Stripe Press — Boom
From the Moon landing to the dawning of the atomic age, the decades prior to the 1970s were characterized by the routine invention of transformative technologies at breakneck speed. By comparison, ours is an age of stagnation; of slowing median wage growth, rising inequality, and decelerated scientific discovery. In Boom, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber take an inductive approach to this problem. They track some of the most significant breakthroughs of the past 100 years—from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to Moore’s law and Bitcoin—and reverse-engineer how transformative progress arises from the same dynamics that govern financial bubbles, bringing together small groups with a unified vision, vast funding, and surprisingly poor accountability. Bubbles, they conclude, aren’t all bad—in fact, they create the ideal conditions for transformative innovation. Integrating insights from economics, philosophy, and history, Boom provides a blueprint for accelerating innovation and a path to unleash a new era of global prosperity.
Byrne Hobart is an investor, consultant, and writer. He is the author of The Diff, a daily newsletter covering inflection points in finance and technology. He is also a founding partner at Anomaly, a frontier tech investment firm.
