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Humans are inextricably connected with our tools - from the explicit (can openers) to the unnoticed (t-shirts) to the systemic (building architecture and urban design). This book investigates who these tools are designed for, who designs them, how they're designed and evaluated, and what happens when we expand the aperture of those current answers. Hendren viscerally demonstrates the power and importance of focusing on the mismatches that particular individuals face and meeting them with design. Rather than aiming for products that scale uniformly across large masses of people, this approach advocates for developing and scaling design processes.

This book is an engaging mix of personal anecdotes and rigorous academic research and theory. The historical background on some of the issues examined in this book, while necessarily brief, still provides tantalizing perspectives that interested readers can follow up on. This is a vital, one of a kind book. Highly recommend

This book brings together a great group of scholars to analyze the economic aspects of slavery from a variety of perspectives - the development of modern management, building Northern wealth, building legal jurisprudence, and more. It's impossible to walk away from this book without a deep appreciation for how profoundly slavery was and in many ways still ingrained in the foundations of American society.

While some of the chapters are more of a historical play by play, many of the essays engage in probing analysis of slavery's influences on economic practices. For me the standout was the chapter by Daina Ramey Berry on human capital and enslaved mortality. Highly recommend

The importance of innovation in driving economic growth and better societal outcomes is often overlooked, but not here - this book brings Schumpeterian theory back into its rightful place as a critical economic process. Reviewing a wide range of economic research on the correlates and causes of positive outcomes, the authors show that innovation is often at the root of them all. Further, they demonstrate that when governments target phenomena that hamper innovation, they tend to get better results.

This book does have an Achilles heel, however - it's far too bought into long-discredited notions of Western exceptionalism and the primacy of Western-style institutions of causing economic success. The work of Pistor and others has since taken these notions out to the woodshed, and perhaps unsurprisingly these are the book sections notably free of citations. If you skip those sections it's an excellent book on an important topic