Archives de catégorie : Economics

THE END OF REALITY de Jonathan Taplin

A brilliant takedown and exposé of the great con job of the twenty-first century—the metaverse, crypto, space travel, transhumanism—being sold by four billionaires (Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk), leading to the degeneration and bankruptcy of our society.

THE END OF REALITY:
How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of The Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto
by Jonathan Taplin
PublicAffairs, September 2023
(via Writers House)

At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme—the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism—is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms.
In THE END OF REALITY¸ Jonathan Taplin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen (“The Four”) —and shows how their tech monopolies have brought middle-class wage stagnation, the hollowing out of many American towns, a radical increase in income inequality, and unbounded public acrimony. Meanwhile, the enormous amount of taxpayer money to be funneled into the dystopian ventures of « The Four, » the benefits of which will accrue to billionaires, exacerbate these disturbing trends. 
THE END OF REALITY is both scathing critique and reform agenda that replaces the warped worldview of « The Four » with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment.

“Persuasive and insightful, this cutting portrait of America on the verge of oligarchy hits home.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Jonathan Taplin is a public intellectual, writer, film producer, and scholar. He is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and professor at the USC Annenberg School from in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment. His extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band, producer of major films such as Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, an executive at Merrill Lynch, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service  and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. His book Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (Little Brown 2017) was nominated by the Financial Times as one of the Best Business Books of 2017. His commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Medium, the Washington Monthly, and the Wall Street Journal.

NUMBER GO UP de Zeke Faux

The harrowing, highly entertaining inside chronicle of how FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and a cast of fellow nerds and hustlers convinced the world to send trillions of dollars of real money to buy useless virtual coins—from a Bloomberg Businessweek writer.

NUMBER GO UP:
Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Currency/PRH, September 2023

After years on the financial world’s margins, crypto went mainstream in 2021. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady and Justin Bieber endorsed it, and Washington bigwigs debated new regulations. It seemed like everyone knew someone who was bragging about their returns from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and other bizarrely named “digital assets.” FOMO spread: Was crypto the new path to financial freedom? Unspoken was that hardly anyone knew how it worked. To borrow a phrase from crypto parlance, the only thing that mattered was “number go up.”
Observing this mania, Zeke Faux decided to embark on a quest to pull back the curtain on the wizards behind this new financial machinery. He first sets his sights on Tether, a digital currency dreamed up by a former child actor from the 1992 Disney film The Mighty Ducks. Tether had become crypto’s de facto bank, with $69 billion pouring into it. Each Tether was supposedly backed by one dollar. But where was the money?
As he chases this mystery around the globe, Faux is driven by a nagging question: Is it all just a global confidence game of epic proportions? In the Bahamas, he meets Tether’s biggest customer: Sam Bankman-Fried, a schlubby 29-year-old who Fortune once suggested was “the next Warren Buffett.” In El Salvador, he discovers what happens when a country decides to gamble its treasury on Bitcoin. A spam text message leads him to a crypto-fueled human-trafficking ring in Cambodia. And in Lugano, Switzerland, he finally tracks down the mysterious former plastic surgeon who runs Tether.
Then, in 2022, the crypto bubble burst, and Tether’s biggest customers started collapsing one by one. It culminated in November, when Bankman-Fried’s FTX failed in spectacular fashion. Faux returns to the Bahamas and takes readers inside the glittering sadness, lies and delusion of SBF’s luxury loft in the days after FTX’s implosion, revealing the emptiness at the center of the crypto industry. Fueled by the absurd details and authoritative reporting that earned Faux the title “our great poet of crime” (Matt Levine), NUMBER GO UP is a riveting account of the biggest financial mania the world has ever seen.

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News in New York. He’s a winner of the Gerald Loeb award for explanatory business journalism and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel award, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Faux lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their three children.

POWER AND PREDICTION d’Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans & Avi Goldfarb

Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines can help you prepare.

POWER AND PREDICTION:
The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence
by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans & Avi Goldfarb
Harvard Business Review Press, November 2022
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted many industries around the world—banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, manufacturing, and retail. But it has only just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions that drive strategic business decisions. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform, and with such transformation comes disruption.
What is at the root of this? In their bestselling first book, Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet game-changing economics of AI. Now, in POWER AND PREDICTION , they go deeper, examining the most basic unit of analysis: the decision. The authors explain that the two key decision-making ingredients are prediction and judgment, and we perform both together in our minds, often without realizing it. The rise of AI is shifting prediction from humans to machines, relieving people from this cognitive load while increasing the speed and accuracy of decisions.
This sets the stage for a flourishing of new decisions and has profound implications for system-level innovation. Redesigning systems of interdependent decisions takes time—many industries are in the quiet before the storm—but when these new systems emerge, they can be disruptive on a global scale. Decision-making confers power. In industry, power confers profits; in society, power confers control. This process will have winners and losers, and the authors show how businesses can leverage opportunities, as well as protect their positions.
Filled with illuminating insights, rich examples, and practical advice, POWER AND PREDICTION is the must-read guide for any business leader or policymaker on how to make the coming AI disruptions work for you rather than against you.

