Business books giants and chip
AUTHORS TACKLE TOUGH AND IMPORTANT ISSU
AFTER three years of global economic turmoil caused by the pandemic – and the pound dropping in value against the dollar in the UK – there is more than passing interest in the six titles shortlisted for the Financial Times 2022 Business Book of the Year.
Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times,
summed up: “Our finalists have tackled some of the toughest and most important issues facing global capitalism, from the energy crisis to semiconductor supply to technology investment. They have done so in compelling and enjoyable prose, based on deep knowledge and extensive investigation.”
Khalaf heads the judging panel, which include Shriti Vadera, chair of Prudential Plc and also of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The winner, to be announced on December 5, will receive £30,000, with the others getting £10,000 each.
Previous winners include Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for economics in 2019, for Poor Economics (2011); Raghuram Rajan, who was governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013-2016, for Fault Lines (2010); and Liaquat Ahamed for The Lords of Finance (2009).
The shortlisted books this year, with notes on them from the judges, are:
Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World’s Most Secretive Industry by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel: In July 2011, the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was drifting through the treacherous Gulf of Aden when a crew of pirates attacked and set her ablaze in a devastating explosion. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for Lloyd’s of London, inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. Soon after his inspection, he was murdered.
Dead in the Water is a shocking exposé of the criminal inner-workings of international shipping, an old-world industry at the backbone of our global economy. Through first-hand accounts of those who lived the hijacking – from members of the ship’s crew and witnesses to the attacks, to the ex-London detectives turned private investigators seeking to solve Mockett’s murder – award-winning reporters Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel piece together the astounding truth behind one of the most brazen financial frauds in history.
Influence Empire: The Story of Tencent and China’s Tech Ambition by Lulu Chen: In 2017, a company known as Tencent overtook Facebook to become the world’s fifth largest company. It was a watershed moment, a wake-up call for those in the West accustomed to regarding the global tech industry through the prism of Silicon Valley: Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft.Yet to many of the two billion-plus people who live just across the Pacific Ocean, it came as no surprise at all.
Founded by the enigmatic billionaire Pony Ma, the firm that began life as a simple text-message operator invested in and created some of China’s most iconic games enroute to dreaming up WeChat, the Swiss Army knife super-app that combines messaging, shopping and entertainment.
In this fascinating narrative, crammed with insider interviews and exclusive details, Lulu Chen tells the story of how Tencent created the golden era of Chinese technology, and delves into key battles involving Didi, Meituan and Alibaba. It’s a chronicle of critical junctures and asks just what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur in China.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle: The epochal shift toward neoliberalism – a web of related policies that, broadly speaking, reduced the footprint of government in society and reassigned economic power to private market forces – that began in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1970s, fundamentally changed the world. Today, the word ‘neoliberal’ is often used to condemn a broad swathe of policies, from prizing free market principles over people to advancing privatisation programmes in developing nations around the world.
To be sure, neoliberalism has contributed to a number of alarming trends, not least of which has been a massive growth in income inequality. Yet as the eminent historian Gary Gerstle argues in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Disorder, these indictments fail to reckon with the full contours of what neoliberalism was and why its worldview had such persuasive hold on both the right and the left for three decades.
An indispensable and sweeping re-interpretation of the last fifty years, this book illuminates how the ideology of neoliberalism became so infused in the daily life of an era, while probing what remains of that ideology and its political programmes as America enters an uncertain future.
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption by Sebastian Mallaby, Allen Lane (UK), Penguin
Press (US): Innovations rarely come from ‘experts’. Jeff Bezos was not a bookseller, Elon Musk was not in the
auto industry. When it comes to innovation, a legendary venture capitalist told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered.
Drawing on unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time, award-winning financial historian Sebastian Mallaby tells the story of this strange tribe of financiers who have funded the world’s most successful companies, from Google to SpaceX to Alibaba.
We learn the unvarnished truth about some of the most iconic triumphs and infamous disasters in the history of tech, from the comedy of errors that was the birth of Apple to the venture funding that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber, to the industry’s notorious lack of women and ethnic minorities.
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller, Simon & Schuster (UK), Scribner (US): Power in the modern world – military, economic, geopolitical – is built on a foundation of computer chips. America has maintained its lead as a superpower because it has dominated advances in computer chips and all the technology that chips have enabled. Virtually everything runs on chips: cars, phones, the stock market, even the electric grid.
Now that edge is in danger of slipping, undermined by the naïve assumption that globalising the chip industry and letting players in Taiwan, Korea and Europe take over manufacturing serves America’s interests. Currently, as Chip War reveals, China, which
spends more on chips than any other product, is pouring billions into a chip-building Manhattan Project to catch up to the US.
In Chip War economic historian Chris Miller recounts the fascinating sequence of events that led to the United States perfecting chip design, and how faster chips helped defeat the Soviet Union by rendering the Russians’ arsenal of precision-guided
weapons obsolete. The battle to control this industry will shape our future. China spends more money importing chips than buying oil, and they are China’s greatest external vulnerability as they are fundamentally reliant on foreign chips. But with 37 per cent of the global supply of chips being made in Taiwan, within easy range of Chinese missiles, the West’s fear is that a solution may be close at hand.
Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson: The 21st century has brought a powerful tide of geopolitical, economic, and democratic shocks.
Their fallout has led central banks to create over $25 trillion of new money, brought about a new age of geopolitical competition, destabilised the Middle East, ruptured the European Union, and exposed old political fault
lines in the United States.
Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a long history of this present political moment.
It recounts three histories – one about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies – and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic the disruption in each became a big story.