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Extreme Economies
- What Life at the World's Margins Can Teach Us About Our Own Future
- Narrated by: James MacCallum
- Length: 12 hrs
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Publisher's summary
A New Statesman best book of the year
A Financial Times best economics book of 2019
An accessible, story-driven look at the future of the global economy, written by a leading expert
To predict our future, we must look to the extremes. So argues the economist Richard Davies, who takes listeners to the margins of the modern economy and beyond in his globe-trotting audiobook. From a prison in rural Louisiana where inmates purchase drugs with prepaid cash cards to the poorest major city on earth, where residents buy clean water in plastic bags, from the world’s first digital state to a prefecture in Japan whose population is the oldest in the world, how these extreme economies function - most often well outside any official oversight - offers a glimpse of the forces that underlie human resilience, drive societies to failure, and will come to shape our collective future.
While the people who inhabit these places have long been dismissed or ignored, Extreme Economies revives a foundational idea from medical science to turn the logic of modern economics on its head, arguing that the outlier economies are the place to learn about our own future. Whether following Punjabi migrants through the lawless Panamanian jungle or visiting a day-care for the elderly modeled after a casino, Davies brings a storyteller’s eye to places where the economy has been destroyed, distorted, and even turbocharged. In adapting to circumstances that would be unimaginable to most of us, the people he encounters along the way have helped to pioneer the economic infrastructure of the future.
At once personal and keenly analytical, Extreme Economies is an epic travelogue for the age of global turbulence, shedding light on today’s most pressing economic questions.
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Story
Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world - one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism, the leading source of the world's most popular drug, and perhaps the most widespread word on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's 500-year transformation from a mysterious Muslim ritual into an everyday necessity.
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Unfortunately
- By Brian on 06-06-20
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Empire of Things
- How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
- By: Frank Trentmann
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 33 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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What we consume has become the defining feature of our lives: our economies live or die by spending, we are treated more as consumers than workers and even public services are presented to us as products in a supermarket. In this monumental study, acclaimed historian Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary history that has shaped our material world, from late Ming China, Renaissance Italy and the British Empire to the present.
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An exhaustive attempt to get the story right
- By John on 03-09-16
By: Frank Trentmann
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Socialism Sucks
- Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
- By: Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 4 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The bastard step-child of Milton Friedman and Anthony Bourdain, Socialism Sucks is a bar crawl through former, current, and wannabe socialist countries around the world. Free-market economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell travel to countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and Sweden to investigate the dangers and idiocies of socialism - while drinking a lot of beer.
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I learned more than I anticipated in a 4 + hr book
- By J D Rossi on 08-06-19
By: Robert Lawson, and others
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KasiNomic Revolution
- The Rise of African Informal Economies
- By: GG Alcock
- Narrated by: GG Alcock
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Prepare for this new generation, prepare for the Afripolitan Generation. A revolution is taking place in the great marketplaces of the informal sector and it contains an unquantified scale and power as an economic engine and a way of life for the majority of our low-income populations. The KasiNomic Revolution may still be a murmur in the streets, a grassroots economic groundswell, but it is the future of African economic activity.
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Exciting and Eye Opening
- By Hendrik on 12-11-23
By: GG Alcock
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Fulfillment
- Winning and Losing in One-Click America
- By: Alec MacGillis
- Narrated by: Danny Gavigan
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Alec MacGillis’ Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.
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Missing some important angles
- By D. Zimmerle on 08-19-21
By: Alec MacGillis
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The Great Reset
- How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity
- By: Richard Florida
- Narrated by: Eric Conger
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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We tend to view prolonged economic downturns, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Long Depression of the late 19th century, in terms of the crisis and pain they cause. But history teaches us that these great crises also represent opportunities to remake our economy and society and to generate whole new eras of economic growth and prosperity.
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glorification of City Life
- By Ryan Riggs on 11-25-20
By: Richard Florida
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Bending Adversity
- Japan and the Art of Survival
- By: David Pilling
- Narrated by: Tim Andes Pabon
- Length: 14 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In Bending Adversity, Financial Times Asia editor David Pilling presents a fresh vision of Japan, drawing on his own deep experience, as well as observations from a cross section of Japanese citizenry, including novelist Haruki Murakami, former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, industrialists and bankers, activists and artists, teenagers and octogenarians. Through their voices, Pilling captures the dynamism and diversity of contemporary Japan.
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Good book, but terribly read
- By Kallan Resnick on 10-24-14
By: David Pilling
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Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy
- By: Tim Harford
- Narrated by: Roger Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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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, best-selling author and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford recounts each invention's own curious, surprising, and memorable story.
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Thought provoking
- By Paul Norris on 09-10-17
By: Tim Harford
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The Undercover Economist
- By: Tim Harford
- Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Author of the extremely popular "Dear Economist" column in Financial Times, Tim Harford reveals the economics behind everyday phenomena in this highly entertaining and informative book. Can a book about economics be fun to read? It can when Harford takes the reins, using his trademark wit to explain why it costs an arm and a leg to buy a cappuccino and why it's nearly impossible to purchase a decent used car.
