Book Bits: 13 September 2025

● The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right)
David J. Lynch
Review via Kirkus Reviews
As the last century ended, a popular Washington consensus held that the market had all the answers and that bringing China into the global trading system would cement a peaceful future. That seemed to work out until it didn’t. It’s a discouraging story skillfully told by Lynch, global economics correspondent for the Washington Post. He reminds us that America’s industrial production has been declining since the 1950s and that automation, not foreign competition, remains the biggest factor. Obsessed with cutting costs, American businesses were already moving to Mexico and other nations, but everyone thrilled to China, which had discarded “Maoist idiocy” to open a titanic market to world entrepreneurs. The world was getting richer, and the world’s richest nation could only benefit by trading in this immense, supposedly free market. Giving President Clinton most of the credit, Lynch describes his 1990s crusade for globalization.

● How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations
Carl Benedikt Frey
Review via Financial Times
In How Progress Ends, Carl Benedikt Frey offers a detailed and compelling account of how entrepreneurial, institutional and cultural forces have shaped periods of technological advance and stagnation across the world. In doing so, Frey, an economist and economic historian, draws timely lessons for today’s policymakers as the race for supremacy in artificial intelligence and green technology continues.

● If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
Review via Semafor
For AI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, authors of the new, unambiguously titled book If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies, it’s time to freak out about the technology.
“Humans have a long history of not wanting to sound alarmist,” Yudkowsky said in an interview with Semafor before the book’s publication next week. “Will some people be turned off? Maybe. Someone, at some point, just has to say what’s actually happening and then see how the world responds.”

● Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature
Alyssa Battistoni
Summary via publisher (Princeton U. Press)
Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.

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