Kind: Notes

My fiction book at the moment is Blue Remembered Earth by Alistair Reynolds. I’m enjoying it so far. The characters are a bit flat, but it’s got an interesting mystery in it. One thing I really like is the background world, it’s around mid-22nd century, and Africa, China, and India are the big world powers. It’s not discussed at all in the narrative – but it seems like a very possible future. It’s relatively peaceful and quasi-Utopian, although it’s hinted at that some of that peace seems to come from authoritarian-sounding mass surveillance.
Really interesting to learn that the developer of the ideas of Gross National Product (Kuznets) was also a very vocal critic of it being used as the only measure of a country’s success.

“the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income”.