Coding Capitalism – Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy
By: Devin Kennedy – University of Wisconsin–Madison
Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labor, manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar economy. Their efforts would shape early computer science and the first applications of computer technology in manufacturing and business, with profound consequences for workers and managers alike. By the 1960s, practices originally developed to improve industrial efficiency were being used by Wall Street, influencing how markets worked and even how traders thought. Digital technology became central to finance, tying together far-flung trading floors and automating decision making—with alarming consequences, including the 1987 Black Monday crash.
Drawing on the archives of businesses, computer researchers, regulators, and financial institutions, Coding Capitalism retells the story of the postwar economy and the computer, revealing how midcentury business laid the foundations of the digital world. Bridging business and economic history with the history of science and technology, this book uncovers the prehistory of big tech and demonstrates how capitalism has shaped computing since its invention.
The Winner’s Curse
By: Richard H. Thaler, Alex O. Imas – University of Chicago
Why do people cooperate with one another when they have no (selfish) motivation to do so? Why do we hold onto possessions of little value? And why is the winner of an auction so often disappointed?
In the original 1992 version of The Winner’s Curse, Richard Thaler introduced readers to behavioral economics, challenging the notion of traditional economics that people are selfish, rational optimizers and behave accordingly every time. Three decades later, Thaler has teamed up with economist Alex Imas to provide fresh insights in this fully updated edition. They revisit Thaler’s original columns on economic anomalies, some written with collaborators like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and explore how these anomalies hold up today.
Many anomalies remain, whether in households saving for retirement (or not), professional golfers putting for millions of dollars, or shoppers at large retail chains. In this era of meme stocks and Dogecoin, it is hard to defend the view that financial markets are highly efficient. The good news, however, is that they have gotten funnier.
What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity
By: Daron Acemoglu – MIT
Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu argues in this powerful book that liberal democracy flourished when it pursued its core promises of shared prosperity, democratic governance, and the free pursuit of knowledge. But liberalism, a philosophy built to challenge power, never fully adjusted to becoming the establishment. Nor was it able to deal with the economic and social disruptions that digital technologies wrought. Worse, in the postindustrial economy, liberalism turned its back on its core promises. As a segment of college-educated elites became politically dominant and separated from the rest of society, they sowed the seeds of widespread inequality while intensifying efforts to reshape mass culture and values.
Acemoglu, using the interdisciplinary lens that has won him acclaim, documents the extraordinary, unparalleled progress that liberalism created, and recounts how liberal democratic institutions plunged themselves into crisis over the last several decades. Looking at rapid advances in technology, shifts in regulatory environments, global political history, and economics, Acemoglu lucidly lays out the successes and failures of our most important political system. And he envisions a new way forward, which he calls working-class liberalism: a philosophy that prioritizes shared prosperity, empowers communities, and accommodates a range of values and views.
Governing Growth: The Postwar Transformations of Capitalism and Democracy
By: Peter A. Hall – Harvard University
How do capitalist economies change over time? And what political consequences follow? In Governing Growth, Peter Hall traces the interactions between politics and economics in Western democracies over the past eighty years, identifying a series of profound shifts in the political economies of Europe and the United States. Hall develops the concept of successive growth regimes, each the result of public policies interacting with the strategies of private firms. Alongside each growth regime, he argues, there is a distinctive representation regime, which determines whose voices have the most influence over public policy. Showing how these two regimes interact, he develops a new account of the processes through which political economies change over time.Hall outlines three postwar growth regimes: an era of modernization, from 1945 to about 1975; an era of liberalization, from 1980 to the late 1990s; and an era of knowledge-based growth, beginning at the turn of the century. His sweeping analysis sheds new light not only on the relationship between capitalism and democracy, but also on the roots of our contemporary political dilemmas.
