● The Corporate Life Cycle: Business, Investment, and Management Implications
Aswath Damodaran
Summary via publisher (Portfolio/Penguin Random House)
Throughout his storied career, Aswath Damodaran has searched for the universal key to demystify corporate finance and valuation. Now, at last, he offers the groundbreaking answer to readers everywhere. It turns out there is a corporate lifecycle very much like our own — with unique stages of growth and decline. And just as we must learn to act our age, so too must companies. By better understanding how corporations age and the characteristics of each stage of their lifecycle, we can unlock the secrets behind any businesses behavior and optimize our management and investment decisions accordingly.

● Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More
Rob Larson
Summary via publisher (Haymarket Books)
Economist Rob Larson combines wit, righteous anger, and clear-eyed analysis as he dissects the lifestyle, moral bankruptcy, and stupidly large sums of money hoarded by the disgustingly wealthy. The fact that we live in one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world is becoming common knowledge. And while lists of “richest people in x country” may be easy to come by, how much do we really know about the billionaires who sit atop our global economic system? Who are they, really? How did they accumulate their ill-gotten gains? And what kind of depravities do they use to maintain their positions?

● How to Think Like an Economist: Great Economists Who Shaped the World and What They Can Teach Us
Robbie Mochrie
Review via Publishers Weekly
Mochrie, an economics professor at Heriot-Watt University, debuts with an erudite history of economics, told through profiles of thinkers who have advanced the discipline. According to Mochrie, Aristotle believed that charging interest was immoral, and Saint Thomas Aquinas only grudgingly allowed that merchants could ethically profit from trade. Elsewhere, Mochrie impartially contrasts Adam Smith’s conception of the market as a mechanism for channeling self-interest into socially benign cooperation with Karl Marx’s ideas about how market dynamics empower capitalists to exploit workers.

● Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition
Jeffrey Ding
Summary via publisher (Princeton U. Press)
When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In this book, Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

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