My new book comes out next week.
You can pre-order it here if you are so inclined.
The book will be in paperback as well as Kindle format. There will also be an audio version.
When planning out the book my publisher asked if I would like to read it myself or have a guy with a British accent do it for me. At first I punted and said just let a professional handle it.
But I changed my mind. I do a podcast. I can put the correct inflections and emotions on certain words and sentences. Why wouldn’t I do it?
So a few months ago I went to a recording studio for a couple of days and read the entire book into a mic.
It was harder than anticipated to read out loud for hours on end but I enjoyed the process. Finding the right rhythm was equally parts challenging and fun. I like how it turned out.
I’m a convert to audio books in the past six months or so. I still read fiction on my Kindle but have migrated 90% of the non-fiction books to Audible. My book intake has broken out to new all-time highs because it’s so much easier.
I find myself listening to more books these days when I’m walking the dog, grocery shopping or wasting time waiting around for one of my kid’s sporting events to get started.
I’m a sucker for new stories, datapoints and anecdotes.
Here are some things I’ve learned from some recent books:
Wealth inequality is a big concern for many people these days. It doesn’t seem fair that the top 10% controls nearly 70% of the wealth in America.
It’s hard to believe but this is actually an improvement from the past.
In Wall Street: A History, Charles Geisst shares that inequality was far worse in the early 20th century:
Five percent of the population controlled 90 percent of the wealth. Two hundred corporations controlled half of the corporate wealth in the country. Massive fortunes were being accumulated while the average annual wage was less than $1,500 per year.
The top 5% has 90% of the wealth in the early 1900s!
What’s interesting about that era is how many of the wealthiest people from the Gilded Age became so philanthropic. Andrew Carnegie’s steel business was earning $40 million a year in profits (that’s ~$2 billion today) by 1900. Accumulating vast sums of wealth made Carnegie lose interest in business, which in turn led to a focus on giving away his fortune.
Carnegie wrote, “After my book, The Gospel of Wealth was published, it was inevitable that I should live up to its teachings ceasing to struggle for more wealth. I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.”
Hopefully today’s wealthiest individuals will follow a similar path.
There were two stories told by David McWilliams in his book The History of Money that stood out to me.
One is that Hitler was planning to drop millions of pounds from planes all across Britain during the Second World War.
After living through the hyperinflation in Weimar Germany, Hitler was well aware of how destabilizing extreme levels of inflation could be to an economy:
The plan for the Luftwaffe to drop millions of banknotes over Britain was top secret, only known by a few senior Nazis. While some honest subjects of the king might go to the authorities, Hitler worked on the basis that most British folk would stuff a few notes under the mattress. He would enlist the people Napoleon famously dismissed as a money-obsessed “nation of shopkeepers” against themselves. By bringing this counterfeit money into circulation all over the country, inflation would rip through the system, particularly as so much of Britain’s economic resources were directed at the war effort. Only a small amount of consumer goods and essentials were being traded, and therefore prices would be volatile. In such conditions of privation, the cascade of new money would drive British prices skyward, triggering panic. Hitler hoped that the previously quiet and obedient British would experience a fire in the theater moment. They’d freakout and the ensuing chaos would upend their Blitz spirit, compromising the war effort.
The Germans had hundreds of counterfeiters working around the clock to help potentially break the Bank of England. The plan never came to fruition because Germany was losing on the battlefield and couldn’t spare the planes.
McWilliams also describes a theory about the The Wizard of Oz that was new to me:
In the film, we can read Oz, the evil Wizard, as the embodiment of the banking elite and also a stand-in for gold, oz being the symbol for an ounce. The Yellow Brick Road represents the Gold Standard itself, a pathway made of gold bars. Dorothy is the farmer’s daughter from Kansas, the state geographically smack in the middle of the country, representing that mythical place, middle America. The Scarecrow is the Midwestern farmer, put upon by falling prices, and the Tin Man is the industrial worker whose wages are also falling, impacted by deflation associated with the Gold Standard. The Cowardly Lion is the merged Democrat-Populist candidate in the 1896 presidential election, William Jennings Bryan.
When they unmask the Wizard, however, they discover he is nothing but a fraud–as is the Gold Standard.
Even if this isn’t true I love how deep this theory goes for its hatred of the gold standard.
McWilliams makes the case that the invention of money helped create the incentive structure for progress and innovation.
In How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil describes how energy helped usher in a new era of prosperity around the globe as well:
An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century.
Inflation adjusted energy prices have fallen considerably as supply has increased:
By 1964 crude oil surpassed coal as the world’s most important fossil fuel, but although its output kept on rising, supply remained plentiful and so prices were falling. In constant (inflation-adjusted) monies, the world oil price was lower in 1950 than it was in 1940, lower in 1960 than in 1950–and lower still in 1970 than in 1960.
The gain in energy sources is hard to fathom:
The 20th century saw a nearly 40-fold gain in useful energy; since 1800 the gain was about 3,500-fold.
And our efficiency in using energy to feed billions of people has re-shaped society:
Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kilogram of grain by more than 98 percent–and we reduced the share of the country’s population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin.
The current geopolitical situation is yet another reminder in the importance of energy in the world order.
Further Reading:
The Best Books I Read in 2025
