3 Books of 2021 that you ought to not miss!

These 3 books, though they may adress different issues and subjects, have ‘1' thing in common, which is:

They all help us in making sense of the challenging times we live in!

In the present times our world has got more complex and composite in many different ways, and key driver for this was and is the Covid-19 pandemic… So in order to find and learn new things for the future that awaits us we must look towards books, whether they be physical or digital.

So here is the first one I’m recommending for you to read:

• Shutdown — How Covid Shook the World’s Economy

Credit goes to: Shutdown — How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (Penguin Books)

Let’s get straight to business with this first one, the book was written by a Columbia University professor and it aims to explain the effect that the Covid-19 pandemic had, and is still having on the world economy.

Credit goes to: La Salle University

Being a US based Briton who grew up in Germany, Mr.Tooze knows many different perspectives of many different countries around the world. In his book he explains that this is just the beginning of all the things that are going to happen in the ‘Anthropocene’ epoch of our world. ‘Anthropocene’ implies a epoch of significant human impact on the Earth. He signifies that over the last few centuries we have only been lucky not to have anything like this happen. You might ask why this is so? Well, Tooze says that ‘with Covid-19 the result of human beings getting too close to viruses previously safely contained in wild animals… that just happened!’.

Overall the book is somewhere positioned between two signs: too recent to be history but stale as journalism. Albeit, ultimately it is filled with wisdom and information.

• The Pay Off — How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything

Credit goes to: The Pay Off — How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything

At the core of it, this book is an important first step in helping all those who seek to understand the ‘future of the payments industry’ and its effect on the world economy. When we come to look at the reputation of the authors, Mr.Gottfired Leibbrandt was the former CEO of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) and Natasha de Terán was a former SWIFT executive and financial writer. To understand the importance of SWIFT we must first look at an overview of its operations. It runs an electronic messaging system that allows financial institutions to agree the details of financial transactions and instruct the movement of securities and cash around the world. We can therefore say that the authors genuinely know what they are talking about.

Credit goes to: Iliad Solutions

Invariably, the ‘Fintech’ boom in the financial sector was mostly focused on ‘payments’. The book includes an intelligent analysis of the Fintech revolution. But conceivably, even more important than the authors analysis of the Fintech revolution is their simple explanation of the ‘fundamentals of payments’, from the evolution of payments to the nature of money, and their basic mechanisms. On the whole it is a great book for getting a grasp on how the financial world works.

• Noise — A Flaw in Human Judgement

Credit goes to: Noise — A Flaw in Human Judgement

This book explains to us why different people make different decisions regarding the same questions and objectives. To better understand what I’m saying, presume that you have a friend who underwent through intense leg pain and saw four different orthopedic doctors about it. The first doctor instructed him that the leg pain was not serious in nature and to take more rest and some painkillers. The second one advised him to undergo through a surgery. The third one asked him to continue physical therapy. The fourth one advised him to take steroids and to undergo surgery if the pain persisted. Suppose your friend followed the fourth doctor’s advice and that it seemed to be working. Nevertheless, he will be strongly confused by all those contending viewpoints.

This situation has an undesirable variability in judgement which is an example of ‘noise’. The book was written by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman who previously wrote the bestseller ‘Thinking, fast and slow’, and management professor Olivier Sibony, and behavioral economist Cass Sunstein.

When the book says ‘noise’ it does mean ‘bias’, noise (unsystenatic scatter) is actually very different from bias (systematic deviations). Therefore they have been distinguished by the authors. Then they examine the effect of ‘noise’ in day-to-day decision making. They also point out what people can do about it. It helps us understand why we waste time and money, damage mental and physical health by making a clear analysis of statistics combined with stories and studies.

Credit goes to: The Staffing Stream