Ford Library

Mayer, Jane. Dark money : the hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. Anchor Books, 2017.

A post script to my recent review of Nancy MacLean’s new book Democracy in Chains:

In her new book about the radical right’s covert plan to restructure American shareholder capitalism and public policy, Duke history professor Nancy MacLean cited the work of investigative journalist Jane Mayer, who reported that the Koch brothers and other wealthy right-wing donors poured more than a $100 million into a “war against Obama”. These political contributions were given to groups and candidates who supported their ultraconservative core beliefs, but also benefited the donors’ powerful business interests, including corporate deregulation, lower personal and corporate taxes, cuts in social spending, and reduced oversight of the environment.

Termed “dark money,” this political spending is untraceable by law, but it is treated as a charitable contribution for tax purposes. Dark Money is also the name of Jane Mayer’s new bestselling book that portrays a network of archconservative families, who use political donations to influence how Americans think and vote. Most prominently featured are right wing multibillionaires Charles and David Koch, but Mayer also includes short portraits of other ultra-conservatives such as Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes; the DeVos family of Michigan, founders of the Amway marketing empire; and NC discount store magnate (Roses) Art Pope.

Dark Money was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year.

Also available as an audiobook on OverDrive and as an eBook on OverDrive.

MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in chains: the deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Viking, [2017].

Last week, I learned that both anti-immigration activist Stephen Miller and white nationalist Richard Spencer were students at Duke in 2006 when the lacrosse scandal consumed our town and the nation. At the time, Stephen Miller was an undergraduate studying political science and a columnist for The Chronicle. A decade after graduation, Miller had an office in the Trump White House advising the president on immigration issues.

White supremacist Richard Spencer was a PhD student in history at Duke in 2006, but he dropped out to become an editor of the American Conservative, where he was later fired for his extreme views. Credited for creating the term alt-right, Spencer was the leader of a protest in Charlottesville, VA last month that resulted in a violent confrontation.

Stephen Miller and Richard Spencer express views that garner media attention but far more threatening are the secret plans by more powerful players on the radical right. In her new book, Democracy in Chains, Duke history and public policy faculty member Nancy MacLean presents the story of the radical right and their well-planned and financed stealth campaign to rewrite democracy in America by concentrating economic and political power in the hands of a few.

Prof MacLean begins her story in the mid-1950’s at the University of Chicago and later at the University of Virginia and George Mason where economist James Buchanan and other like-minded intellectuals set out to free markets from collective action and government interference. These early libertarians argue that private markets acting in their own self-interest allocate goods and services most efficiently, and that public officials, who also operate with self-interested motives, cannot be trusted to act for the public good. Buchanan advocates for a smaller role for government, lower taxes and government spending, curtailing of worker rights, fewer environmental protections and privatizing public resources. In 1986, Buchanan wins a Nobel Prize in Economics for his groundbreaking work, but he and his associates make little headway in implementing his vision.

In the 1990’s, the Koch brothers and other multibillionaires begin financing a covert strategy to implement Buchanan’s groundbreaking ideas for radical and permanent change, replacing majority rule with pure capitalism. After 2008, the Koch team engineers a hostile takeover of the Republican party. Vice President Mike Pence sympathizes with their view. Libertarian leaders seek liberty, “The liberty to concentrate vast wealth, so as to deny elementary fairness and freedom to the many.” Recommended

Also available as an audiobook on OverDrive and as an eBook on OverDrive.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Economic scholars study, debate and write about problems in today’s global economy, but only the most optimistic readers believe that government policymakers will reverse the trends. Three important works were published last year addressing sluggish growth, rising inequality and unstable financial markets.

Ricks, Morgan. The money problem : rethinking financial regulation. The University of Chicago Press, [2016].

The central problem in the U.S. financial system is vulnerability in the short term funding markets. The solution is to update and redesign the monetary system to include explicit government guarantees for all short-term borrowing of financial firms.

Also available as an eBook.

El-Erian, Mohamed A. The only game in town : central banks, instability, and avoiding the next collapse. Random House, [2016].

In 2008, central banks prevented a collapse in the world economy. Now they are the only responsible economic policymakers. It is time for governments to step up and develop comprehensive economic policies that will lead to growth and stability.

Also available as an audiobook on OverDrive and as an eBook on OverDrive.

