Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse

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The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop by Gregory Dicum, Nina Luttinger

biodiversity loss, California gold rush, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, do well by doing good, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, European colonialism, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, open economy, price stability, Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

First the tavern or coffeehouse, where a certain number of people met on special evenings for purposes of social conversation, and incidentally consumed a good deal of liquid refreshment; then the beginnings of the club proper—some well-known house of refreshment being taken over from the proprietor by a limited number of clients for their own exclusive use, and the landlord retained as manager; and finally the palatial modern club, not necessarily sociable, but replete with every comfort, and owned by the members themselves ...14 Lloyd’s of London also evolved from a coffeehouse, one that primarily served seafarers and merchants. In his late-seventeenth-century coffeehouse, Edward Lloyd established a list detailing ships’ cargo and their schedules. Underwriters came to his coffeehouse to sell shipping insurance and merchants came to keep track of the ships. From this tradition emerged Lloyd’s of London, today one of the largest insurance firms in the world. Attendants at this institution are still called “waiters,” as they were in the former coffeehouse three centuries ago. If the English were swayed by the medical virtues of coffee and the sociability of their myriad coffeehouses, Parisians were finally won over for the sake of fashion.

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This coffeehouse remained the only one in the city for many years. Located in New York’s growing financial district, Merchant’s Coffeehouse opened in about 1737, on the northwest corner of the present Wall and Water streets (near the site of today’s National Coffee Association headquarters). This coffeehouse became an important center for meetings and commerce; the Chamber of Commerce conducted sessions in the coffeehouse’s long room, and, like Edward Lloyd, the proprietor eventually kept a marine list, announcing the names of vessels arriving and departing from the port. The proprietor also organized a register of citizens that may have been the first city directory.

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Historic Timeline 1000 Physician and philosopher Avicenna of Bukhara is the first writer to describe the medicinal properties of coffee, which he calls bunchum 1470–99 Coffee use spreads to Mecca and Medina 1517 Sultan Selim I introduces coffee to Constantinople after con quering Egypt 1554 The first coffeehouses open in Constantinople 1570–80 Religious authorities in Constantinople order coffee houses to close 1600 Coffee is brought into southern India by a Muslim pilgrim named Baba Budan 1616 Coffee is brought from Mocha to Holland 1645 The first coffeehouse opens in Venice 1650 The first coffeehouse opens in England, at Oxford 1658 The Dutch begin coffee cultiva tion in Ceylon 1668 Coffee is introduced to North America 1669 Coffee catches on in Paris, when a Turkish ambassador spends a year at the court of Louis XIV 1670 Coffee is introduced to Germany 1674 The Women’s Petition Against Coffee is published in London 1675 King Charles II orders the closing of all London coffee houses, calling them “places of sedition” 1679 The physicians of Marseilles attempt to discredit coffee by claiming it is harmful to health 1679 The first coffeehouse in Germany opens, in Hamburg 1689 The first enduring Parisian café, Café de Procope, opens 1696 New York’s first coffeehouse, the King’s Arms, opens 1706 The first samples of coffee grown in Java are brought back to the Amsterdam botani cal gardens 1714 A coffee plant, raised from a seed of the Java samples, is presented by the Dutch to Louis XIV and maintained in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris 1720 The still-enduring Caffè Florian opens in Florence 1723 Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu brings a coffee seedling from France to Martinique 1727 Francisco de Mello Palheta brings seeds and plants from French Guiana to Brazil 1730 The English bring coffee culti vation to Jamaica 1732 Johann Sebastian Bach com poses The Coffee Cantata in Leipzig, parodying the German paranoia over the growing popularity of the drink 1777 King Frederick the Great of Prussia issues a manifesto denouncing coffee in favor of the national drink, beer 1809 The first coffee imported from Brazil arrives in Salem, Massachusetts 1869 Coffee leaf rust is first noticed in Ceylon; within ten years the disease wipes out a majority of the coffee plantations in India, Ceylon, and other parts of Asia 1873 The first successful national brand of packaged roast ground coffee, Ariosa, is put on the U.S. market by John Arbuckle 1882 The New York Coffee Exchange commences business 1904 Fernando Illy invents the mod ern espresso machine 1906 Brazil attempts to increase world coffee prices by with holding some from the market through the “Valorization of Coffee” 1910 German decaffeinated coffee is introduced to the U.S. market by Merck and Co., under the name Dekafa 1911 U.S. coffee roasters organize into a national association, the precursor to the National Coffee Association 1928 The Colombian Coffee Federation is established 1930–44 Brazil destroys 78 million bags of coffee in an attempt to raise global prices 1938 Nestlé technicians in Brazil invent the first commercially successful instant coffee, Nescafé—still the world’s lead ing brand 1939–45 U.S. troops bring instant coffee to a global audience 1959 Juan Valdez becomes the face of Colombian coffee 1962 Peak in U.S. per capita con sumption: more than three cups per person per day 1962 International Coffee Agreement establishes a worldwide cartel to control coffee supply 1971 The first Starbucks opens, in Seattle 1973 The first Fair Trade coffee is imported into Europe from Guatemala 1975 Brazil suffers a severe frost that sends coffee prices skyrocket ing to historic highs 1989 International Coffee Agreement collapses; world prices plum met to historic lows early 90s Specialty coffee takes off in the United States late 90s Organic coffee becomes the fastest growing segment of the specialty coffee industry 1999 TransFair USA launches the first Fair Trade Certified coffee in the United States 2001–03 World coffee prices fall to their lowest real levels ever; millions of coffee farmers face a devas tating crisis 2005 Specialty coffee represents half of the U.S. coffee market by value; Fair Trade Certified coffee is its fastest-growing segment Another legend linked to Islam holds that the Angel Gabriel came to a sickly Mohammed in a dream, showing him the berry and telling the prophet of its potential to heal and to stimulate the prayers of his followers.

I Never Knew That About London by Christopher Winn

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Clapham omnibus, Desert Island Discs, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869

Used for meetings of the Council of Lloyd’s and for receptions, the magnificent classical design provides a wondrous contrast to the stark modernism of rest of the building. Lloyd’s of London is the world’s leading insurance market. It all began in 1688 in a coffee-house in Tower Street, run by Edward Lloyd and frequented by sailors, merchants and shipowners who would exchange information about their ships and cargoes and arrange insurance. Individuals would each take a share of the risk for payment of a premium and write their names on the policy, one under the other. Hence they were known as ‘underwriters’. A few years later, around 1696, Edward Lloyd began to publish a news sheet containing all the shipping information he had gathered. Called Lloyd’s News, this was the forerunner of Lloyd’s List and LONDON’S FIRST DAILY NEWSPAPER.

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JOHN NEWTON ONCE AN INFIDEL AND LIBERTINE A SERVANT OF SLAVES IN AFRICA WAS BY THE RICH MERCY OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST PRESERVED, RESTORED, PARDONED AND APPOINTED TO PREACH THE FAITH HE HAD LONG LABOURED TO DESTROY John Newton was Rector here for 28 years and wrote the hymns ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds’ and ‘Amazing Grace’. He died in 1807, the year his dream was realised, with the introduction of the Slave Trade Act that abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. William Wilberforce declared his inspiration to be the sermons John Newton gave from the pulpit of St Mary Woolnoth. Edward Lloyd, whose coffee-house in Lombard Street was the origin of Lloyd’s of London insurance market, was buried here in 1713. In the west gallery is a 17th-century Father Smith organ, THE ONLY UNRESTORED EXAMPLE OF ITS KIND LEFT IN LONDON. St Mary Woolnoth was THE ONLY CITY CHURCH TO SURVIVE THE BLITZ UNSCATHED.

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LOMBARD STREET is named after the Lombardy merchants who came here in the 12th and 13th centuries to collect taxes for the Pope, then became bankers in place of the Jews ousted by Edward I in 1290. Barclays, Lloyds, Glyn Mills and Martin’s banks have all had their head offices in Lombard Street, which is still regarded as the banking centre of Britain. Edward Lloyd moved his coffee-house here from Tower Street in 1692. The poet ALEXANDER POPE was born in Plough Court, off Lombard Street, in 1688. 30 ST MARY AXE, designed by Norman Foster and opened in 2004, is the London headquarters of THE WORLD’S LARGEST REINSURANCE COMPANY, Swiss Re, and is LONDON’S FIRST ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE TALL BUILDING.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The coffeehouses around the Royal Exchange were thronged with businessmen, who would keep regular hours at particular coffeehouses so that their associates would know where to find them, and who used coffeehouses as offices, meeting rooms, and venues for trade. Books were sold at Man's coffeehouse in Chancery Lane, and goods of all kinds were bought and sold in several coffeehouses that doubled as auction rooms. So closely were some coffeehouses associated with certain topics that the Tatler, a London magazine founded in 1709, used the names of coffeehouses as subject headings for its articles. Its first issue declared: "All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment shall be under the Article of White's Chocolate-house; Poetry, under that of Will's Coffee-house; Learning, under the title of Grecian; Foreign and Domestick News, you will have from St.

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But of even greater significance than this new drink was the novel way in which it was consumed: in coffeehouses, which dispensed conversation as much as coffee. In doing so, coffeehouses provided an entirely new environment for social, intellectual, commercial, and political exchange. 8 The Coffeehouse Internet You that delight in Wit and Mirth, and long to hear such News, As comes from all parts of the Earth, Dutch, Danes, and Turksand Jews, I'le send you a Rendezvous, where it is smoaking new: Go hear it at a Coffee-house—it cannot but be true . . . There's nothing done in all the World, From Monarch to the Mouse, But every Day or Night 'tis hurl'd into the Coffee-house.

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"Foreigners remarked that the coffee-house was that which especially distinguished London from all other cities," wrote the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Macauley in his History of England. "The coffee-house was the Londoner's home, and that those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow." Some people frequented multiple coffeehouses, the choice of which depended on their interests. A merchant, for example, might oscillate between a financial coffeehouse and one specializing in Baltic, West Indian, or East Indian shipping. The wide-ranging interests of the English scientist Robert Hooke were reflected in his visits to around sixty London coffeehouses during the 1670s, as recorded in his diary.

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

The restoration of Charles II, Newton’s theory of gravity, the South Sea Bubble—they all came about, in part, because England had developed a taste for coffee, and a fondness for the kind of informal networking and shoptalk that the coffeehouse enabled. Lloyd’s of London was once just Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, until the shipowners and merchants started clustering there, and collectively invented the modern insurance company. You can’t underestimate the impact that the Club of Honest Whigs had on Priestley’s subsequent streak, precisely because he was able to plug in to an existing network of relationships and collaborations that the coffeehouse environment facilitated. Not just because there were learned men of science sitting around the table—more formal institutions like the Royal Society supplied comparable gatherings—but also because the coffeehouse culture was cross-disciplinary by nature, the conversations freely roaming from electricity, to the abuses of Parliament, to the fate of dissenting churches.

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Thinking about Priestley’s streak in the context of information networks takes us all the way back to that fateful meeting at the London Coffee House. The open circulation of ideas was practically the founding credo of the Club of Honest Whigs, and of eighteenth-century coffeehouse culture in general. With the university system languishing amid archaic traditions, and corporate R&D labs still on the distant horizon, the public space of the coffeehouse served as the central hub of innovation in British society. How much of the Enlightenment do we owe to coffee? Most of the epic developments in England between 1650 and 1800 that still warrant a mention in the history textbooks have a coffeehouse lurking at some crucial juncture in their story.

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Together, all those forces converged on him, as the Samson struggled against the current, bearing west to the New World . . . BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND THE KITE CHAPTER ONE The Electricians December 1765 London THE LONDON COFFEE HOUSE LAY IN St. PAUL’S churchyard, a crowded urban space steps from the cathedral, bustling with divinity students, booksellers, and instrument makers. The proximity to the divine hadn’t stopped the coffeehouse from becoming a gathering place for some of London’s most celebrated heretics, who may well have been drawn to the location for the sheer thrill of exploring the limits of religious orthodoxy within shouting distance of England’s most formidable shrine.

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage

An Inconvenient Truth, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Evgeny Morozov, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, New Journalism, packet switching, place-making, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, social intelligence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, yellow journalism

Some people frequented multiple coffee houses, the choice of which depended on their interests. A merchant, for example, might divide his day between a financial coffeehouse and one specializing in Baltic, West Indian, or East Indian shipping. And one way to quantify the wide-ranging interests of the English scientist Robert Hooke is to note that according to his diary, he frequented around sixty London coffee houses during the 1670s. So closely were some coffee houses associated with particular topics that the Tatler, a London magazine founded in 1709, used the names of coffee houses as subject headings for its articles.

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The literary set, meanwhile, congregated at Will’s coffeehouse in Covent Garden, where for three decades the poet John Dryden and his circle reviewed and discussed the latest poems and plays. Coffee houses around the Royal Exchange were thronged with businessmen, who would keep regular hours at particular coffee houses so that their associates would know where to find them, and who used coffee houses as offices, meeting rooms, and venues for trade. In Jonathan’s, in Exchange Alley, customers bought and sold stocks and commodities, the prices of which were posted on the wall. Merchants and shipowners met in Lloyd’s coffeehouse. Books were sold at Man’s coffeehouse in Chancery Lane, auctions took place at the London, doctors went to Baston’s, scientists to the Grecian, and barristers to the George.

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The origins and impact of Milton’s Areopagitica are discussed by Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain; Morehouse, Areopagitica; and Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility. CHAPTER 6: AND SO TO THE COFFEEHOUSE The rise of the coffeehouse is discussed in Pincus, “Coffee Politicians Does Create”; Cowan, “Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere”; and my previous book A History of the World in 6 Glasses. Efforts to suppress the coffee houses are the subject of Cowan, “The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered.” For the use of coffee houses by scientists, see Stewart, “Other Centres of Calculation.” For Oldenburg, correspondence societies, and the origins of the Philosophical Transactions, see Webster, “New Light on the Invisible College”; Johns, “Miscellaneous Methods”; Stimson, “Hartlib, Haak and Oldenburg”; Lux and Cook, “Closed Circles or Open Networks?”

The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug by Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer

British Empire, clean water, confounding variable, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, Honoré de Balzac, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lao Tzu, placebo effect, Plato's cave, spice trade, trade route, traveling salesman

Almost everyone you meet is a polite scholar and a wit.” Watercolor drawing of the Lion’s Head sign for Button’s Coffee House, London. It was designed by Hogarth and erected by Addison in 1713. (W.H.Ukers, All about Coffee) Lloyd’s Coffee-House, in Lombard Street, was founded by Edward Lloyd around 1688. There the captains and merchants of England’s burgeoning sea trade met and cut deals with underwriters and insurance brokers to protect their investments from the hazards of expeditions that could last many months and take them through many uncertainties of weather and welcome. This was the beginning of two institutions, the Royal Exchange Lloyd’s, which, at least prior to its recent financial boondoggle, was the largest insurance company in the world, and Lloyd’s Register of Shipping.

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Another testimonial comes from John Ray (1627–1705), a London botanist, who computed in 1688 that coffeehouses were nearly as general in London as in Cairo.27 Timbs, in his classic Clubs and Club Life in London (1872), quotes an early edition of the National Review to the effect that “Before 1715, the number of Coffee-houses in London was reckoned at two thousand. Every profession, trade, class, party, had its favorite Coffee-house.” However, Stella Margetson, in her incisive and entertaining book Leisure and Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (1970), writing of the age of Addison, provides a considerably smaller estimate, stating that there were “more than 500 coffeehouses in London alone at this time.” Extrapolating from Dufour’s figure for London coffeehouses, we should expect almost fifty thousand in New York City today; extrapolating even Margetson’s more modest estimate, we should expect seventy-five hundred.

