Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

J. Bradford DeLong

Basic Books

September 2022, $44.00

Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would use such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. After the 1870–2010 period, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.

Economist Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, this book reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

Max Fisher

Little, Brown and Company

September 2022, $37.00

We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we understand. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks, in their pursuit of unfettered profits, preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies’ founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone.

Fisher’s narrative is about more than the villains, however. He also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it’s too late.

Top experts from PIMCO deliver a uniquely comprehensive guide for sophisticated investors and advanced graduate students, covering everything from financial mathematics to the practical realities of asset allocation and pricing. Investors like you typically have a choice to make when seeking guidance for portfolio selection: either a book of practical, hands-on approaches to the craft or an academic tome of theories and mathematical formulas. Portfolio Selection and Asset Pricing strikes the right balance between these options with an extensive discussion of both the mathematical foundations of portfolio choice and asset pricing models, as well as the practice of asset allocation. This guide is conveniently organized into four sections: Mathematical Foundations: normed vector spaces, optimization in discrete and continuous time, utility theory, and uncertainty; Portfolio Models: single-period and continuous-time portfolio choice, analogies, asset allocation for a sovereign as an example, and liability-driven allocation; Asset Pricing: capital asset pricing models, factor models, option pricing, and expected returns; Robust Asset Allocation: estimation of optimization inputs, such as the Black-Litterman Model, shrinkage, and robust optimizers.

Whether you are a sophisticated investor or advanced graduate student, this high-level title combines rigorous mathematical theory with an emphasis on practical implementation techniques.