Milanovic, Branko. Global inequality : a new approach for the age of globalization. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, [2016].

The industrial revolution in Europe and North America drove up inequality between rich and poor countries, but the fast rate of growth of Asian countries is pushing global inequality back down. The current trend of shrinking inequality among nations but increasing inequalities within nations will continue.

Also available as an eBook.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (reviewed here) has been on the New York Times’ list of best sellers for almost a year and his memoir is one of only 5 titles on Bill Gates’ summer reading list. In his insightful book, Vance illustrates how the consumer-oriented values and chaotic family customs of the working class limit their children’s chances for a prosperous future.

But that is not the whole story. In addition to suffering from their own dysfunctional behaviors, ordinary people are routinely cheated in subtle ways that are impossible to detect. Two new books illustrate how elites are advancing their own agendas, while abandoning a longstanding sense of social responsibility.

Enrich, David. The spider network. Custom House, [2017].

Wall Street Journal editor David Enrich tells the story of British math prodigy Tom Hayes, who was convicted of criminal fraud in 2015 for manipulating Libor, the benchmark that underlies the interest rate on loans worldwide. From his first days as a trader in the City of London, Hayes learns that his sole objective is to make money. Working at a series of banks, he speculates on the companies’ own funds, using sophisticated pricing models. Hayes optimizes his performance by working with a group of bankers to change their Libor submissions in the direction favorable to his security holdings.

Executives at powerful banks, Citigroup, Goldman, UBS and others, were complicit; yet these influential people were never held accountable. Oversight from regulators was minimal. Meanwhile, people on Main Street who used a credit card, took out a variable rate mortgage or carried a student loan paid more for interest on those obligations. Those with pensions saw lower returns.

Also available as an audiobook on CD, an audiobook on OverDrive, and an eBook on OverDrive.

McDonald, Duff. The golden passport. Harper Business, [2017].

The Harvard Business School (HBS) proudly claims to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. But business journalist Duff McDonald holds HBS to blame for the key problems in America today — growing inequality and the flawed structure of today’s shareholder capitalism. As the most prominent and largest graduate business school, HBS has shaped countless companies, but also the world’s financial system, the economy and society itself. An HBS MBA is the “golden passport” to influence and wealth.

McDonald explains that HBS created the Socratic case method to train MBA students to operate in an ambiguous environment, to diagnose problems and frame solutions, to prioritize, communicate and act. But he also argues that the case method is backward facing and has armed its graduates with conventional answers to conventional questions. McDonald holds Harvard faculty members responsible for the theories that empower executives to increase stock prices by laying off employees. He also criticizes the pervasive focus on money within the school. MBA’s flock to lucrative consulting and investment banking careers. Administrators fixate on raising money from alumni. Faculty members multiply their salaries by serving as consultants for corporate clients. While the institution revolves around making money, McDonald calls for HBS to live up to its aspiration to make the world a better place.

Also available as an audiobook on CD, an audiobook on OverDrive, an eBook on OverDrive, and on Notable Business Books Kindles at the Ford Library.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Kolhatkar, Sheelah. Black Edge: inside information, dirty money, and the quest to bring down the most wanted man on Wall Street. Random House, 2017.

Stories about powerful people behaving badly make good beach reading, especially if the protagonists are rich financiers and they come to a bad end. Extra points if the books illuminate the workings of Wall Street.

Ruthless hedge fund owner Stephen A. Cohen is the subject of Sheelah Kolhatkar’s new book, Black Edge. The story begins as Cohen graduates from Wharton and begins his career at a small brokerage firm in lower Manhattan. His natural instincts make him a star trader almost immediately. Fearless and self-confident, he generates huge profits by trading large blocks of stock at high frequency.

In 1992, Cohen starts his own hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, and by 1995, the company is worth $100 million. He charges exorbitant fees and keeps half the profits. As he grows more powerful, he requires Wall Street bankers to give him advance notice before releasing information that would affect the price of a stock. After SAC surpasses $1 billion in assets, he hires new traders who have personal connections with people working in public companies. He uses these contacts to gather inside information (black edge) that he uses for trading. Cohen becomes one of the richest men in the world.

