Books - Q3 2025

Read 15 books this quarter. Two main themes: demographics (3) and financial services companies and banking (4). [See also first quarter 2025 and second quarter 2025.]

• Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity (2/5) Just published but this reads like it was written in 2020. Surprisingly many references to climate change by the woke author, cardiologist Eric Topol, who wants us to know that red meat consumption has a big greenhouse-gas footprint. He also says, "food deserts are real." At the same time, the book is a decent survey of the cutting edge in conventional medicine. He says that he has become convinced that we are in the early stages of generalized anti-aging drugs. He is very excited about the GLP-1 drugs for several reasons: "a disassociation between side effects and efficacy," as well as reduction of inflammation throughout the body. (Carl Lumma predicts: "We will eventually have a pill that 1B+ people take every day. It will be the most successful drug in history.") One thing he cautions about is that ultra-high protein diets (like keto) could potentially promote atherosclerosis because they are so high in leucine. On the other hand, taurine supplementation could be useful for antiaging. As you would expect, he is opposed to supplements - he does not have an anti-aging stack. He gives sensible advice on lifestyle factors (except for his total abstinence from red meat): exercise, avoiding ultra-processed foods, very low alcohol consumption, avoiding environmental toxins. (Air quality is an underrated concern.) Topol quotes someone saying that "AI will not replace pathologists - it will only replace those who do not use AI." A friend of CBS calls this "augment" theory: AI/LLMs will augment human workers and be especially useful to smarter ones who think of good questions to ask. Finally, "if an infection causes a disease, it makes sense that there could be a vaccine for it." Does he know about Greg Cochran's theory? Best takeaway: focus on diet and exercise so that you don't end up in the hands of a doctor who believes in food deserts.
• Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (1/5) Another woke book, written by two Candian wordcels who have noticed the declining birth rate and aging population problem, but whose proposed solution is mass immigration from the third world. The problem with their "solution" is that the immigration seems (to us) to contribute to the falling native birthrate, so you end up with a positive feedback loop and a replacement of the natives with migrants. But if you replace everyone in Canada with Indians, don't you just end up with a cold India? The intellectually dishonest authors dismiss all of these types of concerns with "nativism" and "racism" name-calling. They have Trump derangement even though the reason that Trump got elected may have as much to do with the Iraq war disaster (which was supported by both parties) as with immigration policy. These guys are wordcels so the book unfortunately has no modeling of different scenarios or quantitative analysis of the implications of different scenarios. What we really want to know is: how much demand for oil and coal there is going to be in 2050? How about real estate? The Twitter account BirthGauge posts TFR data which continues to show steep declines. The number of births in Poland is down 10.5% for the first half of 2025 compared with 2024. The Baltic and Visegrad TFRs are plummeting. Something that we have figured out with the help of Empty America is that these population collapses are paradoxically bullish for the big cities. People leave rural areas and small towns and crowd into the biggest population centers. Another question that we have is, assuming that you have high fertility subpopulations, how long will it take - and how big of a drawdown in population will there be before those subpopulations dominate, both numerically and politically? The Amish have a TFR of 6 but their population of 400k is too small to make any difference. And how will politics change when virtue signalling leftists with sub-replacement TFR are replaced? Cornucopian theory predicts that energy availability will continue to increase. So if energy abundance and rising standard of living is causing leftism then expect more leftism. On the other hand, religiosity (and political belief) is heritable, and the religious are having more children. The 21st century will be a test of which of these forces (increasing energy/abundance/affluence vs increasing religiosity) is stronger. 
• Buffett's Early Investments (3/5) Not sure that anyone really needs to be thinking about common stock investments that Warren Buffett was making in 1950, seventy-five years ago, but here we are. On the other hand, it does say something that you could have a strategy of buying low quality companies at a big discounts to liquidation value in 1950 and have it still work three-quarters of a century later. You could bring Benjamin Graham and Jerome Newman (born in 1894 and 1897) back today and they could set right to work making a good return with basically nothing changed about their strategy. There is very little actively managed money involved in small bank investing right now, so you can buy small banks for under 1x tangible book value and around 7x earnings. (These are not even low quality businesses necessarily.) One thing that we had never heard before is that Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate holdco was essentially a copy of Graham & Newman's company Philadelphia & Reading. "Buffett saw up close the power of total control - all the many levers an intelligent investor can pull not when he influences management, but when he becomes management. Nearly all the characteristics that became famous hallmarks of Berkshire Hathaway - the 19th century industrial beginnings, the irreversible secular decline of the original business, the initial cheap valuation, the fight for full control, the partial liquidation of inventory to raise cash, the reallocation of capital towards new and better businesses, the clever management compensation, the behind-the-scenes tax minimization strategies, the reliance on personal friendships to source deals, and the fundamental integrity and trustworthiness of company leadership as the foundation of a sprawling conglomerate - had some antecedent or inspiration in the way Ben Graham and Micky Newman transformed and built P&R."
