Preorder Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

From Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, a radical blueprint for accelerating innovation.

“A bubble is not simply a collective delusion but an expression of a future that is radically different from now.”

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.

Why are we unable to replicate the rate of progress of past decades? What can we do to reinvigorate innovation?

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, they write, bubbles 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. It’s available for preorder now.