● Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence
Ajay Agrawal, et al.
Review via Financial Times
When these three authors published a well-reviewed book about the economics of artificial intelligence called Prediction Machines in 2018, they thought they had nailed it. They later realised they had missed out important parts of the jigsaw, which has conveniently given them an excuse to write a second book.
Their fault, they admit, was to obsess too much about what the technology could do in theory rather than how it might be used in practice. Neural networks can indeed be usefully viewed as prediction machines that can draw robust conclusions from vast amounts of disparate data. But they will never be adopted in an organisational vacuum. So, the authors have shifted their focus to how we make decisions (human cognition), why people make decisions (social behaviour) and the interconnections between decisions (production systems and industry structures).

● Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon
William D. Cohan
Review via The Dispatch
And then there is the sorry story of General Electric, as told by noted business journalist William D. Cohan in Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon. (Cohan’s publishers must have real faith in the book: You’ll notice that the company’s name does not appear in the book title, and its logo appears on the cover only as 18-point shadow text.)
GE—the company that once boasted, “We bring good things to life”—helped bring to market world-changing products from the electric lightbulb to the jet engine. Yet it ended up being a company that mostly played with money through GE Money Bank, a subsidiary of GE Capital. And it did so with a genuinely spectacular level of incompetence.

● Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency
Andy Greenberg
Review via The New York Times
Greenberg, a writer who covers, among other things, hackers, surveillance and the seamier precincts of the internet for Wired, deftly assembles a rogues’ gallery of characters who fell prey to this false sense of invulnerability: drug marketers, thick-necked federal agents, globe-trotting libertarians and (less amusingly) child porn collectors.
“Tracers in the Dark” sets the scene by highlighting politicians’ self-fulfilling predictions that the new internet wild west would provide an unprecedented chance for bad actors to carry out lurid evil deeds with impunity.

● Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950
Review via The Economist
Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger
Robert Skidelsky’s three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes achieved something few histories of economic thought can do: it was well written, packed with interesting detail and offered enough—but not too much—theory. Now Keynes’s great rival, Friedrich Hayek, is the subject of a biography comparable to Lord Skidelsky’s. It is certainly on a similar scale. The first volume is more than 800 pages, and a second is on the way. Bruce Caldwell’s and Hansjoerg Klausinger’s work also has the makings of something just as good.

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