Join 📚 Hadar's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Hadar's read, .
The first intervention – and the most overlooked – is to maximise output from agriculture, which employs the vast majority of people in poor countries. Successful east Asian states have shown that the way to do this is to restructure agriculture as highly labour-intensive household farming – a slightly larger-scale form of gardening.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records. They obviously had no computers or photocopying machines, but they did have catalogues, and far more importantly, they did create special schools in which professional scribes, clerks, librarians and accountants were rigorously trained in the secrets of data-processing.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
By then I was sick of everything. I packed a bag and went to a Buddhist temple deep in the mountains somewhere in southern China. Oh, I didn’t go to become a monk. Too lazy for that. I just wanted to find a truly peaceful place to live for a while. The abbot there was my father’s old friend—very intellectual, but became a monk in his old age. The way my father told it, at his level, this was about the only way out. The abbot asked me to stay. I told him, “I want to find a peaceful, easy way to just muddle through the rest of my life.” The abbot said, “This place isn’t really peaceful. There are lots of tourists, and many pilgrims too. The truly peaceful can find peace in a bustling city. And to attain that state, you need to empty yourself.” I said, “I’m empty enough. Fame and fortune are nothing to me. Many of the monks in this temple are worldlier than me.” The abbot shook his head and said, “No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.”
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise