Empires were abolished and replaced by a global arrangement enforced by the U.S. Navy. With all the world's oceans safe for the first time in history, markets and resources were made available for everyone. Enemies became partners.We think of this system as normal - it is not. We live in an artificial world on borrowed time.In The Accidental Superpower, international strategist Peter Zeihan examines how the hard rules of geography are eroding the American commitment to free trade; how much of the planet is aging into a mass retirement that will enervate markets and capital supplies; and how, against all odds, it is the ever-ravenous American economy that - alone among the developed nations - is rapidly approaching energy independence. Combined, these factors are doing nothing less than overturning the global system and ushering in a new (dis)order. For most, that is a disaster-in-waiting, but not for the Americans. The shale revolution allows Americans to sidestep an increasingly dangerous energy market. Only the United States boasts a youth population large enough to escape the sucking maw of global aging. Most important, geography will matter more than ever in a de-globalizing world, and America's geography is simply sublime.

    A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe's leading young thinkers shows how we can build an ideal world today. "A more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell."—The New York Times After working all day at jobs we often dislike, we buy things we don't need. Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, reminds us it needn't be this way—and in some places it isn't. Rutger Bregman's TED Talk about universal basic income seemed impossibly radical when he delivered it in 2014. A quarter of a million views later, the subject of that video is being seriously considered by leading economists and government leaders the world over. It's just one of the many utopian ideas that Bregman proves is possible today. Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you think can happen. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty, to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history, and beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he champions ideas whose time have come. Every progressive milestone of civilization—from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy—was once considered a utopian fantasy. Bregman's book, both challenging and bracing, demonstrates that new utopian ideas, like the elimination of poverty and the creation of the fifteen-hour workweek, can become a reality in our lifetime. Being unrealistic and unreasonable can in fact make the impossible inevitable, and it is the only way to build the ideal world.

    To build and manage your wealth, you must look at your situation holistically: build your character, standards, dreams, goals, and personal aspirations from the inside out. By developing both self-sufficiency and a connection with your community, it is possible to create wealth for yourself no matter who you are, what you do, or where you come from.

    Whether you're building the next killer app, investing in a startup, or simply curious about the technology, this practical book is essential reading.Bitcoin, the first successful decentralized digital currency, is still in its infancy and it's already spawned a multi-billion dollar global economy. This economy is open to anyone with the knowledge and passion to participate. Mastering Bitcoin provides you with the knowledge you need (passion not included).This book includes:A broad introduction to bitcoin--ideal for non-technical users, investors, and business executivesAn explanation of the technical foundations of bitcoin and cryptographic currencies for developers, engineers, and software and systems architectsDetails of the bitcoin decentralized network, peer-to-peer architecture, transaction lifecycle, and security principlesOffshoots of the bitcoin and blockchain inventions, including alternative chains, currencies, and applicationsUser stories, analogies, examples, and code snippets illustrating key technical concepts

    Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world's wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail.In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends--growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration--come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime--but it's impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side.

    Now, in an entertaining and accessible primer, he explains how the global economy actually works—in real-world terms. Writing with irreverent wit, a deep knowledge of history, and a disregard for conventional economic pieties, Chang offers insights that will never be found in the textbooks.Unlike many economists, who present only one view of their discipline, Chang introduces a wide range of economic theories, from classical to Keynesian, revealing how each has its strengths and weaknesses, and why  there is no one way to explain economic behavior. Instead, by ignoring the received wisdom and exposing the myriad forces that shape our financial world, Chang gives us the tools we need to understand our increasingly global and interconnected world often driven by economics. From the future of the Euro, inequality in China, or the condition of the American manufacturing industry here in the United States—Economics: The User’s Guide is a concise and expertly crafted guide to economic fundamentals that offers a clear and accurate picture of the global economy and how and why it affects our daily lives.

    It's not about carbon—it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better. In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers Shock Doctrine and No Logo, exposes the myths that are clouding climate debate. You have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. You have been told it's impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it—it just requires breaking every rule in the 'free-market' playbook. You have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight back is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring. It's about changing the world, before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. Either we leap—or we sink. This Changes Everything is a book that will redefine our era.

    stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders. They band together—some of them walking away from seven-figure salaries—to investigate, expose, and reform the insidious new ways that Wall Street generates profits. If you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you.

    More than four million homes were lost to foreclosures. Is it a coincidence that the United States witnessed a dramatic rise in household debt in the years before the recession—that the total amount of debt for American households doubled between 2000 and 2007 to $14 trillion? Definitely not. Armed with clear and powerful evidence, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi reveal in House of Debt how the Great Recession and Great Depression, as well as the current economic malaise in Europe, were caused by a large run-up in household debt followed by a significantly large drop in household spending. Though the banking crisis captured the public’s attention, Mian and Sufi argue strongly with actual data that current policy is too heavily biased toward protecting banks and creditors. Increasing the flow of credit, they show, is disastrously counterproductive when the fundamental problem is too much debt. As their research shows, excessive household debt leads to foreclosures, causing individuals to spend less and save more. Less spending means less demand for goods, followed by declines in production and huge job losses. How do we end such a cycle? With a direct attack on debt, say Mian and Sufi.  More aggressive debt forgiveness after the crash helps, but as they illustrate, we can be rid of painful bubble-and-bust episodes only if the financial system moves away from its reliance on inflexible debt contracts. As an example, they propose new mortgage contracts that are built on the principle of risk-sharing, a concept that would have prevented the housing bubble from emerging in the first place. Thoroughly grounded in compelling economic evidence, House of Debt offers convincing answers to some of the most important questions facing the modern economy today: Why do severe recessions happen? Could we have prevented the Great Recession and its consequences? And what actions are needed to prevent such crises going forward?

    Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist. And so it goes with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.In theory these efforts are intended to help the poor—and poor minorities in particular. In practice they become massive barriers to moving forward.Please Stop Helping Us lays bare these counterproductive results. People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but in too many instances the current methods and approaches aren’t working. Acknowledging this is an important first step.

    In the depths of the Great War, with millions dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. The heart of the financial system shifted from London to New York. The infinite demands for men and matériel reached into countries far from the front. The strain of the war ravaged all economic and political assumptions, bringing unheard-of changes in the social and industrial order.A century after the outbreak of fighting, Adam Tooze revisits this seismic moment in history, challenging the existing narrative of the war, its peace, and its aftereffects. From the day the United States enters the war in 1917 to the precipice of global financial ruin, Tooze delineates the world remade by American economic and military power.Tracing the ways in which countries came to terms with America’s centrality—including the slide into fascism—The Deluge is a chilling work of great originality that will fundamentally change how we view the legacy of World War I.

    The Tuttle Twins series of books helps children learn about political and economic principles in a fun and engaging manner. With colorful illustrations and a fun story, your children will follow Ethan and Emily as they learn about liberty!

    But Alex Epstein shows that if we look at the big picture, the much-hated fossil fuel industry is dramatically improving our planet by making it a far safer and richer place. The key difference between a healthy and unhealthy environment, Epstein argues, is development—the transformation of nature to meet human needs. And the energy required for development is overwhelmingly made possible by the fossil fuel industry, the only way to produce cheap, plentiful, reliable energy on a global scale. While acknowledging the challenges of fossil fuels (and every form of energy), Epstein argues that the overall benefits, including the largely ignored environmental benefits, are incomparably greater.

    Geithner helped the United States navigate the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, from boom to bust to rescue to recovery. In a candid, riveting, and historically illuminating memoir, he takes readers behind the scenes of the crisis, explaining the hard choices and politically unpalatable decisions he made to repair a broken financial system and prevent the collapse of the Main Street economy. This is the inside story of how a small group of policy makers—in a thick fog of uncertainty, with unimaginably high stakes—helped avoid a second depression but lost the American people doing it. Stress Test is also a valuable guide to how governments can better manage financial crises, because this one won’t be the last.Stress Test reveals a side of Secretary Geithner the public has never seen, starting with his childhood as an American abroad. He recounts his early days as a young Treasury official helping to fight the international financial crises of the 1990s, then describes what he saw, what he did, and what he missed at the New York Fed before the Wall Street boom went bust. He takes readers inside the room as the crisis began, intensified, and burned out of control, discussing the most controversial episodes of his tenures at the New York Fed and the Treasury, including the rescue of Bear Stearns; the harrowing weekend when Lehman Brothers failed; the searing crucible of the AIG rescue as well as the furor over the firm’s lavish bonuses; the battles inside the Obama administration over his widely criticized but ultimately successful plan to end the crisis; and the bracing fight for the most sweeping financial reforms in more than seventy years. Secretary Geithner also describes the aftershocks of the crisis, including the administration’s efforts to address high unemployment, a series of brutal political battles over deficits and debt, and the drama over Europe’s repeated flirtations with the economic abyss. Secretary Geithner is not a politician, but he has things to say about politics—the silliness, the nastiness, the toll it took on his family. But in the end, Stress Test is a hopeful story about public service. In this revealing memoir, Tim Geithner explains how America withstood the ultimate stress test of its political and financial systems.

    Hayek is one of only a few social scientists over the past 200 years who thoroughly rethought the relationship between individual people and both the market and the state. While countless works have discussed the importance of Hayek and his ideas, none have focused on making his core ideas accessible to average people. This volume highlights and explains Hayek's basic insights in plain language to ensure that his critical ideas about the nature of society are both accessible and enduring.

