Brandon Donnelly

So Stripe, the payment-processing company, also has a book publishing division. It’s called Stripe Press, and its objective is to publish ideas that support overall business progress. Their latest book is called Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, and I must say that the website is pretty neat.

Here’s what the actual book is about though:

From the Moon landing to the dawning of the atomic age, the decades prior to the 1970s were characterized by the routine invention of transformative technologies at breakneck speed. By comparison, ours is an age of stagnation; of slowing median wage growth, rising inequality, and decelerated scientific discovery. In Boom, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber take an inductive approach to this problem. They track some of the most significant breakthroughs of the past 100 years—from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to Moore’s law and Bitcoin—and reverse-engineer how transformative progress arises from the same dynamics that govern financial bubbles, bringing together small groups with a unified vision, vast funding, and surprisingly poor accountability. Bubbles, they conclude, aren’t all bad—in fact, they create the ideal conditions for transformative innovation. Integrating insights from economics, philosophy, and history, Boom provides a blueprint for accelerating innovation and a path to unleash a new era of global prosperity.

If you’re interested, it comes out on November 19, 2024.