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A good example of inconsistency in state policies with respect to coffee and tea is an English king’s disapproval of the tumultuous atmosphere of the early coffeehouses, while his queen played a starring role in introducing the fashion of tea to England. The promiscuous mingling of political opinions, the trademark of the new coffeehouses, engendered fear and suspicion, bolstering opposition to coffee and the establishments in which it was served. This opposition culminated in a proclamation by Charles II, made on December 23, and issued on December 29, 1675, banning coffee-houses from London after January 10, 1676: BY THE KING: A PROCLAMATION FOR THE SUPRESSION OF COFFEE HOUSES Charles R. Whereas, it is most apparent that the multitude of Coffee Houses of late years set up and kept within this kingdom,… the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons …, have produced very evil and dangerous effects; as well for that many tradesmen and others, do herein mispend much of their time, which might and probably would be employed in and about there Lawful Calling and Affairs; but also, for that in such houses…diverse false, malicious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the defamation of his Majesty’s Government and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm; his Majesty hath thought it fit and necessary, that the said Coffee Houses be (for the future) Put down, and supressed, and doth…strictly charge and command all manner of persons, That they or any of them do not presume from and after the Tenth Day of January next ensuing, to keep any Public Coffee House, or to utter or sell by retail, in his or her or their house or houses (to be spent or consumed within the same) any Coffee, Chocolate, Sherbett, or Tea, as they will answer the contrary at their utmost perils…(all licenses to be revoked).

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

THE PARTNERS OPENED THEIR OPERATION IN 1652 Edwards’s and Rosee’s introduction of the coffeehouse to England draws on Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004), chapter 3. The anecdote about Edwards’s coffee habit can be found in Houghton, “Discourse of Coffee,” p. 312. BUT THE OPENING OF THE FIRST COFFEEHOUSE There is some controversy about the priority claim. Several histories of coffee place the first public vendor in England in Oxford. I’m persuaded by Ellis’s argument that Rosee’s has the better documented historical trail. See Coffee House, Kindle location 691 of 7491. “BURNT BREAK AND PUDLE WATER,” John Tatham, Knavery in All Trades; or, The Coffee-house: a Comedy, act III.

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One satirist described the typical draught as “Burnt break and pudle water,” smelling of “old Gehenna, Lucifers deep furnace, a stench to stifle virtue and good manners.” But for the growing crowds gathering in the new cafés, the point was less what they drank than what happened when people met to consume it. Crucially, the coffeehouse temporarily suspended the usual social hierarchies. A broadside printed in 1674 presented a tongue-in-cheek list of the “Rules and Orders of the Coffee House,” the first of which was that “gentry, tradesman, all are welcome hither / And may without affront sit down together.” The routine was much the same: a penny bought a seat; a dish of coffee; access to another novelty, the newspapers; and, as one chose, conversation with friends or with strangers, sometimes organized, often not.

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Such radical informality catalyzed by an exotic new concoction was catnip to Royal Society men. John Houghton captured this eagerness in his report to the Society meeting in 1699: “[The] Coffee-house makes all sorts of People sociable, they improve Arts, and Merchandize and all other Knowledge”—which was to say that the Fellows found themselves returning over and over again to favored establishments, many within a few hundred yards of Rosee’s first location. The polymathic Robert Hooke, for example, traveled daily around a series of regular perches, with Jonathan’s Coffee House in Exchange Alley vying with Garraway’s, a few doors farther down the Alley, as his most frequent destination.

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

business climate, business cycle, commoditize, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Honoré de Balzac, it's over 9,000, land reform, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open economy, out of africa, profit motive, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, The Great Good Place, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, vertical integration, women in the workforce

The coffeehouses provided England’s first egalitarian meeting place, where a man was expected to chat with his tablemates whether he knew them or not. Edward Lloyd’s establishment catered primarily to seafarers and merchants, and he regularly prepared “ships’ lists” for underwriters who met there to offer insurance. Thus began Lloyd’s of London, the famous insurance company. Other coffeehouses spawned the Stock Exchange, the Bankers’ Clearing-house, and newspapers such as The Tattler and The Spectator. Before the advent of coffee, the British imbibed alcohol, often in Falstaffian proportions. “What immoderate drinking in every place!”

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The Women’s Petition revealed that a typical male day involved spending the morning in a tavern “till every one of them is as Drunk as a Drum, and then back again to the Coffee-house to drink themselves sober.” Then they were off to the tavern again, only to “stagger back to Soberize themselves with Coffee.” In response, the men defended their beverage. Far from rendering them impotent, “[coffee] makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds a spiritualescency to the Sperme.” On December 29, 1675, King Charles II issued A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee Houses. In it he banned coffeehouses as of January 10, 1676, since they had become “the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons” where tradesmen neglected their affairs.

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For those who did not have such means, coffeehouses, known as kaveh kanes, sprang up. By the end of the fifteenth century, Muslim pilgrims had introduced coffee throughout the Islamic world in Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa, making it a lucrative trade item. As the drink gained in popularity throughout the sixteenth century, it also gained its reputation as a troublemaking brew. Various rulers decided that people were having too much fun in the coffeehouses. “The patrons of the coffeehouse indulged in a variety of improper pastimes,” Ralph Hattox notes in his history of the Arab coffeehouses, “ranging from gambling to involvement in irregular and criminally unorthodox sexual situations.”

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Thus, in total, the sectors we’ll review in this chapter are the front runners in the race to reinvent the rest of your life. Let’s dive in.… Coffee, Risk, and the Origins of Insurance In 1680, Edward Lloyd arrived in London. He was thirty-two years old and hunting for opportunity. He found one in coffee. Fueled by this then novel beverage, London’s coffeehouse scene was exploding. Over three thousand java shops were already scattered throughout the city. Was the marketplace too crowded for another competitor? Lloyd didn’t think so. In 1686, he launched his own establishment, Lloyd’s Coffee House, on London’s Tower Street. At the time, London was driven by two economic engines: shipping and finance.

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Wired called these kinds of efforts: Megan Molteni, “Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood into an Elixir of Youth,” Wired, September 5, 2018. See: https://www.wired.com/story/startups-flock-to-turn-young-blood-into-an-elixir-of-youth/. National Institute on Aging committed $2.35 million: Ibid. Chapter Eleven: The Future of Future of Insurance, Finances, and Real Estate Coffee, Risk, and the Origins of Insurance Edward Lloyd: For a full history of Lloyd’s of London, see: https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/history/corporate-history. 33.6 billion pounds’ worth of insurance premiums in 2017: Read the full press release from March 27, 2019, here: https://www.lloyds.com/news-and-risk-insight/press-releases/2019/03/lloyds-reports-aggregated-market-results-for-2018.

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Some two millennia later, this notion of risk-based, data-driven maritime insurance reached new heights in the confines of a certain London coffeehouse. The bankers who frequented Lloyd’s were willing to collect premiums in exchange for taking shipping risks. They dubbed this process “underwriting,” as bankers would literally write their names on the blackboard under the name of the ship and a list of the trip’s details: its cargo, crew, weather, and destination. Today, some 320 years later, this idea of “underwriting” has grown into a multitrillion-dollar insurance industry. Lloyd’s humble coffeehouse evolved into the famed Lloyd’s of London, which generated 33.6 billion pounds’ worth of insurance premiums in 2017.

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell, Kit Chellel

big-box store, coronavirus, COVID-19, drone strike, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, eurozone crisis, failed state, Filipino sailors, financial innovation, information security, lockdown, megacity, offshore financial centre, Skype, South China Sea, trade route, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Dolly Parton’s breasts were insured at Lloyd’s, as were Bruce Springsteen’s voice, David Beckham’s legs, and a distinctive mustache belonging to a famous Australian cricketer. But the market’s bread and butter has always been ships. Lloyd’s began life as a coffeehouse run by Edward Lloyd, the son of a stocking knitter, in the late seventeenth century, only a few hundred yards from its modern home. At the time, coffeehouses were fashionable, sometimes raucous places for London merchants to conduct business. Over the subsequent decades, Lloyd’s attracted a varied crowd of traders, speculators, gamblers, and con artists, as well as businessmen who funded lucrative sea voyages—and those willing to insure them.

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Over the subsequent decades, Lloyd’s attracted a varied crowd of traders, speculators, gamblers, and con artists, as well as businessmen who funded lucrative sea voyages—and those willing to insure them. (As Lloyd’s acknowledged in a 2020 apology for its role in the trade, many of those journeys were to transport African slaves.) Edward Lloyd recognized the importance of reliable information and realized that if he provided his customers with the latest maritime news, they would have more reason to stay on the premises. That insight led him to create a journal called Lloyd’s List to record the comings and goings of ships. It’s still published today, making it one of the world’s oldest continuously running periodicals. The earliest surviving marine insurance policy, predating even Lloyd’s, gives an insight into the hazards sailors faced in the early modern era.

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In the 1980s and 1990s, deregulation and computerization transformed banking and trading in London, vaulting the city into direct competition with New York for the title of the world’s premier financial hub. The Lloyd’s crowd liked the lack of rules, but wasn’t quite as ready to embrace technology. The Brillante’s hull insurance contract, for instance, was placed at the market in late 2010 in a style that Edward Lloyd himself would have recognized. The central feature of the Lloyd’s building is the Underwriting Room, a vast trading floor at the base of an atrium that rises fourteen stories. The Room, as everyone calls it, takes up most of the ground level, and during the trading day is full of insurers sitting in little wooden booths, waiting for business to find them.

The Companion Guide to London by David Piper, Fionnuala Jervis

British Empire, cakes and ale, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute couture, Isaac Newton, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Nelson Mandela, South Sea Bubble, V2 rocket

But there in the early eighteenth century most stock exchange business was done, and there at Jonathan’s or Garraway’s even amateurs or hopeful incompetent poets liked to have a flutter; thus Pope wrote to a friend there in 1720, the year of the great financial crash known as the South Sea Bubble, asking to be remembered to John Gay ‘for anywhere else (I deem) you will not see him as yet…’ It was at No. 16 Lombard Street that Edward Lloyd had his coffeehouse whence sprang Lloyd’s of London. Some banks still have the agreeable medieval habit of indicating their presence by a sign hanging out over the pavement, and outside No. 68 is a large and beautiful, gilt grasshopper – the house is said to have belonged to Gresham, and later Martin’s Bank (the oldest in England, founded in 1163).

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Leadenhall Street is a big thoroughfare with the usual banks, but here too a reminder of its days as home to the offices of the great shipping companies. On the south side is the great underwriter of their risks in the perennial battle with the hazards of the sea: Lloyd’s, one of the most famous institutions in London which took root like other institutions in a coffee-house towards the end of the seventeenth century. This, run by Edward Lloyd, was in Lombard Street. Lloyd’s is now housed in an audacious high-tech glass and steel building by Richard Rogers (opened by the Queen, 1986; floodlit by night). This replaced a building of 1928 by Sir Edwin Cooper (the entrance is preserved). On the other side of Lime Street is a second Lloyd’s building by Terence Heysham (1950–7).

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Now it is against all contemporary way of life and is most noticeable. This archaic costume may still be found elsewhere, of course – in the City, dotted through the higher echelons of Whitehall. But St James’s is its true habitat, the clubs of St James’s. The clubs began as coffee houses in the mid-seventeenth century. In the beginning different groups of people began to meet by custom in different coffee houses; some of them soon became almost political centres or propaganda seminaries, though it is easy to overestimate their political significance. Still, in 1675, Charles II tried, and failed, to suppress them. At the time of the Dutch wars, Pepys was asked to float atrocity stories in the houses ‘where they would spread like leprosy’.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, experimental economics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mental accounting, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norman Macrae, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, spectrum auction, statistical model, stocks for the long run, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

With the volume of shipping constantly expanding, there was a lively demand for current information with which to estimate sailing times between destinations, weather patterns, and the risks lurking in unfamiliar seas. In the absence of mass media, the coffee houses emerged as the primary source of news and rumor. In 1675, Charles II, suspicious as many rulers are of places where the public trades information, shut the coffee houses down, but the uproar was so great that he had to reverse himself sixteen days later. Samuel Pepys frequented a coffee house to get news of the arrival of ships he was interested in; he deemed the news he received there to be more reliable than what he learned at his job at the Admiralty. The coffee house that Edward Lloyd opened in 1687 near the Thames on Tower Street was a favorite haunt of men from the ships that moored at London's docks.

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Although the granting of this monopoly did prevent the establishment of any other insurance company, "private and particular persons" were still allowed to operate as underwriters. In fact, the corporations were constantly in difficulty because of their inability to persuade experienced underwriters to join them. In 1771, nearly a hundred years after Edward Lloyd opened his coffee house on Tower Street, seventy-nine of the underwriters who did business at Lloyd's subscribed 0100 each and joined together in the Society of Lloyd's, an unincorporated group of individual entrepreneurs operating under a self-regulated code of behavior. These were the original Members of Lloyd's; later, members came to be known as "Names."

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The Emperor Claudius (10 BC-AD 54), eager to boost the corn trade, made himself a one-man, premium-free insurance company by taking personal responsibility for storm losses incurred by Roman merchants, not unlike the way governments today provide aid to areas hit by earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods. Occupational guilds in both Greece and Rome maintained cooperatives whose members paid money into a pool that would take care of a family if the head of the household met with premature death. This practice persisted into the time of Edward Lloyd, when "friendly societies" still provided this simple form of life insurance.tt The rise of trade during the Middle Ages accelerated the growth of finance and insurance. Major financial centers grew up in Amsterdam, Augsburg, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Lyons, and Venice; Bruges established a Chamber of Assurance in 1310.

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

The sobriety coffee fostered was welcomed, “for whereas formerly apprentices and clerks with others used to take their morning’s draught in ale, beer, or wine, which by the dizziness they cause in the brain make many unfit for business, they use now to play the goodfellows [with] this wakeful and civil drink.” 12 RUM Sugar and slave trading were among the principal topics of conversation at Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House in London. Europeans had been found to have an insatiable appetite for the former substance, whose manufacture relied upon cheap labor supplied by the latter traffic. Sugar for the English market was produced in various Caribbean islands, which the English had begun to colonize at about the same time as New England.

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Indeed, some such in the City of London quickly became the foci of both the domestic capital markets and international trade. From 1697 onward, most of the business of the London Stocks Exchange was carried out in a pair of coffeehouses—Jonathan’s and Garraway’s. London’s shipowners, meanwhile, met at Lloyd’s Coffee House, whose proprietor published a daily paper listing news of interest to the shipping world, held auctions of prize goods, and which evolved to become the headquarters of a global insurance market. The net effect of the “salutiferous berry” on British drinking habits was considerable. For the first time in history, there was a safe, cheap, and respectable alternative to alcohol.

