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This book is an important look at exactly how corporate accounting standards are developed, and the profoundly political nature of what emerges from that process. Ramanna takes a rigorous, analytical approach to this question in the US context, validating hypotheses on the effects of new standards bodies and their membership composition on the contours of emerging accounting guidance, and even follows that up with a survey of the international landscape. While I'm a sucker for analytical detail, some of it might have been better left as a paper citation rather than explicitly spelled out in the book. Overall, given the importance of the metrics companies report to investors and the public on their business, however, Ramanna does a service by delivering a deeper understanding of just how subjective and political this process is is of vital importance. Highly recommend

(Disclosure: Hilary is a friend)

Japan is at the forefront of directly grappling with the implications of a declining population, and arguably nowhere do these implications become more pressing than when it comes to work. Specifically, effectively integrating foreigners and women into the workforce in a country that has traditionally been seen as inhospitable to both of those groups.

Through an impressive data collection effort across a dozen large, information-worker intensive firms, Hilary reveals the surprising reality of work for different groups, with non-Western foreigners faring relatively well (albeit still with gaps relative to their Japanese colleagues), and Western men actually still seeing superior outcomes to other groups. These biases are most apparent when it comes to gender differences, and the results here around representation in more front-line roles driving perceptions is extremely important.

This is a very academically-inclined book, which I love but is a personal preference. Beyond that the sample sizes for some of the categories analyzed here are smaller than I'd like for sweeping conclusions, although it's the best data we have at the moment.

Overall, this book is an essential look at how work, organizations, and careers will change as populations shrink in rich countries and they will come to rely more on immigration. The lessons learned here will very quickly need to be applied in other rich countries as they begin to catch up to Japan, ideally at an accelerated pace. Highly recommend

This book is most interesting not for covering the ins and outs of the Gaokao itself, but for the examination of the zero-sum, competitive tournament it represents at school and beyond, importantly stretching into academia. This is almost by necessity a biased look at the system - the authors benefitted immensely from it as they mention, and also still maintain strong ties to a government that benefits from a positive framing of it. However, some of the drawbacks are engaged here, and even the quantitative data brought to bear shows many of the drawbacks of this approach along with the benefits (the economic mobility stats in particular are impressive). A big gap is any reference to educational literature, with a myopic economic focus being centered here. Overall, this is still an extremely thoughtful book on one of the world's most important evaluation systems. Highly recommend

French is always a must-read, but this book sets a new standard even for him, tracing the arc of Pan-Africanism and its reverberations across the world in a riveting fashion. While Kwame Nkrumah is at the center of this history, it is by no means a biography. Instead, French uses Nkrumah's trajectory to chart various movements in Africa, the US, Europe, and the Soviet Union and how they intersected with the African independence and Pan-African movements. It's genuinely eye-opening how connected the US and Ghana were during this period. I'd known that W.E.B. DuBois died there, but learning about Nkrumah's education in the US and the interactions and influence over the decades with people who would later become leaders of the civil rights movement was incredible. It was all the more depressing to read about the creeping impossibility of charting a successful non-aligned middle way for Ghana and African nations more broadly, but this history is a shining example of the power of international solidarity in driving social change. Highly recommend