned, bypassing democracy. One example she gives is direct appeals from technocratic bodies to populist goals, as in the "Fed Listens" series. It seems benign in this case, making the operations of these important bodies more transparent. But broadly it's concerning. The direct appeal to populism reflects declining trust in democratic bodies, a perceived or real inability for democracy to fix problems, and a weakening of our constitutional order and separation of powers. Article 1 of the constitution gives Congress the ability to control the currency; that authority has been delegated to the executive, and from the executive to an independent body. There are reasons for that independence, but it's also at tension with our rule of law, and feeds discontent with the broader political system.

There's a quote on page 274 that I really liked: "American policy makers' and institutions' attempts to stabilize prices have reflected, shaped, and sometimes come into conflict with our political values. As American political values are neither homogeneous nor static, the legitimacy of a wide variety of state interventions in prices has been litigated and relitigated in the courts and the courts of public opinion". Things are complicated! Political movements have risen and shifted over time, and actions that once seemed unthinkable (setting a minimum wage, leaving the gold standard) now are our normal. There is no natural law when it comes to the economy: it's us, our opinions and actions, that shape it. We can and often do change over time.

Near the end Binder mentions her own preferred approach of targeting the Nominal GDP (NGDP) instead of the inflation rate. So if the long-run desired inflation rate is 2% and the real GDP growth rate is 2.5%, the Fed could target an average annual nominal GDP growth rate of 4.5%. One appeal of this is that it explicitly focuses on both sides of the dual mandate: if there is a recession and the GDP drops (or seems likely to drop), the Fed would pursue looser money and more inflationary policy until it is back on track. She's an economist and I'm not; on reading this, my mind goes to a few places. First, from my understanding, a long-term real GDP rate of 2.5% feels ambitious for a fully developed economy. The real GDP rate tends to be the population growth rate plus the productivity growth rate, with productivity largely dependent on advances in technology. My understanding (which may be wrong) is that since 1820 or so the long-run per-capita growth rate in the most advanced economies has tended to be near 1%. So you take that and add any population growth you can get. I'd be curious to hear if Binder's thinking has changed in the last two years; if the US continues to pursue an anti-immigrant agenda, we're likely to see flat or even declining population over the long term; if we continue our anti-science and anti-higher-education agenda, we'll probably start to lag the 1% per capita real GDP growth. That might mean pursuing a 4% annual inflation rate instead of 2% over the long term. Which might be fine, as long as that expectation stays anchored, but I think the expectation behind targeting NGDP is to accommodate short-term and temporary shocks rather than long-run changes in real growth.

Anyways! This book was even better than I expected. Even though I've read a decent amount of economic books covering this era, most of the information was new to me, and I really appreciated the focus in the writing. It deepened my understanding of inflation specifically and price levels more broadly. This book fits in nicely alongside some other ones: where The Code of Capital focuses on private law (contracts, trusts, bankruptcy, etc.), Shock Values focuses on public law (statutory law and court challenges to private laws). Where The Birth of Plenty looks at the reasons for growth, Shock Values looks at the reasons for price changes. Where Investing In US Financial History details events in the stock market, Shock Values details events in the currency market. I'd definitely recommend this book to any money nerds like me, and it could also be a good entry point to anyone who has a particular interest in learning more about why we had that large inflation a few years ago and what history tells us about efforts to combat inflation.

Glassworks for Gelre

I continue to be obsessed with Victoria 3. I recently was on vacation for nearly a week, and for most of the time I caught myself thinking about my current campaign, hearing the music in my head, plotting strategy and reviewing previous decisions.

 

I'm now well into the 20th century. This game does a fantastic job at depicting the enormous changes that occurred in the world within the span of two generations: from a predominantly peasant-based agricultural society to one with telephones, airplanes, power plants and more. As well as an explosion in new ideologies and movements, including Communism, anarchy and fascism.

 

 

I'm mostly writing this post to jot down a few notes. I plan to play through to the 1936 end date - if so, it will be the first time I've ever actually finished a Paradox game!