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James Nicholls and Susan J. Owen, Sheffield Academic Press, 2000, pp. 45-46. 138 “freedom from the illegal and intolerable”: Cornell, p. 82. 139 “a simple innocent thing”: The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse, Brian Cowan, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005, p. 95. 140 “thick as puddle water”: “A Character of Coffee and Coffee Houses” 1661, London, electronic edition prepared and edited by Emily Clark. 140 “First, Gentry, Tradesmen, all are welcome hither”: Cowan, p. 102. 12 RUM 142 “The chief fuddling they make”: Rum: A social and Sociable history of the Real Spirit of 1778, Ian Williams, Nation Books, New York, 2005, p. 28. 143 “For when their spirits are exhausted”: Ibid., p. 44. 143 “This drink is of great use to cure”: Ibid. 143 “the best way to make . . . their strangers welcome”: Ibid., p. 53. 143 “lately supplied the Place of Brandy in Punch”: Ibid., p. 52. 144 “Every Man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment”: A General History of the Pyrates, Daniel Defoe (1724), Dover Publications Edition, New York, 1999, p. 211.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

The ‘Greenspan doctrine’ regards the exchange of risk as similar to the exchange of milk and coffee: the effect of the trade is to ‘allocate (risk) to those investors most able and willing to take it’.11 But three centuries after Colbert, a different strand of thought in modern economics revives the notion that trade is tricky by stressing ‘information asymmetry’ – people trade because they have different knowledge, or different perceptions of the same knowledge. These two approaches to thinking about trade in risk have a long history. Michel Albert, a French economist turned insurance company boss, offered an entertaining account of the development of the global insurance market in the eighteenth century. He explained how, in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in London, leisured English gentlemen gathered to gamble on the fate of ships at sea. The value of these positions ebbed and flowed with the tides; their fortunes were buffeted by the weather. A thousand miles away, Swiss villagers came together to agree that, if a cow died, they would take collective responsibility for replacing it.

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And, astonishingly, London and Switzerland remain key centres of the global insurance market. The villagers have descended from alpine meadows to the impressively prosperous urban centres of Zurich and Munich. The iconic Lloyd’s building – designed by Richard Rogers and perhaps the most striking of all City of London office buildings – is barely a hundred yards from the place where Edward Lloyd’s customers first smelt the coffee. And Lloyd’s is still the principal global location for marine insurance. In the twentieth century both Lloyd’s and the Swiss/German industry were primarily re-insurance markets. A policyholder’s insurer will normally handle the routine administration of premiums and claims, but large losses are ceded, at an appropriate price, to re-insurers with specialist risk evaluation skills.

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Lloyd’s was supported by its ‘names’: (mostly) English individuals of means and social standing who hoped to derive a regular income from profitable underwriting but put their personal wealth on the line to meet any losses. Munich Re and Swiss Re were financial behemoths, pooling risks globally and maintaining large capital reserves to meet future losses. At Lloyd’s the coffee-house tradition continued with business conducted in ‘the Room’. The Lutine Bell at its centre reflected the maritime history. (The bell had been salvaged from a bullion ship, the Lutine, that had sunk in 1799; it was rung once to signify a wreck and twice to record a safe return.) A broker placing a risk would attempt to find a lead underwriter willing to accept a substantial portion of it: if the lead underwriter was well regarded, others would follow on behalf of their own ‘names’.

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

(July 11, 2000) (Jim Griffin testimony). 2. Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996). Starting in 1696, the coffeehouse owner Edward Lloyd tracked information about the shipping business and provided a place to buy and sell insurance for it. Those who wanted to accept risk would write their names under a particular ship, which is where we get the term “underwriter”; the famous British insurance company took its name from the coffeehouse itself. 3. In 1941, when ASCAP was sued on antitrust grounds by the Department of Justice, the case was settled with a consent decree; BMI signed a similar decree the same year.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Technically speaking, it’s the enterprise that agrees to take on the risk involved with some asset or venture, for a fee. Why is it called that? Because in the 1600s, parties willing to insure merchant ships embarking on open-sea voyages literally wrote their signatures under posted descriptions of the cargoes. (Many such notices of voyages were posted at Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse in London—the origin of the Lloyd’s of London we know today.) But within today’s big insurance firms (and banks and real estate companies), underwriter is also the job title given to people entrusted with the core work of evaluating risks and coming up with the fair price an asset owner should pay (usually in the form of an insurance premium) to be insulated against the possibility of loss.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Only later in the Venetian Republic was marine insurance invented. This enabled the risks faced by merchants to be spread over many individuals. All could sleep easily in their beds, knowing that no single event could expose them to perils as grave as Antonio's. The market was developed further in Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse in the City of London. Lloyd's of London is still a center of the marine insurance market today. Several hundred years afterward, Hurricane Hugo hit the South Carolina coast in September 1989. The fishing village of McClellanville, halfway between Charleston and Georgetown, was flattened by eighteen-foot waves and 140 mile per hour winds, and the devastation extended to the neighboring cities and some way inland.

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

Lime Street Lloyd’s of London An incorporated society of private insurers and one of the world’s best-known companies, occupying Richard Rogers’s equally well-known building of 1986, Lloyd’s was begun in the 1860s by Edward Lloyd, who opened a coffee house on Tower Street and encouraged patrons connected with shipping to visit and exchange news. By the eighteenth century runners were scurrying back and forth between the coffee house and the docks gathering the latest information, and before long shipowners were coming to Lloyd’s to fill in forms listing the details of their proposed voyage – the route, intended ports of call, and value of the cargo – with speculators announcing how much they were willing to pay for insurance.

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Charles was supported by a group of City women who, the previous year, had presented the king with a petition against coffee, ‘representing to public consideration the grand inconveniences accruing to their sex from the excessive use of the dying and enfeebling liquor’. The king’s attempt to close the establishments failed, the order was rescinded within days, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century there were more than 1,000 coffee houses in London and twenty-six between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street alone. The Jamaica coffee house (since rebuilt as the Jamaica Wine House) replaced Bowman’s in the 1670s. The coffee houses died out during the nineteenth century. (ii) north of Fenchurch Street Aldgate Originally Ealdgate (‘the old gate’), a Roman gate at the start of the route leading from the City to Colchester, the Roman capital, its gatehouse included apartments.

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Cowper’s Court Traders who dealt with India met in the 1770s at the Jerusalem coffee house on Cowper’s Court, off Cornhill, to discuss business, and for many years the Jerusalem rivalled Lloyd’s as a centre of maritime commerce. In the nineteenth century metal traders, obliged to move out of the Royal Exchange to discuss their affairs, met there, establishing the ‘tradition of the ring’, during which merchants with metal to sell would draw a circle on the floor with sawdust and call out ‘Change’, at which point all those wishing to trade would assemble around the circle and make their bids. • Bowman’s coffee house, St Michael’s Alley, p. 29. Gracechurch Street A street of handsome nineteenth-century banks and grand offices, south of Bishopsgate, named after the church of St Benet Grass (demolished 1868), Gracechurch Street stands on the site of a huge Roman forum and basilica, whose existence was uncovered during excavation work in the 1950s.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The official place to do business was the Royal Exchange, but this stuffy, inflexible institution was no match for side deals done out on the “street.” Well, not literally the street. There were a few warmer places to meet in London to do business, the pubs and the coffee houses. For some reason, more business was done by the caffeinated than the quaffed. One such coffee house, Quaker Edward Lloyd’s, became the center for marine insurance. It was first mentioned in the press, located on Tower Street in 1688, the same year William and Mary began their reign, and it moved to Lombard Street in 1791. Merchants, through an “insurance office” or broker would seek out wealthy individuals to sign a policy, taking on a percentage of the risk of a ship in exchange for a similar percentage of the premiums paid.

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They would sign at the bottom of the policy, under the wording and under the previous signer’s name, hence the name underwriters. Many believe this signing under dates back to 14th century Genoan merchants. But who really cares? It’s a stupid name that stuck. Business at Lloyd’s became huge. Edward Lloyd himself made money selling coffee and reliable shipping news. Those that frequented his coffee house prospered as well. The British Navy didn’t rule the seas quite yet, but was strong enough to protect shipping. Someone must have been in the back office with a Pascal/Leibniz calculator figuring out probabilities and what size premiums to collect to make up for risk.

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OK, so Oliver Twist wasn’t going to become an insurance underwriter, but wealthy individuals backed by their real estate and other holdings could write and trade insurance. They could use illiquid holdings to get very liquid premiums. The coffee house was spared, and the gang at Lloyd’s continued to do the sea lion’s share of insurance underwriting. To show how long most government regulations outlive their usefulness, the so-called Bubble Act was not repealed until 1824. But insurance and gambling were still tied together. Lloyd’s and other coffee houses had royal death pools and bookmakers for just about anything. In 1769, 79 “members” representing most of the marine insurance business moved around the corner into New Lloyd’s Coffee Shop (these Brits love the concept of new, New York, New Jersey, New London, New and Improved).

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Innovative combinations emerge from intense and extended creative conversations in which ideas are opened up to challenge but also built upon. London coffee houses were vital public forums for such conversations in the 17th and 18th centuries. Edward Lloyd’s coffee shop, which encouraged a focus on trade, shipping and insurance, eventually became the insurance market of the same name. The New York Stock Exchange had similar origins. As Mark Ellis puts it in The Coffee House: A Social History, the convivial, bawdy coffee house was where ‘men learnt new ways of combinatorial friendship turning their discussions there into commercial ventures, critical tribunals, scientific seminars and political clubs’.

