Origin of Wealth
What is wealth?How is it created? And how can we create more of it for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and societies?In The Origin of Wealth,Eric Beinhocker provides provocative new answers to these fundamental questions. Beinhocker surveys the cutting-edge ideas of economists and scientists and brings their work alive for a broad audience. These researchers, he explains, are revolutionizing economics by showing how the economy is an evolutionary system, much like a biological system. It is economic evolution that creates wealth and has taken us from the Stone Age to the $36.5 trillion global economy of today. By better understanding economic evolution, Beinhocker writes, we can better understand how to create more wealth. The author shows how “complexity economics” is turning conventional wisdom on its head in areas ranging from business strategy and organizational design to investment strategy and public policy. As sweeping in scope as its title,The Origin of Wealthwill rewire our thinking about the workings of the global economy and where it is going.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
31mentions
19people
2007–2022years
77% recommend19% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- To explore what wealth is I recommend The Origin Of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker.
In essence, wealth is a process that creates low entropy.
He posits three conditions that need to be met:
All value creating economic transformations and transactions
1) Irreversibility - are thermodynamically irreversible
2) Entropy - reduce entropy locally while increasing it globally
3) Fitness - need to be fit for human purposes.
On my recent trip, I saw mountains being broken and shipped off to distant places for construction. If it goes on, within a few decades they will cease to exist. The last one tells us that we can define what wealth means - to some the mountains and the ecosystem they harbour are wealth, to some the buildings and the resulting economic activity is wealth.
- Great to see this list. I started reading Origin of Wealth last week and wish I had encountered the book earlier.
- * The Origin of Wealth * Elephant in the Brain * A Random Walk Down Wall Street * Why Buddhism Is True * Digital Minimalism
- - The Origin of Wealth. Fantastic book on the new field of complexity / evolutionary economics
- The Language Instinct. How mind creates language.
- The Elephant in the Brain. I’ve posted notes here https://invertedpassion.com/notes-from-the-elephant-in-the-b...
- Existential Cafe. History of existential thought. Excellent book.
- 12 rules of life. Highly opiniated but well argued book on how to live life
- Skin in the game by Nasim Taleb.
- Daemon. The sci-fi book that anticipated what rouge blockchain like programs can do. Again, highly recommended
- I recommend reading the Cliff Notes for "The Origin of Wealth" (the full book is just too damn long). Sometimes product designs with a devout following still fail the product market fit test. Trying a bunch of things to see what sticks is a pretty valid strategy, it's what nature does. Steve Jobs would just convince you of your folly for wanting anything but a one button mouse, but Eric, Larry, and Sergey would offer you mice with 1-10 buttons, hover mice, eyeball tracking systems that act as mice, a laser pointer mouse, etc. Each is a small fixed cost and if there's product market fit, the winning variant pays for all the others...
- Poor Charlie's Almanac -- can't beat Charlie Munger when it comes to explaining how the world works.
Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile -- Nassim Taleb reviles lots of new ways to think, first in finance, then everything in later books.
The Origin of Wealth -- Similar to Antifragile with a lot of mental models packed in on many different subjects: economics, business, biology, ...
The Design of Everyday Things -- the bible of design. Read it to know why everyday frustrations with tech are probably not your fault. His book Emotional Design is a good compliment.
The Essential Drucker -- "essential" reading for anyone in management or scaling a startup.
History, and why the world is the way it is today:
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
The Birth of Plenty, William Bernstein
They Made America, Harold Evans -- fantastic history book with each chapter telling the detailed story of a businessperson or inventor in U.S. history
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