"The news is full of their names, supposedly the vanguard of a rethinking of capitalism. Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Uber, and many more companies have a mandate of disruption and upending the "old order"--and they've succeeded in effecting the "biggest change in the American workforce in over a century, " according to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. But this new wave of technology companies is funded and steered by very old-school venture capitalists....

In modern history, the story of capitalism has been a story of firms and financiers. That's all going to change thanks to the Big Data revolution. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, bestselling author of Big Data, and Thomas Ramge, who writes for The Economist, show, data is replacing money as the driver of market behavior. Big finance and big companies will be replaced by small groups and individual actors who make markets instead of making things: think...

Something remarkable emerged as a result of the Great Recession of the early twenty-first century: a sharing economy. Among the loss of jobs and mortgages and uncertainty about the future, people got creative with the way they earned and spent their money. Democratic platforms like Uber and Airbnb have skyrocketed in popularity, prompting tighter government regulations. But are they the answer to an economy increasingly controlled by giant corporations?...