    Avert your eyes from this dangerous extremist, citizen! Government is composed of wise public servants who innocently pursue the common good! In Real Dissent, Tom Woods demolishes some of the toughest critics of libertarianism in his trademark way. In doing so he strays beyond what he calls the index card of allowable opinion, the narrow range within which the media and political classes permit debate to take place in America. Should 40% or 35% of our income be taxed? That's the kind of debate the New York Times prefers. Should our income be taxed at all? Now that's out of bounds, citizen! In foreign policy, Americans are permitted to choose between bombing a despised country or starving its people to death. You favor peace? Why, you must be an "extremist"! On the Federal Reserve, the debate is over which policy the Fed should pursue. But what if the Fed is itself the problem? No answer, because the question isn't raised. Real Dissent is organized into ten parts: Part I: War and Propaganda Part II: Capitalism and Anti-Capitalism Part III: Libertarianism Attacked, and My Replies Part IV: Ron Paul and Forbidden Truths Part V: End the Fed Part VI: History and Liberty Part VII: When Libertarians Go Wrong [on people who don't quite get their own philosophy] Part VIII: Books You May Have Missed Part IX: Talking Liberty: Selected Tom Woods Show Interviews Part X: Back to Basics Afterword: How I Evaded the Gatekeepers of Approved Opinion The index card of allowable opinion forces Americans into narrow and pointless debates, and closes off discussion of plausible and humane alternatives. For the sake of American liberty, it’s time we set that thing on fire. This book is a match. PRAISE FOR TOM WOODS: “During my presidential campaigns, Tom Woods wrote some of the most effective replies to some of my unkindest critics.... "Real Dissent is great fun to read, but also filled with useful debating points that will come in handy as you make the case for the free society with friends and family. Over the years I have worked together closely with Tom, one of the libertarian movement’s brightest and most prolific scholars, and I am delighted to commend his new book to you. You will enjoy it, and profit from it.” Ron Paul, former U.S. Congressman “The smartest guy in the room.” Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Senior Judicial Analyst, FOX News “Tom Woods is one of my dearest allies in the struggle against wrong-headed and dangerous economic policy.” Peter Schiff “Tom Woods has written some great stuff over the years, and he's contributed to the education of a lot of people, including myself.” David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, 1981-1985 About the Author Thomas E. Woods Jr. is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and host of The Tom Woods Show, a Monday-through-Friday podcast (at TomWoodsRadio.com). He has appeared on CNBC, FOX News, MSNBC, C-SPAN, FOX Business, Bloomberg Television, and many other outlets, and has been a guest on hundreds of radio programs. Tom is the New York Times betselling author of 12 books, including Meltdown (on the financial crisis) and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.

    And why Socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, requires either fraud or armed robbery in order to achieve power, and then the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship in order to remain in power. Social Democrats do not have the stomach for armed robbery and the mass murder it entails, and thus do not establish socialism but merely a more hampered market economy. It takes the Communists to openly establish socialism.

    In its name, wages have been frozen, benefits have been slashed and public spending squeezed. The pain of a financial crisis caused by bankers and speculators has been borne by ordinary people all over the country – and by the poor and disabled most of all.

    The banking systems of Mexico and Brazil have not only been crisis prone but have provided miniscule amounts of credit to business enterprises and households.Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents. Calomiris and Haber combine political history and economics to examine how coalitions of politicians, bankers, and other interest groups form, why they endure, and how they generate policies that determine who gets to be a banker, who has access to credit, and who pays for bank bailouts and rescues.Fragile by Design is a revealing exploration of the ways that politics inevitably intrudes into bank regulation.

    While the state is an evil in all its forms, monarchy is, in many ways, far less pernicious than democracy. Hoppe shows the evolution of government away from aristocracy, through monarchy, and toward the corruption and irresponsibility of democracy to have been identical with the growth of the leviathan state. There is hope for liberty, as Hoppe explains, but it lies not in reversing these steps, but rather through secession and decentralization. This pocket-sized, eye-opening pamphlet is ideal for tabling, conferences, or sharing with friends. It can revolutionize the way a reader sees society and the state.

    Despite tremendous increase in national income, the wealth gap in Malaysia is alarmingly high and extremely skewed. For instance, the top 0.2 per cent of depositors in Amanah Saham Bumiputera (ASB) has about 1,133 times more than the bottom 80 per cent of depositors combined. This gap echoed by the fact that approximately two-thirds of Malaysian workers earn less than RM3,000 per month, and about 90 per cent of Malaysians have nearly zero savings. The current policies are not facilitating improvements in this wealth gap, which could lead to aristocracy where birth, not hard work or talent and effort, matter the most in wealth accumulation. This book explores possible policy interventions that can be undertaken to ensure that economic growth is equitably shared, which is vital for a stable and prosperous society.

    The consensus that the PAP government has constructed and maintained over five decades is fraying. The assumptions that underpin Singaporean exceptionalism are no longer accepted as easily and readily as before. Among these are the ideas that the country is uniquely vulnerable, that this vulnerability limits its policy and political options, that good governance demands a degree of political consensus that ordinary democratic arrangements cannot produce, and that the country’s success requires a competitive meritocracy accompanied by relatively little income or wealth redistribution. But the policy and political conundrums that Singapore faces today are complex and defy easy answers. Confronted with a political landscape that is likely to become more contested, how should the government respond? What reforms should it pursue? This collection of essays suggests that a far-reaching and radical rethinking of the country's policies and institutions is necessary, even if it weakens the very consensus that enabled Singapore to succeed in its first fifty years.