 

 

One new mechanic in V3 is Expeditions. There are various options, like searching for the source of the Nile, mapping the American West, being the first to the South Pole, etc. The mechanics for this are fairly simple. You appoint a General or Admiral to lead the expedition, and pay a monthly fee to support the expedition costs. Each month, there's a chance of an event firing, which generally describes some scenario your expedition has encountered (suspicious natives, illness, rockslide) and lets you make a choice. You're trading off Progress and Peril: you want to fill your Progress bar before your Peril bar fills. Based on my experience, it seems like the best strategy is to avoid Peril whenever possible: it's better to pick a choice that makes Minor Progress and no Peril than one with full Progress and Minor Peril.

 

 

I'd successfully done a few African expeditions and thought I had a handle on them, then started the Tibet one, which turned out to be significantly different. This one doesn't have a Peril bar, and instead you're basically racing against the clock: you need to reach Lhasa and negotiate with the leader before your commander dies or war breaks out. At one point a Diplomatic Play triggered, and I got pretty confused. I went down a rabbit hole of demanding them to become a subject; they were Fearful but never backed down. When the war started, there was nothing to do: no Front ever appeared. I went so far as to write a post on the official Paradox forum to try and figure this out - I'll have more details below, but the upshot is that this expedition probably shouldn't have even been possible for me since I didn't share a land border with Tibet, and is likely one of the many wonky things that have cropped up in the wake of the Great Wave update.

 

 

I was able to reload a save game from just before the Diplomatic Play - fortunately V3 is more forgiving than other Paradox games and you can still get Achievements without Ironman enabled. The Diplo Play fired again. At first I tried to drag it out as long as possible - each time you add a War Goal or call another party into the conflict, the timer pauses for a bit, so I was hoping I could complete the Expedition before it fired. Tibet stayed Fearful for the entire time, but still wouldn't back down. I eventually let the timer proceed into the last phase, and this time they did back down. I think that it's because this time I had a very benign Primary War Goal - I think it was just Humiliation or maybe a small monetary fine - while my Secondary War Goals were more major, like subjecthood and lots of forced goods transfers. (I was trying to pick as many War Goals for as little Infamy as possible.) I think that, basically, they did the math that just giving in would be relatively harmless, while fighting and losing the war would be much more painful; in contrast, the first time around my primary goal was incredibly painful and I didn't have any secondary goals, so they didn't have anything to lose from war.

 

 

After they backed down, the expedition ticked a few more times and I completed it. The writing in this, like all of the events, is really good: the short vignettes are really powerful at setting atmosphere and stakes in just a sentence or two. The writing style reminds me a lot of Failbetter Games' writing; I know Alexis Kennedy helped with writing on Stellaris and am curious if he helped with V3 as well, or if Paradox has just learned good lessons from those games.

At the end of this I had Tibet as a subject, which is cool and all, but not all that helpful. Again, they're a distant, land-locked nation. They immediately demanded that I give them control of their own market; I initially refused, then realized that they did need it, since they had no way to access my own market. 

This gets back to the issue I had before with no Front. In Victoria 3, you can sign treaties with other nations for Military Access and/or Transit Rights, which respectively allow you to march armies through a nation's territory and to trade through their territory. Conceptually, I feel like if I have a treaty for movement through China, then I should be able to land troops in China and march them through to Tibet; or I should be able to trade from Tibet through China and out to my market via the ocean. As I've learned, though, this is not the case. You can't "land" troops or trade directly into a foreign nation, whether or not you have a treaty with them: they only allow you access starting from land you yourself own. This is where "treaty ports" come into play: these are small, single-province territories that generally have very few resources or arable land but do give you strategic footholds into distant lands. So, long story short, I should be prioritizing getting Treaty Ports if I want to conduct military operations on another continent. For trade, my general preference is to get a coastal nation to join my trading Power Bloc and then work my way inland; unfortunately, in east Asia all of the nations are insular, isolationist and xenophobic, so it's incredibly difficult to get the necessary Influence advantage. I'm still trying to figure out how to connect to Tibet.

