Boom

Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

De: Byrne Hobart, Tobias Huber

Narrado por: Rob Grannis

A timely investigation of the causes of technological and scientific stagnation, and a radical blueprint for accelerating innovation.

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. Median wage growth has slowed, inequality and income concentration are on the rise, and scientific research has become increasingly expensive and incremental.

Why are we unable to replicate the rate of progress of past decades? What can we do to reinvigorate innovation?

In Boom, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber take an inductive approach to the problem. In a series of case studies tracking some of the most significant breakthroughs of the past 100 years—from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to fracking and Bitcoin—they reverse-engineer how transformative progress arises from small groups with a unified vision, vast funding, and surprisingly poor accountability. They conclude that financial bubbles, while often maligned as destructive and destabilizing forces, have in fact been the engine of past breakthroughs and will drive future advances. In other words: Bubbles aren’t all bad.

Integrating insights from economics, philosophy, and history, Boom identifies the root causes of the Great Stagnation and provides a blueprint for accelerating innovation. By decreasing collective risk aversion, overfunding experimental processes, and organizing high-agency individuals around a transcendent mission, bubbles are the key to realizing a future that is radically different from the present. Boom offers a definite and optimistic vision of our future—and a path to unleash a new era of global prosperity.

©2024 Byrne Hobart & Tobias Huber (P)2024 Stripe Press

Inspiring and counter intuitive

I’d put this in the class of “Bold” by Peter Diamandis and “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel. It is a call to build something new, backed by (select) evidence of successful innovations from the last 100 years. I enjoyed it because I’m looking for this sort of compelling narrative.

Interesting perspective

This is an important read for any business leader. The irrational may be necessary for progress, suggesting booms are advantageous.

Booms are good, actually

This is a fundamentally optimistic book about the future. It argues that many great things are in-the-moment and at-the-margin irrational for individual steps and individual actors, and the solution is some external force, hype, "boom", etc. which makes it happen anyway -- being rational at the larger scale. Essentially, why do A, B, and C if each only make sense if the others are also successful, but betting everything that B and C will be done, going all-in on A (even if it has to be tried in multiple parallel ways, so only one method works) can make everything work. They give some great examples from technology and history (Manhattan project, Apollo, and fracking), show how these were enabled by being built during "booms", and the positive results. It's interesting that the naive response to the boom/bust cycle of markets is that it's bad and one should sit them out, but many of the greatest investors (Warren Buffett) jump in as early as possible, and the cycle seems to be responsible for much of the progress in the world.

Great point and arguments

Excelent book. The main idea is very solid, and supporting explanations are logical and interesting, full of nuaced details.