    I want to know how the economic engine of capitalism works the way it does, and why it might stutter and stall and sometimes appear to be on the verge of collapse. I also want to show why this economic engine should be replaced, and with what." --from the Introduction To modern Western society, capitalism is the air we breathe, and most people rarely think to question it, for good or for ill. But knowing what makes capitalism work--and what makes it fail--is crucial to understanding its long-term health, and the vast implications for the global economy that go along with it. In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, the eminent scholar David Harvey, author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, examines the internal contradictions within the flow of capital that have precipitated recent crises. He contends that while the contradictions have made capitalism flexible and resilient, they also contain the seeds of systemic catastrophe. Many of the contradictions are manageable, but some are fatal: the stress on endless compound growth, the necessity to exploit nature to its limits, and tendency toward universal alienation. Capitalism has always managed to extend the outer limits through "spatial fixes," expanding the geography of the system to cover nations and people formerly outside of its range. Whether it can continue to expand is an open question, but Harvey thinks it unlikely in the medium term future: the limits cannot extend much further, and the recent financial crisis is a harbinger of this. David Harvey has long been recognized as one of the world's most acute critical analysts of the global capitalist system and the injustices that flow from it. In this book, he returns to the foundations of all of his work, dissecting and interrogating the fundamental illogic of our economic system, as well as giving us a look at how human societies are likely to evolve in a post-capitalist world.

    It is Technocracy.With meticulous detail and an abundance of original research, Patrick M. Wood uses Technocracy Rising to connect the dots of modern globalization in a way that has never been seen before so that the reader can clearly understand the globalization plan, its perpetrators and its intended endgame.In the heat of the Great Depression during the 1930s, prominent scientists and engineers proposed a utopian energy-based economic system called Technocracy that would be run by those same scientists and engineers instead of elected politicians. Although this radical movement lost momentum by 1940, it regained status when it was conceptually adopted by the elitist Trilateral Commission (co-founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller) in 1973 to be become its so-called "New International Economic Order."In the ensuing 41 years, the modern expression of Technocracy and the New International Economic Order is clearly seen in global programs such as Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Councils of Governments, Smart Growth, Smart Grid, Total Awareness surveillance initiatives and more.Wood contends that the only logical outcome of Technocracy is Scientific Dictatorship, as already seen in dystopian literature such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1948), both of whom looked straight into the face of Technocracy when it was still in its infancy.With over 250 footnotes, an extensive bibliography and clarity of writing style, Wood challenges the reader to new levels of insight and understanding into the clear and present danger of Technocracy, and how Americans might be able to reject it once again.

    Not supported by any government or central bank, completely electronic, Bitcoin is a virtual currency based on advanced cryptographic systems. Like the currency he created, the identity of Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto is virtual, existing only online. The Nakamoto persona, which may represent an individual or a group, exists only in the online publications that introduced and explained Bitcoin during its earliest days. Here, collected and professionally published for the first time are the essential writings that detail Bitcoin's creation. Included are:-Satoshi Nakamoto Emails and Posts on Computer Forums Presented in Chronological Order -Bitcoin Fundamentals Presented in Layman's Terms -Bitcoin's Potential and Profound Economic Implications -The Seminal Paper Which Started It All The Book of Satoshi provides a convenient way to parse through what Bitcoin's creator wrote over the span of the two years that constituted his "public life" before he disappeared from the Internet . . . at least under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Beginning on November 1st 2009 with the publication of the seminal paper describing Bitcoin, this public life ends at about the time PC World speculated as to a possible link between Bitcoin and WikiLeaks, the infamous website that publishes leaked classified materials. Was there a connection? You be the judge. Nakamoto's true identity may never be known. Therefore the writings reproduced here are probably all the world will ever hear from him concerning Bitcoin's creation, workings, and theoretical basis. Want to learn more about Bitcoin? Go directly to the source-the writings of the creator himself, Satoshi Nakamoto!

    Author and leading economist Richard Koo explains the unique political and economic pitfalls that stand in the way of recovery from this rare type of recession that was largely overlooked by economists. Koo anticipated the current predicament in the West long before others and issued warnings in his previous books: Balance Sheet Recession and The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics. This new book illustrates how history is repeating itself in Europe while the United States, which learnt from the Japanese experience, is doing better by avoiding the fiscal cliff. However, because of the liberal dosage of quantitative easing already implemented, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan may face a treacherous path to normalcy in what Koo calls the QE Trap. He argues that it is necessary to understand balance sheet recession in order to resolve the Eurozone crisis, particularly the competitiveness problems. Koo issues warnings against those who are too ready to argue for structural reforms when the problems are actually with balance sheets. He re-examines Japan's two decades of experiences with this rare recession and offers an insider view on the Abenomics. On China, readers will gain a very different historical perspective as Koo argues that western commentators have forgotten their own history when they talk about the re-balancing of the Chinese economy. Learn from Japan which experienced the same predicament afflicting the West fifteen years earlier Discover how unwinding of quantitative easing will affect the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, as well as the emerging world Examine solutions to the Eurozone problems caused by two balance sheet recessions eight years apart Gain insight into China's problems from the West's own experiences with urbanisation Koo, who developed the concept of balance sheet recession based on Japan's experience, took the revolution in macroeconomics started by John Maynard Keynes in 1936 to a new height. The Escape from Balance Sheet Recession and the QE Trap offers the world cure for balance sheet recession.