 

 

Moving on to politics: I mentioned in my last post that I was having a hard time passing the Laissez-Faire law. The only interest group that ordinarily supports it is the Industrialists, and they were very unhappy with me due to my strong pro-labor positions, and had low clout due to my Universal Suffrage voting, and seemed particularly reluctant to join larger parties; when they did, the ideological incoherence tended to make those parties non-starters for forming government. I did eventually get to pass the law; I forget now whether that's because a Market Liberal became a party leader of another interest group, or if the Industrialists were finally able to make it into government. The Trade Unions were incensed that I was even considering the law, but I had banked a lot of approval with them from my earlier laws; I think I was able to neutralize their opposition by promising to pass Workplace Safety Protections or similar, so I was glad to still have that bargaining chip up my sleeve.

 

 

My private sector has grown a lot since adopting Laissez-Faire. I don't usually pay a ton of attention to it, it just grinds away in the background building stuff, and I'll pick up the slack for any necessary goods it under-develops. Every once in a while I'll peek into the Private Construction Queue and see what it's up to. One time I did that and burst out laughing. It had queued up twelve Railroads in Timbuktu. Timbuktu had a single railroad, which, granted, was running at capacity and earning a respectable profit; but still, it was a massive overinvestment into a remote backwater. I'm sure that the "dumb" AI just saw the current profit and decided to jump on board. But the thing that cracked me up is, that is exactly what happened historically with railroad constructions! The mid-to-late 1800s were filled with ventures where multiple competing railroads would pour into an area, overinvest, overbuild, and be left with too much infrastructure that was earning too little to be profitable. That story has cropped up in House of Morgan, Goliath, and more. Anyways, it just cracks me up that one thing can both seem like a really dumb AI bug and an accurate historical representation of our real-life stupidity.

It's been interesting to see how politics have shifted. In the monarchial days, I tended to have high Legitimacy with a power base that included the Intelligentsia and some other IGs, so I was able to generally progress through reforms I wanted. Once we switched to a democracy, I put a strong thumb on the scales for a Trade Union / Intelligentsia party; this had fairly low legitimacy, which I partially offset with low taxes and concessions. Over time this party grew very strong, and I finally started to have more Loyalists than Radicals due to the continued high legitimacy. More recently, the Catholic/Conservative party has consistently been stronger. Now that I no longer need to pass particular laws, I've shifted my strategy from boosting my preferred party to instead checking what party is in the best position at the start of an election, and then taking all the choices to further boost their vote. This ensures that they take office with a high Legitimacy; I've been able to run High Taxes while also maximizing my Loyalists for a couple of decades now. High Loyalists keeps all the Interest Groups in the neutral-to-happy zone (except the Landowners, but screw them). 

 

 

I think that the reason the conservative party has been stronger lately is because of my advancement and wealth. I've been shifting to more advanced production methods, which has more demand for skilled labor and middle-strata jobs; I think this results in a shift to a populace that proportionally is more likely to favor the Petite Bourgeois over the Trade Unions. Historical materialism, baby!

I've been really happy with the shift to Laissez Faire, which as hoped has turbo-charged my economy. The budgets have gotten really weird: for the first decade or so, I persistently ran a large deficit, and yet my treasury was usually near the max. I think this is because the private sector keeps buying government-owned buildings, which impacts the treasury with one-off transfers but doesn't show up in the budget. I slashed taxes and still had a hard time staying under the maximum reserves, until I eventually grew my military large enough to eat up the surplus.

Speaking of armies: as I mentioned in my last post, I've had a few wars against the Netherlands. I've surpassed them with my tech, economy and military, but I've had to be strategic in my wars so they don't call in too many powerful allies; in particular, I've tried to wait until Great Britain is tied up in a half-dozen conflicts. I eventually conquered their continental holdings, seizing the remainder of Gelre and all of Holland and Friesland. However, I did not take Luxemburg, which I now hugely regret. I'd been friendly to them, supporting their independence, and had a vague idea that I might be able to diplomatically annex them. That isn't a thing in Victoria 3, though. They did break free of the Netherlands, but were just their own state; I could guarantee their independence, but again, that wouldn't actually add them to my territory. This was a bummer because I just needed their province to be able to form the United Netherlands, one of my few concrete goals for this campaign.

