Do you feel like you have a handle on the perils and possibilities of AI?
Do you understand the risks to us all in terms of international relations, employment, the environment, intellectual property, and “Zero Day” algorithms that could end the human race?
I gained a lot of clarity regarding these issues in The new Roaring Twenties and didn’t put the book down feeling any easier. In addition, the book cautions that we all need to educate ourselves about the inevitable changes AI is bringing into all our lives nearly every day, why we need do due diligence in accepting the news we receive over social media, and why we all need to be more human to each other in the “New Roaring Twenties.”
In short, a very important and indispensable read in 2023.
The world and its economic foundations are shifting beneath our feet!
We are at the threshold of the new roaring twenties—a resurgent era of technology-driven advancement with greater financial equity and economic expansion.
Not unlike the famed decade of the previous century, our next ten years will be filled with striking cultural shifts, new challenges, and, ultimately, abundant financial opportunities.
Paul Zane Pilzer, the economist/entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, sees a better world on the horizon. In The New Roaring Twenties he imparts inspiration and a new template for escaping the shadow of a global…
As an undergraduate History student, I was told by one of my professors that I thought too much like an anthropologist; as a postgraduate Anthropology student, I was told by another professor that I wrote too much like a historian! At that point, I finally gave up and turned to journalism and fiction writing…though my love for history figures largely in much of what I continue to write and read today.
I loved the way this anti-colonial narrative turns our idea of colonialism in India on its head. It goes beyond the obvious wrongs of the Raj to examine the 17th—and 18th-century roots of the empire—namely, the corporate greed, corruption, and outsized influence of the East India Company. It's an incredible read!
THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR
FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019
A FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, WALL STREET JOURNAL AND TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India ... A book of beauty' - Gerard DeGroot, The Times
In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English…
I did not use to believe in human progress, but thought there must have been good old days behind us – until I studied history and understood that my ancestors did not live ecologically, they died ecologically, at an early age. Since then I’ve been obsessed with progress, what makes it possible and how we can spread it to more people. I am a historian of ideas from Sweden, the host of a video series on innovations in history, New and Improved, and the writer of many books on intellectual history and global economics, translated into more than 25 languages.
The great fact of economic history is that we all used to be poor, and now most of us are not. 200 years ago, almost 90 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, today around 9 percent does. This is the story of that remarkable transformation and what made it possible. Of course, there are many good books on this, and I have greatly enjoyed for example Joel Mokyr, Deirdre McCloskey, and David Landes, but this is a powerful, short book by a great historian, that manages to weave together economic, political, technological and intellectual factors into a very compelling narrative of progress and its preconditions over the past one thousand years.
How did the modern dynamist economy of wealth and opportunity come about? This major new analytical work emphasizes the often surprising, fundamental and continuing processes of innovation and transformation which has produced the world we live in now. / Today we live in a social and economic world that is fundamentally different from the one inhabited by our ancestors. The difference between the experience of people living today and that of all of our ancestors back to the advent of agriculture is as great as that between them and their hunter-gatherer forebears. The processes of transformational changes could have started…
I am a professor of history at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. I have written about the history of international organizations, international trade, the British Commonwealth, and Canada in the world. Although these topics have taken me in different directions, I have always examined the political currents that run through them. Politics emerge in relation to ideology, policymaking, leadership, norms, values, interests, identity, international relations, and global governance. I have been especially interested in connecting economics and politics. Many scholars write about trade policies, organizations, and negotiations as though they are technical and narrowly economic when they are agents, instruments, and expressions of international politics.
This book shows how trade has long connected people and societies all over the world, from miners in Potosi, to coffee growers in Yemen, and traders and shippers from Fujian.
Topik and Pomeranz reject a Eurocentric approach to the history of international trade and they put real people back into the story. The engaging vignettes in this collection are not primarily about politics, but they make clear why trade is political and polarizing.
The workings of international trade powerfully affected people’s lives, for better and for worse, and so people reacted strongly to trade, as committed champions and tireless opponents.
The World That Trade Created brings to life the history of trade and its actors. In a series of brief, highly readable vignettes, filled with insights and amazing facts about things we tend to take for granted, the authors uncover the deep historical roots of economic globalization.
Covering over seven hundred years of history, this book, now in its fourth edition, takes the reader around the world from the history of the opium trade to pirates, to the building of corporations and migration to the New World. The chapters are grouped thematically, each featuring an introductory essay designed to synthesize…
I grew up in Brooklyn in a family that often faced financial difficulties and started working in my early teens in my father’s grocery store. These experiences made me painfully aware of the great disparities in education, security, material well-being, and opportunity in our society. I saw how these inequalities caused some people to become cynical, resigned, or indifferent—while others became determined to overcome them. I became fascinated by them. I felt that if I wanted to live in a more just and productive society, I first had to understand how it worked. My recommended books inspired me further and helped me to gain that understanding.
This is the first of four book recommendations that may not be as inspirational as The Grapes of Wrath, but which make up for that by providing real-world information that can be useful to people trying to improve our world. This book shows how fresh thinking about economics can help solve some of the world’s most intractable problems. Innovative research, careful observation, and plain common sense enable these two Nobel Prize-winning MIT economists to upend a lot of conventional wisdom and develop interesting and compelling policy proposals, which they discuss in a particularly accessible way.
The winners of the Nobel Prize show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day.
