New Global Dynamics – Managing Economic Change in a Transforming World
By: Zia Qureshi, Daehee Jeong – Brookings, Korea Development Institute
The world faces a conflux of powerful forces of change. Digital technologies and advances in artificial intelligence are transforming markets, economies, and societies. Global geopolitics is shifting, and the rise of China is challenging the postwar international order led by the United States. Geopolitical tensions are elevated, and so are political polarization and societal anxieties within countries as change creates winners and losers. Nationalist industrial policies and protectionism are surging. Added to this mosaic of change is climate change, which will have profound effects on global patterns of production, investment, and trade.
“New Global Dynamics” analyzes the implications of these transformations and addresses the new challenges institutions and policymakers face at national and global levels. It examines how these changes are affecting the global economy, the future of globalization, international power structures, and competition in markets, delving into the shifting dynamics in industry, trade, and finance.
AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference
By: Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor – Princeton University
In AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion to give you an essential understanding of how AI works and why it often doesn’t, where it might be useful or harmful, and when you should suspect that companies are using AI hype to sell AI snake oil—products that don’t work, and probably never will.
While acknowledging the potential of some AI, such as ChatGPT, AI Snake Oil uncovers rampant misleading claims about the capabilities of AI and describes the serious harms AI is already causing in how it’s being built, marketed, and used in areas such as education, medicine, hiring, banking, insurance, and criminal justice. The book explains the crucial differences between types of AI, why organizations are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, why AI isn’t an existential risk, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. The book also warns of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.
AI Snake Oil . . . [is] well-informed, clear and persuasive – the cool breeze of knowledge and good sense are a good antidote to anybody inclined to believe the hyped claims and fears.
Diane Coyle, University of Cambridge
The Central Bank as Crisis Manager
By: Patrick Honohan – Peterson Institute for International Economics
The world’s central banks have confronted crisis after crisis in recent years—both before and since the global financial crisis. Yet many of these events seem to take central banks by surprise, obliging them to improvise. In this important study, Patrick Honohan, former governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, calls on central banks to make preparation for crisis management a core activity. They should be ready to deal with the unexpected. Departing from the rather sedate mode of operation appropriate to their normal focus on price stability and risk control, they must speed up their decision making, change their style of communication, and be more open to cooperation with governments when a crisis hits. They need to keep careful track of changing financial market practices, evaluating solvency in murky situations and quickly weighing the tradeoffs involved in measures that can help contain the crisis but have adverse side effects. The Central Bank as Crisis Manager warns that failure to recognize these challenges could be costly for society.
Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America
By: Peter Conti-Brown, Sean H. Vanatta – The Wharton School, University of Glasgow
In Private Finance, Public Power, Peter Conti-Brown and Sean Vanatta offer a new history of finance and public policy in the United States by examining the idiosyncratic way the nation manages financial risk across the public-private divide. Covering two centuries, from the founding of the Republic to the early 1980s, Conti-Brown and Vanatta describe the often-contested, sometimes chaotic, engagement of bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and others in the overlapping spaces of the public-private system of bank supervision.Conti-Brown and Vanatta trace the different supervisory frameworks that evolved over time, from the imposition of private liability on bank shareholders to the development of the central bank to the creation of federal deposit insurance. Negotiations took place at federal and state levels, but, over time, the federal government assumed most of the responsibility for managing financial risk. Moreover, federal supervisory officials began to undertake more varied tasks, including monitoring racial discrimination and managing financial concentration. Conti-Brown and Vanatta introduce a diverse cast of characters—bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and others—and show how they navigated two hundred years of financial panics, scandals, and crises to build the system that structures modern America’s banking system.
