Insane Mode: How Elon Musk’s Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
Hamish McKenzie
Dutton, Oct. 3, 2017 $37.00

A former insider at Tesla tells the astounding story of the most revolutionary car company since Ford and shows how, under Elon Musk’s “insane mode” leadership, the company is bringing an end to the era of gasoline-powered transportation.

Hamish McKenzie, who worked for Tesla, tells how a West Coast startup’s audacious dream came true.

As McKenzie shows, Tesla has triggered frenzied competition, but it remains ahead of the pack because it’s building the highest quality cars and infrastructure that a new era of transportation will require. The popularity of electric cars is growing around the world, especially in China, and McKenzie interviews little-known titans who have the money and the market access to power a global electric car revolution quickly and decisively.

Economics for the Common Good
Jean Tirole, translated by Steven Rendall
Princeton University Press, October 2017 $37.95

When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day—no matter how distant from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics—far from being a “dismal science”—is a positive force for the common good.

Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy
Tim Harford
Riverhead Books, Aug. 29, 2017 $37.00

Who thought up paper money? What was the secret element that made the Gutenberg printing press possible? And what is the connection between The Da Vinci Code and the collapse of Lehman Brothers?

Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy paints an epic picture of change in an intimate way by telling the stories of the tools, people, and ideas that had far-reaching consequences for all of us. From the plough to artificial intelligence, from Gillette’s disposable razor to IKEA’s Billy bookcase, bestselling author and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford recounts each invention’s own curious, surprising, and memorable story.

Invention by invention, Harford reflects on how we got here and where we might go next. He lays bare often unexpected connections: how the bar code undermined family corner stores and why the gramophone widened inequality. In the process, he introduces characters who developed some of these inventions, profited from them, and were ruined by them. The result is a wise and witty book of history, economics, and biography

Stumbling Giants: Transforming Canada’s Banks for the Information Age
Patricia Meredith and James L. Darroch
Rotman-UTP Publishing, University of Toronto Press, December 2017 $34.95

Canada’s big six banks weathered the 2008 financial crisis very well. Their adherence to tried-and-tested twentieth-century products and services made them a safe harbour in the financial storm. However, as the modern global information economy continues to develop, the banks must confront their innovation crisis, or they will fail.

With banks earning 40 per cent return on equity from traditional retail banking, pressure from investors with short-term interests has discouraged technological innovation and adaptation. Patricia Meredith and James Darroch reveal the socio-technological disruptors threatening the banks’ three primary product divisions—lending, wealth management, and payments— and offer innovative yet realistic recommendations for improvement. Their new vision for the Canadian banking industry involves a broad cross-section of Canadians and is a call to action for all interested stakeholders to work together in creating a banking system for the twenty-first century.

The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek
Howard Markel
Pantheon, Aug. 8, 2017 $47.00

John Harvey Kellogg was one of America’s most beloved physicians; he was also a bestselling author, lecturer, and health magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which revolutionized the mass production of food and what we eat for breakfast.

In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward each other changed America’s notion of health and wellness from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet.

As Markel chronicles the Kelloggs’ fascinating, Magnificent Ambersons-like ascent into the pantheon of American industrialists, we see the cast changes in American social mores that took shape in diet, health, medicine, philanthropy, and food manufacturing during seven decades—changing the lives of millions and helping to shape our industrial age.

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa
Irene Yuan Sun
Harvard Business Review Press, Nov. 7, 2017 $40.50

China is now the biggest foreign player in Africa. Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding into the continent, investing in long-term assets such as factories and heavy equipment. Irene Yuan Sun follows these entrepreneurs and finds, instead, that they’re factory owners, building in Africa what they so recently learned to build in China— a global manufacturing powerhouse.

This gives rise to a tantalizing possibility: that Africa can industrialize in the coming generation. With a manufacturing-led transformation, Africa would be following in the footsteps of the U.S. in the nineteenth century, Japan in the early twentieth century, and the Asian Tigers in the late twentieth century. Many may consider this an old-fashioned way to develop, but it’s the only one that’s proven to raise living standards across entire societies for generations. And with every new Chinese factory boss setting up machinery and hiring African workers, that possibility becomes more real for Africa.

With stories of entrepreneurs, workers, and government officials in Africa, along with incisive business and economic analysis, The Next Factory of the World will make you rethink both China’s role in the world and Africa’s future in the globalized economy.

The Money Formula: Dodgy Finance, Pseudo Science and How Mathematicians Took Over the Markets
Paul Wilmott and David Orrell
Wiley, June 2017 $41.95

The Money Formula takes you inside the engine room of the global economy to explore the little-understood world of quantitative finance and show how the future of our economy rests on the backs of this all-but-impenetrable industry. Written not from a post-crisis perspective but from a preventative point of view, this book traces the development of financial derivatives from bonds to credit default swaps and shows how mathematical formulas went beyond pricing to expand their use to the point where they dwarfed the real economy. Rather than rehash tales of post-crisis fallout, this book focuses on preventing the next one: delve into one of the world’s least-understood but highest-impact industries; understand the key principles of quantitative finance and the evolution of the field; and discover how the industry’s next steps dictate the economy’s future.

The Money Formula explores the how and why of financial disaster, and what must happen to prevent the next one.

Give and Take: The CitizenTaxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy
Shirley Tillotson
UBC Press, Oct. 15, 2017 $39.95

Can a book about tax history be a page-turner? You wouldn’t think so, but Give and Take is full of surprises—a Canadian millionaire who embraced the new federal income tax in 1917, and a socialist hero, J.S. Woodsworth, who deplored the burden of big government. Most surprising of all, Give and Take reveals that taxes deliver something more than armies and schools. They build democracy.

Shirley Tillotson launches her story with the 1917 war income tax, takes us through the tumultuous tax fights of the interwar years, proceeds to the remaking of income taxation in the 1940s and onwards, and finishes by offering a fresh angle on the fierce conflicts surrounding tax reform in the 1960s.

Give and Take is neither a simple tale of tax rebels nor a tirade against the taxman. Tillotson argues that Canadians also made real contributions to democracy when they taxed wisely and paid willingly.

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Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
William N. Goetzmann
Princeton University Press, August 2017 $24.95

Exploring the critical role of finance over the millennia and around the world, William Goetzmann details how wondrous financial technologies and institutions—money, bonds, banks, corporations, and more— have helped urban centres to expand and cultures to flourish. And it’s not done reshaping our lives, as Goetzmann considers the challenges we face in the future, such as how to use the power of finance to care for an aging and expanding population.