The difference between peacetime and wartime productivity is when things are so explosive and all your systems break down and when you get out the other side everything is changed. It’s an essential and very educational mode.

Instead, the system—in America and around the world—has been organized to siphon the gains from innovation upward, such that the fortunes of the world’s billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone else’s, and the top 10 percent of humanity have come to hold 90 percent of the planet’s wealth.

I’ve been meaning to finish reading up on German history. If I read the five books below, I should be in a great place.