Best of
Economics

1979

Economic Policy


Ludwig von Mises - 1979
    He has long been regarded as a most knowledgeable and respected economist, even though his teachings were generally outside the mainstream. He wrote twenty-five books and hundreds of articles on human action, free markets, and political economy.Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow presents six concise essays that offer a coherent view of Mises's economic thought. Originally given as a series of lectures in Argentina in 1959, these pieces were designed for an audience unfamiliar with freedom of the market or individual freedom. Mises used accessible language and homespun examples to describe the truths he had observed about capitalism, socialism, interventionism, inflation, foreign investment, and economic policies and ideas. These essays could be used as a brief introductory course in economics or an overview of Mises's thought for the more advanced reader.Economist Fritz Machlup praises the book as a work that “fully reflects the author's fundamental position for which he was—and still is—admired by followers and reviled by opponents…While each of the six lectures can stand alone as an independent essay, the harmony of the series gives an aesthetic pleasure similar to that derived from looking at the architecture of a well-designed edifice.”As a resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education, Bettina Bien Greaves has written and lectured extensively on topics of free market economics. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Human Events, Reason, and The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. A student of Mises, Greaves has become an expert on his work in particular and that of the Austrian School of economics in general. She has translated several Mises monographs, compiled an annotated bibliography of his work, and edited collections of papers by Mises and other members of the Austrian School.

Knowledge And Decisions


Thomas Sowell - 1979
    Sowell, one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making--a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency but our very freedom. This is because actual knowledge is being replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision of what ought to be. Knowledge and Decisions, a winner of the 1980 Law and Economics Center Prize, was heralded as a landmark work and selected for this prize "because of its cogent contribution to our understanding of the differences between the market process and the process of government." In announcing the award, the center acclaimed that the "contribution to our understanding of the process of regulation alone would make the book important, but in reemphasizing the diversity and efficiency that the market makes possible, [this] work goes deeper and becomes even more significant."

Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life


Fernand Braudel - 1979
    Like everything he writes, it is new, stimulating and sparkles like champagne.Braudel's technique, it has been said, is that of a pointilliste. Myriads of separate details, sharp glimpses of reality experienced by real people, are seen miraculously to orchestrate themselves into broad rhythms that underlie and transcend the excitements and struggles of particular periods. Braudel sees the past as we see the present — only in a longer perspective and over a wider field.The perspective is that of the possible, of the actual material limitations to human life in any given time or place. It is the every¬day, the habitual — the obvious that is so obvious it has hitherto been neglected by historians — that Braudel claims for a new and vast and enriching province of history. Food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and, above all, the growth of towns, that powerful agent of social and economic development, are described in all the richness and complexity of real life.The intensely visual quality of Braudel's understanding of history is brought into sharper focus by the remarkable series of illustrations that of themselves would make this book incomparableFERNAND BRAUDEL was born in 1902, received a degree in history in 1923, and subsequently taught in Algeria, Paris and Sao Paulo. He spent five years as a prisoner of war in Germany, during which time he wrote his grand thesis, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, which was published in 1949. In 1946 he became a member of the editorial board of Annates, the famous journal founded by Marc Bloch and Lucian Febvre, whom he succeeded at the College de France in 1949. He has been a member of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and since 1962 has been chief administrator of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. Professor Braudel holds honorary doctor¬ates from universities all over the world.Jacket painting: Detail from Breughel the Elder's The Fall of Icarus, from the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. (Giraudon)"Braudel deserves a Nobel Prize. . . . [This is] the most remarkable picture of human life in the centuries before the human condition was radically changed by the growth of industry that has yet been presented. A book of great originality, a masterpiece."—J. H. Plumb, The Washington Post"Braudel's books enthrall. ... He is brilliant in demonstrating how most history is written on the backs of most people."—John Leonard, The New York Times"Even a preliminary glance at The Structures of Everyday Life shows a book that has no obvious compeer either in scope of reference or level of accessibility to the general reader. ... Its broad authority remains deeply impressive."—Richard Holmes, Harper's"Here is vast erudition, beautifully arranged, presented with grace of style, with humility before life's complexity and warm humanist feeling. Braudel's subject is nothing less than every¬day life all over the world before the industrial revolution.... He succeeds triumphantly in his first purpose: 'if not to see everything, at least to locate everything, and on the requisite world scale.'"—Angus Calder, The Standard"On neither side of the Atlantic does there live a man or woman with so much knowledge of the past as Braudel, or with a greater sense of its aptness to the intellectual occasion in hand....You can't pick up this big fat book without having your attention transfixed by something or other, if only the great gallery of pictures. They are a masterpiece in themselves."—Peter Laslett, The Guardian"This new book is unarguably a brilliant survey of demog¬raphy, urbanisation, transport, technology, food, clothing, housing, money and business, social classes, state power and international trade in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries."—Theodore Zeldin, The Listener-----By examining in detail the material life of preindustrial peoples around the world, Fernand Braudel significantly changed the way historians view their subject. Volume I describes food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and the growth of towns.

