Category: Economics

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Review: Skin in the Game – Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Intelligence (Commercial), Misinformation & Propaganda, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

6 Star – Skin in the Game = Ethics = Sustainable

By the author Black Swan and Anti-Fragility, among many other works, this book is a simplified overview — a capstone work — and the easiest to read.

Skin in the Game is defined by the author as symmetry of risk and reward — in other words, you don't get to externalize losses to others while reaping the rewards without any personal risk.

That pretty much sums up everything that is wrong with banking, commerce, government, religions, and universities.

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Review: ANTIFRAGILE – Things That Gain From Disorder

7 Star Top 1%, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

7 Star Transformative — As Important as Governing the Commons — LOCALIZE

For those who do not know this, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action earned Elinor Ostrom a Nobel Peace Prize in Economics. This book, by the author of Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable   is of that caliber. A later book,, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life is easier to read — if you have time for only one go with the latter.

The core message of this book is that you cannot predict or control high impact low probability events, but you can downsize, localize, you can decentralize, and in so doing make much of the ecology “antifragile.”

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Review: TRUMPED – A Nation on the Brink of Ruin – And How to Bring It Back

5 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Best Practices in Management, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)
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Some books are so far out of my personal ability to digest in detail that I very rapidly convert to my scanning mode with one big question that I ask on every page: does this book and its author pass the smell test with me, and would I, if President, want to trust this author to help implement his ideas without necessarily understanding them in detail?

Not only is the answer for this book and this author a resounding YES, but on pages 31-32 I have a note, “Holy Shit! Could DT be doing all this?” Those two pages outline ten great deals that Donald Trump could be pursuing: peace, jobs, sound-money, Glass-Steagall, federalist, regulatory, liberty, health-care, fiscal, and governance.

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Review: When Google Met WikiLeaks

6 Star Top 10%, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Future, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
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It has been very distressful for me, as a professional intelligence officer committed to truth and transparency, to find so many of my colleagues absolutely livid – constipated with anger, impotent in every sense of the word – when confronted with the success off WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange is the epitome of truth, transparency, and trust, the sub-title of The Open Source Everything Manifesto that places Julian and the good works of his thousands of volunteers in context. The post-Western, post-Google Internet begins and ends, in my view, with Julian Assange, myself, William Binney, and John McAfee. The WikiLeaks “model” – while it can be broadened and scaled up – is the perfect manifestation of what Tom Atlee has called The Tao of Democracy. WikiLeaks is Collective Intelligence in its purest form: no barriers, no lies.

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Review: Trump and the Resurrection of America: Leading America’s Second Revolution

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Civil Society, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
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John Michael Chambers

Best New Book for Those Who Love America

I received a PDF copy from the author, with whom I share many concerns about and hopes for the Trump Presidency, and am truly delighted with all that he has done. As a former spy who also co-created the Marine Corps Intelligence Intelligence Activity and went on to found the Open Source Intelligence discipline, I deal every day with complex nuanced topics that I find very difficult to explain to normal people.

This author has done a BRILLIANT job, a PATRIOTIC job, a LIFE-ENHANCING and GOD-BLESSED job, of laying out both the threats to the Trump Presidency and to America, and the threats and possibilities for resurrecting America and saving it from the Deep State I know so well.

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Review: The Fruits of Graft

7 Star Top 1%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
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Wayne Jett

5.0 out of 5 stars7 Star Life Transformative Insight Into How Bankers Caused the Great Depression to Destroy Middle Class, Concentrate Wealth, and Consolidate Power over the US Government with FDR Complicity

Everyone who actually knows anything substantive lies about the Great Depression and its causes.

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Review: The Grand Self-Deception – A Libertarian Manifesto Against the Deep State – The Failed Welfare-Taxation Model of Norway

5 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Civil Society, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
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5 Stars — Destroys the Deep State in 479 Pages

I met the author of this book in Norway, when he interviewed me for Ny Tid (Modern Times) in relation to my nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, an interview that is on YouTube in multiple channels. I absolutely respect his combination of intelligence and integrity, and in any hearing that pits him against the Deep State, I would absolutely believe him and challenge the Deep State. This is his manifesto.

At 479 pages, with a fourteen page table of contents (Kindle users will love this, it is the deepest most specific table of contents I have ever seen in a business, economics, ethics, libertarian, or political book), this book is both a bargain at cost per page and a brilliant provocation with brain-bombs left and right.

God Bless Donald Trump — for all of Trump's failings as he rolls over and plays dead for the Deep State (with a reported promise of no less than $20B for playing his role) — we are indebted to Donald Trump for doing in 120 days what so many of us, including the Libertarian Party of which I am a member, have failed to do in a quarter century: made the Deep State a topic of common conversation. The mainstream “fake news” media can no longer repress this topic, it is mainstream.

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