• Dune (2/5) Empty America says, "I think the Frank Herbert Dune series is the 'deepest well' of ideas in any one series of books." The novel was published in 1965 and was made into a movie in 1984 (David Lynch), TV miniseries (2000) and movie again in 2021 (Denis Villeneuve). Perhaps what Empty America likes about it is that in the "Duniverse," a transhuman civilization that has banned all "thinking machines", including computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." Otherwise, it seemed rather thin in terms of ideas -- we are not seeing what Empty America sees here. (Normally he is a great source for worthwhile books.) The idea of an underground burrowing worm that is a quarter-mile long and over 100 feet in diameter is preposterous. A good science fiction author should be thinking about friction and the square-cube law. Also the power required to move that much sand out of the way. Highlight: "A world is supported by four things: the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous, and the valor of the brave."
• The Death of the Banker: The Decline and Fall of the Great Financial Dynasties and the Triumph of the Small Investor (2/5)  Ron Chernow worked on financial policy studies for a while in the 1980s. Unlike his tedious biographies, this is a short little pamphlet that gives his theory of why banking dynasties centered around a particular family have not been a permanent feature of economic life but rather a fleeting developmental economic phase. Best quote: "As we have seen repeatedly in our own day, any successful business that engenders a large surplus is, potentially, an embryonic bank. In the absence of special regulatory restrictions, banking seems to spring spontaneously from other forms of economic activity." His model is that there are suppliers of capital (creditors/investors), users of capital (governments, industry), and intermediaries (investment bankers) and that the relative bargaining power - the bottleneck or fulcrum - has shifted over time. That makes sense, although he does not really have good reasons for why it shifts. He ought to be thinking much more about regulation, the way that Charles Calomiris does. Big problem with Chernow: too much biography, not enough economics.
• Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (4/5) Good summary: "Intellectuals asks whether the despicable personal behavior of several influential thinkers disqualifies their far-reaching theories about how people should live." But it was not just "several." Every single leftist so-called "intellectual" from the past two centuries has been disloyal to friends, dishonest, vicious, and sexually immoral. One thing that Johnson missed, but that our generation has picked up on, is that these leftists - Marx, Sartre, etc. - were hideously deformed: bioleninism. (Another term to describe them is spiteful mutants.) Johnson: "I want to focus on the moral and judgmental credentials of intellectuals to tell mankind how to conduct itself. How did they run their own lives? With what degree of rectitude did they behave to family, friend, and associates? Were they just in their sexual and financial dealings? Did they tell, and write, the truth?" Answer: they were all monsters. Highlights: "Kipling was not an intellectual. He was a genius, he had a 'daemon' but he did not believe he could refashion the world by his own unaided intelligence, he did not reject the vast corpus of its inherited wisdom." "By the summer of 1949, thanks to a good deal of double-dealing and outright lying, Brecht had exactly what he wanted: an Austrian passport, East German government backing, a West German publisher, and a Swiss bank account." Hemingway: "My sympathies are always for exploited working people against absentee landlords even if I drink around with the landlords and shoot pigeons with them." Something interesting that Johnson has picked up on is that the Great Depression was horrible for book sales, and it caused the intellectual class to become communist, which it has remained now for nearly a century. Possible that there would be no Somalis in Minneapolis today without the Great Depression. 
• Style Drift (4/5) The latest (4th) installment in the Robert Fairchild Shipping Man series by Matthew McCleery, who is the president of a shipping industry information business called Marine Money. We thought the original book was a 5/5 and the sequels (Viking Raid, Exit Strategy, and this one) have held up well. Highlights: "'You'll take Dogecoin but you won't take gold?' 'Dog money is gold. For people who aren't fossils like you.'" "Picture the biggest warehouse you've ever seen. Raiders of the Lost Ark big. It stretches in every direction. Cool, dry air. Stacked to the rafters with rent-paying items." "Robert had learned early in high-stakes finance that big pitches had to be made face-to-face even if that meant flying across the world for a single lunch meeting." "Serendipitous run-ins between finance pros used to only happen in New York - but ever since COVID, the southeast coast of Florida had become equally fertile ground."
• Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture (3/5) We mentioned earlier this year that scientific papers which are "sleeping beauties" should be part of cornucopian theory. (The LFP battery chemistry took off because of scarcity of lithium and cobalt, but it has been known as a possible cathode material at least as far back as 1996.) The biological analogies are interesting - like the paper about the different biochemical pathways for plants to make caffeine - but we were expecting much more about the sleeping beauties in science. Here is a paper that looked at academic literature using a quantitative beauty coefficient. ("The results indicate that many SBs become highly influential more than 50 years after their publication, far longer than typical time windows for measuring citation impact.")
• A Term at the Fed: An Insider's View (3/5) Good timing since the July Fed meeting had dissents from two Fed governors who were Trump appointees (Bowman and Waller). (And now Trump has fired a Fed governor!) The author Laurence Meyer was appointed to the Federal Reserve Board by Clinton in 1996. Clinton's first choice was Felix Rohatyn (see Q1 books) but Republicans controlled the Senate and thought that Rohatyn was too dovish. (You always want tight money if you oppose the administration and loose money if you are in charge.) Meyer ended up being pretty hawkish most of his term. An evident change thirty years later is that politicians are now much less concerned about inflation. Meyer mentions that for a presidential administration to comment on monetary policy was unthinkable - no longer! If they are appointed for a full term, Fed governors serve for fourteen years and have a very cushy job, working in a pink granite and marble building, with staff to do all of the actual work. There must be some kind of a travel budget because they make speeches all over the place, although their salary is pretty low. (Meyer: "If you ran down your wealth year after year, as we were doing, you wouldn't be able to retire well.") Surprising: "I ended my term not sure I had ever influenced the outcome of an FOMC meeting." Greenspan was the chairman during Meyer's entire term and was dictatorial. For 19 years, the U.S. economy was partially centrally planned by one man. Powell is probably getting much more pushback today than Greenspan ever experienced. Greenspan's big view, the reason he didn't tighten during the mid-1990's: "newborn technological innovations take years to become productivity-accelerating tools." Other highlights: "Each wave of innovation brought with it an acceleration in productivity, while pauses in the pace of innovation were reflected in low productivity growth." "Unfortunately the Thai currency didn't really 'float.' It sank." The Federal Reserve is an institution that represents capital. The Fed's job is to make sure that labor is never the bottleneck in the economy, that labor can never earn economic rents. 
• Lincoln: A Novel (3/5) This is one of Gore Vidal's historical fiction novels. Something interesting about Abraham Lincoln is that despite having four sons, he appears to have no living descendants, the last one having died decades ago. Are WASPs not just declining politically but actually going extinct? Good review of the novel when it was published (1984) in the Claremont Review: Lincoln as Nihilist. Gore Vidal was something of a libertarian, so this novel really hammers the Lincoln (and Seward) as dictator theme. You don't often see that. "There were times when Seward felt that Chase shared his imperial vision. But those times were few. Essentially, Chase was a man in thrall to a single cause - the abolition of slavery. It was a cause that tended, in Seward's view, to drive men quite mad, assuming that they were not already mad to begin with and so turned to the cause of abolition as a means of legitimizing the furies that drove them."
