David Roediger
Summary via publisher (Haymarket Books)
The Sinking Middle Class challenges the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, but this social experience separated them from the contemporary middle class of today, overwhelmingly employed and surveilled. Today’s highly unequal US hardly qualifies as sustaining the middle class.
Jonathon P. Karelse
Summary via publisher (Forbes Books)
Dating back to the ancient time of the venerated Oracle at Delphi, humans have been curious as to what the future has in store. The desire for foresight has been proven to be not only a subject of extreme curiosity but also one of considerable need. In Histories of the Future, author Jonathon Karelse walks us through the storied timeline of forecasting and its disparate origins in places like sugar beet farms, naval warfare, and computer labs. It begins with the period leading up to the calamitous 1929 stock market crash and brings us through the decades, showing how the blend of technological advancements and business progression have advanced us to where we are today. Histories of the Future opens the potential for new and unique ways of understanding this core business process and gives light to an entirely new way of viewing the future.
David McRaney
Review via Fast Company
If you’ve ever tried to change someone’s mind but found they were completely unwilling to budge in their thinking, it can help to understand how the brain works. Changing your mind—or someone else’s—is a complex process done through assimilation or accommodation, says David McRaney, author of How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion and host of the science podcast You Are Not So Smart.
“When the brain is confronted with novel information that generates cognitive dissonance, we tend to assuage that conflict by either updating our interpretations information or updating the models of reality that we generated to make sense of it,” he says.
Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi
Summary via publisher (Pluto Press)
Contemporary capitalism is always evolving. From digital technologies to cryptocurrencies, current trends in political economy are much discussed, but often little understood. So where can we turn for clarity? As Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi argue, new trends don’t necessarily call for new theory. In Capitalism in the 21st Century, the authors show how Marx’s law of value explains numerous issues in our modern world. In both advanced economies and the periphery, value theory provides a piercing analytical framework through which we can approach topics as varied as labour, profitability, automation and AI, the environment, nature and ecology, the role of China, imperialism and the state.
Andrew Smithers
Summary via publisher (Oxford U. Press)
The current consensus economic model, the neoclassical synthesis, depends on aprioristic assumptions that are shown to be invalid when tested against the data and fails to include finance. Economic policy based on this consensus has led to the financial crisis of 2008, the ‘Great Recession’ that followed, and the slow subsequent rate of growth. In The Economics of the Stock Market, Andrew Smithers proposes a model that is robust when tested, and by including the impact of the stock market on the economy, overcomes both these defects. The faults of the current consensus model are shown to result typically from an unscientific methodology in which assumptions are held to be valid despite their incompatibility with data evidence. Smithers demonstrates examples of these faults
Brandon M. Greenwell
Summary via publisher (Chapman and Hall/CRC)
Tree-based Methods for Statistical Learning in R provides a thorough introduction to both individual decision tree algorithms (Part I) and ensembles thereof (Part II). Part I of the book brings several different tree algorithms into focus, both conventional and contemporary. Building a strong foundation for how individual decision trees work will help readers better understand tree-based ensembles at a deeper level, which lie at the cutting edge of modern statistical and machine learning methodology. The book follows up most ideas and mathematical concepts with code-based examples in the R statistical language; with an emphasis on using as few external packages as possible.
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