Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox
Review via The Economist
Revolutionaries have the best slogans. The Bolsheviks shouted “Peace! Land! Bread!” Mao Zedong promised a “Great Leap Forward”. Che Guevara claimed to “tremble with indignation at every injustice”. Advocates of gradual change, by contrast, find it hard to compose a good rallying cry. No crowd ever worked itself into a frenzy chanting: “What do we want? Incremental reform! When do we want it? When budgetary conditions allow!”
But as Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox argue in “Gradual”, incrementalism works. Revolutionaries promise paradise but often bring about bloodshed, bread lines and book-banning. Humanity has grown more prosperous by making a long series of often modest improvements to an unsatisfactory status quo. The Industrial Revolution, despite its name, was not a single, sudden event but thousands of cumulative innovations spread across nearly a century. “Over time, incremental reforms can add up to something truly transformative,” note the authors.
Dror Goldberg
Summary via publisher (Chicago U. Press)
Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems—coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention. Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed. Easy Money illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods—such as silver—to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts.
Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs
Essay by authors via Time
As sociologists interested in the connection between poverty and the dynamics of labor markets, we have traced the employment and earnings trajectories of 18,000 individuals across business cycles for the last half century. What we have found is striking: When unemployment dips below 4.5%, the odds that a marginalized worker—especially Black workers, younger workers, and those without a high school diploma—finds and keeps a job over the long-term increase dramatically. Their earnings start higher and increase faster relative to their peers who find work when jobseekers outnumber job openings.
Ken Hersh
Summary via publisher (Greenleaf Book Group)
Through their entertaining conversations, Ken Hersh and his interviewer, best-selling author Steve Fiffer, recount Ken’s improbable life journey, both personally and professionally. And what a journey it has been! Knowing nothing about the energy industry, Ken ventured in and ultimately helped pioneer an investment methodology that built one of the country’s most successful private investment firms and has been copied by dozens of firms to become the dominant means by which capital flows into the domestic energy industry. As a fearless young capitalist, he never shied away from raising his hand. He says, “I viewed every opening as a gaping opportunity. The uncertainty kind of excited me.”
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