 

They got gobbled up by the German Empire, which then prompted me to shift my entire diplomatic outlook. I ended my campaign-long rivalry with Russia and boosted my friendship with France, hoping that one of them would start a war that I could join against Germany, who I was no longer appeasing. I also seriously cranked up my military. I'd had far more than enough for the Netherlands, but not nearly enough for Germany; worse, Germany was allied to Britain, which is friendly with me but has the world's largest army and an even larger navy. I'd been neglecting military techs for most of the campaign, but made a concerted effort to try and get a generational advantage in my ship designs.

 

 

The actual war for Luxemburg was huge. I secured an alliance with France and declared on Germany specifically for that one teeny tiny province in German Wallonia. Britain joined Germany, and so did Russia. Britain was fighting a bunch of other wars at the same time and never landed troops in the continent, but I had to play hide-and-seek with their navies: I would sink supply ships and blockage ports around the North and Baltic Seas, then scurry back to Holland once Britain's stack of 120 Modern Ironclads appeared on the horizon.

 

 

The war was a slog - I had an advantage in quality, but Germany and Russia had infinite manpower to throw in front of me. I made gradual progress on the front along the Rhineland and Alsace-Lorrance, but no progress in Wallonia. I eventually set that as a Strategic Objective, which I think may have prompted my generals to change their focus along the front. I feel like they should have done that anyways, as getting the War Goal is so essential for victory. Once I did have it, I switched my generals' orders from Advance to Defend and waited a few months for the war enthusiasm to drop low enough. At last - tada! - I had my United Netherlands.

 

 

A little while after this, France somewhat surprised me by launching their own war against Sardinia-Piedmont. I shouldn't have been surprised, France has been fairly war-hungry for the whole game; now that I have Luxemburg I think I'll probably gracefully drop that alliance. But it ended up working out pretty well. Portugal answered Sardinia-Piedmont's call to arms, and in exchange for my own support I was able to make a secondary demand of Portuguese Angola. This is adjacent to my huge colonial holdings in the Congo, and covers a ton of coastline and adds significantly to my stock of potential rubber plantations (and, just as importantly, removed non-Belgian rubber from the World Market). Russia was also pulled into the war, with France making some nonsensical demand for like a regime change in Chechnya or something.

I was feeling good about this war, but was shocked to realize that all of my battalions were at 0% Organization, hamstringing their effectiveness. The UI for this was very unhelpful, claiming that there was a supply shortage and the "supply ships" were delivering 0 supplies. I eventually realized that it was due to a shortage of radios in particular. Which is weird, since I hadn't discovered radios yet - weirder yet, nobody on the planet had! I think that I had discovered a more advanced unit type (probably Mobile Artillery or something) and upgraded my battalions to that type, but that type apparently requires radios, even if they don't exist. Annoying. I think the game should warn you if you're trying to research and/or switch to a unit type you can't actually use. (Ideally the Radio tech would be a prerequisite for techs that require Radio, but I don't think they currently have any way to manage dependencies between the Production, Military and Social tech trees.)

So I switched up my research plans to drop everything and discover Radio. This took about 9 months; in the meantime, I was able to completely take the totally undefended Angola despite 0% Organization. I had a lot of troops along the Rhone front, I set them all to Defend and let France do all the heavy fighting. (Hey, they started the war!) Eventually I discovered Radio, was able to switch my existing Electrics Industries to start building them, and gradually get my forces Organized again and eventually assigned to advancing the front. Once we were all pushing together, we were able to take down Sardinia-Piedmont.

They surrendered, but the war continued. I'm still getting used to the Victoria 3 system of war. You can't negotiate a peace unless all parties in the war agree to it, including co-belligerants; but anyone can Capitulate at any time. If you do this you leave the war, but co-belligerants stay in it. S-P gave in on all the War Goals against them, but I still didn't own Portuguese Angola, because that goal was against an ally.

