A New York Times Notable Book of the Year * Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker , NPR, Newsweek , The Economist, TIME, Slate, and WIRED " Catch Me if You Can meets Coming to America in this epic tale of one of the greatest scammers of all time."―NPR The astounding, never-before-told story of how an audacious Ghanaian con artist pulled off one of the 20th century’s longest-running and most spectacular frauds. When Ghana won its independence from Britain in 1957, it instantly became a target for home-grown opportunists and rapacious Western interests determined to snatch any assets that colonialism hadn’t already stripped. A CIA-funded military junta ousted the new nation’s inspiring president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of hiding the country’s gold overseas. Into this big lie stepped one of history’s most charismatic scammers, a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty in Ghana and trained in the United States, John Ackah Blay-Miezah declared himself custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. You, too, could claim a piece--if only you would “invest” in Blay-Miezah’s fictitious efforts to release the equally fictitious fund. Over the 1970s and ‘80s, he and his accomplices―including Ghanaian state officials and Nixon’s former attorney general--scammed hundreds of millions of dollars out of thousands of believers. Blay-Miezah lived in luxury, deceiving Philadelphia lawyers, London financiers, and Seoul businessmen alike, all while eluding his FBI pursuers. American prosecutors called his scam “one of the most fascinating--and lucrative--in modern history.” In Anansi’s Gold , Yepoka Yeebo chases Blay-Miezah’s ever-wilder trail and discovers, at long last, what really happened to Ghana’s missing wealth. She unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements, international finance, and postcolonial betrayal, revealing how what we call “history” writes itself into being, one lie at a time.

In this urgent, thought-provoking book, Bjorn Lomborg presents the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest and our global SDG promises. • If you want to make the world better, Best Things First is the book to read. World leaders have promised everything to everyone. But they are failing. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are supposed to be delivered by 2030. The goals literally promise everything, like eradicating poverty, hunger and disease; stopping war and climate change, ending corruption, fixing education along with countless other promises. This year, the world is at halftime for its promises, but nowhere near halfway. Together with more than a hundred of the world’s top economists, Bjorn Lomborg has worked for years to identify the world’s best solutions. Based on 12 new, peer-reviewed papers, forthcoming in Cambridge University Press’ Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis , this book highlights the world’s best policies. Some things are difficult to fix, cost a lot, and help little. Other problems we know how to fix, at low cost, with remarkable outcomes. We should do the smart things first. Governments and philanthropists should focus on these 12 smartest things. Fix tuberculosis, malaria, and chronic disease, tackle malnutrition, improve education, increase trade, implement e-procurement, and secure land tenure. This will improve the world amazingly. The cost is $35 billion a year. The benefits include saving 4.2 million lives each year and generating $1.1 trillion more for the world’s poor. We can definitely afford it: The cost of $35 billion is equivalent to the increase in annual global spending on cosmetics over the last two years. This is likely the best thing the world can do this decade.

A comprehensive account of how government deficits and debt drive inflation Where do inflation and deflation ultimately come from? The fiscal theory of the price level offers a simple answer: Prices adjust so that the real value of government debt equals the present value of taxes less spending. Inflation breaks out when people don’t expect the government to fully repay its debts. The fiscal theory is well suited to today’s economy: Financial innovation undermines money demand, and central banks don’t control the money supply or aggressively change interest rates, invalidating classic theories, while large debts and deficits threaten inflation and constrain monetary policy. This book presents a comprehensive account of this important theory from one of its leading developers and advocates. John Cochrane aims to make fiscal theory useful as a conceptual framework and modeling tool, and for analyzing history and policy. He merges fiscal theory with standard models in which central banks set interest rates, giving a novel account of monetary policy. He generalizes the theory to explain data and make realistic predictions. For example, inflation decreases in recessions despite deficits because discount rates fall, raising the value of debt; specifying that governments promise to partially repay debt avoids classic puzzles and allows the theory to apply at all times, not just during periods of high inflation. Cochrane offers an extensive rethinking of monetary doctrines and institutions through the eyes of fiscal theory, and analyzes the era of zero interest rates and post-pandemic inflation. Filled with research by Cochrane and others, The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level offers important new insights about fiscal and monetary policy.