One of Cohen’s first in-house analysts is Duke engineering alumnus C.B. Lee, who travels to Taiwan and China to gather inside information on companies that manufacture semiconductors. Another early hire is Mathew Martoma, a Stanford MBA, who had attended Duke as an undergrad under the name Ajai Mathew Thomas. Martoma is a biotechnology specialist at SAC who had black edge on pharmaceuticals. After the FBI and SEC investigates, Lee cooperates with law enforcement, while Martoma is convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to prison. He never turns on Cohen, who goes free. At the end of the book, Stephen A. Cohen is more wealthy and powerful than ever. Instead of ending corruption in a powerful industry that operates in the dark, the FBI and SEC stop prosecuting high level corporate criminals on Wall Street.

Sheelah Kolhatkar is a master storyteller. Her entertaining and well-researched book is recommended for anyone interested in finance and ethics. She presents complex material in a clear narrative. Characters are multi-dimensional, including Duke alumni C.B. Lee and Mathew Martoma, who are treated sympathetically. Duke readers note: there is a third university connection — ethics professor Bruce Payne (Sanford School of Public Policy) who is depicted as acting with honesty and integrity.

Also available as an audiobook on OverDrive and as an eBook on OverDrive.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

The film The Circle was released last month and has already grossed $170 million. Reviews have been negative, but that has not stopped readers from wanting to read the book that the film was based on.

I reviewed The Circle by Dave Eggers on this blog in 2015, after it was selected as one of the best business books of 2014 by leadership expert James O’Toole. In Eggers’ novel, The Circle is the name of the powerful internet company that replaces Google, Facebook, Twitter with one unified corporation that offers a single account for email, banking, social media and all other identity needs. The goal of the company is to improve the world, through utility, efficiency and transparency.

The story is about a young woman who lands a customer relations job at The Circle and is selected for a new technology project at the company. Employees are pressured to share their experiences through social media and in company sponsored events. This habit of online sharing intensifies into constant surveillance called “transparency.” Employee performance is based on feedback from millions of nameless users.

As time passes at The Circle, relationships become superficial and everyday communication sounds hollow. Individuals are conscious of everything they do and filter everything they say. As employees begin spending all their time at work, life becomes one-dimensional.

While not a great book, The Circle provokes ideas about workplace culture, privacy, surveillance and freedom. I recommend The Circle to anyone interested in the culture of organizations as well as those concerned about the changes in society arising from use of the internet.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Americans are living in a time of unprecedented prosperity. At the beginning of the 20th century, life at home and at work was dull, dangerous and uncomfortable. Today, average Americans live as comfortably as royalty a few decades ago, and have more leisure time. Four new books combine economics and history to provide ideas on how prosperity evolved in our modern age and insights into what is likely to happen in the lean years ahead.
 
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon
The technological, economic and social transformations that drove the rise in prosperity between 1870 and 1970 overshadow today’s advances in communication and information technologies, which have not produced a comparable prosperity.
 
 
 
 
Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann
Since the dawn of civilization, people’s role or work defined who they were, but in today’s consumer culture, material possessions display identity. The transformation to a worldwide consumer society developed over the past 5 centuries and changed the course of history.
 
Also available as an eBook on OverDrive.
 
 
Bourgeois Equality by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Citizens in advanced nations are better off than they were in 1800 by an astounding 3000%. The reason?
Innovation. In Europe, ideas for inventions were widely disseminated for the first time under a new ideology of individual dignity for common people and their right to improve their lives.
 
 
 
 
Money Changes Everything by William N. Goetzmann
A financial historian explains how the development of finance made civilizations possible. A tool for managing time and risk, finance was an innovation that permitted individuals to move economic value forward and backward through time – allowing people to imagine and to calculate a future.
 
Also available as an eBook.
 

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Every year, the Wall Street Journal asks writers, academics, business owners, athletes and assorted interesting people for their recommendations for the best books of the year. Here’s what the contributors said for 2016.
 
Retired basketball player and sportscaster Bill Walton is “the proud and fortunate son of a librarian.” He proposed Shoe Dog to entrepreneurs as a guide to success. “Phil Knight started Nike in 1963 with a $50 loan from his father. I don’t need to tell you how that story ended up.”
 
 
Fellow athlete Abby Wambach recommends Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. “As I have transitioned into retirement, Grit is a powerful reminder of the qualities that made me a successful soccer player would serve me just as well in the world beyond the field.”
 
