As you know, I love books and live in a personal library of more than 57,000 of them. Only a few – say 2-300 of them – really capture my excitement and enthusiasm.
Fewer, Richer, Greener by Larry Siegel is one of those books. It just went on sale on Amazon.
I must first admit that Larry is a good friend of mine and has been for 48 years. He entered the University of Chicago two years after I did; we lived in the same dormitory. It was immediately clear that Larry was one of the smartest people in a place with a lot of smart people. We soon found a shared love of the social sciences: of studying people, human behavior, human geography, demographics, and the rise and fall of cities.
We also love facts and data. In college, we played a game with one of my favorite books, the World Almanac, in which one of us would turn to a random page and the other would have to guess the right answer. Which state produces the most corn? Who is the Governor of Idaho? How many of the biggest metropolitan areas can you name, in order starting with #1?
We each went on to careers in “applied social sciences” – Larry as one of the top investment thinkers and writers in the country, and me as a retailer.
In Fewer, Richer, Greener, Larry has brought together everything he has learned from decades of studying global society and economics. His forecasts of the world to come are neither pollyanish nor full of doom, but based on real trends and data – often things that the rest of us do not see, and rarely make the headlines.
Larry is also one of the best writers I have ever known. And, most importantly, he brings a historical context to every subject he studies, something missing from so many bestsellers. As Confucius said, “Study the past if you would define the future.”
If you want to have your thinking challenged, if you want to look at the realities of our present situation and our future, you need to read this book!
Gary Hoover
Full disclosure: Larry also serves on the board of the American Business History Center, a non-profit which he and I and two other friends started in 2019.
Gary Hoover
Executive Director
American Business History Center
