Ryan Avent
Ryan Avent
Ryan Avent is director of portfolio communications for Select Equity Group. He previously covered the global economy for The Economist for 15 years.
His work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Bloomberg, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Journal of Economic Geography.
Previously, he worked as an economic consultant and as an industry analyst for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the principal fact-finding agency for the US Government in the broad field of labour economics and statistics. He now lives in North Carolina with his wife, daughter and son.
Books
In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies
Rights
Endorsements
What are the social devices we use to transcend a world that seems to have gone mad? Why have so many people lost their social bearings? Few authors write as inspirationally about the intertwined thread of faith, history, and economics as Ryan Avent does in this book. In Good Faith is a religious book which doesn’t require a faith in God or theology but rather a faith in the power of belief, and shows why it is critical to contemporary society and politics.
Read In Good Faith if you want to grapple with the very biggest questions: Where did growth come from? What is our potential as a society? And how can we avoid failure? This mind-stretching book draws on history, evolutionary biology, anthropology and economics to argue that we are shaped by common beliefs that are much more malleable than people often assume. Avent meets the gravity of today’s problems with an energising and hopeful call to action, to have faith in our ability to be and do better.
Synopsis
How a society’s capacity for belief forms the foundation of its success
Do you struggle to find reasons to feel optimistic about the future? Are you trying to understand the creeping institutional dysfunction we see the world over? In this book, Ryan Avent explores how an unswerving confidence in systems of liberal democracy and free market capitalism—which he terms the “Modern Faith”—has left many Western countries struggling to deal with democratic backsliding and social dysfunction. Those seeking the certainty of another technocratic solution, however, are searching in the wrong place. The true foundation of our prosperity, Avent argues, is not in an ability to reason our way to better policies and institutions but rather lies in the nature and distribution of our beliefs.
Drawing from economics, history, philosophy, biology, and much else besides, Avent shows that our capacity for belief is what connects us, guides our behavior moment by moment and year by year, and determines how well we cooperate in the production of social and economic complexity. Far from standing in opposition to science and reason, faith is central to the human endeavor. By understanding the nature of faith and how it forms the fabric of our society, we can better find ways to come together to tackle the global crises of rising authoritarianism and climate change that threaten us all, and find hope within one another.
The Wealth of Humans: Work and its Absence in the Twenty-first Century
Rights
Endorsements
Ryan Avent is a superb writer
Avent is a fluent writer who takes complex ideas and works them, like Plasticine, into vivid models ... The Wealth of Humans stands favourable comparison with Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty
Midway through Ryan Avent's The Wealth of Humans, I found myself marking "H" in the margin, to stand for heresy, so thick and fast do the counterintuitive insights arrive ... I found the virtuosity with which Mr Avent knocked down possible solutions disquieting
Timely ... the author is a confident guide ... deft at exploring the economic, political and social changes triggered by technological progress and the abundance of cheap labour
Compelling and troubling... In popular commentary on the future, there is an unhelpful view that one day each of us will turn up at work and find a robot sitting in our chairs. Avent's alternative account, of a slow but persistent decline in the importance of work and a fractious search for a new political settlement, is immeasurably more plausible
In the world of economics, Ryan Avent is simply one of the sharpest and most intelligent writers around. Nobody is better placed to tell us how technology is shaping our economy and our lives
An important argument on a subject that will shape the coming decades
Synopsis
To work is human, yet the world of work is changing fast, and in unexpected ways. With rapid advances in information technology, huge swathes of the job market - from cleaners and drivers to journalists and doctors - are being automated: a staggering 47% of American employment is at risk of automation within the next two to three decades. At the same time, millions more jobs are being created. What does the future of work hold?
In this illuminating new investigation of what this means for us, Ryan Avent lays bare the contradictions in today's global labour market. From Volvo's operations in Sweden to the vast 'Factory Asia' hub in China, he offers the first clear explanation of the state we're in-and how we could get out of it.