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WikiHistory counter.li.org/ english.ohmynews.com/ www.fark.com www.ige.com www.plastic.com portal.eatonweb.com www.slashdot.org www.technorati.com/about www.worldofwarcraft.com INDEX 42 Entertainment 10, 11 A ABC 173 academia, academics 6, 27, 48, 59 Acquisti, Alessandro 210 Adam, James 95 adaptation 109, 110, 121 advertising 104, 105, 129, 173, 180, 219 Aegwynn US Alliance server 99 Afghanistan 237 Africa broadband connections 189 mobile phones 185, 207 science 196 use of Wikipedia 18 Aids 193, 206, 237 al-Qaeda 237 Alka-Seltzer 105 Allen, Paul 46 Altair BASIC 46 Amadeu, Sérgio 202 amateurism 105 Amazon 86 America Speaks 184 American Chemical Society 159 anarchy cultural 5 Wikipedia 16 Anderson, Chris: The Long Tail 216 Apache program 68 Apple 42, 103, 104, 135, 182 iPhone 134 iPods 46 Arendt, Hannah 174, 176 Argentina 203 Arrayo, Gloria 186 Arseblog 29, 30 Arsenal Football Club 29, 30 Arsenal.com 29 arXiv 160 Asia access to the web 5, 190 attitude to open-source 203 and democracy 189 mobile phones 166, 185 and open-source design communities 166–7 Ask a Ninja 57, 219 assembly line 93, 130 assets 224 astronomy 155, 162–3 authority 110, 115, 233 authorship and folk culture 57, 58 and mapping of the human genome 62 Azerbaijan 190 B bacteria, custom-made 164 Baker, Steve 148 Banco do Brazil 201 Bangladesh 205–6 banking 115, 205–6 Barber, Benjamin: Strong Democracy 174 Barbie, Klaus 17 Barbie dolls 17 Barefoot College 205 barefoot thinking 205–6 Barthes, Roland 45 Batchelor, Charles 95 Bath University 137 BBC 4, 17, 127, 142 news website 15 beach, public 49, 50, 51 Beach, The (think-tank) xi Bebo 34, 85, 86 Bedell, Geraldine x, xii–xiii Beekeepers 11, 15 Benkler, Yochai 174 The Wealth of Networks 194 Berger, Jorn 33 Bermuda principles 160 Billimoria, Jeroo 206 BioBrick Foundation 164 biology 163 open-source 165 synthetic 164–5 BioMedCentral 159 biotechnology 154, 163–4, 196–7, 199 black fever (visceral leishmaniasis) 200 Blackburn Rovers Football Club 29 Blades, Joan 188 Blizzard Entertainment 100 Bloc 8406 191 Blogger.com 33 blogs, blogging 1, 3, 20, 29–35, 57, 59, 74, 75, 78, 86, 115, 159, 170, 171, 176, 179, 181–2, 183, 191, 192, 214, 219, 229 BMW 140 Bohr, Neils 93 bookshops 2 Boulton, Matthew 54–5 Bowyer, Adrian 139, 140, 232 Boyd, Danah 213, 214 Bradley, Bill 180 Brand, Stewart 39–40, 43, 63 brands 104, 109 Brazil 201–2 Brenner, Sydney 62–5, 70, 77, 118, 231 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking) 163 Brindley, Lynne 141, 142, 144–5 British Library, London 141, 142, 144, 145 British Medical Journal 159 British National Party 169 Brooks, Fred 77–8 Brooks Hall, San Francisco 38 BT 112 bugs, software 70, 72, 165 bulletin boards 34, 40, 68, 77 Burma 190, 191 Bush, President George W. 18, 33–4, 180, 183 business services 130, 132, 166 C C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans) 62–5 Cambia 197 Cambridge University Press 159 camcorders 11 Campbell, Anne 176 Cancer Genome Atlas 160 capital 224 capitalism 224 commune 121, 125 managerial 24 modern 91, 121 social dimension of 90 Carlson, Rob 164 Carnegie Mellon University 210 cars manufacture 135–6 sharing 153 CBS 173 Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT 139 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) 30–31, 159 Chan, Timothy 106, 107 chat rooms 165 Chavez, President Hugo 203 Cheney, Dick 180 Chevrolet 105 Chicago: Full Circle council project 184 China based on privileged access to information 236 creative and cultural sectors 129–30 hackers 234 Internet connection 190, 204 makes available genetic data 199 motor-cycle production 136–7 online games market 106 open-access scientific data 159–60 open-source designs 141 politics 171, 192 power struggle in 235 spending on R & D 96, 159 web censorship 190–91 Chinese Communist Party 171, 235 Chongquing, China 136 Cisco 190 Citibank 207 Citizendium 14 climate change 170, 239 Clinton, Bill 174, 188 Clinton, Senator Hillary 181, 182, 183 CNN 15 co-operatives 121, 122, 123, 188 co-ordination 109, 110–11 coffee houses, London 95 Coke 109–10, 239 Cold War 169, 235 Coles, Polly xiii collaboration 9, 22, 31, 32, 36, 67, 79–80, 81, 82 collaborative innovation 65, 70, 75 and commerce 227 computer game 99, 100 Cornish tin-mining 55 and healthcare 150 and the library of the future 145 new technologies for 227–8 open 126, 128 peer 239 public services 145, 146, 152, 153 scientific 154, 155–6 We-Think 21, 23, 24, 146 Collis, Charles 134 Columbia University 212 commerce 25, 38, 48, 52, 57, 98, 227 commons 49, 50, 51–3, 79, 80, 124, 191, 226 communes 39–40, 46, 90, 121, 122, 128 communication(s) 130, 168, 174, 206, 239 mobile 186 Communism, collapse of 6 communities collaborative 117 and commerce 48 and commons 52 conversational 63 Cornish tin-mining 55 creative 70, 95 diverse 79–80 egalitarian 27, 48, 59, 63, 64 hacker 232 healthcare 151, 152 independence of 23 of innovation 54 libertarian, voluntaristic 45 Linux 65, 227 and loss of market for local newspapers 3 meritocratic 63 open-source 45, 68, 75, 80, 83, 95–6, 102, 109, 110, 111 open-source design 166–7 of scientists 53, 228 self-governing 59, 79, 80, 97, 104, 232 sharing and developing ideas 25 web 21, 23 worm-genome researchers 62–5 community councils 77, 80, 82 Community Memory project 42–3 companies computer-games 128 employee-owned 121, 122 shareholder-owned 122, 123, 125 see also corporations; organisations computer games 60, 127, 218 children and 147 created by groups on the web 7, 23, 87 modularity 78 multi-player 7, 204 success of World of Warcraft 98–9 tools for creating content 74 and We-Think 23 computer-aided design 134 computers democratising how information is accessed 139 distrust of 39 Goa School Computers Project 200–201 laptop 5, 36, 82, 155 mini- 135 personal 39, 46, 203 punch-cards 38 and science 154, 155 viruses 3, 4 connect 67, 75–9 Connectiva 201 consumer spending 131 consumers 98–108 consumer innovators 101–3 consumption constraints 25–6 engaging 89 fans 103–4 freedom 218 and innovation risk 100–101 participant 98–108 urban 124 contribute 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74–5 conversation 53, 54, 63, 69, 77, 93, 95, 113, 118, 174 Copernicus, Nicolaus 162 copyright 124, 157, 196 core 66, 67, 68–9, 70 Cornell University 233 ‘Cornish’ engines 55–6, 136, 229 Cornish tin-mining industry 54–6, 63, 125, 136 corporations centralisation of power 110 closed 128 and collaborative approaches to work 109 the cost of corporate efficiency 89–90 difficulty in making money from the web 7 hierarchies 88, 110 industrial-era 88 leadership 115, 117–19 loss of stability 122 restructuring and downsizing 88–9 see also companies; organisations counter-culture (1960s) 6, 27, 39, 45, 46, 59 Counts, David 183 Craigslist 3, 40, 118, 128, 218 Creative Commons 124 creative sector 129–30 creativity 1–2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 67, 82–3 collaborative 7, 20, 58, 86, 154 collective 39, 57–8 consumers 89 corporate 91–2 emergence of 93, 96 enabled by the web 1–2, 3, 5, 19, 26, 218–21, 222, 227 freedom to create 218–21 and interaction 119 and open innovation 93 origin of 112–13 social 5, 7, 58, 59, 82, 83, 86 tools for 218, 219 Crick, Francis 52, 62, 76 crime 153, 169, 183 criminality 1, 3 crowds 23, 61, 70, 72, 77 Crowdspirit 134 cultural élite 2 cultural sector 129–30 culture academic 38 anti-industrial 27, 28 basis of 4 collaborative 135 consumerist 172 corrosion of 4 cultural anarchy 5 folk 6, 27, 56–9, 220, 226 hippie 38 individual participation 6 political 171 popular 102 post-industrial 27, 28 pre-industrial 27, 28 We-Think 28, 59, 62, 169, 194, 230, 232–3, 238 Web 2.0 45 web-inflected 27 Western 239 wiki 14 work 114 YouTube cultural revolution 3 Cunningham, Ward 35–6 cyber cafés 107, 190, 192, 201, 204 Cyworld 34, 85, 86 D Dali, Salvador 105 Darby, Newman 102 Darpa 164 David, Paul 53 de Soto, Hernando 224–5 The Mystery of Capital 224 de Vellis, Phil 182 Dean, Howard 176–7, 178, 180, 185 Dean Corps 177 Debian 66 Debord, Guy 45, 46 decentralisation 7, 13, 39, 46, 59, 78, 226, 232 decision-making 78, 82, 84, 115, 173, 174 del.i.cious 86 democracy 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 16, 24, 170–74, 175, 176–92 basis of 174 conversational democracy at a national level 184 ‘craftsmen of democracy’ 174 Dean campaign 178 democratic advances 184 depends on public sovereignty 172 formal 195 geek 65 Homebrew 176 public debate 170, 171 and We-Think 170, 221, 239 Department for International Development (DFID) 207 Descartes, René 19–20 design 166 modular 136–7 open-source 133–5, 140, 141, 162–3, 166–7 developing world Fab Labs in 166 government attitudes to the Internet 190 impact of the web on 166 mobile phones 185–6 and open-access publishing 166 and open-source design communities 166–7 and open-source software 200–203 research and development 196 and We-Think’s style of organisation 204 diabetes 150 Digg 33 discussion forums 77 diversity 9, 23, 72, 76, 77, 79–80, 112, 121 division of labour 111 DNA description of the double helix (Watson and Crick) 52, 62, 76 DNA-sequencing 164–5 Dobson, John 102, 162–3 Doritos 105 dot.com boom 106 Dupral 68 Dyson (household-goods company) 134 Dyson, Freeman 163, 164 E E-Lagda.com 186 Eaton, Brigitte 33 Eatonweb 33 eBay 40, 44, 102, 128, 152, 165, 216–18, 221, 229, 235 Ebola virus 165 Eccles, Nigel xi economies of scale 137 economy digital 124, 131, 216 gift 91, 226 global 192 global knowledge 239 of ideas 6 individual participation 6 industrial 122 market 91, 221 a mass innovation economy 7 networked 227 of things 6 UK 129, 130 and We-Think 129 Edison, Thomas 72, 93, 95 EditMe 36 education 130, 146–50, 167, 183, 194, 239 among the poorest people in the world 2, 193 civic 174 a more convivial system 44 Edwards, John 181 efficiency 109, 110 Einstein, Albert: theory of relativity 52 elderly, care of 170 Electronic Arts 105, 106, 128, 177 Electronic Frontier Foundation 40 electronics 93, 135 Eli Lilly (drugs company) 77 Ellis, Mark: The Coffee House: a social history 95 enclosures 124 Encyclopaedia Britannica, The 15–18, 126 encyclopaedias 1, 4, 7, 12–19, 21, 23, 36, 53, 60, 61, 79, 161, 231 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) 161, 226 Endy, Drew 164, 165 energy 166, 232, 238 Engelbart, Doug 38–9, 59 engineering 133, 166 Environmental Protection Agency 152 epic poems 58, 60 equality 2, 24, 192–7, 198, 199–208 eScholarship repository, University of California 160 Estonia 184, 234 Estrada, President Joseph 186 ETA (Basque terrorist group) 187 European Union (EU) 130 Evans, Lilly x Evolt 68, 108 F Fab Labs 139, 166, 232 fabricators 139 Facebook 2, 34–5, 53, 142, 152, 191, 193, 210 factories 7, 8, 24 families, and education 147 Fanton, Jonathan 161 Fark 33 Feinstein, Diane 176 Felsenstein, Lee 42, 43, 44 fertilisers 123 Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University 161 file-sharing 51, 58, 135, 144, 233 film 2, 3, 4, 47, 86, 129, 216, 218, 220–21 film industry 56 filters, collaborative 36, 86 financial services 130, 132 Financial Times 118 First International Computer (FIC), Inc. 136, 141 flash mobbing 10, 11 Flickr 34, 85, 86, 210, 218–19 Food and Drug Administration (US) 92 Ford, Henry 24, 93, 96 Fortune 500 company list 122 Frank, Ze (Hosea Jan Frank) 57, 219 freedom 1, 2, 6, 24, 208, 209, 210–21, 226 French, Gordon 41, 42 friendly societies 188 Friends Reunited 34 friendship 5, 233 combinatorial 95 Friendster 34, 35 fundamentalists 232 G Gaia Online 35 Galileo Galilei 154 gambling 169 GarageBand software 57, 135, 148 Gates, Bill 46, 47, 51, 227 Gates Foundation 160 geeks 27, 29–36, 37, 38, 48, 59, 65, 179 gene-sequencing machines, automated 64 genetic engineering 164, 196–7, 235 Georgia: ’colour revolution’ 187 Gershenfeld, Neil 139–40, 166, 232 GetFrank 108 Ghana, Fab Lab in 139 Gil, Gilberto 202 Gjertsen, Lasse 56, 218 Gland Pharma 200 global warming 238 globalisation 202, 228, 239 Gloriad 155 GM 135 Goa School Computers Project 200–201 Goffman, Erving 103–4 Goldcorp Inc. 132–3, 153 Golden Toad 40 GoLoco scheme 153 Google x, 1, 29, 32, 33, 47, 66, 97, 104, 113–14, 128, 141, 142, 144, 212 Google Earth 161 Gore, Al 64 governments in developing countries 190 difficulty in controlling the web 7 GPS systems 11 Grameen Bank 205–6, 208 ‘grey’ sciences 163 grid computing 155 Gross, Ralph 210 group-think 23, 210–11 groups 230–31 of clever people with the same outlook and skills 72 decision-making 78 diverse 72, 80, 231 and tools 76–7 Guthrie, Woody 58 H Habermas, Jurgen 174 hackers 48, 74, 104, 140, 232, 234 Hale, Victoria 199 Halo 2 science fiction computer game 8 Hamilton, Alexander 17–18 Hampton, Keith 183–4 Hanson, Matt xi health 130, 132, 146, 150–52, 167, 183, 239 Heisenberg, Werner 93 Henry, Thierry 29 Hewlett Packard 47 hierarchies 88, 110, 115 hippies 27, 48, 59, 61 HIV 193 Homebrew Computer Club 42, 46–7, 51, 227 Homebrew Mobile Phone Club 136 Homer Iliad 58 Odyssey 58 Homer-Dixon, Thomas: The Upside of Down 238–9 Hubble, Edwin 162 Human Genome Project 62, 64, 78, 155, 160, 161, 226 human rights 206 Hurricane Katrina 184 Hyde, Lewis: The Gift 226 hypertext 35, 39 I I Love Bees game 8, 10–12, 15–16, 19, 20, 69, 231 IBM 47, 66, 97 System/360 computer 77 idea-sharing 37, 94, 237, 239 as the biggest change the web will bring about 6 with colleagues 27 and consumer innovators 103 dual character of 226 gamers 106 Laboratory of Molecular Biology 63 through websites and bulletin boards 68 tools 222 We-Think-style approach to 97 and the web’s underlying culture 7 ideas combining 77 and creative thinking 87 from creative conversations 93, 95 gifts of 226 growth of 222, 239 and the new breed of leaders 117–18 ratifying 84 separating good from bad 84, 86 testing 74 the web’s growing domination 1 identity sense of 229 thieves 213–14 Illich, Ivan 43–5, 48 Deschooling Society 43, 44, 150 Disabling Professions 43 The Limits to Medicine 43, 152 Tools for Conviviality 44 independence 9, 72, 231 India Barefoot College 205 creative and cultural sectors 129–30 Fab Lab in 139 Internet connection 190, 204 mobile phones 207 and One World Health 200 spending on R & D 96 telephone service for street children 206 individuality 210, 211, 215, 216, 233 industrialisation 48, 150, 188 information barriers falling fast 2 computers democratise how it is accessed 139 effect of We-Think 129 large quantities on the web 31–2 libraries 141, 142, 143, 145 looking for 8 privileged access to 236 sharing 94, 136 the web’s growing domination 1 Wikipedia 19 Innocentive 77 innovation 5, 6, 91–3, 94, 95–8, 109 among the poorest people in the world 2 biological 194 collaborative 65, 70, 75, 90, 119, 146, 195 collective 170, 238 and competition/co-operation mix 137 Cornish mine engines 54–6 corporate 89, 109, 110 and creative conversations 93, 95 creative interaction with customers 113 cumulative 125, 238 decentralised 78 and distributed testing 74 and diverse thinking 79 and education 147 independent but interconnected 78 and interaction 119 and Linux 66 local 139 a mass innovation economy 7 medical 194 open 93, 96–7, 125, 195 in open-source communities 95–6 and patents 124 pipeline model 92, 93, 97 R & D 92, 96 risks of 100–101 social 170, 238 successful 69 user-driven 101 and We-Think 89, 93, 95, 125, 126 the web 2, 5, 7, 225 Institute for One World Health 199–200 Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI) 179 Institute of Fiscal Studies 131 institutions convivial 44 industrial-era 234 and knowledge 103 and professionals 3, 5 public 142, 145 Instructables site 134 Intel 97 intellectual property 75, 122, 124, 125, 234 law 124–5 intelligence, collective bloggers 33 getting the mix right 23 Google’s search system 32 I Love Bees and Wikipedia examples 8, 10–19 milked by Google 47 the need to collaborate 32 self-organisation of 8 and social-networking sites 35 the web’s potential 3, 5 International Polar Year (IPY) 156, 226 Internet broadband connection 178, 189, 192 combined with personal computers (mid-1990s) 39 cyber cafés 107, 190, 192, 201, 204 Dean campaign 177 in developing countries 190 draws young people into politics 179, 180 an early demonstration (1968) 38 and Linux 66 news source 178–9 open-source software 68 openness 233 and political funding 180 pro-am astronomers 163 used by groups with a grievance 168 in Vietnam 189–90, 191 investment 119, 121, 133, 135 Iran 190, 191 Iraq war 18, 134, 191 Israel 18 Ito, Joi 99 J Japan politics 171 technology 171 JBoss 68 Jefferson, Richard 197, 199 Jodrell Bank Observatory, Macclesfield, Cheshire 162 JotSpot 36 journalism 3, 74, 115, 170–71 Junker, Margrethe 206 K Kampala, Uganda 206 Kazaa music file-sharing system 144 Keen, Andrew 208 The Cult of the Amateur 208 Kelly, Kevin 211 Kennedy, John F. 176 Kenya 207 Kepler, Johannes 162 Kerry, John 180 Khun, Thomas 69 knowledge access to 194, 196 agricultural 194 barriers falling fast 2 collaborative approach to 14, 69 encyclopaedia 79 expanding 94 gifts of 226 individual donation of 25 and institutions 103 and networking 193 and pro-ams 103 professional, authoritative sources of 222 sharing 27, 44, 63, 70, 199 spread by the web 2, 3 Wikipedia 16, 18, 19, 195 Korean War 203 Kotecki, James (’EmergencyCheese’) 182 Kraus, Joe 36 Kravitz, Ben 13 Kuresi, John 95 Kyrgyzstan: ’colour revolution’ 187 L Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge 62–3, 77 labour movement 188 language 52–3 Lanier, Jaron 16, 210–11, 213 laptop computers 5, 36, 82, 155 lateral thinking 113 leadership 89, 115, 116, 117–19 Lean, Joel 55 Lean’s Engine Reporter 55, 63, 77 Lee, Tim Berners 30–31 Lego: Mindstorms products 97, 104, 140 Lewandowska, Marysia 220, 221 libraries 2, 141–2, 143, 144–5, 227 life-insurance industry (US) 123 limited liability 121 Linked.In 35 Linux 65–6, 68, 70, 74, 80, 85, 86, 97, 98, 126, 127, 128, 136, 201, 203, 227 Lipson Community College, Plymouth 148 literacy 194 media 236 Lloyd, Edward 95 SMS messaging (texting)"/>London coffee houses 95 terrorist bombings (July 2005) 17 Lott, Trent 181–2 Lula da Silva, President Luiz Inacio 201 M M-PESA 207, 208 MacArthur Foundation 161 McCain, John 180 MacDonald’s 239 McGonigal, Jane 11, 69 McHenry, Robert 17 McKewan, Rob 132–3, 153 McLuhan, Marshall: Understanding the Media 45 Madrid bombings (March 2004) 186–7 Make magazine 165 management authoritative style of 117 and creative conversation 118 hierarchies 110 manufacturing 130, 132, 133–7, 138, 139–41, 166, 232 niche 139 Marcuse, Herbert 43 Marin 101 Mark, Paul xi market research 101 market(s) 77, 90, 93, 102, 123, 216, 226–7 Marsburg virus 165 Marx, Karl 224 mass production 7, 8, 24, 56, 96, 227, 232, 238 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 139, 164, 233 Matsushita 135 media 129, 130, 156, 172, 173, 182, 211 literacy 236 Meetup 179, 185 Menlo Park laboratory, New Jersey 95 Merholz, Peter 33 meritocracy 16, 63 Microsoft 46, 47, 51, 56, 75, 109–10, 126, 127, 144, 202, 203, 204, 239 Office 201 Windows 200 Windows XP 66 Middle East 170, 189, 190, 192 Milovich, Dimitry 102 ‘minihompy’ (mini homepage) 204 Minnesota Mining and Materials 121 mobile phones 5 in Africa 185, 207 in Asia 166, 185 camera phones 74, 115, 210 children and 147 in developing-world markets 207–8 with digital cameras 36 flash mobs 10 I Love Bees 11 in India 207 open-source 136, 203 politics 185–9 SMS messaging (texting) 101–2, 185, 187, 214, 215 mobs 23, 61 flash 10, 11 modularity 77, 84 Moore, Fred 41–2, 43, 46, 47, 59, 227 More, Thomas: Utopia 208 Morris, Dick 174 Morris, Robert Tappan 233 Mosaic 33 motivation 109–12, 148 Mount Wilson Observatory, California 162 mountain bikes 101 MoveOn 188–9 Mowbray, Miranda xi music 1, 3, 4, 47, 51, 52, 57, 102, 135, 144, 218, 219, 221 publishing 130 social networking test 212–13 mutual societies 90, 121 MySpace 34, 44, 57, 85, 86, 152, 187, 193, 214, 219 MySQL 68 N National Football League (US) 105 National Health Service (NHS) 150, 151 National Public Radio (NPR) 188 Natural History Museum, London 161 Nature magazine 17 NBC 173 neo-Nazis 168 Netflix 216, 218 Netherlands 238 networking by geeks 27 post-industrial networks 27 social 2–7, 20, 23, 34–5, 36, 53, 57, 86, 95, 147, 149, 153, 159, 171, 183–4, 187, 193, 208, 210, 212, 213–15, 230, 233 New Economy 40 New Orleans 184 New York Magazine 214 New York Review of Books 164 New York Stock Exchange 95 New York Times 15, 182, 191 New Yorker magazine 149 Newmark, Craig 118 news services 60, 61, 171, 173, 178–9 newspapers 2, 3, 30, 32, 34, 171, 172, 173 Newton, Sir Isaac 25, 154 niche markets 216 Nixon, Richard 176 NLS (Online System) 39 Nokia 97, 104, 119, 140 non-profits 123 Nooteboom, Bart 74 Noronha, Alwyn 200–201 Norris, Pippa 189 North Africa, and democracy 189 Nosamo 35, 186 Noyes, Dorothy 58 Nupedia 13, 14 Nussbaum, Emily 214–15 O Obama, Barack 181, 191 Ofcom (Office of Communications) 31 OhmyNews 34, 87, 204, 231 oil companies 115 Oldenburg, Henry 25, 53–4, 156 Ollila, Jorma 119 Online System (NLS) 39 Open Architecture Network (OAN) 133–4 Open Net Initiative 190 Open Office programme 201 Open Prosthetics 134 Open Source Foundation 97 OpenMoko project 136 OpenWiki 36 O’Reilly, Tim 31 organisation commons as a system of organisation 51 pre-industrial ideas of 27, 48 social 20, 64, 165 We-Think’s organisational recipe 21 collaboration 21, 23 participation 21, 23 recognition 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 196 organisations civic 189 open/collaborative vs. closed/hierarchical models 89, 126, 127, 128 public 152 successful 228 see also companies; corporations Orwell, George: 1984 182 Ostrom, Elinor 51–2, 80 ownership 6, 119, 120, 121–6, 127, 128, 225 Oxford University 234 P paedophiles 3, 168, 213–14 Page, Scott xi, 72 Pakistan 237 Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco 40 parallel universes 7 participation 23, 216, 223, 230, 232 consumers 98, 100 public services 145, 146, 150, 152, 153 a We-Think ingredient 21, 24 Partido Populaire (PP) (Spain) 187 patents 55, 56, 92, 97, 102, 124, 154, 196, 197, 199 Paul, Ron 185 Pawson, Dave x–xi Pax, Salam 57 peasants 27, 48, 59 peer recognition 54, 106, 111, 156, 228–9 peer review 53, 54, 156, 165, 236 peer-to-peer activity 53–4, 135, 148, 151 People’s Computer Company 41 People’s Democratic Party (Vietnam) 191 performance art/artists 2, 10 performance management 110 Perl 68 Peruvian Congress 202 Pew Internet & American Life 31, 179 pharmaceutical industry 92–3, 195–6, 197, 199, 200 Phelps, Edmund 114–15, 220 Philippines: mobile phones 185–6 Philips, Weston 105 photographs, sharing of 34, 75, 86, 218–19 Pitas.com 33 Plastic 33 Playahead 35 podcasts 142 Poland 220–21 polar research 156 politics bloggers able to act as public watchdog 181–2, 183 decline in political engagement 171–2 democratic 173 donations 179 funding 180–81 and journalism 170–71 and mobile phones 185–9 online 183 the online political class 179 and online social networks 35, 86 political advocates of the web 173–4 racist groups on the web 169 and television 173, 183 ultra-local 183, 184 US presidential elections 173, 179 videos 182 the web enters mainstream politics 176 young people drawn into politics by the Internet 179 Popper, Karl 155 Popular Science magazine 102 pornography 169, 214 Post-it notes 121 Potter, Seb 108–9 Powell, Debbie ix power and networking 193 technological 236 of the We-Think culture 230 of the web 24–5, 185, 233 PowerPoint presentations 140, 142, 219 privacy 210, 211 private property 224, 225 Procter and Gamble (P & G) 96–7, 98 productivity 112, 119, 121, 151, 227, 232 agricultural 124 professionals, and institutions 3, 5 property rights 224 public administration 130 Public Broadcasting Service 188 Public Intellectual Property Research for Agriculture initiative 199 Public Library of Science 159 public services 132, 141–2, 143, 144–53, 183 public spending 146 publishing 130, 166 science 156–7, 159–60 Putnam, Robert 173, 184 Python 68 Q quantum mechanics 93 ‘quick-web’ 35 R racism 169, 181–2 radio 173, 176 RapRep (Rapid Replicator) machines 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 232 Rawls, John: A Theory of Justice 194 Raymond, Eric 64 recognition 21, 223 peer 54, 106, 111, 156 record industry 56, 102 recycling 111 Red Hat 66, 227 Red Lake, Ontario 132, 133 research 166 market 101 pharmaceutical 195–6 research and development (R & D) 92, 96, 119, 196 scientific 154–7, 159–65 retailing 130, 132 Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil 201 Roh Moo-hyun, President of South Korea 35, 186 Roosevelt, Franklin 176 Roy, Bunker 205 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey 161 Royal Society 54 Philosophical Transactions 25, 156 Ryze.com 34 S Sacca, Chris 113, 114 Safaricom 207 St Louis world fair (1904) 75–6 Samsung xi, 203 Sanger, Larry 13, 14, 16 Sanger Centre, Cambridge 155 Sao Paolo, Brazil 201 SARS virus 165 Sass, Larry 139 satellite phones 11 Saudi Arabia 190 scanners 11 Schumacher, E.