The Economist 's Best Books of 2023 Forbes Top 10 Business Books of 2023 Financial Times' Monthly Best Business Books to Read Pick In this "handbook for disruptors" (Eric Schmidt), The Geek Way reveals a new way to get big things done. It will change the way you think about work, teams, projects, and culture, and give you the insight and tools you need to harness our human superpowers of learning and cooperation. What is “being geeky?” It’s being a perennially curious person, one who's not afraid to tackle hard problems and embrace unconventional solutions. McAfee shows how the geeks have created a new culture based around four norms: science, ownership, speed, and openness. The geek way seems odd at first. It's not deferential to experts, fond of planning and process, afraid of mistakes, or obsessed with "winning." But it explains everything from why Montessori babies turn out to be creative tinkerers to how newcomers are disrupting industry after industry (and still just getting started). When all four norms are in place, a culture emerges that is freewheeling, fast-moving, egalitarian, evidence-driven, argumentative, and autonomous. Why does the geek way work so much better? McAfee provides an original answer: because it taps into humanity's superpower, which is our ability to cooperate intensely and learn rapidly. By providing insights from the young discipline of cultural evolution, McAfee shows that when we come together under the right conditions, we quickly figure out how to build reusable spaceships and self-correcting organizations. Under the wrong conditions, though, we create bureaucracy, chronic delays, cultures of silence, and the other classic dysfunctions of the Industrial Era. Mixing cutting-edge science, history, analysis, and stories that show the geek way in action, McAfee offers a new way to see the world and empowering tools for seizing the big opportunities of today and tomorrow.

“Why do big projects go wrong so often, and are there any lessons you can use when renovating your kitchen? Bent Flyvbjerg is the ‘megaproject’ expert and Dan Gardner brings the storytelling skills to How Big Things Get Done , with examples ranging from a Jimi Hendrix studio to the Sydney Opera House.”— Financial Times “Entertaining . . . There are lessons here for managers of all stripes.”— The Economist A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Economist, Financial Times, CEO Magazine, Morningstar Finalist for the Porchlight Business Book Award, the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award, and the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York’s skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months. These are wonderful stories. But most of the time big visions turn into nightmares. Remember Boston’s “Big Dig”? Almost every sizeable city in the world has such a fiasco in its backyard. In fact, no less than 92% of megaprojects come in over budget or over schedule, or both. The cost of California’s high-speed rail project soared from $33 billion to $100 billon—and won’t even go where promised. More modest endeavors, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, also commonly fail. Why? Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed “the world’s leading megaproject expert.” In How Big Things Get Done , he identifies the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail, and the research-based principles that will make you succeed with yours. For example: • Understand your odds. If you don’t know them, you won’t win. • Plan slow, act fast. Getting to the action quick feels right. But it’s wrong. • Think right to left . Start with your goal, then identify the steps to get there. • Find your Lego. Big is best built from small. • Be a team maker. You won’t succeed without an “us.” • Master the unknown unknowns. Most think they can’t, so they fail. Flyvbjerg shows how you can. • Know that your biggest risk is you. Full of vivid examples ranging from the building of the Sydney Opera House, to the making of the latest Pixar blockbusters, to a home renovation in Brooklyn gone awry, How Big Things Get Done reveals how to get any ambitious project done—on time and on budget.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. • Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material. In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates. Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.

