by Camila Russo ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 14, 2020
A deep dive into efforts to build the next internet, one free of government interference and regulation.
Russo, a leading cryptocurrency journalist, recounts the story of “an idealistic hero, his band of misfits, and the challenges they face to make their incredibly ambitious dream a reality.” The hero is Russian Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin, gifted in mathematics and committed to a certain kind of anarchy, with numerous like-minded allies scattered across the globe. Some, like Russo, are South American, convinced that the key to breaking government control is to develop a cryptocurrency even more thoroughly hidden away than Bitcoin. But that’s only a start, a kind of proof of concept of a larger “world computer,” the dream in question, called Ethereum. Cryptocurrency is just beginning—however, notes the author, it now outstrips many national economies in capital. By way of an analogy, explains one of the players in this book, “email was to the internet what Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, was to blockchain technology,” and Ethereum is bigger still, “bigger than any application built on top of it.” Though, as Russo writes, it turns out that cryptocurrency is subject to the familiar boom and bust of the business cycle, there are still plenty of hackers working on it, even as government agencies such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seek to regulate it. The same is true of Ethereum, which seems more desirable than ever since “long-ago scrappy upstarts Facebook and Google had now become megacorporations serving as the main gateways to the internet.” Russo’s narrative, based on more than 100 interviews, is dense, detailed, and often overstuffed. It’s also quite arcane, and it could use some of the patient explication that Michael Lewis and Katie Hafner, among other technology writers, bring to bear on their work.
A slog, but it will interest small-L libertarian techies.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-288614-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Categories: BUSINESS | ECONOMICS | INVESTING | GENERAL BUSINESS | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | PERSONAL FINANCE
Share your opinion of this book
Did you like this book?
by Matthew Desmond ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Share your opinion of this book
Did you like this book?
More by Matthew Desmond
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
by Bernie Sanders with John Nichols ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 21, 2023
Everyone’s favorite avuncular socialist sends up a rousing call to remake the American way of doing business.
“In the twenty-first century we can end the vicious dog-eat-dog economy in which the vast majority struggle to survive,” writes Sanders, “while a handful of billionaires have more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.” With that statement, the author updates an argument as old as Marx and Proudhon. In a nice play on words, he condemns “the uber-capitalist system under which we live,” showing how it benefits only the slimmest slice of the few while imposing undue burdens on everyone else. Along the way, Sanders notes that resentment over this inequality was powerful fuel for the disastrous Trump administration, since the Democratic Party thoughtlessly largely abandoned underprivileged voters in favor of “wealthy campaign contributors and the ‘beautiful people.’ ” The author looks squarely at Jeff Bezos, whose company “paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018.” Indeed, writes Sanders, “Bezos is the embodiment of the extreme corporate greed that shapes our times.” Aside from a few passages putting a face to avarice, Sanders lays forth a well-reasoned platform of programs to retool the American economy for greater equity, including investment in education and taking seriously a progressive (in all senses) corporate and personal taxation system to make the rich pay their fair share. In the end, he urges, “We must stop being afraid to call out capitalism and demand fundamental change to a corrupt and rigged system.” One wonders if this firebrand of a manifesto is the opening gambit in still another Sanders run for the presidency. If it is, well, the plutocrats might want to take cover for the duration.
Even if they're pie-in-the-sky exercises, Sanders’ pitched arguments bear consideration by nonbillionaires.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593238714
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Share your opinion of this book
Did you like this book?
More by Bernie Sanders
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Bernie Sanders ; adapted by Kate Waters
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.