Book Bits: 8 November 2025

● The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity
Tim Wu
Review via Financial Times
Tim Wu is a titan in the world of competition policy in digital markets. He is a distinguished legal scholar who coined the term net neutrality; the author of two significant books, The Master Switch (2010) and The Attention Merchants (2016), about the accumulation of market power by big tech companies; and was president Joe Biden’s special assistant for technology and competition policy as the administration began to attack the power of the digital giants.
This record of insight, indeed prescience, makes his new book, The Age of Extraction, a must-read. The subtitle says it all — How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. The analysis of economic dominance is unchanged from his previous books, but the tone now is both urgent and pessimistic.

● The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset
Mike Bird
Q&A with author via Jacobin
Land appears to be a simple matter — just location and dirt. But below the surface, it’s the most dangerous asset in the modern economy, determining the trajectory of modern wealth inequality. As the 2007–8 crisis demonstrated, land and housing are inextricably tied to the financial system. Changes in land values can send the entire global economy into a chaotic spiral, creating millions of layoffs and drastically altering the political landscape. Mike Bird’s new book, The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset, reveals land’s unique traits and its essential role in political history. In it, he explains how so many countries have fallen into “the land trap,” a situation where both increases and decreases in land values can have devastating economic impacts.

● The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
Michael Steinberger
Review via The Telegraph
The Philosopher in the Valley, Steinberger’s new book, chronicles the life of both Palantir and Karp (the “philosopher” of the title: he holds a PhD in social theory). The firm was founded in 2003 not by Karp, however, but by Peter Thiel, the libertarian tech billionaire and prominent donor to Donald Trump . Thiel believed that better data analysis could have prevented 9/11. Palantir’s core mission: “to defend the West”.
Whether you realise it or not, Steinberger explains, Palantir has since been at the heart of some of the “most consequential issues of the 21st century”. It helped the NHS to work out which areas of the UK would run out of PPE and hospital beds during the Covid-19 pandemic. It has gigantic international clients such as BP, Airbus, JP Morgan and Credit Suisse. Its software is being used by the Trump administration for its immigration crackdown, and by Israel in the Gaza Strip.

● Deep Learning in Quantitative Trading
Zihao Zhang and Stefan Zohren
Summary via publisher (Cambridge U. Press)
This Element provides a comprehensive guide to deep learning in quantitative trading, merging foundational theory with hands-on applications. It is organized into two parts. The first part introduces the fundamentals of financial time-series and supervised learning, exploring various network architectures, from feedforward to state-of-the-art. To ensure robustness and mitigate overfitting on complex real-world data, a complete workflow is presented, from initial data analysis to cross-validation techniques tailored to financial data. Building on this, the second part applies deep learning methods to a range of financial tasks. The authors demonstrate how deep learning models can enhance both time-series and cross-sectional momentum trading strategies, generate predictive signals, and be formulated as an end-to-end framework for portfolio optimization.

● The Baron of Wall Street: Clarence Dillon and the Making of the Modern Financial World
William R. Loomis, Jr.
Summary via publisher (Harper Collins)
J.P. Morgan. John D. Rockefeller. Charles E. Mitchell. These are some of the most prominent icons of wealth and influence during the Roaring Twenties. Yet the one figure who has strangely escaped notice all these years is an enigmatic banker by the name of Clarence Dillon. In the dazzling 1920s, as he rose in wealth and influence, Dillon became one of the original behind-the-scenes players in Hollywood, and his contact list included everyone from Thomas Edison to Charlie Chaplin and Joseph P. Kennedy to FDR.

● The Sustainable Investor: Responsible, Impactful, and Values-Driven Investing Strategies and Practices for Financial Professionals
Peter Krull
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
In The Sustainable Investor: Responsible, Impactful, and Values-Driven Investing Strategies and Practices for Financial Professionals, the Founder and Director of Sustainable Investing at Earth Equity Advisors, Peter Krull, delivers a timely and insightful discussion of sustainable investing and responsible portfolio construction. In the book, you’ll learn how to help your retail clients build solutions-based, sustainable, responsible, and impact-driven portfolios that actually reflect their values. You’ll also learn how to avoid the greenwashed, “less-bad” investments so commonly found in the products and portfolios of major Wall Street firms seeking to use ESG primarily as a growth vehicle.

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