Joe Merante's Blog

In The Penguin and the Leviathan , Yochai Benkler does a terrific job of synthesizing a wealth of cross-disciplinary research in support of the idea that collaboration isn't just the new competition, it's the driver of progress we've been ignoring for too long.   In many ways, this book felt like The Starfish and the Spider meets The Tipping Point via a trip through the Harvard Business Review.  Which isn't a bad thing at all.  Despite being a first edition, I did notice a bunch of typos.  Anyways, the title derives from the symbol of Linux, Tux the Penguin, and Hobbes' Leviathian .  A more contemporary mashup might be The Penguins' Leviathan as a nod to the equal, if not enhanced, power of new collaborative enterprises over centralized. Benkler is able to follow his points through many fields of study and even examples like the 2008 Obama campaign don't seem quite so cliched given his mastery of the topic.  I enjoyed the historical references and chal...

Pasted below from my review on GoodReads.com (which I've been really getting into lately, check it out!). Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money by Woody Tasch My rating: 3 of 5 stars In this book, Tasch proposes a new paradigm in investment and cultural literacy, beginning with the principle that agriculture led us into the industrial age and must be reassessed in order to get us out. He ties together many schools of thought as applied to the tension between industrial finance and agriculture, such as mathematics ("every formula is either complete and inconsistent, or consistent and incomplete"), economics ("either you are a true fiduciary or a false Malthusian'), environmentalism (recounting the destruction of our ecosystem during the 20th century in exchange for faster, cheaper and less wholesome food-- trading shelf life for quality), sociology (the contradictions that 21st century citizens must balance when facing these issues) and politics. As ...