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WikiHistory counter.li.org/ english.ohmynews.com/ www.fark.com www.ige.com www.plastic.com portal.eatonweb.com www.slashdot.org www.technorati.com/about www.worldofwarcraft.com INDEX 42 Entertainment 10, 11 A ABC 173 academia, academics 6, 27, 48, 59 Acquisti, Alessandro 210 Adam, James 95 adaptation 109, 110, 121 advertising 104, 105, 129, 173, 180, 219 Aegwynn US Alliance server 99 Afghanistan 237 Africa broadband connections 189 mobile phones 185, 207 science 196 use of Wikipedia 18 Aids 193, 206, 237 al-Qaeda 237 Alka-Seltzer 105 Allen, Paul 46 Altair BASIC 46 Amadeu, Sérgio 202 amateurism 105 Amazon 86 America Speaks 184 American Chemical Society 159 anarchy cultural 5 Wikipedia 16 Anderson, Chris: The Long Tail 216 Apache program 68 Apple 42, 103, 104, 135, 182 iPhone 134 iPods 46 Arendt, Hannah 174, 176 Argentina 203 Arrayo, Gloria 186 Arseblog 29, 30 Arsenal Football Club 29, 30 Arsenal.com 29 arXiv 160 Asia access to the web 5, 190 attitude to open-source 203 and democracy 189 mobile phones 166, 185 and open-source design communities 166–7 Ask a Ninja 57, 219 assembly line 93, 130 assets 224 astronomy 155, 162–3 authority 110, 115, 233 authorship and folk culture 57, 58 and mapping of the human genome 62 Azerbaijan 190 B bacteria, custom-made 164 Baker, Steve 148 Banco do Brazil 201 Bangladesh 205–6 banking 115, 205–6 Barber, Benjamin: Strong Democracy 174 Barbie, Klaus 17 Barbie dolls 17 Barefoot College 205 barefoot thinking 205–6 Barthes, Roland 45 Batchelor, Charles 95 Bath University 137 BBC 4, 17, 127, 142 news website 15 beach, public 49, 50, 51 Beach, The (think-tank) xi Bebo 34, 85, 86 Bedell, Geraldine x, xii–xiii Beekeepers 11, 15 Benkler, Yochai 174 The Wealth of Networks 194 Berger, Jorn 33 Bermuda principles 160 Billimoria, Jeroo 206 BioBrick Foundation 164 biology 163 open-source 165 synthetic 164–5 BioMedCentral 159 biotechnology 154, 163–4, 196–7, 199 black fever (visceral leishmaniasis) 200 Blackburn Rovers Football Club 29 Blades, Joan 188 Blizzard Entertainment 100 Bloc 8406 191 Blogger.com 33 blogs, blogging 1, 3, 20, 29–35, 57, 59, 74, 75, 78, 86, 115, 159, 170, 171, 176, 179, 181–2, 183, 191, 192, 214, 219, 229 BMW 140 Bohr, Neils 93 bookshops 2 Boulton, Matthew 54–5 Bowyer, Adrian 139, 140, 232 Boyd, Danah 213, 214 Bradley, Bill 180 Brand, Stewart 39–40, 43, 63 brands 104, 109 Brazil 201–2 Brenner, Sydney 62–5, 70, 77, 118, 231 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking) 163 Brindley, Lynne 141, 142, 144–5 British Library, London 141, 142, 144, 145 British Medical Journal 159 British National Party 169 Brooks, Fred 77–8 Brooks Hall, San Francisco 38 BT 112 bugs, software 70, 72, 165 bulletin boards 34, 40, 68, 77 Burma 190, 191 Bush, President George W. 18, 33–4, 180, 183 business services 130, 132, 166 C C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans) 62–5 Cambia 197 Cambridge University Press 159 camcorders 11 Campbell, Anne 176 Cancer Genome Atlas 160 capital 224 capitalism 224 commune 121, 125 managerial 24 modern 91, 121 social dimension of 90 Carlson, Rob 164 Carnegie Mellon University 210 cars manufacture 135–6 sharing 153 CBS 173 Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT 139 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) 30–31, 159 Chan, Timothy 106, 107 chat rooms 165 Chavez, President Hugo 203 Cheney, Dick 180 Chevrolet 105 Chicago: Full Circle council project 184 China based on privileged access to information 236 creative and cultural sectors 129–30 hackers 234 Internet connection 190, 204 makes available genetic data 199 motor-cycle production 136–7 online games market 106 open-access scientific data 159–60 open-source designs 141 politics 171, 192 power struggle in 235 spending on R & D 96, 159 web censorship 190–91 Chinese Communist Party 171, 235 Chongquing, China 136 Cisco 190 Citibank 207 Citizendium 14 climate change 170, 239 Clinton, Bill 174, 188 Clinton, Senator Hillary 181, 182, 183 CNN 15 co-operatives 121, 122, 123, 188 co-ordination 109, 110–11 coffee houses, London 95 Coke 109–10, 239 Cold War 169, 235 Coles, Polly xiii collaboration 9, 22, 31, 32, 36, 67, 79–80, 81, 82 collaborative innovation 65, 70, 75 and commerce 227 computer game 99, 100 Cornish tin-mining 55 and healthcare 150 and the library of the future 145 new technologies for 227–8 open 126, 128 peer 239 public services 145, 146, 152, 153 scientific 154, 155–6 We-Think 21, 23, 24, 146 Collis, Charles 134 Columbia University 212 commerce 25, 38, 48, 52, 57, 98, 227 commons 49, 50, 51–3, 79, 80, 124, 191, 226 communes 39–40, 46, 90, 121, 122, 128 communication(s) 130, 168, 174, 206, 239 mobile 186 Communism, collapse of 6 communities collaborative 117 and commerce 48 and commons 52 conversational 63 Cornish tin-mining 55 creative 70, 95 diverse 79–80 egalitarian 27, 48, 59, 63, 64 hacker 232 healthcare 151, 152 independence of 23 of innovation 54 libertarian, voluntaristic 45 Linux 65, 227 and loss of market for local newspapers 3 meritocratic 63 open-source 45, 68, 75, 80, 83, 95–6, 102, 109, 110, 111 open-source design 166–7 of scientists 53, 228 self-governing 59, 79, 80, 97, 104, 232 sharing and developing ideas 25 web 21, 23 worm-genome researchers 62–5 community councils 77, 80, 82 Community Memory project 42–3 companies computer-games 128 employee-owned 121, 122 shareholder-owned 122, 123, 125 see also corporations; organisations computer games 60, 127, 218 children and 147 created by groups on the web 7, 23, 87 modularity 78 multi-player 7, 204 success of World of Warcraft 98–9 tools for creating content 74 and We-Think 23 computer-aided design 134 computers democratising how information is accessed 139 distrust of 39 Goa School Computers Project 200–201 laptop 5, 36, 82, 155 mini- 135 personal 39, 46, 203 punch-cards 38 and science 154, 155 viruses 3, 4 connect 67, 75–9 Connectiva 201 consumer spending 131 consumers 98–108 consumer innovators 101–3 consumption constraints 25–6 engaging 89 fans 103–4 freedom 218 and innovation risk 100–101 participant 98–108 urban 124 contribute 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74–5 conversation 53, 54, 63, 69, 77, 93, 95, 113, 118, 174 Copernicus, Nicolaus 162 copyright 124, 157, 196 core 66, 67, 68–9, 70 Cornell University 233 ‘Cornish’ engines 55–6, 136, 229 Cornish tin-mining industry 54–6, 63, 125, 136 corporations centralisation of power 110 closed 128 and collaborative approaches to work 109 the cost of corporate efficiency 89–90 difficulty in making money from the web 7 hierarchies 88, 110 industrial-era 88 leadership 115, 117–19 loss of stability 122 restructuring and downsizing 88–9 see also companies; organisations counter-culture (1960s) 6, 27, 39, 45, 46, 59 Counts, David 183 Craigslist 3, 40, 118, 128, 218 Creative Commons 124 creative sector 129–30 creativity 1–2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 67, 82–3 collaborative 7, 20, 58, 86, 154 collective 39, 57–8 consumers 89 corporate 91–2 emergence of 93, 96 enabled by the web 1–2, 3, 5, 19, 26, 218–21, 222, 227 freedom to create 218–21 and interaction 119 and open innovation 93 origin of 112–13 social 5, 7, 58, 59, 82, 83, 86 tools for 218, 219 Crick, Francis 52, 62, 76 crime 153, 169, 183 criminality 1, 3 crowds 23, 61, 70, 72, 77 Crowdspirit 134 cultural élite 2 cultural sector 129–30 culture academic 38 anti-industrial 27, 28 basis of 4 collaborative 135 consumerist 172 corrosion of 4 cultural anarchy 5 folk 6, 27, 56–9, 220, 226 hippie 38 individual participation 6 political 171 popular 102 post-industrial 27, 28 pre-industrial 27, 28 We-Think 28, 59, 62, 169, 194, 230, 232–3, 238 Web 2.0 45 web-inflected 27 Western 239 wiki 14 work 114 YouTube cultural revolution 3 Cunningham, Ward 35–6 cyber cafés 107, 190, 192, 201, 204 Cyworld 34, 85, 86 D Dali, Salvador 105 Darby, Newman 102 Darpa 164 David, Paul 53 de Soto, Hernando 224–5 The Mystery of Capital 224 de Vellis, Phil 182 Dean, Howard 176–7, 178, 180, 185 Dean Corps 177 Debian 66 Debord, Guy 45, 46 decentralisation 7, 13, 39, 46, 59, 78, 226, 232 decision-making 78, 82, 84, 115, 173, 174 del.i.cious 86 democracy 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 16, 24, 170–74, 175, 176–92 basis of 174 conversational democracy at a national level 184 ‘craftsmen of democracy’ 174 Dean campaign 178 democratic advances 184 depends on public sovereignty 172 formal 195 geek 65 Homebrew 176 public debate 170, 171 and We-Think 170, 221, 239 Department for International Development (DFID) 207 Descartes, René 19–20 design 166 modular 136–7 open-source 133–5, 140, 141, 162–3, 166–7 developing world Fab Labs in 166 government attitudes to the Internet 190 impact of the web on 166 mobile phones 185–6 and open-access publishing 166 and open-source design communities 166–7 and open-source software 200–203 research and development 196 and We-Think’s style of organisation 204 diabetes 150 Digg 33 discussion forums 77 diversity 9, 23, 72, 76, 77, 79–80, 112, 121 division of labour 111 DNA description of the double helix (Watson and Crick) 52, 62, 76 DNA-sequencing 164–5 Dobson, John 102, 162–3 Doritos 105 dot.com boom 106 Dupral 68 Dyson (household-goods company) 134 Dyson, Freeman 163, 164 E E-Lagda.com 186 Eaton, Brigitte 33 Eatonweb 33 eBay 40, 44, 102, 128, 152, 165, 216–18, 221, 229, 235 Ebola virus 165 Eccles, Nigel xi economies of scale 137 economy digital 124, 131, 216 gift 91, 226 global 192 global knowledge 239 of ideas 6 individual participation 6 industrial 122 market 91, 221 a mass innovation economy 7 networked 227 of things 6 UK 129, 130 and We-Think 129 Edison, Thomas 72, 93, 95 EditMe 36 education 130, 146–50, 167, 183, 194, 239 among the poorest people in the world 2, 193 civic 174 a more convivial system 44 Edwards, John 181 efficiency 109, 110 Einstein, Albert: theory of relativity 52 elderly, care of 170 Electronic Arts 105, 106, 128, 177 Electronic Frontier Foundation 40 electronics 93, 135 Eli Lilly (drugs company) 77 Ellis, Mark: The Coffee House: a social history 95 enclosures 124 Encyclopaedia Britannica, The 15–18, 126 encyclopaedias 1, 4, 7, 12–19, 21, 23, 36, 53, 60, 61, 79, 161, 231 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) 161, 226 Endy, Drew 164, 165 energy 166, 232, 238 Engelbart, Doug 38–9, 59 engineering 133, 166 Environmental Protection Agency 152 epic poems 58, 60 equality 2, 24, 192–7, 198, 199–208 eScholarship repository, University of California 160 Estonia 184, 234 Estrada, President Joseph 186 ETA (Basque terrorist group) 187 European Union (EU) 130 Evans, Lilly x Evolt 68, 108 F Fab Labs 139, 166, 232 fabricators 139 Facebook 2, 34–5, 53, 142, 152, 191, 193, 210 factories 7, 8, 24 families, and education 147 Fanton, Jonathan 161 Fark 33 Feinstein, Diane 176 Felsenstein, Lee 42, 43, 44 fertilisers 123 Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University 161 file-sharing 51, 58, 135, 144, 233 film 2, 3, 4, 47, 86, 129, 216, 218, 220–21 film industry 56 filters, collaborative 36, 86 financial services 130, 132 Financial Times 118 First International Computer (FIC), Inc. 136, 141 flash mobbing 10, 11 Flickr 34, 85, 86, 210, 218–19 Food and Drug Administration (US) 92 Ford, Henry 24, 93, 96 Fortune 500 company list 122 Frank, Ze (Hosea Jan Frank) 57, 219 freedom 1, 2, 6, 24, 208, 209, 210–21, 226 French, Gordon 41, 42 friendly societies 188 Friends Reunited 34 friendship 5, 233 combinatorial 95 Friendster 34, 35 fundamentalists 232 G Gaia Online 35 Galileo Galilei 154 gambling 169 GarageBand software 57, 135, 148 Gates, Bill 46, 47, 51, 227 Gates Foundation 160 geeks 27, 29–36, 37, 38, 48, 59, 65, 179 gene-sequencing machines, automated 64 genetic engineering 164, 196–7, 235 Georgia: ’colour revolution’ 187 Gershenfeld, Neil 139–40, 166, 232 GetFrank 108 Ghana, Fab Lab in 139 Gil, Gilberto 202 Gjertsen, Lasse 56, 218 Gland Pharma 200 global warming 238 globalisation 202, 228, 239 Gloriad 155 GM 135 Goa School Computers Project 200–201 Goffman, Erving 103–4 Goldcorp Inc. 132–3, 153 Golden Toad 40 GoLoco scheme 153 Google x, 1, 29, 32, 33, 47, 66, 97, 104, 113–14, 128, 141, 142, 144, 212 Google Earth 161 Gore, Al 64 governments in developing countries 190 difficulty in controlling the web 7 GPS systems 11 Grameen Bank 205–6, 208 ‘grey’ sciences 163 grid computing 155 Gross, Ralph 210 group-think 23, 210–11 groups 230–31 of clever people with the same outlook and skills 72 decision-making 