EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Times of Creative Destruction

Download or read book Times of Creative Destruction written by Alexander Tzonis and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Times of Creative Destruction is about the years that followed the end of WWII, one of the most seminal and dramatic epochs in human history, during which extraordinary star-buildings were born, cities exploded, and an unprecedented world of a ‘Third Ecology’ emerged. Never before was there such a flurry of daring mega-constructions, such daring spatial acrobatics, ‘star’ buildings by star architects attained by star developers, mega-constructions, technological feats, and flourishing spatial acrobatics. But, for all its exhilarating creativity, this was also an era of unanticipated, intractable, irreversible destruction reducing the uniqueness and diversity of cultural, social and ecological peaks and valleys of our world, to a ‘desert flatland’, environmental inequality and unhappiness. This book critically discusses and revaluates these contradictory events, bringing together and commenting on a selection of shorter key texts by Tzonis and Lefaivre, the product of a rare research and writing partnership. The texts, published between the early 1960s and the present, are significant as documents that inform about the period. They are also important and timely because of their critical and influential role in the debates of this era, both creative and destructive.

Book Times of Creative Destruction

Download or read book Times of Creative Destruction written by Alexander Tzonis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Times of Creative Destruction is about the years that followed the end of WWII, one of the most seminal and dramatic epochs in human history, during which extraordinary star-buildings were born, cities exploded, and an unprecedented world of a ‘Third Ecology’ emerged. Never before was there such a flurry of daring mega-constructions, such daring spatial acrobatics, ‘star’ buildings by star architects attained by star developers, mega-constructions, technological feats, and flourishing spatial acrobatics. But, for all its exhilarating creativity, this was also an era of unanticipated, intractable, irreversible destruction reducing the uniqueness and diversity of cultural, social and ecological peaks and valleys of our world, to a ‘desert flatland’, environmental inequality and unhappiness. This book critically discusses and revaluates these contradictory events, bringing together and commenting on a selection of shorter key texts by Tzonis and Lefaivre, the product of a rare research and writing partnership. The texts, published between the early 1960s and the present, are significant as documents that inform about the period. They are also important and timely because of their critical and influential role in the debates of this era, both creative and destructive.

Book Creative Destruction

Download or read book Creative Destruction written by Richard Foster and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turning conventional wisdom on its head, a Senior Partner and an Innovation Specialist from McKinsey & Company debunk the myth that high-octane, built-to-last companies can continue to excel year after year and reveal the dynamic strategies of discontinuity and creative destruction these corporations must adopt in order to maintain excellence and remain competitive. In striking contrast to such bibles of business literature as In Search of Excellence and Built to Last, Richard N. Foster and Sarah Kaplan draw on research they conducted at McKinsey & Company of more than one thousand corporations in fifteen industries over a thirty-six-year period. The industries they examined included old-economy industries such as pulp and paper and chemicals, and new-economy industries like semiconductors and software. Using this enormous fact base, Foster and Kaplan show that even the best-run and most widely admired companies included in their sample are unable to sustain their market-beating levels of performance for more than ten to fifteen years. Foster and Kaplan's long-term studies of corporate birth, survival, and death in America show that the corporate equivalent of El Dorado, the golden company that continually outperforms the market, has never existed. It is a myth. Corporations operate with management philosophies based on the assumption of continuity; as a result, in the long term, they cannot change or create value at the pace and scale of the markets. Their control processes, the very processes that enable them to survive over the long haul, deaden them to the vital and constant need for change. Proposing a radical new business paradigm, Foster and Kaplan argue that redesigning the corporation to change at the pace and scale of the capital markets rather than merely operate well will require more than simple adjustments. They explain how companies like Johnson and Johnson , Enron, Corning, and GE are overcoming cultural "lock-in" by transforming rather than incrementally improving their companies. They are doing this by creating new businesses, selling off or closing down businesses or divisions whose growth is slowing down, as well as abandoning outdated, ingrown structures and rules and adopting new decision-making processes, control systems, and mental models. Corporations, they argue, must learn to be as dynamic and responsive as the market itself if they are to sustain superior returns and thrive over the long term. In a book that is sure to shake the business world to its foundations, Creative Destruction, like Re-Engineering the Corporation before it, offers a new paradigm that will change the way we think about business.

