I started listening to If Books Could Kill in late 2022 and it's informed how I read books, as well as ruining me for reading.

A great example is my current read, Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner, which is about how the US school system needs to change to create innovators.

In this book, Wagner, spends an entire chapter talking about innovators in STEM that should be models for how to parent children and what type of education to pursue for them to become innovators. My first hint that we may be in for a ride was the title Portrait of the Innovator as a Young Man, because innovators are male...right. Luckily it didn't take that gender biased turn, but it did take another turn into wasting my time due to no applicable information.

All of the stories in this chapter about innovative children were about children of rich people. Not many mansions rich, but parents who had jobs that let them spend evenings and weekends with kids to help them learn by traveling. Parents who could afford to rent a second home on the other side of the country to get their kid to the innovative school that they wanted to go to. Parents that could afford to send children to Ivy League schools. Parents that could loan kids $100k to start some business venture.

I'm not knocking the innovation that the children accomplished, but I have no idea how most parents should take any of this information when it's more about having a high paying job so you can finance free time for yourself and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get your kids into the "right" schools that interest them so they can then join Apple and be "innovative".

Chapter six was about innovators in social systems which was a bit better with black kids and kids from less financially well off homes. But these homes are still well off enough to be supporting their children in their 20's as they volunteer because they're passionate about whatever social injustice they gravitated towards1.

While I'm not done the book yet, I've just started the last chapter and it doesn't look like this book is going to do much to redeem itself. I have no indication that Wagner is going to deal with wealth inequality, or busing poor kids to "better" schools which wastes their time in hours of busing and does nothing to address redlining of neighbourhoods that lead to segregation in the first place.

He does nothing to talk about how schools with poor test results get less funding and thus have harder times educating students. This is fine for rich families who just pay for more stuff, and puts families lower down the economic ladder in the same spot they've always been, at the end with little support.

I'm not sure I'd have read this book as critically without the dose of reality that If Books Could Kill threw on some of my other reading, like Freakonomics. The biggest struggle now is, how deeply do I research all the claims in each book I read? How deep does the replication crisis go in making many books a house with a foundation of sand?

  • The kids to the social work all had good causes. I don't want to minimize how important saving sea turtles is or anything like that. ↩