    Funk shows us that the best way to understand the catastrophe of global warming is to see it through the eyes of those who see it most clearly—as a market opportunity.Global warming’s physical impacts can be separated into three broad categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Funk travels to two dozen countries to profile entrepreneurial people who see in each of these forces a potential windfall. The melt is a boon for newly arable, mineral-rich regions of the Arctic, such as Greenland—and for the surprising kings of the manmade snow trade, the Israelis. The process of desalination, vital to Israel’s survival, can produce a snowlike by-product that alpine countries use to prolong their ski season.Drought creates opportunities for private firefighters working for insurance companies in California as well as for fund managers backing south Sudanese warlords who control local farmland. As droughts raise food prices globally, there is no more precious asset.The deluge—the rising seas, surging rivers, and superstorms that will threaten island nations and coastal cities—has been our most distant concern, but after Hurricane Sandy and failure after failure to cut global carbon emissions, it is not so distant. For Dutch architects designing floating cities and American scientists patenting hurricane defenses, the race is on. For low-lying countries like Bangladesh, the coming deluge presents an existential threat.Funk visits the front lines of the melt, the drought, and the deluge to make a human accounting of the booming business of global warming. By letting climate change continue unchecked, we are choosing to adapt to a warming world. Containing the resulting surge will be big business; some will benefit, but much of the planet will suffer. McKenzie Funk has investigated both sides, and what he has found will shock us all. To understand how the world is preparing to warm, Windfall follows the money.

    After filing his last column in 2011, he set off on a journey across the country to report on Americans who were being left behind in an economy that has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. The portraits of those he encountered fuel his new book, Losing Our Way. Herbert’s combination of heartrending reporting and keen political analysis is the purest expression since the Occupy movement of the plight of the 99 percent.     The individuals and families who are paying the price of America’s bad choices in recent decades form the book’s emotional center: an exhausted high school student in Brooklyn who works the overnight shift in a factory at minimum wage to help pay her family’s rent; a twenty-four-year-old soldier from Peachtree City, Georgia, who loses both legs in a misguided, mismanaged, seemingly endless war; a young woman, only recently engaged, who suffers devastating injuries in a tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis; and a group of parents in Pittsburgh who courageously fight back against the politicians who decimated funding for their children’s schools.     Herbert reminds us of a time in America when unemployment was low, wages and profits were high, and the nation’s wealth, by current standards, was distributed much more equitably. Today, the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has widened dramatically, the nation’s physical plant is crumbling, and the inability to find decent work is a plague on a generation. Herbert traces where we went wrong and spotlights the drastic and dangerous shift of political power from ordinary Americans to the corporate and financial elite. Hope for America, he argues, lies in a concerted push to redress that political imbalance. Searing and unforgettable, Losing Our Way ultimately inspires with its faith in ordinary citizens to take back their true political power and reclaim the American dream.From the Hardcover edition.

    Think Like a Commoner dispels such prejudices by explaining the rich history and promising future of the commons—an ageless paradigm of cooperation and fairness that is re-making our world.With graceful prose and dozens of fascinating stories, David Bollier describes the quiet revolution that is pioneering practical forms of self-governance and production controlled by people themselves. Think Like a Commoner explains how the commons:Is an exploding field of DIY innovation ranging from Wikipedia and seed-sharing to community forests, collaborative consumption, and beyond Challenges the standard narrative of market economics by explaining how cooperation generates significant value and human fulfillment Provides a framework of law and social action that can help us move beyond the pathologies of neoliberal capitalismWe have a choice: ignore the commons and suffer the ongoing private plunder of our common wealth, or Think Like a Commoner and learn how to rebuild our society and reclaim our shared inheritance. This accessible, comprehensive introduction to the commons will surprise and enlighten you, and provoke you to action.David Bollier is an author, activist, blogger, and independent scholar. He is the author of six books on different aspects of the commons, including Green Governance, The Wealth of the Commons, and Viral Spiral, and is a frequent speaker at conferences, colleges and universities, and policy workshops.

    She unravels the multi-generational blood, intermarriage, and protégé relationships that have confined national influence to a privileged cluster of people. These families and individuals recycle their power through elected office and private channels in Washington, DC.All the Presidents' Bankers sheds new light on pivotal historic events—such as why, after the Panic of 1907, America's dominant bankers convened to fashion the Federal Reserve System; how J. P. Morgan's ambitions motivated President Wilson during World War I; how Chase and National City Bank chairmen worked secretly with President Roosevelt to rescue capitalism during the Great Depression while J.P. Morgan Jr. invited Roosevelt's son yachting; and how American financiers collaborated with President Truman to construct the World Bank and IMF after World War II.Prins divulges how, through the Cold War and Vietnam era, presidents and bankers pushed America's superpower status and expansion abroad, while promoting broadly democratic values and social welfare at home. But from the 1970s, Wall Street's rush to secure Middle East oil profits altered the nature of political-financial alliances. Bankers' profit motive trumped heritage and allegiance to public service, while presidents lost control over the economy—as was dramatically evident in the financial crisis of 2008.This unprecedented history of American power illuminates how the same financiers retained their authoritative position through history, swaying presidents regardless of party affiliation. All the Presidents' Bankers explores the alarming global repercussions of a system lacking barriers between public office and private power. Prins leaves us with an ominous choice: either we break the alliances of the power elite, or they will break us.

