Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Random House, February 2018, $40.00

The phrase “skin in the game” is one we’ve often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It’s the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich world view that, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

In his most provocative and practical book yet, Taleb redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life.

The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age
David Callahan
Vintage, March 2018, $23.00

While media attention focuses on famous philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Charles Koch, thousands of donors are at work below the radar promoting a wide range of causes. David Callahan charts the rise of these new power players and the ways they’re converting the fortunes of a second Gilded Age into influence. He shows how this elite works behind the scenes on education, the environment, science, LGBT rights, and many other issues—with deep impact on government policy. Above all, he shows that the influence of these givers is only just beginning, as new waves of billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg turn to philanthropy. Based on extensive research and interviews with countless donors and policy experts, The Givers is a fascinating investigation of a power shift in American society that has implications for us all.

Saudi, Inc.: The Arabian Kingdom’s Pursuit of Profit and Power
Ellen R. Wald
W.W. Norton, April 2018, $36.95

The Saudi royal family and Aramco leadership are, and almost always have been, motivated by ambitions of long-term strength and profit. They use Islamic law, traditional ideology, and harsh justice to maintain stability and their own power, but behind the religious fanaticism and illiberalism lies a most sophisticated and ruthless business enterprise. Today, that corporation is poised to pull off the biggest IPO in history.

For more than a century, fed by ambition and oil wealth, Al Saud, as the royal family is known, has come from next to nothing to rule as absolute monarchs, a contrast with the world around them and modernity itself. The story starts with Saudi Arabia’s founder, Abdul Aziz, a lowly refugee embarking on a daring gambit to reconquer his family’s ancestral home, the city of Riyadh. It takes readers almost to present day, when the multinational family business has made Al Saud the wealthiest family in the world and on the cusp of a new transformation.

Now Al Saud and its family business, Aramco, are embarking on their most ambitious move: taking the company public and preparing the country for the next generation.

The History of the Future: How a Bunch of Misfits, Makers, and Mavericks Cracked the Code of Virtual Reality
Blake J. Harris
HarperCollins, July 2018, $35.99

From iconic books like Neuromancer to blockbuster films like The Matrix, virtual reality (VR) has long been hailed as the ultimate technology. But outside of a few research labs and military training facilities, this tantalizing vision of the future was nothing but science fiction—until 2012, when Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (then just a rebellious teenage dreamer living alone in a camper trailer) invented a device that has the potential to change everything.

With the help of a video game legend, a serial entrepreneur, and many other colourful characters, Luckey kick-starts a revolution with his start-up and sets out to bring VR to the masses. As with most underdog stories, things don’t quite go according to plan. But what happens next turns out to be the ultimate entrepreneurial journey: a tale of battles won and lost, lessons learned, and never-ending twists and turns—including an unlikely multi-billion-dollar acquisition by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, which shakes up the landscape in Silicon Valley and gives Oculus the chance to forever change our reality.

Drawing on more than 100 interviews with the key players driving this revolution, The History of the Future weaves together a rich, cinematic narrative that captures the breakthroughs, breakdowns, and human drama of trying to change the world.

Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back
Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever
Berrett-Koehler, June 2018, $33.95

Technology promises to help us achieve our dreams, connect us to everyone, and free up time—so why are we more miserable than ever? Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever show that our unhappiness can be traced to a concerted effort by tech companies to mould our thoughts and behaviour to accomplish their goals.

For all its considerable benefits, technology, many argue, has been instrumental in eroding security, privacy, and community. But Wadhwa and Salkever argue that the truth is far more insidious: technology is actively robbing us of our happiness by making us so reliant on it that it becomes an addiction. Tech companies have all the weapons—sophisticated tracking bots, GPS co-ordinates, and algorithms that determine the optimal ways to distract us to their products and apps—but Vivek and Salkever now provide us with insights and techniques to fight back. They focus on four key areas: love, work, self, and society. In each case, they document how the promise of technology has mutated into addiction and despair, and they lay out strategies to take back control by understanding the addictive mechanisms at the root of technology overload.

Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car and How it Will Reshape Our World
Lawrence D. Burns with Christopher Shulgan
HarperCollins, August 2018, $34.99

In Autonomy, former GM executive and current advisor to the Google self-driving car project Lawrence Burns offers a sweeping history of the race to make the driverless car a reality. In the past decade, Silicon Valley companies like Google, Tesla, and Uber have positioned themselves to revolutionize the way we move around by developing driverless vehicles, while traditional auto companies like GM, Ford, and Daimler have been fighting back by partnering with new tech start-ups. It’s not a question of whether the self-driving car will disrupt the automobile industry; it’s a question of when and how, and who will win the race.

