Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in Law (all time)

All Time Past 6 Months

The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder

Peter Zeihan and Hachette Audio

4.7 on Amazon

12 HN comments

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

David Eagleman

4.6 on Amazon

11 HN comments

Discrimination and Disparities

Thomas Sowell

4.9 on Amazon

9 HN comments

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Frederick Engels and Edward Aveling

4.6 on Amazon

9 HN comments

The End of Policing

Alex S. Vitale

4.7 on Amazon

9 HN comments

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics)

Hannah Arendt and Amos Elon

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement

Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

James W. Loewen

4.8 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age

Amy Klobuchar

4.5 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

Francis Fukuyama, Jonathan Davis, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

Mehrsa Baradaran

4.8 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Knowledge and Decisions

Thomas Sowell, Robertson Dean, et al.

4.8 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Evidence: A Structured Approach [Connected Casebook] (Aspen Casebook)

David P. Leonard, Victor J. Gold, et al.

4.1 on Amazon

6 HN comments

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement

John Rawls and Erin I. Kelly

4.4 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Associated Press Stylebook

The Associated Press

4.8 on Amazon

5 HN comments

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programnatureonSep 11, 2015

Fukuyama's recent book Political Order and Political Decay goes into some detail on the forest service, from its origins as a model of a modern effective government agency in the Progressive era to one captured by special interests and turned ineffective by conflicting mandates from congress.

misrabonApr 28, 2020

Reminds me of Fukyama's "Political Order and Political Decay", but in a more contemporary and narrow context. Interesting thought bubble, thanks for the read!

jwhitlarkonOct 30, 2016

Fukuyama's "The origin of political order" and "political order and political decay" I would recommend to anybody interested in this topic. They are, however, quite ... extensive.

solidsnack9000onDec 2, 2018

This is explored by Francis Fukuyama in "The Origins of Political Order" and "Political Order and Political Decay". He presents compelling arguments for why we have failed states but more interestingly, he works through how we got successful ones. Non-failed states are far more rare in history, and they are the goal, after all.

dash2onOct 22, 2020

Maybe, but plenty of intelligent specialists have thought otherwise.

* It was a common idea about the Roman empire. Gibbon found it plausible though he invoked other mechanisms.

* John Stuart Mill, who was hardly a pompous conservative: https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/12/11/luxury-and-societa...

* Toynbee too.

* More recently Francis Fukuyama wrote Political Order and Political Decay.

hacknatonJan 15, 2017

Reading Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order" and part 2, "Political Order and Political Decay" is a really good sweep on political progress where it comes from and whether or not it's inevitable (hint: it's not).

Fukuyama is a real realist. What I mean by that is that he doesn't deny that progress has occurred (something some people believe), but he points out how precarious that progress is and that it can go away (something some people deny).

I don't understand why it's a controversial statement to say that progress isn't inevitable and that decay can sometimes happen, but for some reason it is. I think his books, among many other things, are useful for grasping that progress takes hard work and can, like anything in this world, be ruined by laziness, corruption, or simple accidental misfortune.

0x10101onAug 9, 2017

I would take a look at Fukuyama's "Origins of Political Order" and "Political Order and Political Decay". The first hints of meritocracy were in China during the Qin and Han dynasties, where exams where used to provide positions in bureaucracy to those not of noble birth.

Prussia was really the first example of this in the west, where in 1770 all civil servants were required to pass a written exam.

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