Adam Davidson is the founder of NPR’s Planet Money podcast and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers economics and business. Previously, he was an economics writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has won many of journalism’s most prestigious awards, including a Peabody for his coverage of the financial crisis.
2019/20 Journalism Series Subscribers (except Student/U25 and complimentary subscriptions) receive a complimentary copy of Davidson’s new book, The Passion Economy.
The brilliant creator of NPR’s Planet Money podcast and award-winning New Yorker staff writer explains our current economy in his latest book, The Passion Economy, laying out its internal logic and revealing the transformative hope it offers for millions of people to thrive as they never have before.
Contrary to what you may have heard, the middle class is not dying and robots are not stealing our jobs. In fact, writes Adam Davidson, the twenty-first-century economic paradigm offers new ways of making money, fresh paths toward professional fulfillment, and unprecedented opportunities for curious, ambitious individuals to combine the things they love with their careers. In The Passion Economy, he delineates the ground rules of the new economy, and armed with these, we begin to see how we can succeed in it according to its own terms—intimacy, insight, attention, automation, and, of course, passion.
Drawing on the stories of average people doing exactly this—an accountant overturning his industry, a sweatshop owner’s daughter fighting for better working conditions, an Amish craftsman meeting the technological needs of Amish farmers—as well as the latest academic research, Davidson shows us how the twentieth-century economy of scale has given way in this century to an economy of passion. He makes clear, too, that though the adjustment has brought measures of dislocation, confusion, and even panic, these are most often the result of a lack of understanding.
