History Future Now

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Jobs and Economy

Unlike some of the sublime writing by historians in the Global Balance of Power reading list, the standard of writing from economists and business writers is more prosaic. What they lack in style, however, is more than made up for by some of their ideas, which have had a lasting impact.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, David Ricardo’s The Principles of Political Economy and Karl Marx’s Capital: An Abridged Edition (Oxford World's Classics) are classic economic texts for a very good reason. Smith was writing first and describes the very early stages of the industrial revolution. Ricardo came next and really provided an update to Smith with the added twist of looking at comparative advantage. Marx was the last of the three and was writing when the industrial revolution was in full swing. They are all great contemporary observations of how economies worked in their era. In many respects they were following the traditions of Malthus and Darwin who were observing the natural world - they were literally writing down what they saw. And since nobody else had done that they have become classics and also dangerous. The world economy of the 2020s has very little in common of the British economy of the 1770s that Smith was describing or the 1820s that Ricardo was describing. Yet Adam Smith is revered by large sections of the political classes as some kind of prophet. Ricardo’s comparative advantage story has been thoroughly disproved by countries like the US and China who were large enough to do everything, from agriculture to high tech manufacturing. Marx was ignored for most of his life and his ideas and his collaborative work with the industrialist Engles The Communist Manifesto (Oxford World's Classics) (mercifully short) were re-discovered decades later. But Capital: An Abridged Edition (Oxford World's Classics) is actually a pretty good read.

An Essay on the Principle of Population (Classics S.) by Thomas Malthus deserves a read and is also wonderfully short. Malthus wrote his book on population booms and busts just before the agricultural revolution which made many of his findings seem completely erroneous. But they are highly applicable to the animal world and are still used by scientists today. Humans need to keep innovating to keep ahead of Malthus. If they do not then his predictions will come true and a massive famine and population crash would be a future scenario for us all.

Jumping along I would also recommend Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change). Christensen, who died recently, has a cult like following from many businessmen who take his analysis of why some companies succeed and others fail as gospel. Christensen created a mini industry around his ideas and his various books are worth reading.

The full list is as follows:

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) 

Clayton Christensen

An Essay on the Principle of Population (Classics S.)

T.R. Malthus, Anthony Flew (Editor)

Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith, et al

Capital: An Abridged Edition (Oxford World's Classics)

Karl Marx, David McLellan (Editor)

The Principles of Political Economy

David Ricardo

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) 

Clayton Christensen

The Industrial Revolution

Patrick N. Allitt, The Great Courses

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business (J-B Lencioni Series)

Lencioni, Patrick M.

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

Coyle, Daniel

Lean Six Sigma For Dummies

Morgan, John

The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer

Liker, Jeffrey

The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses

Ries, Eric

Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean (O'Reilly))

Ash Maurya

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy

King, Mervyn

The Second Machine Age - Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

Brynjolfsson, Erik

Machine Learning For Absolute Beginners: A Plain English Introduction (Machine Learning For Beginners)

Theobald, Oliver

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

O'Neil, Cathy

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Domingos, Pedro

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Bostrom, Nick

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

Gordon, Robert J.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben Horowitz

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages

Carlota Perez

Debt : The First 5000 Years

David Graeber

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

Levinson, Marc

History Future Now

Fischer, Tristan

An Economic History of the World since 1400

Donald J. Harreld, The Great Courses

Why Did the Chicken Cross the World

Andrew Lawler

Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact (Technical Revolutions and Their Lasting Impact Book 1)

Vaclav Smil

Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Brings You 90% of Everything

Rose George

Becoming Steve Jobs: The evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader

Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization

Vaclav Smil

Pandaemonium 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers

Cottrell Boyce, Frank

Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression, and the Bankers who Broke the World

Liaquat Ahamed

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer

The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History

Fischer, David Hackett

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

Tyler Cowen

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty

Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

The End of Growth: Adapting to our new economic reality

Richard Heinberg

The End of Growth Update: Europe & America Stumble, China Hits the Wall

Richard Heinberg

The Price of Inequality

Joseph Stiglitz

The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses

Eric Ries

Capturing New Markets: How Smart Companies Create Opportunities Others Don't

Stephen Wunker

iSteve: The Book of Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

Walter Isaacson

The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better:A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton

Tyler Cowen

eWork: Change the Way You Work Forever

Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Michael Lewis

Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air

David J.C. MacKay

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers

Geoffrey A. Moore

Race between Education and Technology

Goldin, et al

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

Niall Ferguson

Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy

ESTRIN (Author)

Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action

Robert S. Kaplan (Author), et al

Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes

Robert Kaplan (Author), David P. Norton (Author)

The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor

Seeing What's Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change

Clayton M. Christensen, et al

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Urban Studies & Biography)

Robert A. Caro

The Living Company: Growth Learning and Longevity in Business

Arie De Geus

Carnegie

Peter Krass

The Affluent Society (Penguin Business)

John Kenneth Galbraith (Introduction)

Capitalism and Freedom

Milton Friedman, University of Chicago

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

John Maynard Keynes

An Essay on the Principle of Population (Classics S.)

T.R. Malthus, Anthony Flew (Editor)

The Communist Manifesto (Oxford World's Classics)

Karl Marx, et al

Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith, et al

Capital: An Abridged Edition (Oxford World's Classics)

Karl Marx, David McLellan (Editor)

Blown to Bits : How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy

Philip Evans, Thomas S. Wurster

Natural Capitalism

Paul Hawken, et al

The Internet Bubble : Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks--And What You Need to Know to Avoid the Coming Shakeout

Anthony B. Perkins, Michael C. Perkins

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