The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan
online access from Springer English/International eBooks
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Foreign Affairs The Best of Books 2021

This original and panoramic book proposes that the underlying forces of demography and globalisation will shortly reverse three multi-decade global trends – it will raise inflation and interest rates, but lead to a pullback in inequality. “Whatever the future holds”, the authors argue, “it will be nothing like the past”. Deflationary headwinds over the last three decades have been primarily due to an enormous surge in the world’s available labour supply, owing to very favourable demographic trends and the entry of China and Eastern Europe into the world’s trading system. This book demonstrates how these demographic trends are on the point of reversing sharply, coinciding with a retreat from globalisation. The result? Ageing can be expected to raise inflation and interest rates, bringing a slew of problems for an over-indebted world economy, but is also anticipated to increase the share of labour, so that inequality falls. Covering many social and political factors, as well as those that are more purely macroeconomic, the authors address topics including ageing, dementia, inequality, populism, retirement and debt finance, among others.

This book will be of interest and understandable to anyone with an interest on where the world’s economy may be going.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

見微知著 : 心靈故事選萃

李怡
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李怡三本暢銷書《細味人生100篇》、《閱讀人生100篇》、《感悟人生100篇》之文章選集，重新編排。

我從二十歲開始，就過着閱讀、編輯、寫作的生涯。數十年來，讀過的書不少（當然想讀而沒有讀的就更多），人生經歷過許多起伏跌宕，在社會上看到最多的並非「失敗乃成功之母」，而"是「成功乃失敗之母」。許多人從高處落下，不是不夠聰明，而是沒有自知之明。

我慢慢發現一些生活的小故事，一些漫不經心的話語，實際上蘊含着生活的大智慧。講出來似乎卑之無甚高論，但若成為時刻警惕自己的座右銘，則對一個人的一生可以有很大影響，甚至帶來關鍵性的轉變。十多年來，我將收集到的小故事，加上自己的解釋和領悟，寫成好幾本關於人生的書。這些書在銷售一時之後，這幾年已沒有重印。現在從這些書中選出我認為最有意思的一百多篇，以新的書名重新出版。

成語「見微知著」的意思，是見到些微跡象，就可以從中知道整個真象和發展趨勢。用作書名，是表示從一些小故事中可以領悟到的大道理和生活智慧。──李怡

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

Jimmy Soni (Author), Jonathan Todd Ross (Narrator)
online access from EBSCOhost Ebook
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National Bestseller * New York Times Editors’ Choice *Financial Times “Books to Read in 2022”

“A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible” (The Wall Street Journal)—including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared.

Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired.

Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain.

In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success.

Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

藏在地名裏的香港

木木
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優美散文：作者精選數十處香港地名，從中撰文探究香港歷史文化，講述在港生活諸多趣事。
手繪地圖：每篇文章文首配有手繪水彩地圖，標註著名景點與人文古跡，文藝清新，直觀介紹香港各地風貌。
古體詩詞：作者對古體詩詞頗有研究，文中插入許多作者

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)

French Braid: A novel

Anne Tyler
online access from ProQuest Ebook Central
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NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author—a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family’s foibles, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild in our pandemic present.

The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.

Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

圖解嶺南建築

崔俊, 倪韻捷
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本書挑選了嶺南建築中的民居、園林、學宮、古塔、宗祠等類型, 並以西關大屋、騎樓、圍龍屋、清暉園、揭陽學宮、廣濟橋等經典建築為例，用圖解的形式向讀者呈現出嶺南建築清新明快、中西合璧、務實求變等鮮明的特點,從建築物中了解嶺南建築文化的價值和歷史地位。

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)