    Few people think of gangs as sophisticated organizations (often with elaborate written constitutions) that regulate the prison black market, adjudicate conflicts, and strategically balance the competing demands of inmates, gang members, and correctional officers. Yet as David Skarbek argues, gangs form to create order among outlaws, producing alternative governance institutions to facilitate illegal activity. He uses economics to explore the secret world of the convict culture, inmate hierarchy, and prison gang politics, and to explain why prison gangs form, how formal institutions affect them, and why they have a powerful influence over crime even beyond prison walls. The ramifications of his findings extend far beyond the seemingly irrational and often tragic society of captives. They also illuminate how social and political order can emerge in conditions where the traditional institutions of governance do not exist.

    The explanations are illustrated with simple diagrams, making the concepts easy to "see". The explanations are targeted to the "non-economist" with a serious interest in the current debate about fiscal policies and National Budgets.

    Therefore, to survive economically, our middle class needs and deserves a supplementary source of nonlabor income. To meet this need, Barnes proposes to give every American a share of the wealth we own together starting with our air and financial infrastructure. These shares would pay dividends of several thousand dollars per year money that wouldn t be welfare or wealth redistribution but legitimate property income."

    Digital game players happily pay for avatars, power-ups, and other game items. But behind every virtual sale, there is a virtual economy, simple or complex. In this book, Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova introduce the basic concepts of economics into the game developer's and game designer's toolkits. Lehdonvirta and Castronova explain how the fundamentals of economics—markets, institutions, and money—can be used to create or analyze economies based on artificially scarce virtual goods. They focus on virtual economies in digital games, but also touch on serious digital currencies such as Bitcoin as well as virtual economies that emerge in social media around points, likes, and followers. The theoretical emphasis is on elementary microeconomic theory, with some discussion of behavioral economics, macroeconomics, sociology of consumption, and other social science theories relevant to economic behavior.Topics include the rational choice model of economic decision making; information goods versus virtual goods; supply, demand, and market equilibrium; monopoly power; setting prices; and externalities. The book will enable developers and designers to create and maintain successful virtual economies, introduce social scientists and policy makers to the power of virtual economies, and provide a useful guide to economic fundamentals for students in other disciplines.

    The cure is a radical one because, as the book incontrovertibly shows, the many problems that confront us today are no accident. They stem from the nature of government itself. Only peaceful cooperation based on the free market can rescue us from our present plight.Against the State is written by Lew Rockwell, the founder of the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com, and the closest friend and associate of Murray Rothbard, the leading theorist of anarcho-capitalism. Rockwell applies Rothbard’s combination of individualist anarchism and Austrian economics to contemporary America. The book shows how the government is based on war, both against foreign nations and against the American people themselves, through massive invasions of our liberties. Fueled by an out-of-control banking system, the American State has become in essence fascist. We cannot escape our predicament through limited government: the government is incapable of controlling itself. Only a purely private social order can save us, and Rockwell succinctly sets out how an anarcho-capitalist order would work.

    Not since W. E. B. Du Bois's 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes' Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing.To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops' articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation's history.

    This book explains: 1. How to exempt yourself from Obamacare without having to pay a tax for being uninsured 2. How to find alternative types of coverage that are far less expensive than conventional insurance 3. How to find doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, and other medical providers that provide big discounts for cash payment 4. How to avoid the sky-high healthcare prices that unsuspecting self-pay patients are often charged The Self-Pay Patient is a resource for anybody who wants or needs to pay directly for their own healthcare, including the uninsured as well as people with high-deductible health insurance. This is the real survival guide for anyone who wants to opt out of Obamacare, and can save individuals and families thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars a year!

    This book starts with the notion of potential outcomes, each corresponding to the outcome that would be realized if a subject were exposed to a particular treatment or regime. In this approach, causal effects are comparisons of such potential outcomes. The fundamental problem of causal inference is that we can only observe one of the potential outcomes for a particular subject. The authors discuss how randomized experiments allow us to assess causal effects and then turn to observational studies. They lay out the assumptions needed for causal inference and describe the leading analysis methods, including, matching, propensity-score methods, and instrumental variables. Many detailed applications are included, with special focus on practical aspects for the empirical researcher.