I shifted my focus to invading Iberia. I would have loved military access through Spain, but Spain hates me for reasons I no longer recall. So I did my first, and so far only, Naval Invasion. I think this is another new feature from the recent Great Wave update. I didn't have any Marines or anything, but I had a good-sized army of about 54 Infantry and Artillery, and a big Transport fleet to get them to Iberia. Portugal's armies teleported back from the Rhone, but they were pretty small. I was able to get a toehold, then could transport the rest of my armies there regularly. Before long Portugal surrendered and I got my Angola. As I write this Russia fights on, which is pretty funny - they don't have any War Goals assigned to them, so there doesn't seem to be any point, other than maybe inflicting pain on France. I don't really care about anything else in this war so I've preemptively demobilized my troops and am letting France do what it wants, which at the moment seems to be launching doomed naval invasions of Karelia.

That seems to be a good place to pause this update and jump back into the game! I don't have any other conquests planned on the horizon, and I think that once I end my alliance with France I should be free from getting pulled into or being targeted by other wars. The one other thing I'd kind of like to try and get is Multiculturalism, which seems to be even harder than Laissez-Faire since none of the Interest Groups support it, nor any of the major ideologies in Belgium/United Netherlands like Liberalism or Radicalism. It looks like I might need to trigger some sort of revolt or uprising to get it. Anyways, that's another system for me to try and learn; in the meantime, I'm having a blast just growing my economy, increasing my GDP and literacy rate and standards of living. Fun times!

Our Town is a Company Town

I've had Company Town by Madeline Ashby on my list for a while now. I think I was originally drawn to it via a warm recommendation from Charles Stross. I wasn't sure what to expect, as I wasn't familiar with the author and wasn't even sure exactly what genre it was. It ended up being a fun, exciting and thought-provoking read.

 

MINI SPOILERS

Like many of my favorite books in speculative fiction, the worldbuilding in Company Town is almost all implicit: nobody sits you down and says "This is How Things Are and How They Got To Be This Way". Over the course of the book, though, you gradually figure out the setting, in parallel with getting to know the characters and the actual plot.

So, laying down my impression, which is much more linear than the actual book:

Company Town is set in the mid-future: I'd guess a couple of generations from now, not multiple centuries. Nations still exist, but mostly as geographic descriptors, not political entities. This book takes place in what used to be Canada. The titular town is a massive offshore oil rig. Its primary economy is extracting oil, but there's a whole town that has grown up around that industry, which is larger than the work itself.

A few years before this book opens, a disaster occurred that killed many people in the town. They were able to rebuild, but at enormous expense, which has resulted in the town being sold to the Lynch Corporation. This is a wealthy and comparatively benevolent family concern, headed by the elder Lynch who has been pursuing life-extending treatments and so is overseeing multiple generations of his progeny.

The overall technology of this world is recognizable, with a few particular innovations standing out to me. Genetic screening and modification have recently become widespread and socially accepted, so parents will select their childrens' traits in advance. People are also significantly augmented, with bio-engineered limbic upgrades and eye enhancements and such. And speaking of eye enhancements, most people participate in a sort of shared augmented-reality version of the world: they select what image they want to project to others, and decide what images they want to receive. In general this allows people to edit out parts of their vision that they don't want to see or replace it with something more palatable.

The protagonist, Hwa, is kind of an oddity in this world. She was born near the tail end of non-genetically-selected humans. She has a birth defect that would horrify some people, except that since everyone else has selective vision, they don't see anything wrong with her. And she has, out of pride or poverty, rejected implants, making her way through life with just her own strength.

It took me a while to realize that Hwa is also a high-schooler. She comes across as significantly older in the opening chapters. One of the major industries in the town is prostitution, and Hwa is a bodyguard who escorts the escorts, picking them up from clients and making sure everything is consensual and safe. Many of the characters in this novel are prostitutes, and overall it seems to be pretty sex-work-positive, although there's also a lot of danger shown in the profession.

For most of the novel, Hwa's job is protecting the young Lynch scion, putting her bodyguard skills to use protecting him from an unknown enemy; they also attend class together, collaborate on science projects and go to a dance. Hwa also grows closer to Daniel, a protector/enforcer for the Lynches, which turns into a pretty great slow-burning romance.

