● The Data Economy: Tools and Applications
Isaac Baley and Laura L. Veldkamp
Summary via publisher (Princeton U. Press)
The most valuable firms in the global economy are valued largely for their data. Amazon, Apple, Google, and others have proven the competitive advantage of a good data set. And yet despite the growing importance of data as a strategic asset, modern economic theory neglects its role. In this book, Isaac Baley and Laura Veldkamp draw on a range of theoretical frameworks at the research frontier in macroeconomics and finance to model and measure data economies. Starting from the premise that data is digitized information that facilitates prediction and reduces uncertainty, Baley and Veldkamp uncover the ways that firm-level data choices resonate throughout the broader macroeconomic and financial landscapes.

● A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims: The Ugly Truth about Stakeholder Capitalism
Andrew F. Puzder
Summary via publisher (Encounter Books)
Over the last thirty-five years, asset manager mega-giants BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard have accumulated unprecedented levels of stock ownership in virtually every major US company. Voting the shares they hold for clients allows these companies to force their own “environmental, social, and governance” or “ESG” agenda on the American corporate sector and, by extension, on all of us. A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims exposes how, although they may abandon the acronym “ESG,” these elites have pursued—and will continue to pursue—their ESG goals: to transform our consumer-driven free-market economy into one that is subject to their elitist demands, overriding the will of the people whom they deem incapable of self-government.

● A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion
Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth
Review via The Wall Street Journal
It is not only politics that may be seen as war by other means. For centuries, governments have sought to demoralize and defeat their enemies without resorting to the battlefield. In “A Measure Short of War,” Jill Kastner and William Wohlforth give a well-researched account of the many ways in which nation-states have conducted information warfare aimed at “subversion”—with lessons for democracies in our current, war-raging moment.

● Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America
Erik Baker
Summary via Harvard U. Press
How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change—not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven’t seen commensurate rewards. Make Your Own Job explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies.

● House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company
Eva Dou
Interview with author via The Diplomat
Q: One of the core concerns in the West about Huawei is uncertainty about the depths of its ties to the Chinese state. As early as the 1990s, you note in the book, Huawei had been subject to security demands from the Chinese government. What do we know about if and how Huawei rebuffed those demands? In the end, how would you characterized the connection between the company and the state?
A: Huawei has resisted becoming too intertwined with Beijing over the years, with Ren fearful the company would lose its competitive edge if it was subsumed into state bureaucracy. But the reality is that tech companies must cooperate with the national-security requirements of their governments – that is the case under the law in China, the United States, and countries around the world. We know through Edward Snowden’s leaks that U.S. companies have not been able to rebuff such demands from the U.S. government, and Chinese companies would likely have less ability to rebuff Beijing.
There’s a logic to why governments would want to use domestically made technology equipment. But in the globalized economy, it’s also impossibly expensive for most countries to build end-to-end systems entirely at home. So it’s a balance.

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