Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
By 1965, Detroit’s big three still had 90 percent of the US car market; now they do not have even 45 percent. Until 1980, Shenzhen was a small fishing village, when it became China’s first special economic zone, and now it is a megacity with more than 12 million people: what role will it play in 2050? A mass-scale, rapid retreat from the current st
... See moreVaclav Smil • How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going
The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)
amazon.com
The U.S. geopolitical leadership has shown two faces to the world. One was the U.S. interest in building law-based multilateral institutions, including the global institutions of the UN system and regional institutions such as the European Community (and later European Union), of which the United States was a champion from the start. The other was
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
Determined to unshackle market forces from the heavy hand of the state and the millstone of “tax and spend,” the classes that led this bloc aimed to liberalize and globalize the capitalist economy. What that meant, in reality, was financialization: dismantling barriers to, and protections from, the free movement of capital; deregulating banking and
... See moreNancy Fraser • The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond
The title for the chapter on Japan is “A Bug in Search of a Windshield.” While the currency of the Land of the Rising Sun is very strong as we write, there are real structural reasons, as well as political ones, that lead us to predict that the yen will begin to weaken. At first, it will be gradual. But without real reform in government expenditure
... See moreJohn Mauldin • Endgame: The End of the Debt SuperCycle and How It Changes Everything
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St)
James C. Scott • 4 highlights
amazon.com
At the time, a fierce debate was raging about whether centrally planned economies like that of the Soviet Union—in other words, economies where there was a single core responsible for creating and distributing goods and services—worked better than free market economies where planning and production were done by an undirected, decentralized crowd. M
... See moreAndrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson • Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
A 3 percent increase in the standard of living of the U.S. population costs twenty-five times as much as a similar increase in the living standard of India, despite the greater size and more rapid growth of the Indian population. Significant benefits for the poor demand a reduction of the resources used by the rich, while significant benefits for t
... See more