MEGA SPOILERS

The brutal murders continue to pile up as the novel progresses. There's a pretty fun twist near the end, when you realize that all along the killer has been trying to stop Hwa, not murder Joel Lynch. I was surprised by who the killer actually turns out to be, although we've spent fairly little time outside of the main cast and so I struggled to remember what we knew about him.

The book definitely seems to set up a sequel when it ends, particularly with the revelation that the killer(s) were not the entity that had sent the threatening notes about Joel. I have no idea what to make of that.

END SPOILERS

I really enjoyed this book - I read it during a vacation, and it was a great place to lose myself during long flights and while nestled in quiet spaces. As far as I can tell it doesn't look like there's a sequel, but the author has written several other books and I'll likely be looking for them in the future. Overall it was a fun read with good action, some really witty dialogue, nicely twisty plotting, and an intriguing world to reveal. 

What's So Great About the Great Books

I like reading books, and I like writing about reading books, and I like writing about reading books that write about reading books!

I just finished "What's So Great About the Great Books?", the latest book and first non-fiction book from Naomi Kanakia. It's a great, thoughtful, gently persuasive case for the seemingly-daunting task of reading through "the classics", the received-wisdom (but surprisingly amorphous) list of the greatest books ever written. She roams around a bit, looking at the contents of the books themselves but also directly addressing the many reasons why people may be reluctant to embark on such a time-consuming project.

 

 

For the last few years I've followed along with this project through her blog Woman Of Letters, which launched as a Substack in part to promote this book's project, and since then has also become a place to read intriguing short fiction (as well as some really fun and occasionally catty inside-baseball glimpses of the literary fiction world). Some topics from this book have been previously discussed on there, such as the importance of taste and the value in reading authors from diverse eras as well as diverse cultures. I liked how everything came together in this volume, each chapter is nicely focused but the book as a whole coheres and can easily refer back to previous points.

While this isn't exactly a memoir, it does draw on a lot of autobiographical material, both the overall course of her life and specific meaningful moments within it. This doesn't feel at all gratuitous: the book aims to show how reading the Great Books can change your life, and shows that in a concrete way. She also shows how her own understanding of the Great Books has changed: when she started reading them, she was an aspiring science-fiction author, and assumed that all writers and publishers were immersed in the Great Books. Only many years later did she realize that most writers have not seriously studied these books, either in school or outside of it, and that today that classics have only marginal influence inside academia.

I like how Naomi keeps restating the premise of the book - she uses different language at different points, but the overall thrust is that reading the Great Books is a good use of your time, because it will help develop your sense of taste. It does this by exposing you to very well-written literature, and literature from cultures unlike our own, so being exposed to this greatness helps you recognize greatness. Having this taste won't directly transform your life: it won't make you more employable or popular, but it can improve the quality of your life and make you more thoughtful. In her own experience, she can't say "Reading X helped me do Y", but the overall experience of reading Proust was profound, and reading about the struggles of characters in eighteenth-century novels gives language for us to describe our own situations.

The book spends a lot of time considering the intersection of politics and the Great Books. Historically, the Great Books as a concept started as a middle-class American invention in the post-WW2 era. This was a time when the elite institutions like Harvard stopped requiring Latin and Greek, so there was a desire to still share those ancient stories to a larger audience. Academics thought that people reading these great books would help make the populace more educated, thoughtful, better citizens. Encyclopedia Britannica sent its salesmen door-to-door selling subscriptions to the Great Books; their direct goal was profit, and the vision they sold was that people would be able to raise their social and cultural capital by learning to speak about these great books. Interestingly, this was especially effective in many African-American homes, and you can still see a lot of Great Books on the bookshelves of older black peoples' homes.  In a survey Encyclopedia Britannica commissioned to study who was buying the books, they found that they tended to be weird, loner nerds, who loved books but felt awkward in high society, and saw the books as a potential gateway to entering that world.

