21st-century classic books?

EconJournalWatch asked contributors to name works published so far in this century that will still be valuable to read in 2050. I don’t think I could possibly agree with most of the selections. I contributed my own, including this one:

Ray Kurzweil, 2005, The Singularity Is Near. If Kurzweil’s extrapolations are correct, then the reader in 2050 will be a transhuman cyborg, who probably will find the rest of this list trivial. If instead the human race remains much as it is in 2020, then the reader should be curious to figure out “what went wrong.”

11 thoughts on “21st-century classic books?

  1. “Coming Apart” (2012) by Charles Murray.

    My guess is that this book will either be updated or re-written several times between now and 2050 because the (depressing) themes are prescient. Good luck to our future selves in sorting through this mess!

    “It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship.”

    “America is coming apart at the seams—not seams of race or ethnicity, but of class.”

    “The culprits are the increasing market value of brains, wealth, the college sorting machine, and homogamy.”

    “My best estimate is that nonmarital births in Belmont as of 2008 were around 6 to 8 percent of all births, whereas in Fishtown they were around 43 to 48 percent of all births.”

    “A substantial number of prime-age white working-age men dropped out of the labor force for no obvious reason. Whatever that reason may have been, it affected men with low education much more than men with high education.”

    “When I say that the American project is in danger, that’s the nature of the loss I have in mind: the loss of the framework through which people can best pursue happiness.”

  2. Your choices all seem plausible, worthwhile books.

    Personally, more scholarly works probably have more staying power. There have been 50th anniversary editions out recently for several classics and I imagine that they will be the same sort that remain useful in 2050. For example one of the three books on my nightstand and which I delve into regularly is the 50th anniversay edition of Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. One can’t really put that intoncontext without Carole Robbins 1959 classic The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman so that naturally is nnaturally sitting there as well. The third book, a light fiction, Jorge Amado’s Tieta came out in 1977.

    From that position, the betting odds would seem to favor works like:

    Rachel Foxley’s 2014 The Levellers: Radical political thought in the English Revolution (Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain) should rise in prominence as the profound inluence of 17th century English radicalism becomes better appreciated.

    Berend Grofman and Arend Lijphart’s 2002 edited collection of essays “Evolution of electoral laws and party systems in the Nordic countries” which observes the political maneuvering behind changes in proportional representation. Has a chapter on Norway which offers context into why the unicameral national assembly would vote in 2009 to stop dividing itself into an upper and lower division.

    The second edition of Arend Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy, came out in 2012, an enormously influential book that has spawned an enormous literature that should still be cited in 2050.

    Anand Teltumbde and Suraj Yengde’s 2018 biographical and critical essays collection B.R. Ambedkar, The Radical in Ambedkar, should stand the test of time. I predict Ambedkar will be more famous in 2050 than he is now.

    Thinking, Fast and Slow, from 2011 by Daniel Kahneman seems to have established something of baseline in understanding the human brain that well may endure to 2050.

    Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 came out in 2012 and people will still be reading it just for pleasure in 2050.
    Not just a preeminent historian, Bailey had writing chops.

    Barry Cunliffe will remaIn essential reading. His 2011 Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000 will probably be his most popular work in 2050.

    I can see Yuval Levine’s The Great Debate from 2014 serving as a useful introduction to Burke and Locke in 2050.

    Undoubtedly missing many better choices that I haven’t read due to not having English translation s available.

  3. Great choice with Ray Kurzweil. Speaking of which, has anyone seen him since March? He must really be hunkering down.

    Quantum computing physicist David Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World” will be worth reading if only for the last two chapters, “Unsustainable” and “The Beginning” to see how humanity did relative to 2011.

  4. I did not see any books about China. Yet China’s rise is surely the most important story of the 21st century.

    • China was rising in the 90s. In the first twenty years, I think the rise of social media is at the top and Kurzweil takes the reader to what he thinks 2020 to 2045 looks like. He has gotten important predictions wrong (95% of diseases curable by 2019 and driverless cars common) but some many correct that people were laughing at in 2004.

        • According to Kurzweil, a new and improved Alvin Toffler 2.0 will be able to comment at some point after 2045. I bet he will be impressed.

  5. COuld not buy Kurzweil then, cannot now.

    We are not one iota closer to understanding consciousness than we were in ’05.

    All we have done is write bigger and “better” algorithms. Thought and consciousness continue to elude us utterly.

    and without some kind of significant breakthrough in something other than CS (philosophy? Quantum science??) (hint: Computer science is not, nor will it, help us here), we will never do so.

  6. I think we are least an iota closer. There is Daniel Dennett’s 2018 From Bacteria to Back and Back: The Evolution of Minds, certainly an advance over 1991’s Consciousness Explained, which didn’t. And there is Stanislas Dehaene’s 2014 Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts the capstone to a trilogy that includes The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics and Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read.

  7. I assume the state of economics will move on in 30 years, for better or worse. And I will assume this person can go read Smith, Bastiat, Hayak, etc for him or herself. So I would pick some books that explain books that provide particularly interesting information to an economics of “my team.”

    3 Languages -> I’m not butt kissing here. Sadly, the teams described in this book were kind of smashed by the coming of Trump, but it was a very lucid explanation of the way the teams used to talk. And the idea that teams will have their own axis of morality should be an enduring truth. My friends all over the political spectrum appreciate this book, when I have them read it.

    The Wizard and The Prophet, 1491, and 1493 ->Not written by an economist, but a journalist trained in some kind of STEM education. Nevertheless, he demonstrates a mastery of showing how economic decision making influenced some Very Big Ideas.

    Bad Blood -> Not every Sil Valley start up is like this. But you couldn’t say no other start up was like this. Does a good job of describing both what happened, but also the environment needed for it to happen.

    The Cult of Smart + Charter Schools and their Enemies -> Neither is perfect (I don’t think fully automated luxury communism is likely to be a useful solution to the problem of education), but both are very good at describing the crisis of public education current.

    Intellectuals and Society, Bourgeois Virtues, Coming Apart -> others have already described why this would be on my list.

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