 
Alan Greenspan’s biography, The Man Who Knew was selected by several readers, including Elliott Management Corp founder and CEO Paul Singer, who noted, “As important as it is to know which qualities to look for in the next Fed chair, it is also important to know which qualities to avoid.”
 
 
No surprise that several people chose Hillbilly Elegy, including Roger Altman, founder/chairman of Evercore as well as U.S. Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who called J.D. Vance’s memoir, “the story of overcoming a tumultuous family life in southern Ohio and Kentucky. This isn’t just Mr. Vance’s story. It’s the story of many other people across rural America who have lost hope.”
 
 
Fuqua faculty member’s Dan Ariely’s newest best-seller, Payoff is recommended by James Altucher, author of 17 business books. “Dan Ariely makes the strong case that the best way to motivate people, including ourselves, is not through persuasive tactics, however subtle, but by providing the groundwork for meaning in people’s lives. James Altucher also endorses Tools of Titans, “interviews from hundreds of peak performers – from athletes and artists to generals and entrepreneurs and shares the ‘tactics, routines, and habits’ that made them titans.”

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Gratton, Lynda and Andrew Scott. The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. Bloomsbury Information, 2016.

Fuqua students in their 20’s have a 50% chance of celebrating their 100th birthday. Their grandparents in their 60’s have a 50-50 chance of living another quarter century. Millions of people are looking forward to a long life and those who exercise regularly, do not smoke and control their weight are expected to remain healthy and fit deep into old age.

A long and healthy life has long been regarded as one of the greatest gifts, yet foresight and planning are needed to guarantee that the decades late in life will be happy. Structuring and using those extra years effectively is the subject new book, The 100-Year Life, by two professors at the London Business School, Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott.

The book begins with the obvious question: How will this gift of time be financed? Obvious answer: The increase in life expectancy will be funded by working longer or saving more. “Making the most of the gift of a long life requires everyone to face up to the truth of working into your 70s or even 80s. Simple as that.” To some that may sound depressing, but the nature of work will change profoundly to include more innovation, decision making and social engagement.

Gratton and Scott explain that currently, there are three stages in adult life: Education – Career – Retirement. When working life extends to 6 or 7 decades, transitioning between careers will become normal. In some decades, workers will choose maximize finances while in others, they will focus on creating a work-life balance. Workers will routinely take breaks to become re-educated for new careers.

In every age, there are winners and losers. As the 100 year life becomes commonplace globally, there are ways to ensure a successful life. Remain flexible. Continue to learn. Take action. Defer gratification. Authors Gratton and Scott present the financial and social strategies that lead to a long life that is creative and fun. This book is recommended.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Editors, writers and guests at the Financial Times give their opinions about what to read now: It’s a long list. These 5 are my top picks to read over spring break.
 
The 100 Year Life by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott
A Duke student has a 50% chance of living to 100 years old. In the future, the familiar education/career/retirement stages of adult life will be transformed into a flexible, multi-stage life with implications for careers, personal finance and relationships.
 
 
 
Only Humans Need Apply by Thomas Davenport and Julia Kirby
In the U.S. employment of highly skilled workers, such as managers, engineers, analysts, doctors and lawyers peaked in 2000 and has been falling due to advances in artificial intelligence. But opportunities abound for those who learn how to work collaboratively with intelligent machines.
 
 
 
Makers and Takers by Rana Foroohar
Finance dominates the U.S. economy, representing 25% of corporate profits, but only 4% of all jobs. Wall Street’s financial thinking has invaded other sectors, depressing innovation and job creation in companies, controlling natural resources, and increasing social inequality.

Also available as an eBook on OverDrive and as an audiobook on OverDrive.
 
 
Dear Chairman by Jeff Gramm
Backstories of corporate conflicts between management teams and shareholders, including power struggles involving American Express and Warren Buffett in 1964; General Motors and Ross Perot in 1985; BKF Capital and Carlo Cannell in 2005; and many other stories of shareholder activism.

Also available as an eBook on OverDrive, as an audiobook on OverDrive, and as an audiobook on CD.

The Originals by Adam Grant
“The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.” In entertainment, business and politics, innovators make breakthroughs by recognizing original ideas, managing risks and removing barriers that hinder implementation.

Also available as an eBook on OverDrive, as an audiobook on OverDrive, as an audiobook on CD, and on Business Best Seller Kindles at Ford Library.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.