78 diverse 72, 80, 231 and tools 76–7 Guthrie, Woody 58 H Habermas, Jurgen 174 hackers 48, 74, 104, 140, 232, 234 Hale, Victoria 199 Halo 2 science fiction computer game 8 Hamilton, Alexander 17–18 Hampton, Keith 183–4 Hanson, Matt xi health 130, 132, 146, 150–52, 167, 183, 239 Heisenberg, Werner 93 Henry, Thierry 29 Hewlett Packard 47 hierarchies 88, 110, 115 hippies 27, 48, 59, 61 HIV 193 Homebrew Computer Club 42, 46–7, 51, 227 Homebrew Mobile Phone Club 136 Homer Iliad 58 Odyssey 58 Homer-Dixon, Thomas: The Upside of Down 238–9 Hubble, Edwin 162 Human Genome Project 62, 64, 78, 155, 160, 161, 226 human rights 206 Hurricane Katrina 184 Hyde, Lewis: The Gift 226 hypertext 35, 39 I I Love Bees game 8, 10–12, 15–16, 19, 20, 69, 231 IBM 47, 66, 97 System/360 computer 77 idea-sharing 37, 94, 237, 239 as the biggest change the web will bring about 6 with colleagues 27 and consumer innovators 103 dual character of 226 gamers 106 Laboratory of Molecular Biology 63 through websites and bulletin boards 68 tools 222 We-Think-style approach to 97 and the web’s underlying culture 7 ideas combining 77 and creative thinking 87 from creative conversations 93, 95 gifts of 226 growth of 222, 239 and the new breed of leaders 117–18 ratifying 84 separating good from bad 84, 86 testing 74 the web’s growing domination 1 identity sense of 229 thieves 213–14 Illich, Ivan 43–5, 48 Deschooling Society 43, 44, 150 Disabling Professions 43 The Limits to Medicine 43, 152 Tools for Conviviality 44 independence 9, 72, 231 India Barefoot College 205 creative and cultural sectors 129–30 Fab Lab in 139 Internet connection 190, 204 mobile phones 207 and One World Health 200 spending on R & D 96 telephone service for street children 206 individuality 210, 211, 215, 216, 233 industrialisation 48, 150, 188 information barriers falling fast 2 computers democratise how it is accessed 139 effect of We-Think 129 large quantities on the web 31–2 libraries 141, 142, 143, 145 looking for 8 privileged access to 236 sharing 94, 136 the web’s growing domination 1 Wikipedia 19 Innocentive 77 innovation 5, 6, 91–3, 94, 95–8, 109 among the poorest people in the world 2 biological 194 collaborative 65, 70, 75, 90, 119, 146, 195 collective 170, 238 and competition/co-operation mix 137 Cornish mine engines 54–6 corporate 89, 109, 110 and creative conversations 93, 95 creative interaction with customers 113 cumulative 125, 238 decentralised 78 and distributed testing 74 and diverse thinking 79 and education 147 independent but interconnected 78 and interaction 119 and Linux 66 local 139 a mass innovation economy 7 medical 194 open 93, 96–7, 125, 195 in open-source communities 95–6 and patents 124 pipeline model 92, 93, 97 R & D 92, 96 risks of 100–101 social 170, 238 successful 69 user-driven 101 and We-Think 89, 93, 95, 125, 126 the web 2, 5, 7, 225 Institute for One World Health 199–200 Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI) 179 Institute of Fiscal Studies 131 institutions convivial 44 industrial-era 234 and knowledge 103 and professionals 3, 5 public 142, 145 Instructables site 134 Intel 97 intellectual property 75, 122, 124, 125, 234 law 124–5 intelligence, collective bloggers 33 getting the mix right 23 Google’s search system 32 I Love Bees and Wikipedia examples 8, 10–19 milked by Google 47 the need to collaborate 32 self-organisation of 8 and social-networking sites 35 the web’s potential 3, 5 International Polar Year (IPY) 156, 226 Internet broadband connection 178, 189, 192 combined with personal computers (mid-1990s) 39 cyber cafés 107, 190, 192, 201, 204 Dean campaign 177 in developing countries 190 draws young people into politics 179, 180 an early demonstration (1968) 38 and Linux 66 news source 178–9 open-source software 68 openness 233 and political funding 180 pro-am astronomers 163 used by groups with a grievance 168 in Vietnam 189–90, 191 investment 119, 121, 133, 135 Iran 190, 191 Iraq war 18, 134, 191 Israel 18 Ito, Joi 99 J Japan politics 171 technology 171 JBoss 68 Jefferson, Richard 197, 199 Jodrell Bank Observatory, Macclesfield, Cheshire 162 JotSpot 36 journalism 3, 74, 115, 170–71 Junker, Margrethe 206 K Kampala, Uganda 206 Kazaa music file-sharing system 144 Keen, Andrew 208 The Cult of the Amateur 208 Kelly, Kevin 211 Kennedy, John F. 176 Kenya 207 Kepler, Johannes 162 Kerry, John 180 Khun, Thomas 69 knowledge access to 194, 196 agricultural 194 barriers falling fast 2 collaborative approach to 14, 69 encyclopaedia 79 expanding 94 gifts of 226 individual donation of 25 and institutions 103 and networking 193 and pro-ams 103 professional, authoritative sources of 222 sharing 27, 44, 63, 70, 199 spread by the web 2, 3 Wikipedia 16, 18, 19, 195 Korean War 203 Kotecki, James (’EmergencyCheese’) 182 Kraus, Joe 36 Kravitz, Ben 13 Kuresi, John 95 Kyrgyzstan: ’colour revolution’ 187 L Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge 62–3, 77 labour movement 188 language 52–3 Lanier, Jaron 16, 210–11, 213 laptop computers 5, 36, 82, 155 lateral thinking 113 leadership 89, 115, 116, 117–19 Lean, Joel 55 Lean’s Engine Reporter 55, 63, 77 Lee, Tim Berners 30–31 Lego: Mindstorms products 97, 104, 140 Lewandowska, Marysia 220, 221 libraries 2, 141–2, 143, 144–5, 227 life-insurance industry (US) 123 limited liability 121 Linked.In 35 Linux 65–6, 68, 70, 74, 80, 85, 86, 97, 98, 126, 127, 128, 136, 201, 203, 227 Lipson Community College, Plymouth 148 literacy 194 media 236 Lloyd, Edward 95 SMS messaging (texting)"/>London coffee houses 95 terrorist bombings (July 2005) 17 Lott, Trent 181–2 Lula da Silva, President Luiz Inacio 201 M M-PESA 207, 208 MacArthur Foundation 161 McCain, John 180 MacDonald’s 239 McGonigal, Jane 11, 69 McHenry, Robert 17 McKewan, Rob 132–3, 153 McLuhan, Marshall: Understanding the Media 45 Madrid bombings (March 2004) 186–7 Make magazine 165 management authoritative style of 117 and creative conversation 118 hierarchies 110 manufacturing 130, 132, 133–7, 138, 139–41, 166, 232 niche 139 Marcuse, Herbert 43 Marin 101 Mark, Paul xi market research 101 market(s) 77, 90, 93, 102, 123, 216, 226–7 Marsburg virus 165 Marx, Karl 224 mass production 7, 8, 24, 56, 96, 227, 232, 238 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 139, 164, 233 Matsushita 135 media 129, 130, 156, 172, 173, 182, 211 literacy 236 Meetup 179, 185 Menlo Park laboratory, New Jersey 95 Merholz, Peter 33 meritocracy 16, 63 Microsoft 46, 47, 51, 56, 75, 109–10, 126, 127, 144, 202, 203, 204, 239 Office 201 Windows 200 Windows XP 66 Middle East 170, 189, 190, 192 Milovich, Dimitry 102 ‘minihompy’ (mini homepage) 204 Minnesota Mining and Materials 121 mobile phones 5 in Africa 185, 207 in Asia 166, 185 camera phones 74, 115, 210 children and 147 in developing-world markets 207–8 with digital cameras 36 flash mobs 10 I Love Bees 11 in India 207 open-source 136, 203 politics 185–9 SMS messaging (texting) 101–2, 185, 187, 214, 215 mobs 23, 61 flash 10, 11 modularity 77, 84 Moore, Fred 41–2, 43, 46, 47, 59, 227 More, Thomas: Utopia 208 Morris, Dick 174 Morris, Robert Tappan 233 Mosaic 33 motivation 109–12, 148 Mount Wilson Observatory, California 162 mountain bikes 101 MoveOn 188–9 Mowbray, Miranda xi music 1, 3, 4, 47, 51, 52, 57, 102, 135, 144, 218, 219, 221 publishing 130 social networking test 212–13 mutual societies 90, 121 MySpace 34, 44, 57, 85, 86, 152, 187, 193, 214, 219 MySQL 68 N National Football League (US) 105 National Health Service (NHS) 150, 151 National Public Radio (NPR) 188 Natural History Museum, London 161 Nature magazine 17 NBC 173 neo-Nazis 168 Netflix 216, 218 Netherlands 238 networking by geeks 27 post-industrial networks 27 social 2–7, 20, 23, 34–5, 36, 53, 57, 86, 95, 147, 149, 153, 159, 171, 183–4, 187, 193, 208, 210, 212, 213–15, 230, 233 New Economy 40 New Orleans 184 New York Magazine 214 New York Review of Books 164 New York Stock Exchange 95 New York Times 15, 182, 191 New Yorker magazine 149 Newmark, Craig 118 news services 60, 61, 171, 173, 178–9 newspapers 2, 3, 30, 32, 34, 171, 172, 173 Newton, Sir Isaac 25, 154 niche markets 216 Nixon, Richard 176 NLS (Online System) 39 Nokia 97, 104, 119, 140 non-profits 123 Nooteboom, Bart 74 Noronha, Alwyn 200–201 Norris, Pippa 189 North Africa, and democracy 189 Nosamo 35, 186 Noyes, Dorothy 58 Nupedia 13, 14 Nussbaum, Emily 214–15 O Obama, Barack 181, 191 Ofcom (Office of Communications) 31 OhmyNews 34, 87, 204, 231 oil companies 115 Oldenburg, Henry 25, 53–4, 156 Ollila, Jorma 119 Online System (NLS) 39 Open Architecture Network (OAN) 133–4 Open Net Initiative 190 Open Office programme 201 Open Prosthetics 134 Open Source Foundation 97 OpenMoko project 136 OpenWiki 36 O’Reilly, Tim 31 organisation commons as a system of organisation 51 pre-industrial ideas of 27, 48 social 20, 64, 165 We-Think’s organisational recipe 21 collaboration 21, 23 participation 21, 23 recognition 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 196 organisations civic 189 open/collaborative vs. closed/hierarchical models 89, 126, 127, 128 public 152 successful 228 see also companies; corporations Orwell, George: 1984 182 Ostrom, Elinor 51–2, 80 ownership 6, 119, 120, 121–6, 127, 128, 225 Oxford University 234 P paedophiles 3, 168, 213–14 Page, Scott xi, 72 Pakistan 237 Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco 40 parallel universes 7 participation 23, 216, 223, 230, 232 consumers 98, 100 public services 145, 146, 150, 152, 153 a We-Think ingredient 21, 24 Partido Populaire (PP) (Spain) 187 patents 55, 56, 92, 97, 102, 124, 154, 196, 197, 199 Paul, Ron 185 Pawson, Dave x–xi Pax, Salam 57 peasants 27, 48, 59 peer recognition 54, 106, 111, 156, 228–9 peer review 53, 54, 156, 165, 236 peer-to-peer activity 53–4, 135, 148, 151 People’s Computer Company 41 People’s Democratic Party (Vietnam) 191 performance art/artists 2, 10 performance management 110 Perl 68 Peruvian Congress 202 Pew Internet & American Life 31, 179 pharmaceutical industry 92–3, 195–6, 197, 199, 200 Phelps, Edmund 114–15, 220 Philippines: mobile phones 185–6 Philips, Weston 105 photographs, sharing of 34, 75, 86, 218–19 Pitas.com 33 Plastic 33 Playahead 35 podcasts 142 Poland 220–21 polar research 156 politics bloggers able to act as public watchdog 181–2, 183 decline in political engagement 171–2 democratic 173 donations 179 funding 180–81 and journalism 170–71 and mobile phones 185–9 online 183 the online political class 179 and online social networks 35, 86 political advocates of the web 173–4 racist groups on the web 169 and television 173, 183 ultra-local 183, 184 US presidential elections 173, 179 videos 182 the web enters mainstream politics 176 young people drawn into politics by the Internet 179 Popper, Karl 155 Popular Science magazine 102 pornography 169, 214 Post-it notes 121 Potter, Seb 108–9 Powell, Debbie ix power and networking 193 technological 236 of the We-Think culture 230 of the web 24–5, 185, 233 PowerPoint presentations 140, 142, 219 privacy 210, 211 private property 224, 225 Procter and Gamble (P & G) 96–7, 98 productivity 112, 119, 121, 151, 227, 232 agricultural 124 professionals, and institutions 3, 5 property rights 224 public administration 130 Public Broadcasting Service 188 Public Intellectual Property Research for Agriculture initiative 199 Public Library of Science 159 public services 132, 141–2, 143, 144–53, 183 public spending 146 publishing 130, 166 science 156–7, 159–60 Putnam, Robert 173, 184 Python 68 Q quantum mechanics 93 ‘quick-web’ 35 R racism 169, 181–2 radio 173, 176 RapRep (Rapid Replicator) machines 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 232 Rawls, John: A Theory of Justice 194 Raymond, Eric 64 recognition 21, 223 peer 54, 106, 111, 156 record industry 56, 102 recycling 111 Red Hat 66, 227 Red Lake, Ontario 132, 133 research 166 market 101 pharmaceutical 195–6 research and development (R & D) 92, 96, 119, 196 scientific 154–7, 159–65 retailing 130, 132 Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil 201 Roh Moo-hyun, President of South Korea 35, 186 Roosevelt, Franklin 176 Roy, Bunker 205 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey 161 Royal Society 54 Philosophical Transactions 25, 156 Ryze.com 34 S Sacca, Chris 113, 114 Safaricom 207 St Louis world fair (1904) 75–6 Samsung xi, 203 Sanger, Larry 13, 14, 16 Sanger Centre, Cambridge 155 Sao Paolo, Brazil 201 SARS virus 165 Sass, Larry 139 satellite phones 11 Saudi Arabia 190 scanners 11 Schumacher, E.

