Winter 2021 Quarterly Book Round-Up

My Favourite Books from the beginning of this year.

Some of the Books I read this winter

I go through phases of heavy fiction and heavy nonfiction consumption. This was a heavy nonfiction few months, probably because most of the fiction I have on my immediate TBR list is in Spanish, and grad school has me feeling a bit unmotivated to make progress on that. However, I often discuss the nonfiction I read with friends, which is extra motivation to get through it, allowing me to overcome the inertia imposed on me by grad school.

I’ve read 12 books so far this year, and have already discussed a few of them on this blog (the three Magicians books), so what follows will just be my top four.

The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan

This book is an argument that much of education spending is a fat waste of money: Caplan heavily buys into the signalling hypothesis of education. This hypothesis is thus: some to most of the value of education is not in the human capital (knowledge) that it provides, but rather what information that it shows about you to employers. Caplan lays out a pretty compelling case in his book, calling on the sheepskin effect (large gains in salaries the year of graduation), among other things as proof of signalling. While there are compelling counterarguments to even the sheepskin effect, I think…