    Probably even before 2020, the world’s financial system will need to find a different anchor. The dollar has been at the center of the monetary system since the Second World War, but decades of money printing have caused a gradual but relentless dollar devaluation. In a desperate attempt to maintain this dollar system, the United States has waged a secret war on gold since the 1960s. China and Russia have pierced through the American smokescreen around gold and the dollar and are no longer willing to continue lending to the United States. Both countries have been accumulating enormous amounts of gold, positioning themselves for the next phase of the global financial system. There are only two options: a financial reset planned well in advance, or a hastily implemented one on the back of a dollar crisis. The United States, realizing the dollar will lose its prominent role, seems to be planning a monetary reset that will surprise many. It will be designed to keep the United States in the driving seat, but will include strong roles for the Euro and China’s Renminbi. And it is likely gold will be reintroduced as one of the pillars of this next phase of the global financial system. Insiders claim gold could be revalued up to $7,000 per troy ounce during this process.

    While markets are essential to enable individual choice, they cannot be self-regulating because they require ongoing state action. Furthermore, they cannot by themselves provide such necessities of social existence as education, health care, social and personal security, and the right to earn a livelihood. When these public goods are subjected to market principles, social life is threatened and major crises ensue.Despite these theoretical flaws, market principles are powerfully seductive because they promise to diminish the role of politics in civic and social life. Because politics entails coercion and unsatisfying compromises among groups with deep conflicts, the wish to narrow its scope is understandable. But like Marx's theory that communism will lead to a "withering away of the State," the ideology that free markets can replace government is just as utopian and dangerous.

    The book is a heartfelt and often humorous account of a foreigner's life-changing journey in the Philippines. Whether in prisons, conflict areas or dangerous slums, Thomas became inspired by countless heroes that share one common dream -- to build a nation in which no Filipino is ever again left behind.

    The ability to operate a fraudulent credit and loan system has long been known, and through all the slickness of a snake-oil salesman, the money-lenders - the same types Jesus whipped from the Temple - have persuaded governments that banking is best left to private interests. Many wars, revolutions, depressions, recessions, and other social upheavals, have been directly related to the determination of these money-lenders to retain and extend their power and profits. When any state, individual or idea has threatened their scam they have often responded with wars and revolutions. The cultural and material progress of a civilization will often relate to the degree by which it is free from the influence of debt, and the degradation that results when the money-lenders are permitted to regain power. Hence, Goodson shows that both World Wars, the Napoleonic wars, the American Revolution, the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the overthrow of Qathafi in Libya and the revolution against Tsar Nicholas, among much else relate to this "Hidden Hand" in history. This is the key to understanding the past, present and future.

    It further urges an immediate worldwide mobilization to replace the energy source in every car, truck, tractor, ship, airplane, and house on Earth in seven years in a desperate effort to save the planet from further overheating. The book blasts government secrecy, and more than 65 years of supposed lies and disinformation, and demands full disclosure of what they know about visitors from other realms and their technology and the extent of their collaboration, including any treaties that may have been signed by them. With more than 65 years of participation in and observation of political and economic systems—beginning with the Great Depression, extending through World War II, the postwar era of hope for a better life, the Cold War, the subjugation of democracy by oligarchy, and the subtle but continuous militarization of America—Paul T. Hellyer analyzes what he believes has gone wrong with the world and its economy and suggests radical measures to introduce a universal culture of peace and cooperation.

    Have we fallen for the myth of the undeserving poor?

    If you would like to purchase both the physical text and MyEconLab, search for ISBN-10: 0133578038 / ISBN-13: 9780133578034. That package includes ISBN-10: 0321391578 / ISBN-13: 9780321391575 and ISBN-10: 0133498948 / ISBN-13: 9780133498943.MyEconLab should only be purchased when required by an instructor. -- For courses in Principles of MicroeconomicsAcemoglu, Laibson, List: An evidence-based approach to economics Throughout Microeconomics, authors Daron Acemoglu, David Laibson, and John List use real economic questions and data to help students learn about the world around them.Taking a fresh approach, the authors use the themes of optimization, equilibrium and empiricism to illustrate the power of simple economic ideas, and their ability to explain, predict, and improve what happens in the world. Each chapter begins with an empirical question that is later answered using data in the Evidence-Based Economics feature. As a result of the text's practical emphasis, students will learn to apply economic principles to guide the decisions they make in their own lives.Also available with MyEconLab(R) This title is also available with MyEconLab -- an online homework, tutorial, and assessment program designed to work with this text to engage students and improve results. Within its structured environment, students practice what they learn, test their understanding, and pursue a personalized study plan that helps them better absorb course material and understand difficult concepts. Students, if interested in purchasing this title with MyEconLab, ask your instructor for the correct package ISBN and Course ID. Instructors, contact your Pearson representative for more information.

