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 the type of rich where they own mansions, but parents who had jobs that let them spend evenings and weekends with kids to help them learn by travelling. Parents could afford to rent a second home on the other side of the country to get their kids 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 support their children in their 20s as they volunteer because they're passionate about whatever social injustice they gravitated towards1.

While I'm not done with 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 (he didn't), or busing poor kids to "better" schools which waste 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 a harder time 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, in 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 readings, 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? I don't have time to read every book and research every claim it makes...so at some point, I have to trust.

Maybe a good tack moving forward is to search for critical reviews of the book I'm reading as part of my final note-taking process.

  • 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. ↩