Archives de catégorie : Economics

FEMONOMICS de Corinne Low

A radical framework for understanding and improving the lives of women, using a data-driven approach to overcoming the structural, economic, and biological factors that force and constrain women’s choices and limit their potential for wellbeing.

FEMONOMICS
Winning the Bread and Baking It Too: A Data Driven Approach to Happiness in Work, Life, and Home
by Corinne Low
Flatiron, Fall 2025
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

Where mostly male behavioral psychologists have previously dominated the categories of happiness and optimization, Corinne, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, applies economic principles to uniquely female concerns. Teaching readers how to use concepts like personal utility function (how we individually maximize profit and joy) and constrained optimization (making the best choice within external limits) to think about decisions and tradeoffs like the cost of a biological clock, Corinne will arm women with the tools they need to ask for more: from their partners, from their bosses, and from the system itself.

Because Corinne researches the key decisions that shape women’s lives, she finds herself most often answering surprisingly everyday (and existential!) questions from students during office hours, colleagues at conferences, and journalists behind the scenes. Questions like:

  • Should I break up with my boyfriend?
  • What kind of career gives me the life I want?
  • How should I pick a partner?
  • What kind of parent do I want to be?
  • When should I consider freezing my eggs?
  • Why should I fight to get the house in the divorce?

This book is not about optimizing — women are already optimized. It is about moving beyond the work-life binary to help women enjoy a better deal at work, in life, and at home.

Corinne Low is an Associate Professor of business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School, specializing in labor and development economics. Her research brings together applied microeconomic theory with lab and field experiments to understand the determinants of who gets how much across gender and age lines. Corinne received her PhD in economics from Columbia University and her undergraduate degree in economics and public policy from Duke University.

MELTDOWN de Duncan Mavin

MELTDOWN charts the incredible inside story of a once venerable Swiss bank that produced a conveyor belt of financial scandals and whose collapse reveals the amorality at the heart of the global banking system.

MELTDOWN
The Collapse of Credit Suisse
by Duncan Mavin
Pan Macmillan, September 2024
(via Northbank Talent Management)

It’s an international tale that takes us from Mozambique to Australia, from Hong Kong to New York, and of course, inside the hushed, marble corridors of Zurich’s banking elite.

Mavin is uniquely sourced to tell the story of Credit Suisse’s scandal-ridden demise, with dozens of inside-the-room contacts that can spill exclusive details about the bank onto the page. The bank’s collapse has been the biggest shock to the financial system since the financial crisis, sparking a media frenzy. But only Duncan has access to key sources within the bank’s executive suite and inner circle that will bring this critical, rollicking story to life.

Duncan Mavin is a seasoned international financial journalist and author of the critically acclaimed The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Multi-Billion Dollar Scandal. Since 2009, he has been a reporter, editor and now columnist for Dow Jones publications including the Wall Street Journal, based in Hong Kong, London and New York. His writing has also appeared in Barron’s, Financial News and on Bloomberg News. He lives with his wife and three sons in the UK.

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.