Business & Money

On Entrepreneurial Success

I am often asked how I achieved entrepreneurial success. That is, how I became, in the words of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory,” “rich—yes, richer than a king.” (We can gloss over the ultimate...

The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World (Nathan Gorenstein)

Some men have minds that are simply not like those of others, but far better, on a different plane entirely. Such men are vanishingly rare, and appear to be even rarer, because their unique...

Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town (Brian Alexander)

Private equity has made me rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Yet private equity can be, as this book shows, a tool of the devil, a corrosive and destructive force in American life. Still,...

The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming (Jean-Martin Fortier)

My barn has a split personality. On one side, you may not be surprised to learn, dusty in the gloom, carefully organized and stacked, are defensive implements of war, slumbering until the day of...

The Soul of an Entrepreneur: Work and Life Beyond the Startup Myth (David Sax)

The “why” of entrepreneurship varies by entrepreneur. My core “why” is money. I want, and have always wanted, money, for what money can do. Whether that is avarice, or wisdom, or both, we can...

The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America (Hannah Nordhaus)

As befits one who seeks to be a man of wealth and taste (if I have to choose between them, the former), I aspire to live on a vast estate, leading the life of...

The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (Mariana Mazzucato)

I have long known in my gut that usual measures of social wealth, most of all GDP, are fraudulent, in that they falsely identify value where there is none. I have intuited we were...

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Karl Polanyi)

The Great Transformation, published in 1944, is an ambitious book. It attempts two huge tasks. First, to refute the free market ideology, sometimes called market fundamentalism, represented at that time by men such as...

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (David Graeber)

I am trying to understand how human beings create value through their actions, and what that implies for humanity. Although this goal is hardly original, and has occupied much brighter thinkers than me for...

American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (Thomas P. Hughes)

American Genesis is a cultural history of the grand century of American technology, from 1870 to 1970. Thomas Hughes published his book in 1989, when Americans believed that the grandeur of American technological achievement...