Big Data: How the Information Revolution is Transforming our Lives, by Brian Clegg (author), Alex Moorcock (narrator)

Dreamscape Media, ISBN 9781666532036, August 2021

We live in a world of big data, with government, corporations, social media, and all kinds of organizations in possession of vast amounts of quite personal data about us--most of which we've handed over ourselves.

That's just one piece big data, though. The accumulation of enormous amounts of data, and the use of modern, advanced computers to process it, has affected every area of our lives and our world. Not much over two centuries ago, medicine was still largely a matter of trial and error, and medical theories we know to be completely wrong.

Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth, by Rachel Maddow (author, narrator)

Random House Audio, October 2019

This is a fascinating and scary book about what the oil and gas industry has done, to the world in general, to Russia in particular, and in lesser ways to the USA.

Discovering the great natural wealth of large deposits of oil and natural gas ought to be a great boon to a country--and it can be. If it has a strong, functional government committed to the national welfare, not just the private wealth of the ruling class, it can be. Even countries that aren't at all democratic, such as a number of the Middle Eastern oil powers, have managed to raise the income, education, and health of much of the population, not just the privileged ruling classes.

But others haven't. Maddow first introduces us to Equatorial Guinea, and the complete lack of benefit to the economic lower classes there, while the ruling family and their friends rake in the billions.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis (author), Dylan Baker (narrator)

Simon & Schuster Audio, ISBN 9781442341265, October 2011

Published in 2011, when the financial crisis was still fairly fresh in everyone's mind and we had not yet reached as much recovery as we eventually achieved, this is in some respects a look into the past. Yet none of Lewis's observations from his travels through a developed world still reeling from that crisis seem to have been proven truly false. Each country got into trouble in the world of essentially free money in the madness of 2003-2008 by following its own weaknesses and temptations.

Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It by Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, Sinikka Elliott

Oxford University Press, January 2019

This isn't a book about cooking. It's a book about how what we say, think, do, preach, and spend public money around food, health, and family puts more and more pressure on families, especially on mothers.

The book is a result of a research project, following multiple families of various socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. It looks at how they eat, why they make their choices, and how they try to balance time, money, health, conflict in the family over food choices.

Everyone parent wants their children to be healthy, and wants to feed them in a healthy way. It's not that simple even for well-off families, though, and for the economically struggling, it gets even more complicated. Food isn't just nutrition. It's also culture, family tradition, personal memories and feelings, and a way that people assert identity. None of this is easy on the families deciding what are the best choices.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, by Richard H. Thaler (author), L.J. Ganser (narrator)

Audible Studios, May 2015

Richard Thaler is one of the founders of behavioral economics, and he gives us a clear, enlightening, and entertaining account of its origins, principles, and findings.

Traditional economics operates on the theory of the rational economic person--homo economicus, or as Thaler shortens it for convenience, Econs. For the purposes of economic theory, Econs are assumed to always make rational and fully informed choices, for maximum economic benefit. The problems should be obvious; we are rarely fully rational in our decision-making, and almost never have complete, and completely accurate, information. The more important our decisions are--career choice, marriage, retirement planning, the less likely we are to have enough information to make "correct" economic choices.

Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, by Manu Saadia (author), Oliver Wyman (narrator)

Audible Studios, August 2016 (original publication June 2016)

We don't ordinarily think much about the economics of Star Trek when watching an episode or a movie, but when we step back from the stories themselves, it's a pretty interesting question. How does the Federation's economy work? Although there are references to a currency called simply "credits" scattered through The Original Series, that's later retconned to "just a figure of speech." As explicitly stated in Next Generation and Deep Space 9, the Federation operates without money.

How does that work? Can it work?

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local--and Helped Save an American Town, by Beth Macy

Little, Brown and Company, ISBN 9780316231435, July 2014

John Douglas Bassett, a.k.a. J.D. Bassett, started first a sawmill and then a furniture company with his brother, C.C. Bassett, in Virginia in 1902. The unincorporated town of Bassett grew up around the factory. As the business and the family grew, J.D. assisted relatives and in-laws to start other furniture companies, and the region became a powerhouse in the American furniture industry.