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Everyone needs to know this.
- By Paul Norwood on 04-24-06
By: Tim Harford
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Price Wars
- How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World
- By: Rupert Russell
- Narrated by: Ben Deery
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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For Rupert Russell, the Brexit vote was only the latest shock in a decade full of them: the unstoppable war in Syria, huge migrant flows into Europe, beheadings in Iraq, children placed in cages on the U.S. border. In Price Wars, he sets out on a worldwide journey to investigate what caused the wave of chaos that consumed the world in the 2010s. Russell travels to Tunisia, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, East Africa, and Central America and discovers that unrest in all these places was triggered by dramatic and mysterious swings in the price of essential commodities.
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I really wanted to like it
- By Monte Johnston on 04-09-22
By: Rupert Russell
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This Land Is Our Land
- An Immigrant's Manifesto
- By: Suketu Mehta
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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A timely argument for why the US and the West would benefit from accepting more immigrants. Impassioned, rigorous, and richly stocked with memorable stories and characters, This Land Is Our Land is a timely and necessary intervention and a literary polemic of the highest order.
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Greatly informative. wonderful narrated
- By ADEDZWA Dooyum Sartor on 06-29-19
By: Suketu Mehta
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Capitalism in America
- A History
- By: Alan Greenspan, Adrian Wooldridge
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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From the legendary former Fed Chairman and the acclaimed Economist writer and historian, the full, epic story of America's evolution from a small patchwork of threadbare colonies to the most powerful engine of wealth and innovation the world has ever seen.
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Explains a lot
- By Scott on 02-18-19
By: Alan Greenspan, and others
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Sun, Sin, Suburbia
- The History of Modern Las Vegas Revised and Expanded
- By: Geoff Schumacher
- Narrated by: Douglas R. Pratt
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Las Vegas is gambling's mecca - Sin City the Entertainment Capital of the World with 40 million visitors a year. But that's just part of the story. This carefully documented history tracks the rise of Las Vegas from its vital role in World War II, of the Rat Pack era of the 50s, the explosive growth of the 90s, and it's colossal collapse in the post 2008 real-estate crash. It offers a history of the iconic Strip, but also profiles the neighborhoods where over 2 million people live.
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Good History of Vegas - old, modern and mundane
- By Amazon Customer on 06-13-14
By: Geoff Schumacher
What listeners say about Extreme Economies
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Loren
- 02-17-20
Well Researched, Well Travelled, Well Told
There are three sets of stories: Survival, Failure, and Future, and each of those sections has three specific locations for the stories. As the subtitle of the book advertises, there are lessons that each of the stories can provide.
The survival group has stories of post tsunami Indonesia, Zaatari (a very large refugee camp in Jordan), and a prison in Louisiana. Examining these locations from the perceptive of how markets work is quite insightful, and those interested in public policy related to those environments would do well to read these accounts.
The failure group includes Darien (a no-man's land between Panama and Colombia), Kinshasa (DRC), and Glasgow. All of these failed for very different reasons, and are all interesting. The future group includes Akita, Japan (extreme aging), Tallinn, Estonia, (extreme efforts at digital government), and Santiago (an extreme wealth distribution).
The author does a nice job of working in relevant economic and other social science literature where it makes sense, but unlike a lot of books, it does not appear that the editor told the author to jam in more content to make it longer. In addition, he is well versed in economics, and while he clearly supports the vibrant markets that he observed in Zaatari and Indonesia, he also details the harsh impacts of the market oriented policies and income inequality in Santiago and the failure of the market in Darien. So while the examples are 'extreme', he is not an extreme economist on one or the other side of the ideological spectrum.
From work and other interests, I have connections with a number of these places and issues, so I found this book to be very useful. But even for those who didn't have prior interests in these specific locations, it is still a very good read. Few people are likely to get to most of these places, much less do the kind of systematic interviews and analysis performed by the author.
In terms of the audible reading, the narrator does not get in the way of the story and has an English accent as well as a Castilian accent in the sections reading Spanish place names, etc.
Of course, like any audible book, it does mean that you want to refer to a map or photos about those locations, but that is probably a good sign rather than a criticism. I also appreciate that he doesn't bother listing the http address or constantly mentioning "the accompanying PDF", those are just annoying. We know how to find maps and photos.
I read (listen to) a lot of economics titles in the vein of this book and freakonomics, etc., and this author found a good approach and did a really good job on it.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Jordan
- 02-23-23
Santiago chapter is 1 star; rest of book 4 stars
Davies explores fascinating economies all over the world, bringing light to issues not covered very well elsewhere. At the same time, Davies takes unfair shots at free markets because he doesn’t even try to address what free market advocates would say. He just runs with his inequality narrative which is light on both facts and logic. No free markets advocate believes you can just set markets free and everything will work: *Without* property rights, *without* low-corruption courts / agencies, and *without* basic institutions, you won’t see as much success. Davies should have explored Hong Kong to see this for example. Free market capitalism has multiple *pre-requisites* for success.
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