Scott Patterson
Review via The New York Times
The world Patterson portrays is largely divided among two camps: investors who subscribe to Taleb’s “Black Swan” philosophy of financial markets as vulnerable to unforeseeable shocks and those more convinced by the French researcher Didier Sornette’s “Dragon Kings,” anomalous but somewhat foreseeable events. Sornette, who steadfastly believes in “pockets of predictability,” finds Taleb and his partner Mark Spitznagel’s credo a touch too woo-woo. “Quants,” the financial engineers who trust complex formulas to tell them what the future holds — and who are the focus of another book by Patterson — are the extreme foil to both groups.
“The Black Swan concept is dangerous,” Sornette tells Patterson. “It puts us back at the time of pre-science where the wrath of nature, the lightning, the storms were the expression of the anger of the gods.”
Markus K. Brunnermeier and Ricardo Reis
Summary via publisher (Princeton U. Press)
With alarming frequency, modern economies go through macro-financial crashes that arise from the financial sector and spread to the broader economy, inflicting deep and prolonged recessions. A Crash Course on Crises brings together the latest cutting-edge economic research to identify the seeds of these crashes, reveal their triggers and consequences, and explain what policymakers can do about them. Each of the book’s ten self-contained chapters introduces readers to a key economic force and provides case studies that illustrate how that force was dominant. Markus Brunnermeier and Ricardo Reis show how the run-up phase of a crisis often occurs in ways that are preventable but that may go unnoticed and discuss how debt contracts, banks, and a search for safety can act as triggers and amplifiers that drive the economy to crash.
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Review via The Wall Street Journal
“If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won. I win the coast, I win, you know, Illinois and Minnesota, places like that. I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.” So remarked Hillary Clinton, with her usual charm, in 2018. What she meant, of course, is that she won the cities; her words nicely summarize the metropolitan progressive’s view of rural Americans: dumb, lazy, backward-looking, mostly white, always bellyaching. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett challenges that stereotype in “The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country.”
Simon Sharpe
Review via The Guardian
Simon Sharpe’s Five Times Faster outlines a radical but realistic plan for scaling up cuts in global emissions of greenhouse gases so that we reach net zero by 2050 and avoid a rise in global temperature of more than 1.5C.
He starts from the insight that although annual global emissions of greenhouse gases have been rising over the past two decades, this increase has been at a slower rate than the growth in the size of the global economy. Hence the world’s economy has become less emissions intensive, by about 1.5% a year, because of the expansion of renewable power, electric vehicles and energy efficiency.
FC Barker
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
In How I Rob Banks: And Other Such Places, renowned ethical hacker and social engineer FC delivers a gripping and often hilarious discussion of his work: testing the limits of physical bank security by trying to “steal” money, data, and anything else he can get his hands on. In the book, you’ll explore the secretive world of physical assessments and follow FC as he breaks into banks and secure government locations to identify security flaws and loopholes. The author explains how banks and other secure facilities operate, both digitally and physically, and shows you the tools and techniques he uses to gain access to some of the world’s most locked-down buildings.
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