Today, interest in the Great Books in America tends to be aligned with Christian, traditional, conservative groups. The classics tend to be either ignored or viewed with suspicion by progressive or liberal readers, which includes most of secular academia and the publishing world. Naomi seems to be primarily writing to this latter group, and many chapters consider the objections people might have. Are these books racist? Do they harm society? Can reading them trigger you and cause psychological damage? She takes these concerns seriously, looking at the reasons they are raised and what valid arguments could be made, but continually concludes that the benefits outweigh the risks. In some cases, these books are great because they swim in murky and uncomfortable waters. Or we can learn to see the beauty of their art and not be distracted by the author's prejudices.

I have to say that I think I personally lean more towards the perspective of Naomi's wife, who questions the company that these books keep. I mentally sort art as inferior to politics: beauty is wonderful, but survival is more important than beauty. That said, What's Go Great About the Great Books? comes at politics-and-art from a slightly different angle. I'm used to arguments about, say, whether we should praise and study works like "Triumph of the Will" or "Birth of a Nation" that are impressive artistic achievements with horrendous messages. Naomi, though, sees art as inherently individualistic. Experiencing a work of art doesn't mechanically move you in a given direction. If it moves you at all, the effect will depend on your own private history, culture, community, prior beliefs, concerns in life, and so on. As one example, Anna Karenina is beloved by many people who identify as leftist, even though the novel is explicitly about traditional morality. Reading Anna Karenina won't mechanically transform you into a traditional moralist.

Or to directly quote from the book: 

To reduce the Great Books to politics is to make a fundamental mistake about the nature of reading. A book does not make us do or think anything. In reading the book, we might alter our own beliefs, but we changed ourselves - the book does not change us. So, to say certain books are bad is to, as its core, make an assumption about free will: to assume that books can act mechanically on human beings, such that human beings are helpless to judge or resist them. But if human beings can determine their own beliefs, then books cannot be pernicious; they can only be better or worse tools for achieving whatever purpose the reader intends for them.

Then a footnote adds:

An exception to this statement is books that lie. These are books that make arguments that are easily disproven, using either surface-level logic or empirically attained evidence.

Reading that, my mind immediately goes to books that have had a pernicious effect on civilization: the Turner Diaries, the Malleus Malleficarum, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The latter two books definitely lie, the former is a novel. What does it mean for a novel to "lie"? And does it matter that most people believed the lies? To be fair, I don't think any of these books or books like them are part of the Great Books canon, but still, I think there's a gap between our ideal vision of a noble reader thoughtfully and sensitively communing with a work of literature, and the actual measured impacts that some books have caused in generating murders.

Naomi says that books with "perfect politics" can't be Great Books, because they're too flat, missing the complexity and contradiction that reflect real life and are present in great literature. Emile Zola has complicated politics, Upton Sinclair has perfect politics, but The Jungle isn't a good book, because its protagonists are too perfect. I agree that complexity is essential for greatness, but I also think that you can have good complexity or bad complexity. George Saunders might be my Platonic ideal of good complexity - his characters are messy and flawed, but there's a keen moral voice at work in his work. You can still wrestle with a hard problem and its rough edges while always being within a bounded moral area. Would Saunders' stories be better if they earnestly espoused racism or homophobia? They'd be more "complex" but worse.

I'm reminded of recent discourse on and about Bluesky - there's a recurring charge that it's an "echo chamber". Which is kind of funny, because there's nonstop heated argument and debate on there. But on Bluesky it's mostly leftists arguing with liberals. Would the discourse be elevated if the Bronze Age Pervert and Matt Walsh and Curtis Yarvin were a key part of the discourse? I think not - it would be more "complex", but wouldn't elevate worthy ideas above their current exercise. As in the Brain-Dead Megaphone and Nexus, adding more information does not always and mechanically bring us closer to goodness or truth. It has to be good, true information to begin with.

But again, I think all this is somewhat orthogonal to Naomi's thesis. We aren't talking about the Turner Diaries, we're talking about Huckleberry Finn and Aristotle and Nietzsche. These are specifically great books, written by people who died a long time ago and were writing to and about a world that no longer exists. There are good things we can get out of those books, and we shouldn't let our present concerns prevent us from their goodness.

