“Slouching” Nominated for Best Business Book of þe Year, by þe “Financial Times”, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-08-16 Tu
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FIRST: Slouching Nominated for Best Business Book of the Year, by The Financial Times
PREORDER!: <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>. One of fifteen on the longlist. This makes me blush. It is very, very nice to see:
Andrew Hill: FT Business Book of the Year 2022—The Longlist <https://www.ft.com/content/f99809a6-5910-4db3-93dd-02cd7795554d>:
J, Bradford DeLong’s forthcoming Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, which analyses the years from 1870 to 2010. “By the standards of all of the rest of human history, [this period was] much more marvellous than terrible”… but… did not fulfil utopian expectations….
Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era traces how the western world embraced “neoliberalism”….
Helen Thompson’s… Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century… show[s] how energy still drives some of the most powerful and disruptive political trends….
Edward Chancellor… The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, a polemical attack on the credo of low interest rates.…
Direct: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source, by Kathryn Judge… “powerful middlemen and long supply chains”… makes the case for a return to more direct exchange….
Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, out in October, directly addresses… the complex and increasingly fragile network that builds and assembles semiconductors, the “new oil”….
Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, by Tyler Cowen… and Daniel Gross, is a highly practical guide to identifying and recruiting such people….
William D Cohan… Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of General Electric… tackles the extraordinary reputational and financial fall of the conglomerate… “a cautionary tale about hubris, blind ambition, and the limits of believing — and trying to live up continuously to — a flawed corporate mythology”.
Peter Robison… Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing… the tension between profit motives and engineering excellence….
The rise of Tencent… WeChat… Lulu Yilun Chen’s Influence Empire: The Story of Tencent and China’s Tech Ambition… media-shy programmer Pony Ma….
Sebastian Mallaby… The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption… a deep dig into the roots of the venture capital industry….
Kate Bingham… The Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain… Bingham’s experience after the government rushed her into place as head of the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce…..
Oliver Bullough in Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals….
Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World’s Most Secretive Industry, by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel… a fascinating court battle,,, over… the Brillante Virtuoso, a tanker attacked by armed men and set on fire just off Aden in Yemen in 2011….
Gaia Vince’s… Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval paints a bleak picture of encroaching disaster due to unavoidable climate change…
LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/f99809a6-5910-4db3-93dd-02cd7795554d>
What do I think of the other books?
I am still digesting Gerstle, Miller, and Cohan. And I have not even looked at any of the ten others. So if I were on the jury, and had to award it to a book not my own, I would award it to Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. Some of this is that while business- and sector-narratives like Cohan and Miller are great fun, they do not strike me as weighty things that shape my thought—which is no doubt a flaw in how my mind works. (After all, if my mind did work that way, I would probably be a business school professor.)
Cowen & Gross is in the pile, as are Chen, Bullough, Cohan, and Vince.
I think I should spend the rest of the day reading at least the samples of the others that I can get ahold of, if only to get a sense of the competition here…
One Audio:
Tyler Cowen & William MacAskill: On Effective Altruism, Moral Progress, & Cultural Innovation <https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/william-macaskill>
One Image:
Very Briefly Noted:
Tomas Pueyo: A Brief History of Spain <https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/a-brief-history-of-spain>: 'Why did Spain, and not another country, conquer most of America? Why have so many Spanish regions pushed for independence in contemporary Spain, like Catalonia or the Basque Country? Why are Spain and Portugal not united?...
WTF!?!?: Robin Wigglesworth & Alexandra Scaggs: Prepare for the WeWork-ification of Your Home <https://www.ft.com/content/89cbadb5-bc4c-4a2c-853a-ad0436aa00ba>: ‘The Second Coming of Adam Neumann: After cashing out from a failed attempt to transform the commercial property market, Adam Neumann’s second act will apparently be failing to shake up residential real estate…
WTF!?!? WTF!?!?: Robin Wigglesworth & Alexandra Scaggs: Prepare for the WeWork-ification of Your Home <https://www.ft.com/content/89cbadb5-bc4c-4a2c-853a-ad0436aa00ba>: ‘Andreessen Horowitz is reportedly investing $350mn in Neumann’s start-up Flow, after being “thrilled by the scope and aspiration”… Andreessen’s post is short on details about how, exactly, Flow is “rethinking the entire value chain”, or which “benefits of owners” renters will be able to receive.
John Ganz: The Case for Going After Trump <https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-case-for-going-after-trump>: 'Prevarications and what ifs have governed the way the political class and bureaucrats in this country have dealt with Trump from the beginning of his political emergence. James Comey bungled everything with all his efforts to appear unbiased and unpolitical...
Jay L Gischer: Grasping Reality Comment <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/do-i-now-have-a-problem-assigning/comment/8423388>: 'We very much have in our own brains a bag of words and a set of numbers which are correlations. We also have other things, which we apply in a very general way. For instance, the ability to create a map of spatial, kinetic relationships…
Ben Thompson: Instagram, TikTok, & the Three Trends <https://stratechery.com/2022/instagram-tiktok-and-the-three-trends/>: 'Twitter required active management of your feed, but if you put in the effort, you could get something uniquely interesting to you that was incredibly valuable...
MacroPolo: Who’s Paying for the Property Crisis? Not Local Governments: ‘Judging by Zhengzhou’s plan, the provincial capital of Henan with the most unfinished housing projects, it does not appear that local governments are up to the task…
Just read Bret Devereaux's post today and you and he should get together: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
_I_ should write a book arguing that Neoliberalism should at least have been tried before being declared a failure. :)