Monetary Policy and Its Unintended Consequences
By: Raghuram Rajan – University of Chicago
A former central banker who foresaw the 2008 crisis and wrote a bestselling book about the risks of excessively accommodative monetary policy, Rajan takes a hard look at central bank behavior and its embrace of increasingly aggressive strategies to keep economies afloat. Despite efforts to strengthen markets, the 2020 pandemic showed economies remain as vulnerable as ever to adverse shocks, prompting large-scale interventions that, in the case of Covid, led to persistent inflation and market volatility. By examining these undertheorized outcomes, Rajan hopes central banks will recognize the unintended consequences of using all of the instruments available to them, which will encourage them to return to their core mandates of low inflation and financial stability.
A powerful critique of the outsized role of central banks in the modern economy. Rajan’s call for a humbler approach is all the more compelling given his stature as one of the giants in the field.
Jeremy Stein, Harvard University
Grand Transitions – How the Modern World Was Made
By: Vaclav Smil – University of Manitoba
What makes the modern world work? The answer to this deceptively simple question lies in four “grand transitions” of civilization–in populations, agriculture, energy, and economics–which have transformed the way we live.
Societies that have undergone all four transitions emerge into an era of radically different population dynamics, food surpluses (and waste), abundant energy use, and expanding economic opportunities. Simultaneously, in other parts of the world, hundreds of millions remain largely untouched by these developments.
Through erudite storytelling, Vaclav Smil investigates the fascinating and complex interactions of these transitions. He argues that the moral imperative to share modernity’s benefits has become more acute with increasing economic inequality, but addressing this imbalance would make it exceedingly difficult to implement the changes necessary for the long-term preservation of the environment. Thus, managing the fifth transition–environmental changes from natural-resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and global warming–will determine the success or eventual failure of the grand transitions that have made the world we live in today.
Permacrisis – A Plan to Fix a Fractured World
By: Gordon Brown, Mohamed El-Erian, Michael Spence – UN, University of Cambridge, Stanford University
Three of the most internationally respected and experienced thinkers of our time, these friends found their pandemic Zooms increasingly focused on a cascade of crises: sputtering growth, surging inflation, poor policy responses, an escalating climate emergency, worsening inequality, increasing nationalism and a decline in global co-operation. They shared their fears and frustrations. And the more they talked, the more they realised that while past mistakes had set the world on this bumpy course, a better path leading to a brighter future exists. Informed by their different perspectives, they sought a common goal: achievable solutions to fix our fractured world. This book is the product of that thinking. At the heart of today’s permacrisis are broken approaches to growth, economic management, and governance. While these approaches are broken, they are not beyond repair. An explanation of where we’ve gone wrong, and a provocative, inspiring plan to do nothing less than change the world, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World, written with Reid Lidow, sets out how we can prevent crises and better manage the future for the benefit of the many and not the few.
Material World – The six raw materials that shape modern civilization
By: Ed Conway
The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material.
In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates.
Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.