Shifting topics a bit: Kant comes up several times during this book. I haven't read him, but I really like the idea presented here that we can know an object or truth through intuition, not through reason. Logic and reason let us communicate ideas, but those ideas only exist within our minds; actual objects do exist, but we cannot discover them through reason. But art can be a way for us to directly experience and understand those things which cannot be explained. This reminds me a little bit of Kierkegaard, who I have read and enjoyed, and similarly draws a strong boundary between logic and faith: faith isn't necessarily less valuable or important than logic, but exists independently of it.

The appendix to the book includes the list of Great Books that Naomi has been following. As she explains, while plenty of people are eager to extol the virtues of The Great Books, they tend to be very cagey about exactly what books are on or off the list. A handful are indisputable (no list would omit The Odyssey or Shakespeare), but when you start deciding who is in or out you'll inevitably get drawn into arguments. So it's mostly coincidental that this is the specific list she's followed.

Anyways, I like lists too! Just for fun, I noted below which of these Great Books I've read. Ones I mark with a * are cases where I've read only part of a book (typically a collection of poems or essays). Like Naomi, I count books that I know I've read even when I don't remember them well. I think I read The Mayor of Casterbridge for English class in either my junior or senior year of high school, but I couldn't tell you anything about it today.

I read a lot of these books in high school or in college: I was an English Literature major, so many were very relevant! I more clearly remember the ones I've read since then as an adult. I am not counting plays that I've seen but not read, and obviously not adaptations like movies. 

Anyways, I have read: 

The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous

The Iliad by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Antigone by Sophocles

The Histories by Herodotus

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

The Birds by Aristophanes

Protagorus by Plato

Phaedo by Plato

The Aeneid by Virgil

* The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Prince by Machiavelli

The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 1 by Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 2 by Shakespeare

Hamlet by Shakespeare

King Lear by Shakespeare

Macbeth by Shakespeare

Othello by Shakespeare

The Tempest by Shakespeare

* Selected Sonnets by Shakespeare

* Selected Works by John Donne

Discourse on Method by Descartes

Paradise Lost by Milton

* Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

* Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

* Basic Documents in American History by Thomas Jefferson and others

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

Kubla Khan by Coleridge

Pride and Prejudice by Austen

* Nature by Emerson

* Selected Essays by Emerson

The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne

* Selected Tales by Hawthorne

* On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

* Short Stories and Other Works by Edgar Allen Poe

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Walden by Thoreau

Civil Disobedience by Thoreau

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels

Moby-Dick by Melville

Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville

* Selected Poems by Whitman

Madame Bovary by Flaubert

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

* Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson

Huckleberry Finn by Twain

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Ulysses by James Joyce

The Trial by Kafka

The Castle by Kafka

Brave New World by Huxley

The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner

* Short Stories by Hemingway

Labyrinths by Borges

Dreamtigers by Borges

Pale Fire by Nabokov

Animal Farm by Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell

* Collected Poems by Auden

The Plague by Camus

The Stranger by Camus

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez

 

Looking through this list, the biggest surprise for me is my lack of Dickens - he has a lot of books on this list, I've read some of his work but nothing on the list. The list and Naomi's recommendation also reminds me that I want to read more of the great Russian novelists - Crime and Punishment was an incredible book, and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain exposed me to a lot of great short stories from Russians. I'm pretty sparse on poetry and drama, and feel fine about that; most poetry leaves me cold, and I'd usually prefer to see a staged performance of a play than read the text.

What's So Great About the Great Books? was a treat. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect when I picked it up, and I'm still not sure how best to describe it (a manifesto? an essay? a memoir?), but I know I enjoyed it. I've been a lifelong reader, but definitely an aimless one, veering between authors and subjects based largely on whims. I admire the dedication and earnestness in pursuing such a daunting life-long project to read through all these Great Books. As Naomi says, not everyone will, can or should follow this path: some people are too busy curing HIV to read Proust. But for those of us with the leisure time and attention spans to read, we can get a lot from these old, great books.