Age of extractionTim Wu (Knopf). Hanging over this insightful analysis of major technology platforms and their impact on the broader economy is the daunting specter of a “technologically armored wall between the haves and the have-nots.” Wu traces the evolution of companies like Google and Amazon from the 1990s, when they behaved largely as “public town squares,” to the 1920s, when they began to transform into the monopolistic “wealth extractors” we know today. For Wu, the problem is not the platforms themselves; it's about the structures in which they live. To avoid worsening “the division and resentment that are the bane of our age,” he argues, we will need government intervention.
Two paths to prosperityAvner Greif, Joel Mokyr and Guido Tabellini (Princeton). A thousand years ago, as Europeans made their way through the Middle Ages, their Chinese contemporaries lived in a civilization that was one of the most advanced in the world. So why did Europe become richer and more powerful than China in subsequent centuries? In their ambitious history, Greif, Mokyr (winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Economics) and Tabellini suggest that cultural values and social organizations helped establish different paths. Confucianism held sway in China, where kinship groups ruled local life. But in Europe, where family ties were weaker, outsiders collaborated in organizations such as guilds and self-governing cities—institutions that gave rise to functional states, thriving markets, and the Industrial Revolution.
