Annually New YorkerMoney Matters examines some of the strangest, most fascinating and often disturbing ways in which people seek and spend great wealth. latest editionpublished on Monday, contains articles about Irish cocaine kingpin live freely in Dubai, be it Costco Magic can weather changing times and is one of New York's most sought-after hotels. installers of luxury apartments. In addition to this episode, we asked several of our authors to recommend books about business. Their selections—from the history of the term “gold digger” to a Roman clef about an Amazon warehouse worker—offer rich portraits of how making money shapes or distorts the lives of both individuals and the world at large.
Technical revolution
by Maritje Schaake
Technology has been a part of modern life for a long time, but the intertwining of big tech as an industry with our everyday habits—from tracking friends to hiring taxis—is something new. Schaake, a Dutch politician and former member of the European Parliament, seeks to shift the focus of responsibility “from high-tech scandals to the systematic destruction of democracy.” Even when an industry behaves well on its own terms, it runs counter to democratic practice, she said. This is exactly how his incentive structure works. Schaake is no finger-wagging outsider: as an MEP, she served on the cyber policy commission and is currently director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and she has a broad and largely sympathetic view of the dynamics she describes. “In many ways, Silicon Valley has become the exact opposite of what its early pioneers intended: from shutting down government to literally taking over equivalent functions; from praising freedom of speech to becoming curators and regulators of speech; from criticizing government overreach and abuse to speeding up the process with spyware and opaque algorithms,” she writes. The challenge now is not to resist innovative business, but to insist that its giants, trapped by their own impulsiveness, return to the interests of “human scale.” Despite its bleak title, Tech Disruption is one of the most informed and intelligent assessments of the technology landscape I've ever read.— Nathan Heller
American gold miner
Brian Donovan
When playwright Avery Hopwood titled his 1919 play about three Manhattan chorus girls trying to make ends meet “Gold Diggers,” Broadway producers begged him to change the title. They protested that audiences would expect a play about difficult beggars in the American West, not about saucy minxes out to get a rich husband. . . or someone else's. (Really, Diversity A review of the play's debut had to clarify that “this play is not about mining for the precious metal.”) At the time, the word “gold digger” was still just dressing room slang, playfully used between pretty, underpaid dancers. Among them, this term was something between a compliment and a word of encouragement: “Girl, take this bag,” avant la lettre. In American Gold Digger, sociologist Donovan traces how the phrase entered the wider lexicon and why it stuck. He argues that as divorce rates increased in the twentieth century, a genuine moral panic over alimony ensued; a divorcee was often considered a “woman parasite.” There was no equivalent term for ex-husbands who evaded alimony payments by setting up shell companies and moving to “alimony colonies,” cities near New York City where they could avoid serving writs. They were just “men”.—Jennifer Wilson
Seasonal employee
Heike Geissler
The unnamed narrator of Geissler's novel, first published in German in 2014, is a writer and translator from Leipzig who takes a job at an Amazon fulfillment center before the winter holidays. The work—in some ways a series of encounters with random elements of one-click consumerism, including coloring books and marketing manuals for dentists—is tedious, monotonous and demoralizing. The workplace is literally and emotionally cold; The corporate culture, such as it is, views employees as disposable and ordinary people. This is a business story only in the most banal sense, which is what makes it subversive and exciting at the same time. Even in the depths of Amazon, the standard of brutal efficiency, people flirt, fantasize, and find camaraderie. (That's not to say the book is uplifting.) The narrator's co-workers are “cheerful people, all with subtext, and they'd all rather be somewhere else.” As her contract expires, Geissler's narrator briefly contemplates what resistance might look like: damaging goods, withholding items, misclassifying orders to hold them up, dusting books (only the bad ones, she explains), and putting offensive stickers in bags. The prospect of defiance sparks joy, but the dream also serves as a reminder of the need for workers, humanity, and the quiet potential of power.—Anna Wiener
Empire of the Elite
Michael M. Greenbaum
In some ways, this is an anti-business book: the story of a time when the publishing company Condé Nast (which has owned the magazine since 1985) was not about making money, but spending it. Greenbaum, newspaper correspondent Timedetails the period from the eighties to the early 2000s, during which publishing heir Si Newhouse grew a coterie of publications, including Fashion And Vanity Fairwho “told the world what to buy, what to value… even what to think about.” They did this by adopting extravagance as a principle. Yet while Newhouse's spirit disdained the petty matters of dollars and cents, it embraced the theater of business—money and power, machinations and deals. (Sex and the City's “Mr. Big” was inspired by Candace Bushnell's ex-boyfriend Ron Galotti, a Condé executive.) The drama reaches its climax with Briefcasea business magazine that came out on the eve of the Great Recession paid Tom Wolfe a rumored twelve dollars a word, and hired a live elephant for the photo shoot rather than using a stock image. “Empire of the Elite” reflects the inexorable power of money, be it fantasy or economics.—Molly Fisher