• Churchill (3/5) To be clear, Paul Johnson is an essayist and not a historian. So his short biographies (this one, or his Napoleon) or his histories (Civil War) are worth reading because they are opinionated, punchy, and very readable, but they are certainly not the last word on controversial aspects of history. While Andrew Roberts loved his subject (Napoleon), Paul Johnson made a convincing case that Napoleon ruined Europe. (Note that Andrew Roberts has also written a 1,152 page biography of Churchill.) Paul Johnson seems old to us today because he was born a century ago (1925), but Churchill was half a century older than Johnson. He lived from November 1874 – January 1965. Churchill is a figure from the distant past, and Johnson was expressing a great nostalgia for Churchill (and for his teenage WWII years) when he wrote this book in 2009. Johnson is unabashedly pro-Churchill: "no man did more to preserve freedom and democracy and the values we hold dear in the West." Could Paul Johnson not see, towards the end of his life, where the road taken by the British in WWII was leading? Churchill himself bizarrely said early in his career, "the British Empire is the world's greatest Moslem power." Some highlights: "This safe seat [Epping in Essex], near London, was of enormous benefit to his career. He never had to worry about it." "From the start of the crisis [WWI], he was a prominent member of the war party. The issue to him was Belgium and her ports, especially Antwerp. Britain had always been opposed to these ports, aimed like pistols at her coast, being in the hands of a major power, especially France. That was why Britain gave a solemn guarantee of Belgian independence. Now Germany was the threat, and when the right wing of the German army, as part of the 'Schlieffen Plan' to subdue France, swung through Belgian territory, Churchill was enthusiastically in favor of Britain sticking to the guarantee - 'a mere scrap of paper' as the kaiser bitterly called it." One of Churchill's great enjoyments was his country house, Chartwell.
• American Express: The People Who Built the Great Financial Empire (3/5) Capital allocation and corporate strategy has come a long way since the 1960s and 1970s. American Express stumbled through the mid-century with two CEOs in particular (Howard Clark and James Robinson) who could not figure this out. For a long time, there was a question internally of whether AmEx was a travel services company or a financial services company, with reluctance to embrace the financial services view. James Robinson (1935-2024) became CEO at age 41 (which would never happen today) and had the wrong goal, to grow reported net income instead of intrinsic per share value. Though the shares were "out of favor," there was no thought of repurchases, rather acquisitions. Robinson actually tried to make an acquisition that would have been fantastic: McGraw Hill (now known as S&P Global, a $170 billion company). But they couldn't come to terms. Imagine if, instead, AmEx had just bought a friendly 10 or 20% stake in McGraw Hill and held onto it? One thing we didn't know is that at one point Chase owned 97% of AmEx, but was forced to sell after the Depression. Something interesting is that managements had no concept of "disruptive innovation" or the dilemma that innovators face. When debating whether to create a charge card, Amex execs worried that it would "undercut" the traveler's check - what we would now call "cannibalization." But they did not have the language needed to discuss and understand this concept. It seems so common historically in corporate America for acquisitions to have underperformed share repurchases. But managers have figured this out. In 1994, the S&P 1500 firms' market capitalization was $12 trillion. They spent $110 billion on dividends, $56 billion on repurchases, $65 billion on acquisitions, and $351 billion on capex. In 2018, the combined market capitalization was $24 trillion and they spent $525 billion on dividends, $875 billion on repurchases, $505 billion on acquisitions, and $823 billion on capex (link). Repurchases went from 13% of the amount spent on acquisitions and capex to 66%. Something else - remember that Jamie Dimon worked for American Express as an assistant to Sandy Weill from 1982-1985, after getting his MBA. Then the two of them bought a consumer finance company from Control Data and created Citigroup. We have the Dimon biography (Last Man Standing) on our list to read; he writes a good shareholder letter at JPM.
• Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future (3/5) Should have known that Tyler Cowen's recommendation was not worth much, but gambled on this because we have Linked to the author, Dan Wang, before. (Unless the reason that I thought this book seemed trite was because I have already read Wang's ideas on his website?) Noah Smith asks a good question in his review: "you should wonder whether modern China is best modeled as 'America with different leaders', or 'America 75 years ago.'" Dan Wang ways that China is an engineering state that builds and the U.S. is a lawyerly society that blocks everything. But China is less developed - that could be an alternative explanation. Good quote: "The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist." "The state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles." Other highlights: "Financial investors have seen that there is no relationship between Chinese stock market performance and GDP growth. Although the economy has grown by a factor of eight in real terms between 1992 and 2018, the Shanghai Composite Index has been one of the worst performing major indices." China's current five-year plan demands that the manufacturing share of the economy stay constant - we have seen that is not necessarily a good idea. Mentions a book called "The Morning Star of Lingao" which imagines 500 people traveling back in time to 1628 to try to start an industrial revolution in China. Big story is China's one child policy and upcoming demographic collapse. Mao was not Malthusian: "It is a very good thing that China has a big population. Even if China's population multiplies many times, it is fully capable of finding a solution. That solution is production. The absurd argument of Western bourgeois economists like Thomas Malthus that increases in food cannot keep pace with increases in population was not only thoroughly refuted in theory by Marxists long ago but has also been completely exploded by the realities in the Soviet Union and China." However, Mao's successors found that production was falling short under their central planning system, so they blinked and instituted savage population control measures under Deng Xiaopeng: "Rather than acknowledge that it could not deliver the goods, the Communist Party decided instead to blame the people. It was their 'overpopulation' that was the problem, not the inadequate economic system that the leadership insisted on." (We have mentioned Song Jian previously. He was interested in Cybernetics.) Speaking of unreliable population figures, China did not have a census until 1982, so their modeling was based on shaky estimates. "Chinese leaders were just enough exposed to the West to absorb their neo-Malthusian doomerism, without being exposed enough to the Western pushback against it." Also talks about Covid: "China doesn't have a robust system for political contestation; engineers will simply follow the science until it leads to social immiseration." Anyway, Wang thinks that it's great that China builds so much, but they don't build the right stuff.