The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, call centre, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", joint-stock company, junk bonds, labour market flexibility, large denomination, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

LLOYD’S The changes in the insurance market have had a particular impact on London’s most famous insurance market, Lloyd’s. A series of scandals and financial problems have significantly reduced the market’s importance and prompted substantial changes in the way the market operates. Lloyd’s of London developed from a coffee house opened by one Edward Lloyd just before 1687. Gentlemen from the City used to meet there and discuss insurance over their beverages. By the middle of the eighteenth century they decided that they might as well make it their main place of business. From the beginning, the speciality of Lloyd’s was marine insurance, helped by the fact that England has traditionally been a great naval power.

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The Exchange’s origins lay in the seventeenth century, when merchants clubbed together to form joint-stock companies, like the East India Company, to conduct foreign trade. After a time, some merchants sold their holdings to others, and in the process there developed a secondary market for shares in the joint-stock companies. At first, the shares were traded in the coffee houses which were then fashionable, but in 1773 the different sites for trading were centralized for the first time. By 1801, the Stock Exchange was established in roughly its modern form. Exchange members built up some of the country’s most colourful traditions. Legend has it that if a member spotted an outsider on the Exchange floor, he would shout, ‘Fourteen hundred!’

…

For a long time, Lloyd’s had the best intelligence on the movements of foreign shipping. Perhaps the most famous occupant of Lloyd’s is the Lutine Bell, which is rung when important news is about to be announced (one ring for bad news, two rings for good). The Lloyd’s Structure An elaborate structure was built on the flimsy edifice of a coffee house. First and foremost, there are the clients. Merchant shipping has long since passed its peak and Lloyd’s now provides insurance for a wide variety of customers and products, including film stars’ legs, potential kidnap victims and space satellites. Sometimes the clients may be other insurance companies and markets for whom Lloyd’s provides reinsurance.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, London had at least five hundred coffee houses. As in Constantinople, coffee houses became important spaces for socialising. Class distinctions were left in the street, as in a coffee house you took the first free seat (there were no reservations). Coffee houses were like today’s Facebook or Twitter: they were places to meet people, to chat and to pick up the latest gossip or news, places for networking and debate. Located as many of them were in the commercial heart of London, coffee houses played an important role as places where financial information was exchanged. Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in Lombard Street became the centre of the London shipping world after its owner began collecting and publishing details of ship movements from 1696.

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There sit they chatting most of the day; and sippe of a drinke called Coffa (of the berry that it is made of) in little China dishes, as hot as they can suffer it: blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.’34 Constantinople’s first coffee house dated from 1554 and along with others quickly became a central part of Turkish Ottoman society, places where men gathered to talk, to listen to music and to play chess. Christendom’s first coffee house opened in London in about 1652. Located in St Michael’s Alley, just off Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange, it was little more than a stall, run by Pasqua Rosee, from the city of Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire. It proved such a success with the merchants and traders of the area that other coffee houses soon opened. By the 1670s, Paris had its first café, as did Venice by 1683, and Vienna a couple of years later.

…

‘The American Hotel is to an English hotel what an elephant is to a periwinkle,’ said one (British) observer, in 1866.140 The City Hotel (1794–6; burned down 1818) was the first of its kind in New York, with seventy-three rooms on five floors. In Boston, the seven-storey Exchange Coffee House (1806–9, Asher Benjamin), which also housed the city’s merchant exchange, had a striking architectural feature which would become common in later hotels, including Mumbai’s Taj Mahal: a circular domed rotunda with balconies running around the inside. With its seventy-foot dining room and grand ballroom reached by a splendid curving staircase, the Exchange Coffee House was clearly a hotel and not an inn. Also in Boston, Tremont House (1827–30; demolished 1894), designed by the pioneering hotel architect Isaiah Rogers, was ‘a landmark in hotel design’.141 It offered 170 bedrooms, eight bathrooms and the same number of water closets.

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile by Alexander Davidson

accounting loophole / creative accounting, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Exxon Valdez, foreign exchange controls, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, index fund, inflation targeting, information security, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, pension reform, Piper Alpha, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk free rate, shareholder value, short selling, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Overview Lloyd’s represents just over half of the London insurance market, including reinsurance, which is how an insurance entity insures its own position (see Chapter 29). Lloyd’s is a specialist insurance market, and business comes into it from more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. It started as Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House, a 17th-century coffee house where timely shipping news was made available and marine insurance could be obtained. Shipping and insurance were closely connected, and ship owners would meet in the coffee shop with wealthy individuals who took the risk of insuring ships and cargo. These were the early underwriters, and they had unlimited liability, which meant that they had to meet claims even if it bankrupted them.

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These were the early underwriters, and they had unlimited liability, which meant that they had to meet claims even if it bankrupted them. They were called Names because they put their name on a slip of paper, the forerunner of today’s underwriting slip, indicating what percentage of risk they would bear in return for a pro rata cut of the premium. In 1769, the shipping insurance community moved to another coffee house, separating itself from other business, and kept the Lloyd’s name. In _____________________________ INSURANCE: LLOYD’S OF LONDON 247  1811, Lloyd’s gained a constitution, regulating admission more strictly, and in 1871, the market was incorporated by an Act of Parliament. In 1887, Lloyd’s issued its first non-marine policies and, 17 years later in 1904, a first motor policy, followed in 1911 by a first aviation policy.

Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George

Admiral Zheng, air freight, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, bank run, cable laying ship, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Costa Concordia, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, intermodal, Jones Act, London Whale, Malacca Straits, Panamax, pattern recognition, profit maximization, Skype, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

I once wrote about Erika in a newspaper and was invited to lunch at Lloyd’s Register, in an elegant building in London that presents a Georgian façade to the street, and hides behind it a modern building of glass and steel. This is the headquarters of a business that began in 1688 in a coffee house in Lombard Street, when Edward Lloyd began providing the shipping news along with coffee. Now Lloyd’s has a staff of 8500, offices in 78 countries and a turnover of $1 billion. It also has a fine boardroom and good food, over which I was politely educated out of my mistaken views. Erika happened, but North Sea rigs make serious oil and gas spills about once a week and get away with little scrutiny.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

So we defined that and developed risk as an asset class.” Looking across the insurance industry for a comparable approach to onetime devastating risks, he knew of only one company that provided such policies: Lloyd’s of London, the storied centuries-old British insurer. In Elizabethan times, Lloyd’s Coffee House, owned by Edward Lloyd and situated near the Thames, was a favorite meetinghouse for sailors and shipowners. The latter, which included numerous owners of slave ships, became interested in an increasingly popular product for shippers: marine insurance. It grew from there. Schmalbach asked acquaintances at Lloyd’s how they assessed and priced systemic risk.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Mrs White’s Chocolate House, in St James’s near the royal palaces, evolved into the first of London’s gentlemen’s clubs, and served principally as a gaming venue. (And it may not be coincidental that fashionable St James’s is today the centre of London’s hedge funds, while the more business-oriented financial activities are found in the City.) The most famous coffee shop of all was that of Edward Lloyd, where patrons speculated on the weather, the tides and the fate of ships at sea, and merchants could lay off some of the risks associated with foreign trade. Established in 1688, Lloyd’s of London is still globally pre-eminent in marine insurance. History casts a long shadow. Mortality tables and life insurance As Pascal and Fermat were exchanging learned correspondence, an English cloth merchant, John Graunt, was trawling the records of the cemeteries of London.

…

The advance of probability theory would contribute to that economic development through the creation of markets in risk. The first venues for managing risk were the coffee shops of London. Coffee had recently been imported from Arabia to Europe, and gentlemen met to consume the newly fashionable drink, converse, and do business. In the historic City of London, the insurance market began in Tom’s coffee house, while securities were traded in Jonathan’s – today regarded as the origin of the London Stock Exchange. The restoration of the monarchy after the dull morality of the Puritans led to an upsurge in gambling. Mrs White’s Chocolate House, in St James’s near the royal palaces, evolved into the first of London’s gentlemen’s clubs, and served principally as a gaming venue.

