Calestous Juma, Innovation and its Enemies. After flipping through it and reading the section headings I can already tell this is going to be very interesting. If you don’t follow the author on Twitter, you should: @calestous.

Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. I read the first few dozen pages on my Kindle on an airplane while (it must be admitted) stopping periodically to play Monopoly on my iPhone. At first glance, this would seem to suggest that Gordon’s pessimism about the future of innovation and productivity growth might be misplaced–but in the interests of reading as sympathetically as I can, I wonder if a Kindle is really that much better than a stack of books. Furthermore, even though you can get it on your phone or in a few dozen different varieties featuring Minions, the Avengers, Star Wars, and a bunch of other things, Monopoly is still fundamentally the same game it was when it was released.

Speaking of Monopoly, this article by Ben Powell and David Skarbek should be included with the game.

Peter Thiel, Zero to One. This is my current Audible listen for the daily commute. Thiel points out that for an investor it is likely that one investment in an entire portfolio will provide almost all the returns. It would be interesting to read a similar book written by a venture capitalist who was wiped out. So far, I’m interested in the ways he is distinguishing between incremental and iterative change as opposed to truly visionary, path-breaking change.

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