Figuring out how to deal with today's critical economic problems is perhaps the great challenge of our time. Much greater than space travel or perhaps even the next revolutionary medical breakthrough, what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life as we have known it.
Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change--these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to…
I have been studying, writing, and teaching economic history for nearly four decades. I was drawn to the field because it let me combine my passion for understanding how the past and present are connected with my fascination with the insights derived from the natural sciences. When I started studying economic history, the discipline was still relatively new, having grown out of pioneering research in the 1950s and 1960s by a small band of innovative scholars. During my career, I have met many of these intellectual giants personally, and I have watched the discipline of economic history mature and grow in both its methods and intellectual scope.
The British Industrial Revolution is the single most important event in shaping the modern world. Since 1800 the standard of living in Western Industrial nations has increased nearly 40-fold, and in the last half-century, this prosperity has spread more widely. Writing in an engaging style, Clark offers a unique and provocative account of these changes and their causes.
Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution - and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it - occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich - and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In "A Farewell to Alms", Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture - not exploitation, geography, or resources - explains the wealth, and the poverty, of…
After receiving my doctorate in Economics at Cambridge University, I embarked on a 35-year sabbatical as a venture capitalist focused on information technology. I learned about the critical role that the American state had played by sponsoring the computer industry. When the "Dotcom Bubble" of the late 1990s grossly overpriced my companies, because I had written my PhD thesis on 1929-1931 when the Bubble of the Roaring Twenties exploded, I had seen the movie before and knew how it ended. I returned to Cambridge determined to tell this saga of innovation at the frontier and the strategic roles played by financial speculation and the state in funding economic transformation."
Jon Levy provides a hugely creative account of American history through the evolution of its distinctive institution, capitalism.
He relates the unstable dynamics of financial markets to the waves of investment in real capital incorporating innovative technologies and never loses sight of the tension between power accumulated and expressed in markets and the distribution of political power, always attentive to how the former can take over control of the latter.
Levy’s work has enriched my own understanding of this contested history.
A leading economic historian traces the evolution of American capitalism from the colonial era to the present—and argues that we’ve reached a turning point that will define the era ahead.
“A monumental achievement, sure to become a classic.”—Zachary D. Carter, author of The Price of Peace
In this ambitious single-volume history of the United States, economic historian Jonathan Levy reveals how capitalism in America has evolved through four distinct ages and how the country’s economic evolution is inseparable from the nature of American life itself. The Age of Commerce spans the colonial era through the outbreak of the Civil War,…
Peter Temin is an economist and economic historian, currently a professor at MIT and the former head of the Economics Department. His research interests include macroeconomic history, the Great Depression, industry studies in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ancient Rome.
I love this book for two reasons. It condenses a massive amount of economic history into a small book, and it shows how our unequal societies are backtracking to older models of the economy.
Did you know a song by Eddie Cantor triggered the Great
Depression?
I was taking Coursera’s free online course on narrative economics with
Yale professor Robert Shiller, who was dishing insights like the above when my
thirst for even more on the topic was triggered.
I had loved Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking,
Fast and Slow concerning behavioral economics and was getting the sense
that Shiller’s narrative economics work might be just as Nobel Prize-worthy. If
Shiller does get a Nobel nomination or win, this book will let you nod your
head knowingly when it happens.
Not only is Shiller’s premise of narratives
driving the economy compelling, but he also gives super-engaging evidence in the
form of stories and research. Jaw-dropping examples (like the Cantor story)
await you in this book.
From Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller, a groundbreaking account of how stories help drive economic events-and why financial panics can spread like epidemic viruses
Stories people tell-about financial confidence or panic, housing booms, or Bitcoin-can go viral and powerfully affect economies, but such narratives have traditionally been ignored in economics and finance because they seem anecdotal and unscientific. In this groundbreaking book, Robert Shiller explains why we ignore these stories at our peril-and how we can begin to take them seriously. Using a rich array of examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular…
I’m a professor of modern U.S. History and have written books explaining the political and cultural power of corporations, lobbyists, and business people in American life. To me, thesignal event of recent history was when the rapid economic growth that followed WWII ended in the 1970s. From globalization and deindustrialization to the rise of authoritarianism under the guise of populism, from systemic racism and the rise of the carceral state to the proliferation of bad jobs and the gig economy—the effects of that historic change shape every aspect of modern life. But this topic can sometimes seem a little dry, so I’m always looking for books that help make sense of it.
Levinson is a rare thing among economists: he is willing to admit what we don’t understand.
This book argues that global productivity declined in the 1970s compared to the 30 years after World War II, and no one knows why. It seems that, under capitalism, economic growth is normally just very slow, and the fast postwar growth was the aberration. But what really matters is how political leaders responded, making a series of bad decisions to try to appease people’s over-inflated expectations of growth. And this happened all over the world, from the U.S. to Germany to Japan to Latin America. This is the book that let me understand every aspect of modern life in the last 50 years—from stagnant wages to the roller-coaster casino economy to political dysfunction to gig companies.
A Washington Post and Strategy+Business Book of the Year.
Stagnant wages. Feeble growth figures. An angry, disillusioned public. The early 1970s witnessed the arrival of the problems that define the twenty-first century.
In An Extraordinary Time, Marc Levinson investigates how the oil crisis of the 1970s marked a radical turning point in global economics: and paved the way for the political and financial troubles of the present. Tracing the remarkable transformation of the global economy in the years after World War II, Levinson explores how decades of spectacular economic growth ended almost overnight - giving way to an era of…
