Book Bits: Six New Reads
● Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles for Pivoting Through Disruption
Will Page
Review via The Financial Times
Tarzan Economics borrows its title from technologist Jim Griffin’s 2009 speech reflecting on the music industry’s response to the file-sharer Napster. Griffin described how successful companies need always to swing forwards, Tarzan-like, by reaching “for the next vine”. Page has done time in the jungle himself, as a civil servant turned chief economist at PRS, the UK music rights collecting society, and Spotify.
He applies his “rockonomist” eye well beyond the music business, which he argues just happened to be the first industry to suffer significant digital disruption, and therefore the first to “grab a new vine” of streaming services and recover. “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling,” management thinker Peter Drucker said. “That’s why you need this book,” Page writes. “It makes you look afresh at what you think you know.”
● Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power
Zachary Karabell
Review via Publishers Weekly
Journalist and former finance executive Karabell (The Last Campaign) delivers a largely flattering history of the private investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman. In 1800, Alexander Brown left Belfast, Ireland, for Baltimore, Md., where he became an importer of linen and an exporter of tobacco. Drawing on company records, Karabell tracks the evolution of the Brown family business from trading to investment banking, and its merger, at the height of the Great Depression, with a bank founded by railroad heir and U.S. diplomat W. Averell Harriman. Along the way, Karabell documents formative moments in America’s economic and political history
● Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
Ali Tamaseb
Q&A with author via TechCrunch
TC: Why write this book?
AT: When I was a founder, a lot of my perception was shaped through this lens of what the media tells us. Even now, when I’m on Twitter or Clubhouse, a lot of what I hear feels very different compared with what I see as a venture capitalist. Of course, nobody knows everything, and even the most successful venture capitalists have maybe invested in 10 of these breakout companies in their lifetime. So to get to the ground truth, and because nobody has collected this data because it’s hard, over four years of weekends and evenings, I began to collect [it], ultimately establishing 65 data points per company.
● The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World
William D. Nordhaus
Summary via publisher (Princeton University Press)
Solving the world’s biggest problems—from climate catastrophe and pandemics to wildfires and corporate malfeasance—requires, more than anything else, coming up with new ways to manage the powerful interactions that surround us. For carbon emissions and other environmental damage, this means ensuring that those responsible pay their full costs rather than continuing to pass them along to others, including future generations. In The Spirit of Green, Nobel Prize–winning economist William Nordhaus describes a new way of green thinking that would help us overcome our biggest challenges without sacrificing economic prosperity, in large part by accounting for the spillover costs of economic collisions.
● The Promise of Bitcoin: The Future of Money and How It Can Work for You
Bobby Lee
Summary via publisher (McGraw Hill)
Lee offers a primer on the best strategies for purchasing and investing in this digital currency. He discusses the pros and cons, and covers the more complicated method of acquiring bitcoin, mining. He predicts developments in regulation, technology, business, and society that will lead to bitcoin’s price increasing 500 percent over the next two decades. In the wake of the current economic crisis, Lee calls on consumers to embrace a technology that will not only increase their wealth but make their lives easier.
● Postcapitalist Futures: Political Economy Beyond Crisis and Hope
Edited by Adam Fishwick and Nicholas Kiersey
Summary via publisher (Pluto Press)
This book critically engages with the proliferation of literature on postcapitalism, which is rapidly becoming an urgent area of inquiry, both in academic scholarship and in public life. It collects the insights from scholars working across the field of Critical International Political Economy to interrogate how we might begin to envisage a political economy of postcapitalism.
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Disclosures: None.