Education, Free & Compulsory


Murray N. Rothbard - 1979
    Rothbard identifies the crucial feature of our educational system that dooms it to fail: at every level, from financing to attendance, the system relies on compulsion instead of voluntary consent. Certain consequences follow. The curriculum is politicized to reflect the ideological priorities of the regime in power. Standards are continually dumbed down to accommodate the least common denominator. The brightest children are not permitted to achieve their potential, the special- needs of individual children are neglected, and the mid-level learners become little more than cogs in a machine. The teachers themselves are hamstrung by a political apparatus that watches their every move. Rothbard explores the history of compulsory schooling to show that none of this is accident. The state has long used compulsory schooling, backed by egalitarian ideology, as a means of citizen control. In contrast, a market-based system of schools would adhere to a purely voluntary ethic, financed with private funds, and administered entirely by private enterprise. An interesting feature of this book is its promotion of individual, or home, schooling, long before the current popularity of the practice. As Kevin Ryan of Boston University points out in the introduction, if education reform is ever to bring about fundamental change, it will have to begin with a complete rethinking of public schooling that Rothbard offers here.

The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929


Gordon Thomas - 1979
      A riveting living history about Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Captures the era, the intoxicating expectancy, the hope that ruled men’s heart and minds before the bubble burst and the black despair of the decade that followed.

A Guide To Econometrics


Peter E. Kennedy - 1979
    This overview has enabled students to make sense more easily of what instructors are doing when they produce proofs, theorems and formulas.

Applied Mathematics for Business, Economics, and the Social Sciences


Frank S. Budnick - 1979
    Oriented towards the needs of the student, the text retains such pedagogical features as Algebra Flashbacks, Notes to the Student, Points for Thought or Discussion, and an extensive array of problems and applications to support the learning process.

Financial Theory and Corporate Policy


Thomas E. Copeland - 1979
    Appropriate for the second course in Finance for MBA students and the first course in Finance for doctoral students, the text prepares students for the complex world of modern financial scholarship and practice. It presents a unified treatment of finance combining theory, empirical evidence and applications.

Tithing and Dominion


Edward A. Powell - 1979
    

The Government Against the Economy


George Reisman - 1979
    Again and again, it illustrates the economic coordination of a free economy by contrasting it with the chaos produced by price controls and, as the ultimate culmination of price controls, socialism.Written for the intelligent layman who may have no previous knowledge of basic economic theory, this book not only shows where government policy went wrong in imposing price controls, it also shows how free-market prices are essential to the success of our economic system in producing for the benefit of everyone. Included are explanations of: how a free market would progressively reduce the cost of energy, along with that of all other goods; why the Arab oil embargo would not have been a threat to a free economy; how price controls actually raise prices; how partial price controls lead to universal price controls; how universal price controls represent de facto socialism; why Nazi Germany was a socialist country; and why socialism, rather than representing any kind of genuine economic planning, is in fact chaotic and necessarily tyrannical.For those who want to understand how a free-market economy really works and how price controls and socialism create chaos and poverty, this book is mandatory reading.Here is what two of the most famous advocates of the free market have said about this book:“Every commentator on current affairs who is not a fully trained economist ought to read this book if he wants to talk sense. I know no other place where the crucial issues are explained as clearly and convincingly as in this book.” - F. A. Hayek, Nobel Laureate, in Economics for 1975“This is one of the most powerful and convincing books I know. Its explanations are brilliantly clear; its analyses are lethal; it is uncompromising. Readers who come to it without any previous knowledge of basic economic theory will find it a luminous introduction. If any book can slow down the economic destructionism of our age, this could be it.” - Henry Hazlitt, Economist, Author, former Newsweek columnist and New York Times financial editor

