Briefly Noted Book Reviews

"A chilling spectre, of "a technologically armored wall between the haves and have-nots," hangs over this incisive analysis of the major tech platforms and their impact on the broader economy. Wu traces the evolution of firms such as Google and Amazon from the nineteen-nineties, when they behaved largely like "public-spirited town squares," to the twenty-tens, when they began to morph into the monopolistic "agents of wealth extraction" we know today."

"A thousand years ago, as Europeans waded through the Middle Ages, their Chinese contemporaries were living in a civilization that was among the most sophisticated in the world. So why, in the centuries that followed, did Europe become richer and more powerful than China? In their ambitious history, Greif, Mokyr (a winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Economics), and Tabellini suggest that cultural values and social organizations helped establish divergent paths. Confucianism held sway in China, where kinship groups managed local life."

Major tech platforms evolved from public-spirited town squares in the 1990s into monopolistic agents of wealth extraction by the 2010s, creating a technologically armored wall between the haves and have-nots. The core problem lies in the surrounding economic and institutional structures rather than the platforms themselves, and governmental interventions are necessary to prevent worsening division and resentment. A thousand years ago Chinese civilization ranked among the world’s most sophisticated, but Europe later became richer and more powerful because cultural values and social organizations followed divergent paths. Confucian kinship networks in China concentrated local life, while looser family bonds in Europe fostered cooperation among strangers through guilds and self-governing towns, enabling capable states, flourishing markets, and the Industrial Revolution.

Read at The New Yorker