With the first driverless car likely to hit markets in less than five years, Burns also looks toward the future and explains how this new technology will impact our lives—from removing the hassles of driving, parking, and refuelling our cars, to eliminating 90 per cent of road fatalities, drastically reducing our carbon footprint, and automating yet another segment of blue-collar industry, putting more workers out of jobs.

A chronicle of the past, diagnosis of the present, and prediction of the future, Autonomy is the ultimate guide to understanding the driverless car and to navigating the revolution it sparks.

Risk Management and Financial Institutions (Fifth Edition)
John C. Hull
Wiley, April 2018, $150.00

The fifth edition of Risk Management and Financial Institutions explains all aspects of financial risk and financial institution regulation, helping readers better understand the financial markets—and their potential dangers. The edition teaches about the different types of risk, how and where they appear in different types of institutions, and how the regulatory structure of each institution affects risk management practices. Comprehensive ancillary materials include software, practice questions, and all necessary teaching supplements, which help to facilitate more complete understanding and provide an ultimate learning resource.

An Introduction to Banking: Principles, Strategy and Risk Management (Second Edition)
Moorad Choudhry
Wiley, April 2018, $72.00

The second edition of An Introduction to Banking is a comprehensive and jargon-free guide to banking operations. Written at the foundational level, this book provides a broad overview of banking to give readers an all-around understanding that will allow them to contextualize specialty work within the larger picture of their organizations. With a specific focus on risk components, this edition covers all key elements with new chapters on reputational risk, credit risk, stress testing, and customer service, including an updated chapter on sustainability. Practical material includes important topics such as the yield curve, trading and hedging, asset liability management, loan origination, product marketing, reputational risk, and regulatory capital.

UNSCALED: How AI and a New Generation of Upstarts Are Creating the Economy of the Future
Hemant Taneja with Kevin Maney
PublicAffairs, March 2018, $36.50

Unscaled identifies the forces that are reshaping the global economy and turning one of the fundamental laws of business and society—the economies of scale—on its head.

An innovative trend combining technology with economics is unravelling behemoth industries—including corporations, banks, farms, media conglomerates, energy systems, governments, and schools—that have long dominated business and society. Size and scale have become a liability. A new generation of upstarts is using artificial intelligence to automate tasks that once required expensive investment, and “renting” technology platforms to build businesses for hyper-focused markets, enabling them to grow big without the bloat of giant organizations.

The unscaled economy is remaking massive, deeply rooted industries and opening up fantastic possibilities for entrepreneurs, imaginative companies, and resourceful individuals. It can be the model for solving some of the world’s greatest problems—including climate change and soaring healthcare costs—but it will also unleash new challenges that today’s leaders must address.

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A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined a Nation
Scott Nations
HarperCollins, June 2018, $21.99

Scott Nations, a long-time trader, financial engineer, and CNBC contributor, takes us on a journey through five significant stock market crashes in the past century to reveal how they defined the U.S. today. The stories behind the great crashes are filled with drama, human foibles, and heroic rescues. Taken together, they tell the larger story of a nation reaching enormous heights of financial power while experiencing precipitous dips that alter and reset a market where millions of Americans invest their savings, and on which they depend for their futures. Nations vividly shows how each of these major crashes played a role in America’s political and cultural fabric, each providing painful lessons that have strengthened us and helped us to build the nation we know today.

Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality
James Kwak
Vintage, March 2018, $23.00

In order to illuminate the fallacies of economism, James Kwak first offers a primer on supply and demand, market equilibrium, and social welfare: the underpinnings of the most popular economic arguments. He then provides an historical account of how economism became a prevalent mode of thought in the U.S.—focusing on the people who packaged Econ 101 into sound bites that were then repeated until they took on the aura of truth. He shows us how issues of the moment in contemporary American society—labour markets, taxes, finance, healthcare, and international trade, among others—are shaped by economism, demonstrating in each case how, because of its failure to reflect the complexities of our world, economism has had a deleterious influence on policies that affect hundreds of millions of Americans.

From Wall Street to Bay Street: The Origins and Evolution of American and Canadian Finance
Christopher Kobrak and Joe Martin
Rotman-UTP Publishing, March 2018, $34.95

From Wall Street to Bay Street is the first book for a lay audience to tackle the similarities and differences between the financial systems of Canada and the U.S. Christopher Kobrak and Joe Martin reveal the different paths each system has taken since the early nineteenth century, despite the fact that the systems both originate from Britain. The authors trace the roots of each country’s financial systems back to Alexander Hamilton and insightfully argue that, while Canada has preserved a Hamiltonian financial tradition, the U.S. has favoured the populist Jacksonian tradition since the 1830s. The sporadic and inconsistent fashion in which the American system has changed over time is at odds with the evolutionary path taken by the Canadian system. From Wall Street to Bay Street offers a timely and accessible comparison of financial systems that reflects the political and cultural milieus of two of the world’s top 10 economies.