Is the Red Flag Flying?: The Political Economy of the Soviet Union (Imperialism series)


Albert Szymanski - 1979
    

Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory


James M. Buchanan - 1979
    [Cost and Choice] starts off as an essay in the history of cost theory; the central ideas of the book are traced to Davenport and Knight in the United States, and to a series of distinguished writers associated at various times with the London School of Economics. The author emerges from this discussion with what can be described as the ultimate in subjectivist cost doctrines. . . . Economists should learn the lessons offered to us in this little book—and learn them well. It can save them from serious errors."—William J. Baumol, Journal of Economic Literature

Principles of Energy Conversion


Archie W. Culp - 1979
    While covering all aspects of energy conversion,the book concentrates on the power area-introducing readers to the important power system terminology. The book stresses energy-conversion,processes and systems that are currently being used to supply energy for the world economy,but does not neglect other important energy-conversion systems. While some of the actual systems are discussed,the book emphasizes the theory of how energy is released so as not to limit the reader to a particular system. Information on recent developments such as combustion of biomass,the emergence of cold fusion,the use of solar salt ponds,reactor accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl,are added to this edition. In addition,some of the original topics such as economics,solar energy,and power cycles,are expanded and updated.

The Capitalist World-Economy


Immanuel Wallerstein - 1979
    The essays include discussions of the relationship of class and ethnonational consciousness, clarification of the meaning of transition from feudalism to capitalism, the utility of the concept of the semi peripheral state, and the relationship of socialist states to the capitalist world-economy. This book is the first in a three volume collection of Wallerstein's essays. The Politics of World-Economy (1984) elaborates on the role of states, the antisystemic movements and the civilizational project. Geopolitics and Geoculture (1991) analyses both the events leading up to the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the subsequent process of perestroika in the light of Wallerstein's own interpretations, and the ways in which the renewed concern with culture is a product of the changing world-system.

What Should Economists Do?


James M. Buchanan - 1979
    Several essays are published here for the first time, including “Professor Alchian on Economic Method,” “Natural and Artifactual Man,” and “Public Choice and Ideology.”This book provides relatively easy access to a wide range of work by a moral and legal philosopher, a welfare economist who has consistently defended the primacy of the contractarian ethic, a public finance theorist, and a founder of the burgeoning subdiscipline of public choice. Buchanan’s work has spawned a methodological revolution in the way economists and other scholars think about government and government activity.As a measure of recognition for his significant contribution, Dr. Buchanan was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Reading Capital Politically


Harry Cleaver - 1979
    Structuralist, post-structuralist, deconstructed Marxes bloomed in journals and seminar rooms across the US and Europe. These Marxes and their interpreters struggled to interpret the world, and sometimes to interpret Marx himself, losing sight at times of his dictum that the challenge is not to interpret the world but to change it. In 1979, Harry Cleaver tossed an incendiary device called Reading Capital Politically into those seminar rooms. Through a close reading of the first chapter, he shows that Das Kapital was written for the workers, not for academics, and that we need to expand our idea of workers to include housewives, students, the unemployed, and other non-waged workers. Reading Capital Politically provides a theoretical and historical bridge between struggles in Europe in the 60s and 70s and, particularly, the Autonomia of Italy to the Zapatistas of the 90s. His introduction provides a brilliant and succinct overview of working class struggles in the century since Capital was published. Cleaver adds a new preface to the AK Press/Anti-Thesis edition.

Future in Our Hands


Erik Dammann - 1979
    

Annals of an Abiding Liberal


John Kenneth Galbraith - 1979
    

Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Cato paper)


Murray N. Rothbard - 1979
    

The world in the grip of an idea


Clarence B. Carson - 1979
    

Macroeconomics


Richard G. Lipsey - 1979
    This revision includes updated information on such key issues as health care, distribution of income, unemployment, labor, and monetary policy. The authors have also greatly increased the focus on the international economy and economic growth.

The Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier


Elliott West - 1979
    Drawing on contemporaneous newspapers and many unpublished firsthand accounts, West shows that the physical evolution of the saloon, from crude tents and shanties into elegant establishments for drinking and gaming, reflected the growth and maturity of the surrounding community.

The Keynesian Episode


W.H. Hutt - 1979
    H. Hutt was a preeminent and persistent critic of the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes. In The Keynesian Episode , he presents a comprehensive review of Keynes’s General Theory, including the finest critique to date of the Acceleration Principle. He questions the very legitimacy of Keynes’s fundamental epistemology.In Hutt’s discussion of economics there is a refreshing emphasis on the vital importance of the market price system as a coordinating process. As Dr. Hutt wrote: “The intellectual developments for which Keynes’s General Theory appeared to be responsible had caused a setback to scientific thinking about human economic relations at a crucial epoch. Keynes tried to find in the factors determining the value of the money unit the genesis of output and income. . . . He linked monetary theory to the economic world only through unsatisfactory concepts such as employment, income, and effective demand.”In this unsparing analysis of the theories of John Maynard Keynes, W. H. Hutt explains why Keynes’s ideas attracted both practical politicians and ardent academics and why they do not square with the logic of long-accepted laws of economics. Professor Hutt outlines methods by which modern economies can extricate themselves from the disasters into which Keynesian theory has plunged them.

Can Capitalism Survive?


Benjamin A. Rogge - 1979
    Rogge—late Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at Wabash College—was a representative of that most unusual species: economists who speak and write in clear English. He forsakes professional jargon for clarity and logic—and can even be downright funny. The nineteen essays in this volume explore the philosophy of freedom, the nature of economics, the business system, labor markets, money and inflation, the problems of cities, education, and what must be done to ensure the survival of free institutions and capitalism.Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality


Mario Barrera - 1979
    Focusing on the economic foundations of inequality as they have affected Chicanos in the Southwest from the Mexican-American War to the present, Mario Barrera develops his theory as a synthesis of class and colonial analyses.

A History of Accountancy in the United States: The Cultural Significance of Accounting


Gary John Previts - 1979
    

Your Money: Frustration or Freedom


Howard Dayton - 1979
    Dayton shows that if readers follow his suggestions, tensions about money can disappear.

The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts


Philip Steadman - 1979
    It examines the effects of these analogies on architectural and design theory and considers how recent biological thinking has relevance for design.Architects and designers have looked to biology for inspiration since the early 19th century. They have sought not just to imitate the forms of plants and animals, but to find methods in design analogous to the processes of growth and evolution in nature.This new revised edition of this classic work adds an extended Afterword covering recent developments such as the introduction of computer methods in design in the 1980s and '90s, which have made possible a new kind of 'biomorphic' architecture through 'genetic algorithms' and other programming techniques.

Operation Fish: The Race To Save Europe's Wealth, 1939 1945


Alfred Draper - 1979
    

Individual Choice Behavior: A Theoretical Analysis


R. Duncan Luce - 1979
    It begins with the statement of a general axiom, then explores applications of the theory to substantive problems: psychophysics, utility, and learning. Includes considerations of the Fechnerian assumption and signal detectability theory; utility theory; stochastic theories; more. 1959 edition.

Aspects of Development and Underdevelopment


Joan Robinson - 1979
    For this purpose she uses the classical theory of accumulation and the modern theory of international trade and finance. Her simple but penetrating analysis illuminates the problems of poverty, accumulation, industrialization and trade, while exposing misleading conceptions of the Third World. Throughout the book, general principles are demonstrated with particular examples, making those principles both clearer and more relevant. The book's conclusion is that the economic problems of the Third World remain rooted in deep-seated political conflicts of national and international interests.

Thinking Through the Energy Problem (A Supplementary paper of the Committee for Economic Development ; 42)


Thomas C. Schelling - 1979
    

Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources


Partha Dasgupta - 1979
    A presentation of the economic principles relating to the use and management of natural resources, including analysis of optimal use policies.

Economics, Environmental Policy, and the Quality of Life


William J. Baumol - 1979
    They develop the implications of these principles for the design and implementation of environmental regulation and describe experience with existing policy.