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"Excellent. ... Impressive." --Financial Times An award-winning investigative journalist takes us inside the ten business deals that have transformed the modern world We tend to think of our world as controlled by forces we basically understand, primarily the politicians we elect. But in The Deals That Made the World, Jacques Peretti makes a provocative and quite different argument: much of the world around us--from the food we eat to teh products we buy to the medications we take--is shaped by private negotiations and business deals few of us know about. The Deals That Made the World takes us inside the sphere of these powerful players, examining ten groundbreaking business deals that have transformed our modern economy. Peretti reveals how corporate executives engineered an entire diet industry built on failure; how PayPal conquered online payments (and the specific behavioral science that underpins its success); and how pharmaceutical executives concocted a plan to successfully market medications to healthy people. For twenty years, Peretti has interviewed the people behind the decisions that have altered our world, from the CEOs of multinational corporations to politicians, economists, and scientists. Drawing on his vast knowledge, Peretti reveals a host of fascinating and startling connections, from how Wall Street's actions on food commodities helped spark the Arab Spring to the link between the AIDS epidemic in 1980s San Francisco and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. Touching upon tech, finance, artificial intelligence, and the other levers of power in a postglobalization environment, Peretti offers a compelling way to understand the last hundred years--and a suggestion of what the next hundred might hold. An essential book for anyone seeking to understand the hidden forces that shape our modern economy, The Deals That Made the World is illuminating and surprising--and an immensely fun read.… (more)
User reviews
In 10 chapters, the author highlights how businesses have focused on disrupting and transforming existing
This is a quick and easy read; which is impressive, considering the scope of the book and the stunning amount of money these companies have already made and are made in the industries on the cusp of disruption.
Because Peretti is attempting, in essence, to describe the current "world", he is hopelessly bogged down by his overreach. Every paragraph is so chuck full of happenings, statistics, dates, names and references that his descriptions make very difficult reading. They do not flow.
Stories of economic events provide some of the most fascinating works in the non-fiction world. I have recently given top reviews on this site to two such books: A FIRST CLASS CATASTROPHE, Donna Henriques (2017); FEAR CITY, Kim Phillips-Fein (2017). And I would rather read a Michael Lewis book on the markets than a fast-moving murder mystery anytime. The authors just mentioned take the time, and the pages, to describe the players, their motivations, their personal quirks and the suspense leading up to the denouement. Peretti doesn't do this.
Yes, the author writes well and has chosen interesting topics, but he has chosen way too many to make his book a satisfying page-turner.
It's not an easy read as it's dense with information, but Peretti does a good job of contextualising much of the data. I found myself taking it a topic at a time, then putting it down for a week or two.
Peretti gives details and insight about each 'deal' that
If you care about the economy or want to understand how we got where we are this is a must read!!!
Peretti’s thesis is essentially that though the world focuses on politics as the driver of change and regulation of social and economic fortunes, it is more frequently businesses, and the deals made within them, that “have changed ow we spend nd think about money; the way we work; how we conceptualize wealth and risk, tax and inequality.” A strong concept that he then explores through the guise of landmark business deals relating to planned obsolescence, food, drugs, cash, work, risk, taxes, wealth, globalizations, and automation, followed by a discongrous epilog that does not seek to wrap up his argument in any coherent way, but merely predicts the next major impacts will come from small entrepreneurs (while using a big-business initiative by FaceBook to support his point).
More disappointing than the weakness of his argument, though, is that the book’s content is not reflective of its title or back matter. Far from an exciting window into how the sausage is made, most is a quasi-academic economic/social history of the impact of various business decisions. Never once are we given a slims of the reckless ambition, the backroom negotiations, or the hidden truths the subtitle promises.
Instead, we get a series of fairly dry essays about various business decisions (some of them aren’t even “deals,” as they do not involve two or more negotiating parties. They are appropriately be named “decisions.”). In fairness, these are some of the decisions with the largest socio-economic impact in the history of the industrial and post-industrial world. But few are not well known already. Thus, each chapter is essentially an essay of a level appropriate for a 500-level graduate seminar in economic history. But not much more enticing or connected than that. This makes for slow reading, as it is easy to read a chapter, then set the book aside for a month or two, and pick back up with the next one (or a random other one), having really missed nothing of the narrative.
The prose is passable, if not particularly interesting. Peretti’s journalistic background is well-revealed there. To his credit, there are some good citations in the form of Chicago Style end notes. However, these are spotty. If one were seeking to use this work as a starting point for academic research, he would find frustratingly frequent facts, statistics, and quotations that are not cited.
Disclaimer: I received a free pre-release copy in exchange for reviewing. The pre-release copy was an unedited proof, so some improvements may be made before publication. There were no restrictions or influence on the content of my review.