In  Swimming With the Sharks , Joris Lewindijk  provides a stellar inside look at the "City", London's financial industry. His work is remarkable in that he manages to tease out the differences between matters on a human scale and what happens to the system as a whole. He focuses on "perverse incentives", a key mechanism of "assimilation" whereby ordinary people surrender their humanity to the impersonal machinery of the investment banks. The book should be read with "The Real World of Technology", which describes the phenomenon of assimilation in an industrial society in general (not just banking). "Swimming" is a modern classic, to be compared with "The Corporation". At its heart we see acceptance of the fallacy: money as a proxy for value. "Swimming" presents the clearest case I know of how the "Dragon" created by the common efforts of very smart people takes on a life of its own. But the whole is s...