Discover transformative insights from today’s most compelling business thinkers. Each title offers powerful frameworks to reshape your thinking, elevate your decision-making, and gain competitive advantage in an increasingly complex business landscape.
Business Minds: Innovative Reads for Strategic Thinkers
How Countries Go Broke: Principles for Navigating the Big Debt Cycle, Where We Are Headed, and What We Should Do
9781398551466 | Simon & Schuster UK | HB
Ray Dalio
An urgent warning about the global economy from Ray Dalio, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Principles.
Do big government debts threaten our collective well-being? Are there limits to debt growth? Can a big, important reserve currency country like the United States really go broke – and what would that look like?
For decades, politicians, policymakers and investors have debated these questions, but the answers have eluded them. In this groundbreaking book, Ray Dalio, one of the greatest investors of our time who anticipated the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2010–12 European debt crisis, shares for the first time his detailed explanation of what he calls the ‘Big Debt Cycle’. Understanding this cycle is critical for helping policymakers, investors and the general public grasp where we are and where we are headed with the debt issue. Dalio’s model points toward surprisingly straightforward solutions for dealing with the debt problems that the US, Europe, Japan and China face today.
How Countries Go Broke also shows how these debt problems are related to the other forces – political within countries, geopolitical between countries, natural (droughts, floods and pandemics) and technological (most importantly, AI) – that together are causing what Dalio calls the ‘Overall Big Cycle’ changes in the world order. By reading this book, you will improve your understanding of what’s happening now and what to do about it.
Money: A Story of Humanity
9781471195464 | Simon & Schuster UK | BPB
David McWilliams
MONEY.
The object of our desires.
The engine of our genius.
Humanity’s greatest invention.
From clay tablets in Mesopotamia to today’s cryptocurrency, global economist David McWilliams takes us on an epic journey of innovation, disruption and transformation that is an astonishing new history of our species.
The question is, over 5,000 years, have we changed money – or has money changed us?
Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future
9798893310733 | Authors Equity | TPB
Reid Hoffman & Greg Beato
Tech visionary and co-founder of Manas AI Reid Hoffman shares his unique insider’s perspective on an AI-powered future, making the case for its potential to unlock a world of possibilities.
As taught at UPenn’s Wharton and Stanford.
Superagency offers a roadmap for using AI inclusively and adaptively to improve our lives and create positive change. While acknowledging challenges like disinformation and potential job changes, the book focuses on AI’s immense potential to increase individual agency and create better outcomes for society as a whole.
Imagine AI tutors personalizing education for each child, researchers rapidly discovering cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer, and AI advisors empowering people to navigate complex systems and achieve their goals. Hoffman and co-author, tech and culture writer Greg Beato envision a world where these possibilities, and many more, become a reality.
Superagency challenges conventional fears, inviting us to view the future through a lens of opportunity, rather than fear. It’s a call to action – to embrace AI with excitement and actively shape a world where human ingenuity and the power of AI combine to create something extraordinary.
Entrepreneur Reid Hoffman is a co-founder of LinkedIn, Inflection AI, and Manas AI. He is also host of the podcasts Possible and Masters of Scale.
Exile Economics: What Happens if Globalisation Fails
9781399817172 | Basic Books | TPB
BenChu
The dangerous race for self-sufficiency has begun. Be warned.
Nations are turning away from each other. Faith in globalisaton has been fatally undermined by the pandemic, the energy crisis, surging trade frictions and swelling great power rivalry. A new vision is vying to replace what we’ve known for many decades. This vision – Exile Economics – entails a rejection of interdependence, a downgrading of multilateral collaboration and a striving for greater national self-sufficiency. The supporters of this new order argue it will establish genuine security, prosperity and peace. But is this promise achievable? Or a seductive delusion?
Through the stories of globally traded commodities – from silicon to steel and from soybeans to solar panels – economics journalist Ben Chu illustrates the intricate web of interdependence that has come to bind nations together – and underlines the dangers of this new push to isolationism. Exile Economics is an essential guide to this new world in all its promise and peril.
Blood and Treasure: The Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to Ukraine
9780349145402 | Abacus | TPB
Duncan Weldon
Blood and Treasure is the story of the economics of conflict from the Viking Age to the war in Ukraine.
Wars are expensive, both in human terms and monetary ones. But while warfare might be costly it has also, at times, been an important driver of economic change and progress. Over the long span of history nothing has shaped human institutions – and thus the process of economic development – as much as war and violence. Wars made states and states made wars. As the costs of warfighting grew so did state structures, taxation systems and national markets for debt. And as warfare became ever more destructive the incentive for governments to resort to it changed too.
Blood and Treasure looks at the history and economics of warfare from the Viking Age to the war in Ukraine, examining how incentives and institutions have changed over time. It surveys how warfare may have driven Europe’s rise to global prominence, and it explains how the total wars of the twentieth century required a new type of strategy, one that took economics seriously.
Along the way it asks whether Genghis Khan should be regarded as the father of globalisation, explains how New World gold and silver kept Spain poor, ponders why some economists think of witch trials as a form of ‘non-price competition’, notes how pirate captains were pioneers of effective HR techniques, asks if handing out medals hurt the Luftwaffe in the Second World War and assesses if economic theories helped to create a tragedy in Vietnam. As well as considering why some medieval kings were right to arm their soldiers with inferior weapons, taking some management lessons from Joseph Stalin and asking if a culture of patronage and cronyism helped the Royal Navy rise to greatness.
Underpinning it all is a focus on how and why the economics of conflict have changed over time. Economics can help to explain war and understanding the history of warfare can help explain modern economics.