• After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People (2/5) Wow, another woke book (like Empty Planet) about falling population. It's unclear why woke leftists are taking such an interest in population decline, but their biases make it difficult for them to reason clearly. The premise of the book is absurd: that people will choose to have 0 or 1 children for many generations in a row. These co-authors worry that since TFRs have never risen above replacement after dropping below, they never will - ever. They briefly consider population subgroups with different fertility - the Amish - but they are blank slatists who think that these differences are cultural. ("For heritable fertility to prevent depopulation, a high-fertility subpopulation would have to hang together, generation after generation...") In reality, much of fertility differences are driven by personality differences that are genetically determined and heritable. (Greg Cochran would rip this book to shreds.) The authors themselves are examples of this. Co-author Michael has only one child because his wife's "work was important to her and she didn't want pregnancy to compromise her ability to serve the communities that she worked with." What we are experiencing right now is a major selection event against that type of behavior: pathological altruism. Empty America tweet: "There probably isn't anyone you can vote for who will voluntarily tolerate population loss. Above a certain level of power/wealth, national population loss is direct personal negative for them and their own families. They will find some way to get people in." We need to build a better population model with subgroups that have different, partially heritable fertility rates. Mentions The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100 by Robert Fogel.
• Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase (4/5) We should have read this earlier. JPM has had a total return of 12.5x since it was published in October 2010. The stock traded for less than book value from the financial crisis until 2016, and again in 2020 and 2022. Shares outstanding are down by 30% since 2010. Jamie Dimon is kind of a Warren Buffett of banking. We were really impressed with his shareholder letter for 2024. (Example: "I’m a fanatic about proper accounting. Accounting can lead you to the wrong answer. Regulatory rules can lead you to the wrong answer.") That may seem trite, but it makes a big difference if you act that way. We remember talking to bankers before the interest rate spike this cycle who said that rising yields wouldn't matter to the value of their loans and bonds because they are allowed to mark them at cost, so they wouldn't show a loss. Dimon's first letter, as CEO of regional bank Bank One in Chicago, was great too. He used Bank One to take over J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., which is now the biggest bank in the world, with a $900 billion market cap. Highlights: "Dimon's is not a Horatio Alger tale. He has spent the majority of his life within the same five blocks on Park Avenue." Regarding trying to buy Fireman's Fund in 1985: "American Express couldn't do a deal if Sandy [Weill], Morgan Stanley, and Warren Buffett were on the other side." "Weill's taste for martinis led to afternoon naps on the couch in his office." (Also a big cigar smoker, Sanford Weill is still alive, age 92.) Playbook: "fortress balance sheets that gave the wherewithal to make acquisitions during downturns, when assets were cheap." "Dimon considers information systems one of the core competencies of a financial services company, and he thought the function (and any associated information technology strategy) belonged in-house." Buffett on Dimon: "Jamie writes a great letter. He writes it like he would write it to me if I owned 100 percent of the bank. It's a very sensible and literate letter from a manager to his owners. You can't find many like that. You particularly don't find them in financial services."

The top (5/5) books year-to-date:

The Vanished Landscape : A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries (Q1)  

Rocket Boys: A Memoir (Q1)  

Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (Q1)  

Civil War America: 1850-1870 (Q2)

The Fundamental Index: A Better Way to Invest (Q2)