Book Bits: 10 August 2024

● Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World
J. Doyne Farmer
Summary via publisher (Yale U. Press)
We live in an age of increasing complexity—an era of accelerating technology and global interconnection that holds more promise, and more peril, than any other time in human history. The fossil fuels that have powered global wealth creation now threaten to destroy the world they helped build. Automation and digitization promise prosperity for some, unemployment for others. Financial crises fuel growing inequality, polarization, and the retreat of democracy. At heart, all these problems are rooted in the economy, yet the guidance provided by economic models has often failed. Using big data and ever more powerful computers, we are now able for the first time to apply complex systems science to economic activity, building realistic models of the global economy. The resulting simulations and the emergent behavior we observe form the cornerstone of the science of complexity economics, allowing us to test ideas and make significantly better economic predictions—to better address the hard problems facing the world.

● Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I.
Callum Cant, et al.
Review via The Economist
The darker side of the shiny AI era is the subject of “Feeding the Machine” by three academics at the University of Essex and Oxford University. Automation is born of exploitation, they contend. Today’s glowing data centres that run AI systems are akin to the soot-covered factories of the 19th century. Behind the algorithms are humans—yes, lavishly paid engineers, but also an army of workers who make the systems hum, from those who review the underlying data that are fed into the software to those who check its answers.

● Technology is Dead: The Path to a More Human Future
Chris Colbert
Summary via publisher (Routledge)
How did we end up here, masters of scientific insight, purveyors of ever more powerful technologies, astride the burning planet that created us, and now responsible for cleaning up the mess and determining the future direction of all of life? And what do we do about it? Technology is Dead is a book that attempts to answer both of those questions. It is a book of both challenge and hope, written for those who are able or willing to lead us out of our global predicament. It is a book for everybody: the politicians, CEOs, community leaders, everyday parents, and young people who understand that we must change our ways to ensure a sustainable future for all living things and the planet we rely on.

● Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America
Charles Gasparino
Excerpt via NY Post
Whether it’s channeled through ESG or DEI, corporate wokeism is a farce on so many levels that it’s hard to keep track.
Google is said to be a paragon of ESG compliance (what’s the carbon footprint of a search engine?). Yet it’s one of the worst enforcers of speech codes among its employees, as the sad situation of James Damore shows.
He was a Google engineer until he decided to write a memo assailing the left-wing bias in the Google corporate culture. That’s when he was fired.
And you wonder why many employees are afraid to speak up when management brings in some CRT scholar to enlighten them on their systemic racism.

● Cryptomania: Hype, Hope, and the Fall of FTX’s Billion-Dollar Fintech Empire
Andrew R. Chow
Review via Publishers Weekly
Chow, a tech reporter for Time, debuts with a scrupulous postmortem of how “ego and arrogance” drove the 2022 cryptocurrency crash. Blaming the collapse on the “Jenga tower of insanely risky financial instruments” engineered by FTX exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Chow portrays the former mogul as a child of privilege who fostered a “relentless work culture” marked by 15-hour days and indulged in risky trades despite promising creditors to do the opposite. Covering the saga through Bankman-Fried’s fraud conviction, Chow provides a more complete tally of his subject’s misdeeds than previous treatments, but he really shines in contrasting the FTX founder with the stories of genuine blockchain idealists.

● Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers
Hatim A. Rahman
Summary via publisher (U. of California Press)
In a world increasingly run by algorithms and artificial intelligence, Hatim Rahman traces how organizations are using algorithms to control workers in an “invisible cage.” Inside the Invisible Cage uses unique longitudinal data to investigate how digital labor platforms use algorithms to dictate the actions of high-skilled workers by determining accepted behaviors, work opportunities, and even success. As Hatim Rahman explains, employers can use algorithms to shift rules and guidelines without notice, explanation, or recourse for workers. The invisible cage signals a profound shift in the way markets and organizations categorize and ultimately control people.

● Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places
Paul Collier
Review via Jacobin
In writing Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places, economist Paul Collier concedes that “I had to face the discomfiting recognition that ideas I had regarded as established truths of economics, and indeed taught, needed radical revision.” Indeed, Collier a well-known mainstream developmental economist, uses his new book to indict his own profession — in addition to shortsighted politicians and elitist bureaucrats — for helping to create the radically unequal and inegalitarian world in which we live.

● Working for Debt: Banks, Loan Sharks, and the Origins of Financial Exploitation in the United States
Simon Bittmann
Summary via publisher (Columbia U. Press)
In the early twentieth century, wage loans became a major source of cash for workers all over the United States. From Black washerwomen to white foremen, Illinois roomers to Georgia railroad men, workers turned to labor income as collateral for borrowing capital. Networks of companies started profiting from payday and property advances, exposing debtors to the grim prospects of garnishments of their wages and possessions in order to mitigate the risk of default. Progressive and later New Deal reformers sought to eradicate these practices, denouncing “loan sharks” and “financial slavery” as major threats to a new credit democracy. They proposed fair credit as a universal solution to move past industrial poverty and boost consumer freedom—but in doing so, reformers, lenders, and bankers limited credit access to the white middle-class constituencies seen as worthy of protection against extortion.

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