An Economist Best Book of the Year Over the past century, if the wealthiest families had spent a reasonable fraction of their wealth, paid taxes, invested in the stock market, and passed their wealth down to the next generation, there would be tens of thousands of billionaire heirs to generations-old fortunes today. The puzzle of The Missing Billionaires is why you cannot find one such billionaire on any current rich list. There are a number of explanations, but this book is focused on one mistake which is of profound importance to all investors: poor risk decisions, both in investing and spending. Many of these families didn’t choose bad investments– they sized them incorrectly– and allowed their spending decisions to amplify this mistake. The Missing Billionaires book offers a simple yet powerful framework for making important lifetime financial decisions in a systematic and rational way. It's for readers with a baseline level of financial literacy, but doesn’t require a PhD. It fills the gap between personal finance books and the academic literature, bringing the valuable insights of academic finance to non-specialists. Part One builds the theory of optimal investment sizing from first principles, starting with betting on biased coins. Part Two covers lifetime financial decision-making, with emphasis on the integration of investment, saving and spending decisions. Part Three covers practical implementation details, including how to calibrate your personal level of risk-aversion, and how to estimate the expected return and risk on a broad spectrum of investments. The book is packed with case studies and anecdotes, including one about Victor’s investment with LTCM as a partner, and a bonus chapter on Liar’s Poker. The authors draw extensively on their own experiences as principals of Elm Wealth, a multi-billion-dollar wealth management practice, and prior to that on their years as arbitrage traders– Victor at Salomon Brothers and LTCM, and James at Nationsbank/CRT and Citadel. Whether you are young and building wealth, an entrepreneur invested heavily in your own business, or at a stage where your primary focus is investing and spending, The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions is your must-have resource for thoughtful financial decision-making.

From a Stripe and Google executive, a practical guide to company building and scaling the most important resource it has: its people. Selected for "Best Books of 2023" by Bloomberg and The Economist ! “Whether you are a new manager or a CEO, there are going to be moments when you feel alone and need help. Odds are, the advice you need is in Scaling People . You are going to pull this book off your shelf over and over!" —Kim Scott, New York Times bestselling author of Radical Candor and Just Work A leader at both Google and Stripe from their early days, Claire Hughes Johnson has worked with founders and company builders to try to replicate their success. The most common questions she’s asked are not about business strategy—they’re about how to scale the operating structures and people systems of a rapidly growing startup. Scaling People is a practical and empathetic guide to being an effective leader and manager in a high-growth environment. The tactical information it puts forward—including guidance on crafting foundational documents, strategic and financial planning, hiring and team development, and feedback and performance mechanisms—can be applied to companies of any size, in any industry. Scaling People includes dozens of pages of worksheets, templates, exercises, and example documents to help founders, leaders, and company builders create scalable operating systems and lightweight processes that really work. Implementing effective leadership and management practices takes effort and discipline, but the reward is a sustainable, scalable company that’s set up for long-term success. Scaling People is a detailed roadmap for company builders to put the right operating systems and structures in place to scale the most important resource a company has: its people.

The instant New York Times bestseller  • A New York Times Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Nominated for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award "Addicted to Succession ? Well, here's the real thing." - The Hollywood Reporter “Jaw-dropping . . . an epic tale of toxic wealth and greed populated by connivers and manipulators.” — The New York Times Book Review , Editors’ Choice The shocking inside story of the struggle for power and control at Paramount Global, the multibillion-dollar entertainment empire controlled by the Redstone family, and the dysfunction, misconduct, and deceit that threatened the future of the company, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists who first broke the news In 2016, the fate of Paramount Global—the multibillion-dollar entertainment empire that includes Paramount, CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime, and Simon & Schuster—hung precariously in the balance. Its founder and head, ninety-three-year-old Sumner M. Redstone, was facing a very public lawsuit brought by a former romantic companion, Manuela Herzer—a lawsuit that placed Sumner’s deteriorating health and questionable judgment under a harsh light. As one of the last in a long line of all-powerful media moguls, Sumner had been a relentlessly demanding boss, and an even more demanding father. When his daughter, Shari, took control of her father’s business, she faced the hostility of boards and management who for years had heard Sumner disparage her. Les Moonves, the popular CEO of CBS, felt particularly threatened and schemed with his allies on the board to strip Shari of power. But while he publicly battled Shari, news began to leak that Moonves had been involved in multiple instances of sexual misconduct, and he began working behind the scenes to try to make the stories disappear. Unscripted is an explosive and unvarnished look at the usually secret inner workings of two public companies, their boards of directors, and a wealthy, dysfunctional family in the throes of seismic changes, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams. Through the microcosm of Paramount, whose once victorious business model of cable fees and ticket sales is crumbling under the assault of technological advances, and whose workplace is undergoing radical change in the wake of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and a distaste for the old guard, Stewart and Abrams lay bare the battle for power at any price—and the carnage that ensued.