Book Creative Destruction

Download or read book Creative Destruction written by Tyler Cowen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra's "My Way" as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly original treatment of a fiercely debated issue, Tyler Cowen makes a bold new case for a more sympathetic understanding of cross-cultural trade. Creative Destruction brings not stale suppositions but an economist's eye to bear on an age-old question: Are market exchange and aesthetic quality friends or foes? On the whole, argues Cowen in clear and vigorous prose, they are friends. Cultural "destruction" breeds not artistic demise but diversity. Through an array of colorful examples from the areas where globalization's critics have been most vocal, Cowen asks what happens when cultures collide through trade, whether technology destroys native arts, why (and whether) Hollywood movies rule the world, whether "globalized" culture is dumbing down societies everywhere, and if national cultures matter at all. Scrutinizing such manifestations of "indigenous" culture as the steel band ensembles of Trinidad, Indian handweaving, and music from Zaire, Cowen finds that they are more vibrant than ever--thanks largely to cross-cultural trade. For all the pressures that market forces exert on individual cultures, diversity typically increases within society, even when cultures become more like each other. Trade enhances the range of individual choice, yielding forms of expression within cultures that flower as never before. While some see cultural decline as a half-empty glass, Cowen sees it as a glass half-full with the stirrings of cultural brilliance. Not all readers will agree, but all will want a say in the debate this exceptional book will stir.

Book The Power of Creative Destruction

Download or read book The Power of Creative Destruction written by Philippe Aghion and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world’s leading economists and his coauthors, a cutting-edge analysis of what drives economic growth and a blueprint for prosperity under capitalism. Crisis seems to follow crisis. Inequality is rising, growth is stagnant, the environment is suffering, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed every crack in the system. We hear more and more calls for radical change, even the overthrow of capitalism. But the answer to our problems is not revolution. The answer is to create a better capitalism by understanding and harnessing the power of creative destruction—innovation that disrupts, but that over the past two hundred years has also lifted societies to previously unimagined prosperity. To explain, Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin, and Simon Bunel draw on cutting-edge theory and evidence to examine today’s most fundamental economic questions, including the roots of growth and inequality, competition and globalization, the determinants of health and happiness, technological revolutions, secular stagnation, middle-income traps, climate change, and how to recover from economic shocks. They show that we owe our modern standard of living to innovations enabled by free-market capitalism. But we also need state intervention with the appropriate checks and balances to simultaneously foster ongoing economic creativity, manage the social disruption that innovation leaves in its wake, and ensure that yesterday’s superstar innovators don’t pull the ladder up after them to thwart tomorrow’s. A powerful and ambitious reappraisal of the foundations of economic success and a blueprint for change, The Power of Creative Destruction shows that a fair and prosperous future is ultimately ours to make.

Book Prophet of Innovation

Download or read book Prophet of Innovation written by Thomas K. McCraw and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-30 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pan Am, Gimbel’s, Pullman, Douglas Aircraft, Digital Equipment Corporation, British Leyland—all once as strong as dinosaurs, all now just as extinct. Destruction of businesses, fortunes, products, and careers is the price of progress toward a better material life. No one understood this bedrock economic principle better than Joseph A. Schumpeter. “Creative destruction,” he said, is the driving force of capitalism. Described by John Kenneth Galbraith as “the most sophisticated conservative” of the twentieth century, Schumpeter made his mark as the prophet of incessant change. His vision was stark: Nearly all businesses fail, victims of innovation by their competitors. Businesspeople ignore this lesson at their peril—to survive, they must be entrepreneurial and think strategically. Yet in Schumpeter’s view, the general prosperity produced by the “capitalist engine” far outweighs the wreckage it leaves behind. During a tumultuous life spanning two world wars, the Great Depression, and the early Cold War, Schumpeter reinvented himself many times. From boy wonder in turn-of-the-century Vienna to captivating Harvard professor, he was stalked by tragedy and haunted by the specter of his rival, John Maynard Keynes. By 1983—the centennial of the birth of both men—Forbes christened Schumpeter, not Keynes, the best navigator through the turbulent seas of globalization. Time has proved that assessment accurate. Prophet of Innovation is also the private story of a man rescued repeatedly by women who loved him and put his well-being above their own. Without them, he would likely have perished, so fierce were the conflicts between his reason and his emotions. Drawing on all of Schumpeter’s writings, including many intimate diaries and letters never before used, this biography paints the full portrait of a magnetic figure who aspired to become the world’s greatest economist, lover, and horseman—and admitted to failure only with the horses.

