Book Club discussion

Sometimes the timing of things works out quite well, simply by chance. Reading this book right after The Disaster Tourist, was good timing, they are both books about the excesses and destruction caused by capitalism, and they both speak to the subject with a degree of humour, but the similarities mostly end there.

The Big Short is a non-fiction book, and this bookclub generally doesn't generally hasn't done much non-fiction, especially outside of the travel and biography realms, but Hanna gave me this book when I was in London, and it is a topic that interests me.

The Big Short manages to take on the complex, chaotic and opaque topic of the global financial markets and manages to string together something of a narrative through tangentially connected character sketches. It's a great achievement to bring this order of clarity and narrative to such an important event which defies simple explanations.

By making the book about characters and describing their underlying humanity The Big Short is ultimately able to transcend the narrative of just the financial crisis and also speaks to the choices we've made as a society and offers a critique. This is where dovetail back to The Disaster Tourist, a critique of the complex systems that we've built as sometimes the purpose of the complexity appears simply to be the opacity that used to escape accountability.

The key difference is that in the The Disaster Tourist a faceless corporation "Paul" is in charge, calling the shots, and there is an actual narrative that is being followed, written by paid writers. The disaster in this universe is not collateral, the disaster is the point. It's not the inevitable consequence of a series of bad decisions, it's the point. In The Big Short, the disaster is the consequence of everyone acting so much in their self-interest because they were able to create systems of asymmetric risk that allowed them to reap benefits while passing on the risk, at the end of the day the government stepped in to backstop everything. Not to say there wasn't many cases of fraud and malice occurring, but they were on the margins, not the central feature of the system.

Which is to say that The Big Short is a very good book which I would recommend.

Movie was good, IMO. Lots of bittersweet moments.