Books like The Economics of Blockchain Consensus

This book helped me understand why advances in artificial intelligence are going to have a big impact on productivity and economic growth. I loved the analogies to old technologies like electrification of factories, and newer examples like how Team New Zealand used simulations to change racing tactics and boat design.

The book has an important, big idea at its heart. That idea is that AI helps organizations make better predications, and those better predictions allow organizations to be fundamentally redesigned to take advantage of this. This is where the AI productivity revolution comes from.

Michael Lewis is a master at exposing the mechanisms behind financial and technological disasters, and this book is no exception. His deep access to Sam Bankman-Fried makes this a rare inside look at how Silicon Valley hubris can spiral into catastrophe. If we want to build a better future, we have to understand how influential failures happen—and how movements with promise can go off the rails.

I was especially interested in this story because of SBF’s ties to Effective Altruism, a movement with real potential that will now always carry his shadow. As I build my own initiatives—like OpenDI in decision intelligence—this book reinforced the importance of staying vigilant against the forces that can derail even the most well-intentioned ideas.

Well, the author is a friend of mine but it’s also on a topic close to my own academic research interests. So it was kind of compulsory reading for me, but it might be the most enjoyable compulsory reading I’ve ever done.

I thought NFTs were just a gimmick to do with internet pictures. But the authors explain, with great examples, that NFTs are best thought of as a new technology for creating digital assets. And better still, providing the true owner with irrefutable proof of ownership of these digital assets.

What I took away was that NFTs are a new technology for tracking property rights. And since property rights have been fundamental to economic development for millennia, this is a topic one can’t afford not to understand.

I first heard about this book on one of my favorite podcasts: Hard Fork. The author is a famous crypto investor at perhaps the world’s leading technology venture capital firm: a16z. The author got a hard time from the hosts, who are both pretty skeptical of crypto. But he handled it so well I knew I had to read the book.

Read Write Own is persuasive in cautioning against dismissing the entire crypto sector due to early failures. The examples used are great: like the Helium project—a kind of crowdsourced “people’s 5G network” that uses cryptocurrency payments as incentives. If you want to hear the “glass is half full” case for crypto, this is a must read.

This book is a classic and a pleasure to read. If you like Natalie Zemon Davis, you will like Joyce Appleby. It is a terrific introduction to the fascinating world of early modern economic thought and solidifies the importance of mercantilist thought in the era of power and plenty and ships of the line. 

Raworth articulates something I'd felt but couldn't express: that our current economic models are fundamentally flawed, simultaneously transgressing planetary boundaries whilst leaving billions below social foundations.

Her doughnut framework—depicting the safe and just space between social foundations and ecological ceilings—clarifies the "why of work.”

I love how she challenges conventional economic thinking with such clarity and wit. When she explains why GDP growth can't be our goal, or why economies are embedded within society and nature (not the other way around), it feels both radical and obvious.

As a member organization of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, I've seen how this framework helps businesses understand their purpose beyond profit.

This book provides the destination; my work explores the organizational navigation, the concrete patterns and structures that enable businesses to actually operate in that safe and just space.

Moneyless Society, conceptually, is a curious read. Tracking how money affects us all and its presence as a centralized decay against society is another curious concept. I enjoyed reading Moneyless Society for the context of why change needs to be made. Surrounded by the author’s intent in publication is a group of individuals committed to making change. I may quote in my own volumes that money is necessary as a tool but that does not mean you can’t argue otherwise. Moneyless Society is a great feel-good economic story through history into potential change.

Even a professional economist is likely to find something surprising in this book. 

Editor John Siegfried has collected a dozen essays written by notable and award-winning economists explaining how economic research has improved our lives over the past two generations. Several of these essays do not focus on obvious examples but rather on those that are a step or two removed from what many laypersons would consider the domain of economics.

For example, Alvin Roth’s chapter on “deferred-acceptance theory” describes how economics improved the efficiency of educating doctors by better matching prospective medical residents with training hospitals. 

Other chapters explore how economic research helped eliminate the military draft and replace it with an all-volunteer armed service, how economists shaped the welfare-to-work reforms of the 1990s, and the impact of economic research on the allocation of the radio spectrum which was necessary to establish our modern cell phone networks.

We often think about the Civil War in terms of battles, casualties, and fatalities, which isn’t surprising as war is always considered a bloody business sprinkled with death and destruction. However, many historians overlook that it wasn’t just bullets that won the war. Technological innovations changed the battlefield. For example, Samuel M. Pook teamed up with John Eads to design a new style of armored battleship—dubbed Pook’s Turtles. Just weeks after the gunboats were commissioned, they enabled Ulysses S. Grant and Admiral Andrew Hull Foote to take Forts Henry and Donelson. Later, the fleet assisted John Pope in taking Island 10 and again in the Vicksburg campaign.

Christopher Spencer developed a repeating rifle that fired seven balls in quick succession. Abraham Lincoln’s first test determined the gun was a dud. However, the second test went off without a hitch, and the war department ordered 2,000 Spencer Rifles. Many other… show more.

Schneier’s book taught me that hacking isn’t just something that occasionally happens to your laptop. The powerful hack the laws that govern our society too.

I wondered how the hacking mindset could apply to enhancement techs. Which enhancement techs will the elite reserve for themselves and which might they impose on the gig workers of the future? Suppose Neuralink does manage to get its tech into our heads. Imagine Musk finds himself just short of the funds needed to found his planned Martian city. Might beneficiaries of his brain-computer interfaces find themselves abruptly subject to overpowering urges to immediately own ten Teslas? This sounds absurd.

Perhaps the right question to ask is how crazy it is relative to cities of a million on Mars by 2050. Is it beyond the reach of Musk’s rule-breaking, can-do imagination?