The Work of the Future – Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines
By: David Autor, David A. Mindell, Elisabeth B. Reynolds – MIT
The United States has too many low-quality, low-wage jobs. Every country has its share, but those in the United States are especially poorly paid and often without benefits. Meanwhile, overall productivity increases steadily and new technology has transformed large parts of the economy, enhancing the skills and paychecks of higher-paid knowledge workers. What’s wrong with this picture? Why have so many workers benefited so little from decades of growth? The Work of the Future shows that technology is neither the problem nor the solution. We can build better jobs if we create institutions that leverage technological innovation and also support workers though long cycles of technological transformation.
The Economics of Sovereign Debt and Default
By: Mark Aguiar, Manuel Amador – Princeton University, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
The Economics of Sovereign Debt and Default looks at the core friction unique to sovereign debt—the lack of strong legal enforcement—and goes on to examine additional frictions such as deadweight costs of default, vulnerability to runs, the incentive to “dilute” existing creditors, and sovereign debt’s distortion of investment and growth. The book uses the tractable framework to isolate how each additional friction affects the equilibrium outcome, and illustrates its counterpart using state-of-the-art computational modeling. The novel approach presented here contrasts the outcome of a constrained efficient allocation—one chosen to maximize the joint surplus of creditors and government—with the competitive equilibrium outcome. This allows for a clear analysis of the extent to which equilibrium prices efficiently guide the government’s debt and default decisions, and of what drives divergences with the efficient outcome.
The Digital Republic – On Freedom and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century
By: Jamie Susskind – University of Cambridge
In The Digital Republic, acclaimed author and barrister Jamie Susskind tackles one of the biggest political and social questions of our time. He explores how developments in AI, big data, social media, and other technologies are having a profound effect on politics—and what that means for our societies. The Digital Republic is a call for political change, touching on the deepest issues of who we are and what we value most. He takes readers on a journey through a new system of ideas and governance—a digital republic—offering a vision of a world that is freer and fairer than our own.
Unnatural Disasters – Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail but Some Succeed
By: Gonzalo Lizarralde – Université de Montréal
Unnatural Disasters offers a new perspective on our most pressing environmental and social challenges, revealing the gaps between abstract concepts like sustainability, resilience, and innovation and the real-world experiences of people living at risk. Gonzalo Lizarralde explains how the causes of disasters are not natural but all too human: inequality, segregation, marginalization, colonialism, neoliberalism, racism, and unrestrained capitalism. He tells the stories of Latin American migrants, Haitian earthquake survivors, Canadian climate activists, African slum dwellers, and other people resisting social and environmental injustices around the world. Lizarralde shows that most reconstruction and risk-reduction efforts exacerbate social inequalities. Some responses do produce meaningful changes, but they are rarely the ones powerful leaders have in mind.
In this book, Gonzalo Lizarralde tackles some of the most pressing and difficult questions the world faces today as we struggle to adapt to climate change and intensified disasters. The result is a valuable and unique compendium of wisdom and experience, full of insight into both environmental problems and human nature.
David Alexander, University College London