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., 295 , 407 , 412 business cycles, 347 business history (academic discipline), 286 business schools, 318 business strategy: approach in 1970s, 183 ; approach in 1980s, 181–2 ; aspirations confused with, 181–2 , 183–4 ; business plans, 223–4 , 228 ; collections of capabilities, 274–7 ; and the computer industry, 27–31 ; corporate takeovers, 256–7 ; Lampert at Sears, 287–9 , 292 ; Henry Mintzberg on, 296 , 410 ; motivational proselytisation, 182–3 , 184 ; quantification mistaken for understanding, 180–1 , 183 ; and reference narratives, 286–90 , 296–7 ; risk maps, 297 ; Rumelt’s MBA classes, 10 , 178–80 ; Shell’s scenario planning, 223 , 295 ; Sloan at General Motors, 286–7 ; strategy weekends, 180–3 , 194 , 296 , 407 ; three common errors, 183–4 ; vision or mission statements, 181–2 , 184 Buxton, Jedediah, 225 Calas, Jean, 199 California, 48–9 Cambridge Growth Project, 340 Canadian fishing industry, 368–9 , 370 , 423 , 424 cancer, screening for, 66–7 Candler, Graham, 352 , 353–6 , 399 Cardiff City Football Club, 265 Carlsen, Magnus, 175 , 273 Carnegie, Andrew, 427 Carnegie Mellon University, 135 Carré, Dr Matt, 267–8 Carroll, Lewis, Through the Looking-Glass , 93–4 , 218 , 344 , 346 ; ‘Jabberwocky’, 91–2 , 94 , 217 Carron works (near Falkirk), 253 Carter, Jimmy, 8 , 119 , 120 , 123 , 262–3 cartography, 391 Casio, 27 , 31 Castro, Fidel, 278–9 cave paintings, 216 central banks, 5 , 7 , 95 , 96 , 103–5 , 285–6 , 348–9 , 350 , 351 , 356–7 Central Pacific Railroad, 48 Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, 39 Chabris, Christopher, 140 Challenger disaster (1986), 373 , 374 Chamberlain, Neville, 24–5 Chandler, Alfred, Strategy and Structure , 286 Chariots of Fire (film, 1981), 273 Charles II, King, 383 Chelsea Football Club, 265 chess, 173 , 174 , 175 , 266 , 273 , 346 Chicago economists, 36 , 72–4 , 86 , 92 , 111–14 , 133–7 , 158 , 257–8 , 307 , 342–3 , 381–2 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 423 chimpanzees, 161–2 , 178 , 274 China, 4–5 , 419–20 , 430 cholera, 283 Churchill, Winston: character of, 25–6 , 168 , 169 , 170 ; fondness for gambling, 81 , 168 ; as hedgehog not fox, 222 ; on Montgomery, 293 ; restores gold standard (1925), 25–6 , 269 ; The Second World War , 187 ; Second World War leadership, 24–5 , 26 , 119 , 167 , 168–9 , 170 , 184 , 187 , 266 , 269 Citibank, 255 Civil War, American, 188 , 266 , 290 Clapham, John, 253 Clark, Sally, 197–8 , 200 , 202 , 204 , 206 Clausewitz, Carl von, On War , 433 climate systems, 101–2 Club of Rome, 361 , 362 Coase, Ronald, 286 , 342 Cochran, Johnnie, 198 , 217 Cochrane, John, 93 coffee houses, 55–6 cognitive illusions, 141–2 Cohen, Jonathan, 206–7 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 411 Cold War, 293–4 , 306–7 Collier, Paul, 276–7 Columbia disaster (2003), 373 Columbia University, 117 , 118 , 120 Columbus, Christopher, 4 , 21 Colyvan, Mark, 225 Comet aircraft, 23–4 , 228 communication: communicative rationality, 172 , 267–77 , 279–82 , 412 , 414–16 ; and decision-making, 17 , 231 , 272–7 , 279–82 , 398–9 , 408 , 412 , 413–17 , 432 ; eusociality, 172–3 , 274 ; and good doctors, 185 , 398–9 ; human capacity for, 159 , 161 , 162 , 172–3 , 216 , 272–7 , 408 ; and ill-defined concepts, 98–9 ; and intelligibility, 98 ; language, 98 , 99–100 , 159 , 162 , 173 , 226 ; linguistic ambiguity, 98–100 ; and reasoning, 265–8 , 269–77 ; and the smartphone, 30 ; the ‘wisdom of crowds’, 47 , 413–14 Community Reinvestment Act (USA, 1977), 207 comparative advantage model, 249–50 , 251–2 , 253 computer technologies, 27–31 , 173–4 , 175–7 , 185–6 , 227 , 411 ; big data, 208 , 327 , 388–90 ; CAPTCHA text, 387 ; dotcom boom, 228 ; and economic models, 339–40 ; machine learning, 208 Condit, Phil, 228 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 199–200 consumer price index, 330 , 331 conviction narrative theory, 227–30 Corinthians (New Testament), 402 corporate takeovers, 256–7 corporations, large, 27–31 , 122 , 123 , 286–90 , 408–10 , 412 , 415 Cosmides, Leda, 165 Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, 32 , 39 , 71–2 Crick, Francis, 156 cricket, 140–1 , 237 , 263–5 crime novels, classic, 218 crosswords, 218 crypto-currencies, 96 , 316 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 140 , 264 Cuba, 278–80 ; Cuban Missile Crisis, 279–81 , 299 , 412 Custer, George, 293 Cutty Sark (whisky producer), 325 Daily Express , 242–3 , 244 Damasio, Antonio, 171 Dardanelles expedition (1915), 25 Darwin, Charles, 156 , 157 Davenport, Thomas, 374 Dawkins, Richard, 156 de Havilland company, 23–4 Debreu, Gerard, 254 , 343–4 decision theory, xvi ; critiques of ‘American school’, 133–7 ; definition of rationality, 133–4 ; derived from deductive reasoning, 138 ; Ellsberg’s ‘ambiguity aversion’, 135 ; expected utility , 111–14 , 115–18 , 124–5 , 127 , 128 – 30 , 135 , 400 , 435–44 ; hegemony of optimisation, 40–2 , 110–14 ; as unable to solve mysteries, 34 , 44 , 47 ; and work of Savage, 442–3 decision-making under uncertainty: and adaptation, 102 , 401 ; Allais paradox, 133–7 , 437 , 440–3 ; axiomatic approach extended to, xv , 40–2 , 110–14 , 133–7 , 257–9 , 420–1 ; ‘bounded rationality concept, 149–53 ; as collaborative process, 17 , 155 , 162 , 176 , 411–15 , 431–2 ; and communication, 17 , 231 , 272–7 , 279–82 , 398–9 , 408 , 412 , 413–17 , 432 ; communicative rationality, 172 , 267–77 , 279–82 , 412 , 414–16 ; completeness axiom, 437–8 ; continuity axiom, 438–40 ; Cuban Missile Crisis, 279–81 , 299 , 412 ; ‘decision weights’ concept, 121 ; disasters attributed to chance, 266–7 ; doctors, 184–6 , 194 , 398–9 ; and emotions, 227–9 , 411 ; ‘evidence-based policy’, 404 , 405 ; excessive attention to prior probabilities, 184–5 , 210 ; expected utility , 111–14 , 115–18 , 124–5 , 127 , 128–30 , 135 , 400 , 435–44 ; first-rate decision-makers, 285 ; framing of problems, 261 , 362 , 398–400 ; good strategies for radical uncertainty, 423–5 ; and hindsight, 263 ; independence axiom, 440–4 ; judgement as unavoidable, 176 ; Klein’s ‘primed recognition decision-making’, 399 ; Gary Klein’s work on, 151–2 , 167 ; and luck, 263–6 ; practical decision-making, 22–6 , 46–7 , 48–9 , 81–2 , 151 , 171–2 , 176–7 , 255 , 332 , 383 , 395–6 , 398–9 ; and practical knowledge, 22–6 , 195 , 255 , 352 , 382–8 , 395–6 , 405 , 414–15 , 431 ; and prior opinions, 179–80 , 184–5 , 210 ; ‘prospect theory’, 121 ; public sector processes, 183 , 355 , 415 ; puzzle– mystery distinction, 20–4 , 32–4 , 48–9 , 64–8 , 100 , 155 , 173–7 , 218 , 249 , 398 , 400–1 ; qualities needed for success, 179–80 ; reasoning as not decision-making, 268–71 ; and ‘resulting’, 265–7 ; ‘risk as feelings’ perspective, 128–9 , 310 ; robustness and resilience, 123 , 294–8 , 332 , 335 , 374 , 423–5 ; and role of economists, 397–401 ; Rumelt’s ‘diagnosis’, 184–5 , 194–5 ; ‘satisficing’ (’good enough’ outcomes), 150 , 167 , 175 , 415 , 416 ; search for a workable solution, 151–2 , 167 ; by securities traders, 268–9 ; ‘shock’ and ‘shift’ labels, 42 , 346 , 347 , 348 , 406–7 ; simple heuristics, rules of thumb, 152 ; and statistical discrimination, 207–9 , 415 ; triumph of probabilistic reasoning, 20 , 40–2 , 72–84 , 110–14 ; von Neumann– Morgenstern axioms, 111 , 133 , 435–44 ; see also business strategy deductive reasoning, 137–8 , 147 , 235 , 388 , 389 , 398 Deep Blue, 175 DeepMind, 173–4 The Deer Hunter (film, 1978), 438 democracy, representative, 292 , 319 , 414 demographic issues, 253 , 358–61 , 362–3 ; EU migration models, 369–70 , 372 Denmark, 426 , 427 , 428 , 430 dentistry, 387–8 , 394 Derek, Bo, 97 dermatologists, 88–9 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 27 , 31 dinosaurs, extinction of, 32 , 39 , 71–2 , 383 , 402 division of labour, 161 , 162 , 172–3 , 216 , 249 DNA, 156 , 198 , 201 , 204 ‘domino theory’, 281 Donoghue, Denis, 226 dotcom boom, 316 , 402 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 34 , 224–5 , 253 Drapers Company, 328 Drescher, Melvin, 248–9 Drucker, Peter, Concept of the Corporation (1946), 286 , 287 Duhem–Quine hypothesis, 259–60 Duke, Annie, 263 , 268 , 273 Dulles, John Foster, 293 Dutch tulip craze (1630s), 315 Dyson, Frank, 259 earthquakes, 237–8 , 239 Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose , 204 Econometrica , 134 econometrics, 134 , 340–1 , 346 , 356 economic models: of 1950s and 1960s, 339–40 ; Akerlof model, 250–1 , 252 , 253 , 254 ; ‘analogue economies’ of Lucas, 345 , 346 ; artificial/complex, xiv–xv , 21 , 92–3 , 94 ; ‘asymmetric information’ model, 250–1 , 254–5 ; capital asset pricing model (CAPM), 307–8 , 309 , 320 , 332 ; comparative advantage model, 249–50 , 251–2 , 253 ; cost-benefit analysis obsession, 404 ; diversification of risk, 304–5 , 307–9 , 317–18 , 334–7 ; econometric models, 340–1 , 346 , 356 ; economic rent model, 253–4 ; efficient market hypothesis, 252 , 254 , 308–9 , 318 , 320 , 332 , 336–7 ; efficient portfolio model, 307–8 , 309 , 318 , 320 , 332–4 , 366 ; failure over 2007–08 crisis, xv , 6–7 , 260 , 311–12 , 319 , 339 , 349–50 , 357 , 367–8 , 399 , 407 , 423–4 ; falsificationist argument, 259–60 ; forecasting models, 7 , 15–16 , 68 , 96 , 102–5 , 347–50 , 403–4 ; Goldman Sachs risk models, 6–7 , 9 , 68 , 202 , 246–7 ; ‘grand auction’ of Arrow and Debreu, 343–5 ; inadequacy of forecasting models, 347–50 , 353–4 , 403–4 ; invented numbers in, 312–13 , 320 , 363–4 , 365 , 371 , 373 , 404 , 405 , 423 ; Keynesian, 339–40 ; Lucas critique, 341 , 348 , 354 ; Malthus’ population growth model, 253 , 358–61 , 362–3 ; misuse/abuse of, 312–13 , 320 , 371–4 , 405 ; need for, 404–5 ; need for pluralism of, 276–7 ; pension models, 312–13 , 328–9 , 405 , 423 , 424 ; pre-crisis risk models, 6–7 , 9 , 68 , 202 , 246–7 , 260 , 311–12 , 319 , 320–1 , 339 ; purpose of, 346 ; quest for large-world model, 392 ; ‘rational expectations theory, 342–5 , 346–50 ; real business cycle theory, 348 , 352–4 ; role of incentives, 408–9 ; ‘shift’ label, 406–7 ; ‘shock’ label, 346–7 , 348 , 406–7 ; ‘training base’ (historical data series), 406 ; Value at risk models (VaR), 366–8 , 405 , 424 ; Viniar problem (problem of model failure), 6–7 , 58 , 68 , 109 , 150 , 176 , 202 , 241 , 242 , 246–7 , 331 , 366–8 ; ‘wind tunnel’ models, 309 , 339 , 392 ; winner’s curse model, 256–7 ; World Economic Outlook, 349 ; see also axiomatic rationality; maximising behaviour; optimising behaviour; small world models Economic Policy Symposium, Jackson Hole, 317–18 economics: adverse selection process, 250–1 , 327 ; aggregate output and GDP, 95 ; ambiguity of variables/concepts, 95–6 , 99–100 ; appeal of probability theory, 42–3 ; ‘bubbles’, 315–16 ; business cycles, 45–6 , 347 ; Chicago School, 36 , 72–4 , 86 , 92 , 111–14 , 133–7 , 158 , 257–8 , 307 , 342–3 , 381–2 ; data as essential, 388–90 ; division of labour, 161 , 162 , 172–3 , 216 , 249 ; and evolutionary mechanisms, 158–9 ; ‘expectations’ concept, 97–8 , 102–3 , 121–2 , 341–2 ; forecasts and future planning as necessary, 103 ; framing of problems, 261 , 362 , 398–400 ; ‘grand auction’ of Arrow and Debreu, 343–5 ; hegemony of optimisation, 40–2 , 110 – 14 ; Hicks–Samuelson axioms, 435–6 ; market fundamentalism, 220 ; market price equilibrium, 254 , 343–4 , 381–2 ; markets as necessarily incomplete, 344 , 345 , 349 ; Marshall’s definition of, 381 , 382 ; as ‘non-stationary’, 16 , 35–6 , 45–6 , 102 , 236 , 339–41 , 349 , 350 , 394–6 ; oil shock (1973), 223 ; Phillips curve, 340 ; and ‘physics envy’, 387 , 388 ; and power laws, 238–9 ; as practical knowledge, 381 , 382–3 , 385–8 , 398 , 399 , 405 ; public role of the social scientist, 397–401 ; reciprocity in a modern economy, 191–2 , 328–9 ; and reflexivity, 35–6 , 309 , 394 ; risk and volatility, 124–5 , 310 , 333 , 335–6 , 421–3 ; Romer’s ‘mathiness’, 93–4 , 95 ; shift or structural break, 236 ; Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, 163 , 254 , 343 ; social context of, 17 ; sources of data, 389 , 390 ; surge in national income since 1800, 161 ; systems as non-linear, 102 ; teaching’s emphasis on quantitative methods, 389 ; validity of research findings, 245 ‘Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else?’

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, something more like a dedicated insurance market began to form in London. Minds were doubtless focused by the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed more than 13,000 houses.af Fourteen years later Nicholas Barbon established the first fire insurance company. At around the same time, a specialized marine insurance market began to coalesce in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in London’s Tower Street (later in Lombard Street). Between the 1730s and the 1760s, the practice of exchanging information at Lloyd’s became more routinized until in 1774 a Society of Lloyd’s was formed at the Royal Exchange, initially bringing together seventynine life members, each of whom paid a £15 subscription.

Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

In Scotland, it was sealed by the treacherous Massacre of Glencoe (1692)—where the murder of the Catholic Clan Macdonald by the English-backed Campbells marked the onset of a war to the death between Lowlands and Highlands. Internationally, it was accompanied by the engagement of England and Scotland in the League of Augsburg, and in all subsequent coalitions against Louis XIV. LLOYD’S ON18 February 1688 the London Gazette mentioned a coffee-house run by Edward Lloyd in Tower Street. Shortly afterwards Lloyd launched a weekly bulletin, the precursor of Lloyd’s List, providing news about commerce and shipping. By so doing, he supplied both a meeting-place and an information service for all interested in the insurance business. Lloyd’s would grow into the world’s largest insurance association.

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

By Queen Anne’s time it was possible to pick and choose company at the different houses in St James’s. Whigs were to be found at the St James’s Coffee House, Tories at the Cocoa Tree, the clergy went to Truby’s, the very smart to White’s. Here then was the beginning of the London gentlemen’s club. And there was one chocolate house that was to become greater than them all; it was run for the commercially minded in Lombard Street by a man called Edward Lloyd. London may have been fashionable, but it was disgusting to some, including the monarch. The population of England was about five million, nearly 700,000 of whom lived in London.

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And just like those who, 200 years on, viewed automation with dismay, the spinners understood perfectly that their livelihoods would never be the same again. This era was the beginning of what is now called the Industrial Revolution. And inventiveness was not confined to the industrial drawing board: musicians, writers, painters and diarists were prolific, and to be found at every coffee house, salon and studio. Among them were Thomas Sheridan and then his son, Richard, Thomas Tyrwhitt, Joshua Reynolds, Tobias Smollett, James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne and Oliver Goldsmith. Smollett published Peregrine Pickle and Sir Launcelot Greaves and then he decided to produce a political magazine.

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O’Connell’s significance came during the following quarter of a century when his campaigning was influential in the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act. In January 1799, Parliament prepared for a Union with Ireland Bill uncertain what support it would have in Dublin. Certainly in the Irish capital, it was a coffee house subject – with pen as well as craic: ‘Pamphlet writing is such a rage at present that all classes are scribbling upon the Union. It is a common question in the streets; are you writing a pamphlet against the Union.’47 Pamphleteers (often anonymous) were indeed writing – for both sides of the argument: ‘In every other country where religious distinction has been made the test of office, the majority has constituted the establishment.