Ajay Agrawal is Professor of Strategic Management and the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is founder of the Creative Destruction Lab and the Metaverse Mind Lab and cofounder of NEXT Canada and Sanctuary.
Joshua Gans is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Strategic Management at Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is Chief Economist of the Creative Destruction Lab, department editor (Strategy) at Management Science, and cofounder and managing director of Core Economic Research.
Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and Professor of Marketing at Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, a fellow at Behavioral Economics in Action at Rotman, and a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

EARTH FOR ALL, par le Club de Rome

Now is the moment to change course towards a future that is stable. A future worth living on a finite planet. This book is the operating manual to do just that.

EARTH FOR ALL
by The Club of Rome
New Society Publishing, Summer 2022

Almost 50 years ago a group of scientists published a remarkable book that shocked the world. The book, The Limits to Growth, was a warning to humanity. Based on the results from one of the first computer models of the global economy, it showed that population and industrial growth was pushing humanity towards a cliff. Fifty years on, the scenarios explored by the authors still hold true. We know we are crossing planetary boundaries. Inequality is causing deep instabilities in societies making it impossible to make long-term decisions for the benefit of all. There seems to be no way out.
EARTH FOR ALL is an antidote to despair. Using state-of-the-art computer models combining the global economy, population, health, inequality, food, and energy, a leading group of scientists and economic thought leaders present short- term levers for long-term systems change. They show for the first time it is possible to have long-term prosperity for all if key turnarounds are put in place and foundational paradigm shifts adopted. It is possible to stabilize our planet and ensure greater wellbeing for all. And it is possible to do this in a single generation: by 2050. This is arguably the most profound scientific and economic insight of our age.
EARTH FOR ALL describes five systemic shifts that need to happen to upend poverty and inequality, lift up marginalized people, and transform our food and energy systems. Decade by decade, the book details what needs to happen, where and when. It explores eight geographical areas, each with their own distinct characteristics: from the US to Asia and Africa; and recommends key principles for the necessary economic paradigm shifts to enable a new kind of growth within limits.

The Club of Rome is an NGO founded in 1968 to address the multiple crises facing humanity and the planet. Drawing on the know-how of its 100 members – notable scientists, economists, business leaders and former politicians – the organization seeks to define comprehensive solutions to the complex, interconnected challenges of our world. Its goal is to actively advocate for paradigm and systems shifts which will enable society to emerge from our current crises, by promoting a new way of being human, within a more resilient biosphere. Its seminal, best-selling 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, alerted the world to the consequences of the interactions between human systems and the health of our planet. Since then, more than 45 Reports have reinforced and expanded that intellectual foundation.

THE REVENGE OF POWER de Moisés Naím

In his New York Times bestselling book The End of Power, Moises Naim examined power-diluting forces. Now, in THE REVENGE OF POWER, Naim turns to the trends, conditions, and behaviors that are contributing to the concentration and augmentation of power and to the clash between the forces that weaken power and those that strengthen it.

THE REVENGE OF POWER:
The Global Assault on Democracy and How to Defeat It
by Moisés Naím
St. Martin’s Press, February 2022

Moisés Naím concentrates on the three “P”s—populism, polarization, and post-truths. Using the best available data and insights taken from recent research in the social sciences, Naim reveals how the same set of strategies to consolidate power pop up again and again in places with vastly different political, economic, and social circumstances. The outcomes of these battles for power will determine if our future will be more autocratic or more democratic. These outcomes will, in turn, depend on the capacity of our democracies to survive the attacks and dirty tricks of autocratic leaders bent on weakening the checks and balances that limit their power. Naim addresses the questions at the heart of the matter: What are, in practice, those attacks and tricks? Why is power concentrating in some places while in others it is fragmenting and degrading? And the big question: what is the future of freedom?

Moisés Naím is a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an internationally syndicated columnist. For over a decade he was the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine and under his leadership, the magazine was re-launched, won the National Magazine award for General Excellence three times and became one of the world’s most influential publications in international affairs. Naím also served as Venezuela’s Minister of Industry and Trade and as executive director of the World Bank. He holds a PhD from MIT and lives in Washington, DC.