Book Bits: 22 February 2025

● Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back
Marc J. Dunkelman
Interview with author via NPR
Q: When New York City built its subway system in the first part of the 1900s, it took about three years to build the first subway line through Manhattan. It’s impossible to do anything in three years in the United States today, certainly anything of that scale. What do you make of that comparison?
A: I think that’s exactly right. We had a long period in our history where we gave centralized power to certain authority figures to make big decisions that were designed to help everybody. And often they weren’t beneficial. Sometimes they were abusive. There are lots of stories where we awoke to that in the 1960s and seventies.

● The Making of Modern Corporate Finance: A History of the Ideas and How They Help Build the Wealth of Nations
Donald H. Chew, Jr.
Review via Reuters
Wall Street is often blamed for reducing corporate managers’ understanding of business to a single, gameable measure of success: quarterly earnings versus analysts’ consensus forecast. The Making of Modern Corporate Finance: A History of the Ideas and How They Help Build the Wealth of Nations, a book from Donald H. Chew, Jr., seeks to reshape how many investors think about corporations’ arguably excessive focus on simplistic financial measures. He argues that many executives could learn a few things from private equity.

● Price Catalysts: Proven strategies for spotting profitable stock investments
Jim Osman
Summary via publisher (Harriman House)
Price Catalysts explores the world of corporate special situations and demonstrates how savvy investors can profit from untapped investment opportunities in this niche sector of the market. The book is a resource for investors looking for a competitive edge in studying and comprehending the intricacies, dangers, and possible benefits of special situations.

● Golden State: The Making of California
Michael Hiltzik
Summary via publisher (Mariner Books/HarperCollins)
From Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Hiltzik, a definitive new history of California—from the Spanish conquistadors to the Gold Rush to the state’s meteoric rise as a tech powerhouse and bulwark of progressivism—and of its indelible mark on the United States and the world.

● Disposable: America’s Contempt for the Underclass
Sarah Jones
Review via AP
Jones takes readers on a journey to illustrate the disproportionate impact the pandemic had on lower-income, Black and Latino communities, showing how the consequences spanned from nursing home residents to front-line health workers.
“Like all major disasters, the pandemic is a moment of revelation,” Jones writes. “Through it, we see America as it is, and not as we would like it to be.”
Jones underscores her point with staggering details and statistics about how unaddressed gaps in the health care, worker safety and other systems compounded the pandemic’s toll.

● How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change
Jens Beckert
Review via Earth.org
In this relatively compact volume, rather than focusing on geological or meteorological processes, Beckert takes on the topic from a social sciences point of view: what are the social, political, and economic drivers and structures that brought us to this point?
The book opens with a stark truth: “The broader public has known that destruction was coming for close to forty years; we have not stopped it.” The Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth in 1972. Meanwhile, in order to meet the agreed climate targets, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s most authoritative scientific body on climate change, says that global emissions would have to be halved by 2030, and reduced by 85% by 2050. This is quite simply not happening.

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