Book Capitalism in America

Download or read book Capitalism in America written by Alan Greenspan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the legendary former Fed Chairman and the acclaimed Economist writer and historian, the full, epic story of America's evolution from a small patchwork of threadbare colonies to the most powerful engine of wealth and innovation the world has ever seen. Shortlisted for the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award From even the start of his fabled career, Alan Greenspan was duly famous for his deep understanding of even the most arcane corners of the American economy, and his restless curiosity to know even more. To the extent possible, he has made a science of understanding how the US economy works almost as a living organism--how it grows and changes, surges and stalls. He has made a particular study of the question of productivity growth, at the heart of which is the riddle of innovation. Where does innovation come from, and how does it spread through a society? And why do some eras see the fruits of innovation spread more democratically, and others, including our own, see the opposite? In Capitalism in America, Greenspan distills a lifetime of grappling with these questions into a thrilling and profound master reckoning with the decisive drivers of the US economy over the course of its history. In partnership with the celebrated Economist journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge, he unfolds a tale involving vast landscapes, titanic figures, triumphant breakthroughs, enlightenment ideals as well as terrible moral failings. Every crucial debate is here--from the role of slavery in the antebellum Southern economy to the real impact of FDR's New Deal to America's violent mood swings in its openness to global trade and its impact. But to read Capitalism in America is above all to be stirred deeply by the extraordinary productive energies unleashed by millions of ordinary Americans that have driven this country to unprecedented heights of power and prosperity. At heart, the authors argue, America's genius has been its unique tolerance for the effects of creative destruction, the ceaseless churn of the old giving way to the new, driven by new people and new ideas. Often messy and painful, creative destruction has also lifted almost all Americans to standards of living unimaginable to even the wealthiest citizens of the world a few generations past. A sense of justice and human decency demands that those who bear the brunt of the pain of change be protected, but America has always accepted more pain for more gain, and its vaunted rise cannot otherwise be understood, or its challenges faced, without recognizing this legacy. For now, in our time, productivity growth has stalled again, stirring up the populist furies. There's no better moment to apply the lessons of history to the most pressing question we face, that of whether the United States will preserve its preeminence, or see its leadership pass to other, inevitably less democratic powers.

Book Creative Destruction

Download or read book Creative Destruction written by Phil Mullan and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2017-03-29 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western economies have become stuck in a protracted depression that began long before the 2008 crash. Low productivity, which started in the 1970s, has prevented durable rises in living standards. Phil Mullan shows that the only way to ensure a better future is to create one, calling for a comprehensive economic restructure backed by political and cultural change. This means embracing the uncomfortable disruption involved in progressive change, rekindling in democratic form a spirit of Enlightenment thinking. The votes for Brexit and in the US presidential elections in 2016 indicate that many people desire change, offering greater opportunity for this public discussion. What is needed is a new industrial revolution which develops a broad range of emerging and yet unimagined services and products, provides decent jobs and restores prosperity. Providing examples of the new technologies needed to drive change, backed up by a wealth of data, this important book calls for a sea-change in imagination and thinking.

Book Culture Crash

    Book Details:
  • Author : Scott Timberg
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2015-01-01
  • ISBN : 0300195885
  • Pages : 320 pages

Download or read book Culture Crash written by Scott Timberg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that United States' creative class is fighting for survival and explains why this should matter to all Americans.

Book The Creative Destruction of Medicine

Download or read book The Creative Destruction of Medicine written by Eric Topol and published by . This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A professor of medicine reveals how technology like wireless internet, individual data, and personal genomics can be used to save lives.