And then the 1980s and the beginnings of globalization and cheap Chinese import furniture arrived.

The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, by Marc Levinson (author), William Hughes (reader)

Blackstone Audio, ISBN 9781455114658, August 2011

When I was a child growing up in Everett, MA, there was, on Broadway, a little supermarket called A&P. It was bigger and had more selection than the convenience stores in the neighborhood, but smaller than McKinnon's, which has since gone on to bigger and better things, but not, as it turns out, anything like the size and reach that A&P had even in its decay, in that decade of the sixties when its glory days were past. McKinnon's is a quintessential local chain in the best sense, with high quality, excellent service, and unique offerings not found in the national or big regional chains. A&P in its heyday was something different, something I could not have imagined from that dingy little store inferior in every way to McKinnon's, except that my mom liked their 8 O'Clock Coffee.

A&P was, for over forty years, the largest retailer in the world, the retail behemoth that made its competition tremble, Wal-Mart before Wal-Mart. And they reached those heights from a start as a tiny little tea retailer in New York City in the 1860s.

Get Back to Work Faster: The Ultimate Job Seeker's Guide, by Jill Konrath

Sales Gravy Press, ISBN 9780981800486,  October 2009

Jill Konrath wants to share the secret of finding well-paid work as quickly as possible even in a terrible economy. She's happy to share that secret for free; you can buy a paperback copy of her book on Amazon, or you can download a pdf copy for free from her website, at http://www.jillkonrath.com/sales-books/get-back-to-work-faster/

The core of her secret is quite simple: Be a hard-driven, brilliant salesperson.

Really, there are a lot of specific and useful recommendations here. There is also information about valuable resources, most free, some not, that can be valuable additions to your job-hunting strategy.

Holiday Greetings From the Star-Tribune: Shut Up and Be Grateful You Have a Low-Paid, Crummy Job With No Benefits

Editorial: Take this job and ... be glad you have it | StarTribune.com:

'via Blog this'

From the Star-Tribune editorial:

When times were better, retail giants forcing employees to work on treasured family holidays could easily be painted as corporate greed run amok. But today it’s hardly fair to paint merchants as retail Scrooges.

What a cheery, humane holiday sentiment. Times are hard, so as long as you have a paycheck at all, you shouldn't complain about being used and abused.

1493: Uncovering the World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann (author), Roberson Dean (reader)

Random House Audio, ISBN 9780307913760, August 2011

This is the follow-up to Mann's excellent 1491, and it's every bit as excellent. In this book, Mann creates a rich and detailed picture of the world after Columbus, form the first few years of Spanish-Indian interaction through the complex effects of globalization in the contemporary world.

He starts, for reasons that soon become clear, with his own garden, and his introduction to heritage tomatoes. Tomato varieties, differing widely in size, appearance, and color, now come from all over the world--but they began as barely edible fruits of the nightshade family in Meso-America. Why are there now wonderful tomatoes from Bulgaria? That's what this book is about in a microcosm: how Columbus's discovery of the Americas led to the dispersal of people, plants, and animals from both hemispheres all over the world.

The Big Handout: How Government Subsidies and Corporate Welfare Corrupt the World We Live In and Wreak Havoc on Our Food Bills, by Thomas Kostigen

Rodale Books, ISBN 9781609611132, October 2011

This book makes an interesting counterpoint to Clean Energy Nation, by Congressman Jerry McNerney, which I reviewed in August. McNerney is a Democrat, has a high regard for the sustainable energy policies pursued by President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s while regretting the micromanagement and lack of higher-level political skills that helped to doom those policies, thinks well of Clinton and Obama, and is not so fond of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Kostigen is  libertarian-leaning, considers the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation good and respectable sources, and admires Ronald Reagan as one of our great presidents. These two men are not coming from the same place, in their political worldviews.

