Unlikely Partners
Chinese Reformers, Western Economists and The Making of Global China
Reviewer: Christine Shields, Independent Consultant
Unlikely Partners recounts the story of how Chinese politicians and intellectuals looked beyond their country s borders for economic guidance at a key crossroads in the nation s tumultuous twentieth century. Julian Gewirtz offers a dramatic tale of competition for influence between reformers and hardline conservatives during the Deng Xiaoping era, bringing to light China's productive exchanges with the West.
The Power of Networks
Six Principles That Connect Our Lives
Reviewer: Mark Cleary, Kinetic Economics
What makes WiFi faster at home than at a coffee shop? How does Google order search results? Why do Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube use fundamentally different rating and recommendation methods–and why does it matter? Is it really true that everyone on Facebook is connected in six steps or less? And how do cat videos–or anything else–go viral? The Power of Networks answers questions like these for the first time in a way that all of us can understand and use, whether at home, the office, or school. Using simple language, analogies, stories, hundreds of illustrations, and no more math than simple addition and multiplication, Christopher Brinton and Mung Chiang provide a smart but accessible introduction to the handful of big ideas that drive the technical and social networks we use every day–from cellular phone networks and cloud computing to the Internet and social media platforms.
The Curse of Cash
Reviewer: Ian Bright
Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Economics, Association of American Publishers Selected for Canada's Financial Post Best Personal Finance and Economics Books of 2016 One of Bloomberg's Best Books of 2016 One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Economics Books of 2016 Longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2016 "In a brilliant and lucid new book, The Curse of Cash, the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff gives a fascinating and thorough account of the argument against cash."–John Lanchester, New York Times Magazine
The Great Convergence
Information Technology and the new globalisation
Reviewer: Bridget Rosewell, Volterra Partners
Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today s wealthy nations soared from twenty percent to almost seventy. Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As Richard Baldwin explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalisation that is drastically different from the old. Because globalisation is now driven by fast-paced technological change and the fragmentation of production, its impact is more sudden, more selective, more unpredictable, and more uncontrollable. As The Great Convergence shows, the new globalisation presents rich and developing nations alike with unprecedented policy challenges in their efforts to maintain reliable growth and social cohesion.
Dynamic Economic Decision Making
Strategies for Financial Risk, Capital Markets, and Monetary Policy
Reviewer: Dame Kate Barker
Financial decision-making requires one to anticipate how their decision will not only affect their business, but also the economic environment. Unfortunately, all too often, both private and public sector decision-makers view their decisions as one-off responses and fail to see their decisions within the context of an evolving decision-making framework.
In Decision-Making in a Dynamic Economic Setting, John Silvia, Chief Economist of Wells Fargo and one of the top 5 economic forecasters according to Bloomberg News and USA Today, skillfully puts this discipline in perspective.
Connectedness and Contagion
Protecting the financial system from panics
Reviewer: William Allen, NIESR
The Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 was intended to reform financial policies in order to prevent another massive crisis such as the financial meltdown of 2008. Dodd–Frank is largely premised on the diagnosis that connectedness was the major problem in that crisis – that is, that financial institutions were overexposed to one another, resulting in a possible chain reaction of failures. In this book, Hal Scott argues that it is not connectedness but contagion that is the most significant element of systemic risk facing the financial system.
How Change Happens
Reviewer: Vicky Pryce
This book bridges the gap between academia and practice, bringing together the best research from a range of academic disciplines and the evolving practical understanding of activists to explore the topic of social and political change. Drawing on many first-hand examples from the global experience of Oxfam, one of the world's largest social justice NGOs, as well as the author's insights from studying and working on international development, it tests ideas on How Change Happens and offers the latest thinking on what works to achieve progressive change.
The political origins of inequality
Why a More Equal World is Better for Us All
Reviewer: Christine Shields, Shields Economics
Inequality is the defining issue of our time. But it is not just a problem for the rich world. It is the global 1% that now owns fully half the world's wealth-the true measure of our age of inequality. In this historical tour de force, Simon Reid-Henry rewrites the usual story of globalization and development as a story of the management of inequality.
Platform Revolution
How Networked Markets Are Transforming The Economy
Reviewer: Mark Cleary, Kinetic Economics
Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber-these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model. Platform Revolution delivers the first comprehensive analysis of how platforms use technology to match producers and consumers in a multisided marketplace, unlocking hidden resources and creating new forms of value.
The Man Who Knew
The Life & Times of Alan Greenspan
Reviewer: Ian Harwood, Independent Economic & Investment Consultant
Shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, this is the biography of one of the titans of financial history over the last fifty years.