Book Capitalism  Socialism  and Democracy

Download or read book Capitalism Socialism and Democracy written by Joseph A. Schumpeter and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the relation between a socialist view of society and the democratic method of government; argues that socialism is probably inevitable, for political rather than economic reasons. The book developes five principal themes, presented in five parts. Part I, "The Marxian Doctrine," attests to Schumpeter's belief in the importance of Karl Marx's thought, and discusses Marx in the roles of prophet, sociologist, economist, and teacher. His strength lay in synthesis of history, economics, and politics into a vision and system (which Schumpeter admires) that that can be used for solving problems and contributing to knowledge and insight; the value of Marx's theories and conclusions are found wanting. Part II "Can Capitalism Survive?" shows that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from the inevitable decomposition of capitalist society. Essential to capitalism is the process of "creative destruction," which constantly revolutionizes the system from within; this revolutionary transformation of capitalism, which spells its doom, results from its success--not, as Marx argued, from its failure. In Schumpeter's view of capitalism, monopolistic policies promote stability and increase efficiency; unemployment and business cycles accompany economic growth; and without political interference, output would increase and standard of living increase. The entrepreneurial function, which revolutionizes production by exploiting innovation, becomes routine and obsolete due to technical development and rise of big firms; the entrepreneur becomes a bureaucrat. Without innovating enterprise, profit will vanish or become unimportant. Capitalism's success undermines the social conditions that protect it. Capitalism will not survive because public opinion will not support it: the bourgeoisie is not equipped for politics; corporate evolution and decline of the family have reduced the bourgeois sense of property and incentives; destruction of monarchy and aristocracy have deprived the bourgeois of its protectors; and disenchanted intellectuals inflame discontent with free enterprise. Establishment of socialism can be expected. Part III, "Can Socialism Work?" answers, "Of course it can." Socialism for Schumpeter is centralized control over the means of production. Necessary for the success of socialism is reaching the requisite stage of industrial development and resolution of transitional problems. The assessment of a socialist society should be based less on economic efficiency than on the quality of the bureaucratic apparatus operating the system. Socialism may likely be as successful in satisfying consumers, promoting economic progress, and enforcing discipline and efficiency. Part IV, "Socialism and Democracy" argues one can have autocratic, theocratic, or democratic socialism. Socialism's economic problem should only be discussed referring to the given state of the social environment and historical situation. Schumpeter alternatively defines democracy as people's selection of a government. Socialism may be democratic if certain conditions are met: politics must be culturally valued, range of political decisions must be fairly narrow, a well-trained bureaucracy exists, and the public exercises democratic self control. Part V, "Historical Sketch of Socialist Parties" analyzes the history of the most important socialist parties in England, Sweden, U.S., France, Germany, and Austria, emphasizing how they tried to live within the structure of a Marxist system and to remain alive and grow politically. Socialism, though, is likely to present fascist features. (TNM).

Book Meme Wars

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kalle Lasn
  • Publisher : Seven Stories Press
  • Release : 2013-01-15
  • ISBN : 1609804333
  • Pages : 407 pages

Download or read book Meme Wars written by Kalle Lasn and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the editor and magazine that started and named the Occupy Wall Street movement, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics is an articulation of what could be the next steps in rethinking and remaking our world that challenges and debunks many of the assumptions of neoclassical economics and brings to light a more ecological model. Meme Wars aims to accelerate the shift into this new paradigm that takes into account psychonomics, bionomics, and other aspects of our physical and mental environment that are often left out in discussions of economics. Like Adbusters, the book will be image heavy and full-color throughout. Lasn calls it "a textbook for the future" that provides the building blocks, in texts and visuals, for a new way of looking at and changing our world. Through an examination of alternative economies, Lasn hopes to spur students to become "barefoot economists" and to see that a humanization of economics is possible. Meme Wars will include contributions from Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Samuelson, George Akerlof, Lourdes Benería, Julie Matthaei, Manfred Max-Neef, David Orrell, Paul Gilding, Mathis Wackernagel and the father of ecological economics Herman Daly, among others. Based on ideas that were presented in a special issue of Adbusters entitled "Thought Control in Economics: Beyond the Growth Paradigm / An Activist Toolkit," Meme Wars will help move forward the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Book Creative Destruction

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard N. Foster
  • Publisher : Financial Times/Prentice Hall
  • Release : 2001
  • ISBN : 9780273656388
  • Pages : 371 pages

Download or read book Creative Destruction written by Richard N. Foster and published by Financial Times/Prentice Hall. This book was released on 2001 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inhaltsübersicht: About the authors, Acknowledgements, Introduction: the game of creative destruction, 1. Survival and performance in the era of discontinuity, 2. How creative destruction works: the fate of the East River Savings Bank, 3. Cultural lock-in, 4. Operating versus creating: the case of Storage Technology Corporation, 5. The gales of destruction, 6. Balancing destruction and creation, 7. Designed to change, 8. Leading creative destruction, 9. Increasing creation tenfold, 10. Control, permisson, and risk, 11. Setting the pace and scale of change, 12. The ubiquity of creative destruction, Appendix A-C, Notes, Selected sources, Index.