Yet the underlying central message of the two books is the same: Our economic, energy, and agricultural policies are unsustainable, doing damage to our planet, endangering our national security, and making us poorer. McNerney attacked the problem from the perspective of energy policy; Kostigen comes at it primarily through agricultural and other corporate subsidies.

The Cost of Medical Paperwork

http://holykaw.alltop.com/the-sick-cost-of-medical-paperwork-infographi?tu2=1


Created by: Medical Transcription

We don't need to be this inefficient. We are the greatest nation on Earth; we can do better for our people. Also for our businesses, for whom these costs are a huge drain that their competitors in other countries don't have to bear.

The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, by Tyler Cowen--Review

Penguin Group/Dutton, ISBN 9781101502242, February 2011

This is a long essay about what Tyler Cowen considers to be the real roots of our current economic and political frustrations: a stagnation in technological advances that started around 1970. This sounds counter-intuitive, but Cowen makes a good case for his approach.

Up until that point, America always had a great deal of what Cowen refers to as "low-hanging fruit": first, and for a very long time, land so abundant it was practically free. Europeans could come to America, stake their claim, work hard, and be substantially better off than they'd been in Europe. Next, the enormous technological advances of the 19th and first half of the 20th century--steam engines, trains, the telegraph, electricity, the telephone, the car, the airplane. Thirdly, large numbers of smart, uneducated people who could be educated and add tremendously to productivity. Technological advances and the expansion of education continued to make huge differences in the lives of nearly everyone, raising the standard of living and the available wealth dramatically in each generation.

But by the late sixties, there were fewer opportunities to continue making those dramatic advances. Most Americans are now being educated, and the gains to be made are incremental gains amongst the most challenged learners--students with language barriers, or learning disabilities, or who are from families that are economically disadvantaged, or broken or disrupted in ways that make the parents less available or less able to give the students a stable basis. Overcoming those obstacles and educating these students is important  and will benefit the economy as a whole as well as the individuals affected--but not nearly as dramatically as previous, more general advances in education. Technology also has had mostly incremental gains--better cars or better planes, medical gains now concentrated in care for the elderly and other marginal-gain areas. We'll all be glad for those advances when we are old, and they're important, but, again, not making dramatic changes in most people's everyday lives. There's no room for the dramatic advances in medicine and hygiene that took place through the first half of the 20th century.

Moreover, the largest parts of our economy now are government expenditures, medicine, and education, and two of the three should be very dynamic parts of our modern economy. They are, unfortunately, areas where real value, quality, and productivity are hard to measure effectively, and the market forces that control food prices or electronics prices simply aren't effective because of this.

As a result of all these trends, we have slow or stagnant growth, and a political system hampered by the frustrations of a population that is barely keeping even rather than experiencing the steadily rising standard of living of their parents and grandparents.

The one exception to this general picture of technological stagnation is the internet. Cowen discusses with great enthusiasm the advances connected to the internet, the ways in which they have dramatically changed and enhanced the lives of much of the population. By way of the internet, for the cost of a connection and the minor cost of electricity, we have access to information, education, entertainment, and contacts and friendships all over the world. It gives us access to opportunities to be happier, smarter, more fulfilled, without expenses we can't afford in the midst of our Great Stagnation.

And that in turn means that, while easing the pain of the economic slowdown, the internet also paradoxically makes it worse, because we're not spending the money to generate the more externally productive economic activity that's a vital part of reviving the economy.

All this sounds pretty grim, but in fact Cowen sees real prospects for a path out of our stagnation, for the creation of new "low-hanging fruit" that will make possible a return to dynamic growth, development, and human progress. If you have political opinions at all, whatever they are, you will disagree with some of what he says, but this is an essay grounded in fact and reality. Even if you don't in the end agree with Cowen's approach to a solution, you'll find yourself challenged to think by his discussion and analysis.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the publisher via NetGalley.