Book Why Nations Fail

Download or read book Why Nations Fail written by Daron Acemoglu and published by Currency. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.

Book Creative Destruction

Download or read book Creative Destruction written by Francisco E. González and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-07-02 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compares the political economy arising from the Great Depression and from the 1982 Debt Crisis.

Book The Creative Destruction of New York City

Download or read book The Creative Destruction of New York City written by Alessandro Busà and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill de Blasio's campaign rhetoric focused on a tale of two cities: rich and poor New York. He promised to value the needs of poor and working-class New Yorkers, making city government work better for everyone-not just those who thrived during Bloomberg's tenure as mayor. But well into de Blasio's administration, many critics think that little has changed in the lives of struggling New Yorkers, and that the gentrification of New York City is expanding at a record pace across the five boroughs. Despite the mayor's goal of creating more affordable housing, Brooklyn and Manhattan sit atop the list of the most unaffordable housing markets in the country. It seems that the old adage is becoming truer: New York is a place for only the very rich and the very poor. In The Creative Destruction of New York City, urban scholar Alessandro Busà travels to neighborhoods across the city, from Harlem to Coney Island, from Hell's Kitchen to East New York, to tell the story of fifteen years of drastic rezoning and rebranding, updating the tale of two New Yorks. There is a gilded city of sky-high glass towers where Wall Street managers and foreign billionaires live-or merely store their cash. And there is another New York: a place where even the professional middle class is one rent hike away from displacement. Despite de Blasio's rhetoric, the trajectory since Bloomberg has been remarkably consistent. New York's urban development is changing to meet the consumption demands of the very rich, and real estate moguls' power has never been greater. Major players in real estate, banking, and finance have worked to ensure that, regardless of changes in leadership, their interests are safeguarded at City Hall. The Creative Destruction of New York City is an important chronicle of both the success of the city's elite and of efforts to counter the city's march toward a glossy and exclusionary urban landscape. It is essential reading for everyone who cares about affordable housing access and, indeed, the soul of New York City.

Book The Great Reset

Download or read book The Great Reset written by Richard Florida and published by Random House Canada. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We tend to view prolonged economic downturns, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Long Depression of the late nineteenth century, in terms of the crisis and pain they cause. But history teaches us that these great crises also represent opportunities to remake our economy and society and to generate whole new eras of economic growth and prosperity. In terms of innovation, invention, and energetic risk taking, these periods of "creative destruction" have been some of the most fertile in history, and the changes they put into motion can set the stage for full-scale recovery. In The Great Reset, bestselling author and economic development expert Richard Florida provides an engaging and sweeping examination of these previous economic epochs, or "resets." He distills the deep forces that have altered physical and social landscapes and eventually reshaped economies and societies. Looking toward the future, Florida identifies the patterns that will drive the next Great Reset and transform virtually every aspect of our lives — from how and where we live, to how we work, to how we invest in individuals and infrastructure, to how we shape our cities and regions. Florida shows how these forces, when combined, will spur a fresh era of growth and prosperity, define a new geography of progress, and create surprising opportunities for all of us. Among these forces will be * new patterns of consumption, and new attitudes toward ownership that are less centered on houses and cars * the transformation of millions of service jobs into middle class careers that engage workers as a source of innovation * new forms of infrastructure that speed the movement of people, goods, and ideas * a radically altered and much denser economic landscape organized around "megaregions" that will drive the development of new industries, new jobs, and a whole new way of life We've weathered tough times before. They are a necessary part of economic cycles, giving us a chance to clearly see what's working and what's not. Societies can be reborn in such crises, emerging fresh, strong, and refocused. Now is our opportunity to anticipate what that brighter future will look like and to take the steps that will get us there faster. With his trademark blend of wit, irreverence, and rigorous research and analysis, Florida presents an optimistic and counterintuitive vision of our future, calling into question long-held beliefs about the nature of economic progress and forcing us to reassess our very way of life. He argues convincingly that it's time to turn our efforts — as individuals, as governments, and as a society — to putting the necessary pieces in place for a vibrant, prosperous future.