    All it takes is a basic understanding of what enhances the pleasure for human beings and what reduces their pain. We all have, for example, used the ATM to withdraw cash, sometime or the other. Consider a situation where a person visiting the ATM doesn't have to bother to key-in the amount he needs; the ATM recognizes him and hands him the money basis his identified needs. "Heart, Mind & Wallet" aims to highlight the handiness of insights, while - at the same time - capturing their potential, bringing into focus, in the context, how certain thought-leaders have used them to create winning stories.Consider a company leveraging expiry date for pillows to increase the sales of the product by more than 300%. Also, consider a company bridging the gap between ice-cream parlours and consumers and re-writing the way, ice-cream is consumed in India. This well-researched book throws light on some innate human factors, which - while being ridiculously entertaining - are also capable of defining success or failure of a brand. The book has been written in a fairly easy to understand language and, explains everything with loads of exciting stories and marketing examples (largely in Indian context).

    Sowell's remarkable intellectual career; as well as those who have yet to experience his cognitive clarity, rarity, and dexterity. Carefully sorted by topic, over 30 years of unmatched writing from his numerous books and widely popular op-eds are now at your fingertips. The Best of Thomas Sowell is a resource you will turn to time and time again for inspiration and quotation of the paradoxical facts and wisdom that only Dr. Sowell can provide.

    economy. Today, on the list of big business's priorities, sustaining the employer-worker relationship ranks far below building a devoted customer base and delivering value to investors. As David Weil's groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another. The result has been declining wages, eroding benefits, inadequate health and safety conditions, and ever-widening income inequality.From the perspectives of CEOs and investors, fissuring--splitting off functions that were once managed internally--has been a phenomenally successful business strategy, allowing companies to become more streamlined and drive down costs. Despite giving up direct control to subcontractors, vendors, and franchises, these large companies have figured out how to maintain quality standards and protect the reputation of the brand. They produce brand-name products and services without the cost of maintaining an expensive workforce. But from the perspective of workers, this lucrative strategy has meant stagnation in wages and benefits and a lower standard of living--if they are fortunate enough to have a job at all.Weil proposes ways to modernize regulatory policies and laws so that employers can meet their obligations to workers while allowing companies to keep the beneficial aspects of this innovative business strategy.

    It explains how these sweatshops provide the best available opportunity to workers and how they play an important role in the process of development that eventually leads to better wages and working conditions. Using economic theory, the author argues that much of what the anti-sweatshop movement has agitated for would actually harm the very workers they intend to help by creating less desirable alternatives and undermining the process of development. Nowhere does this book put "profits" or "economic efficiency" above people. Improving the welfare of poorer citizens of third world countries is the goal, and the book explores which methods best achieve that goal. Out of Poverty will help readers understand how activists and policy makers can help third world workers.

    Most of recent economists' bibles don't bring anything new to the table other than beautiful tables. Instead of reviving the neglected debate around socio-economic inequality, their misfires add to the cacophony that already existed and their childish solutions to socio-economic injustice, either Robin Hood or Give a dog a bone approaches, make their books as useful as a paperweight. Do we need an Economic Jihad? What can you say about the boring cock-fights between Capitalism deities of our time? You should be as disgusted as I am of these clown shows that chip away the substance of economic disparity dialogues. I have left to the class of economist sloppy cerebral sloths, to tiptoeing around of serious issues. Instead, you, the reader, and I will be swimming against the torrent current. Chapter one through six are exhibits of the case against the current status quo, Capitalism. And if I see you on the other side of chapter seven, please hold my hand tightly from chapter eight through ten. Take your time to digest chapter eleven and get yourself prepared for a big slap to your face. On the closing argument, chapter twelve follows through James Tobin's recommendation: "Good papers in economics contain surprises and stimulate further work." `

    Cunningham uses Rand’s biography to illuminate the policies that led to the economic crash in the U.S. and in Europe, and how her philosophy continues to affect today’s politics and policies, starting with her most noted disciple, economist Alan Greenspan (former chairman of the Federal Reserve). Cunningham also shows how right-wing conservatives, libertarians, and the Tea Party movement have co-opted Rand’s teachings (and inherent contradictions) to promote personal gain and profit at the expense of the middle class. Tackling the complexities of economics by distilling them down to a series of concepts accessible to all age groups, Cunningham ultimately delivers a devastating analysis of our current economic world.

    In the last few years it has generated a number of new approaches. One of the most promising - complexity economics - was pioneered in the 1980s and 1990s by a small team at the Santa Fe Institute. Economist and complexity theorist W. Brian Arthur led that team, and inthis book he collects many of his articles on this new approach. The traditional framework sees behavior in the economy as in an equilibrium steady state. People in the economy face well-defined problems and use perfect deductive reasoning to base their actions on. The complexity framework, bycontrast, sees the economy as always in process, always changing. People try to make sense of the situations they face using whatever reasoning they have at hand, and together create outcomes they must individually react to anew. The resulting economy is not a well-ordered machine, but a complexevolving system that is imperfect, perpetually constructing itself anew, and brimming with vitality.The new vision complements and widens the standard one, and it helps answer many questions: Why does the stock market show moods and a psychology? Why do high-tech markets tend to lock in to the dominance of one or two very large players? How do economies form, and how do they continually alter instructure over time?The papers collected here were among the first to use evolutionary computation, agent-based modeling, and cognitive psychology. They cover topics as disparate as how markets form out of beliefs; how technology evolves over the long span of time; why systems and bureaucracies get more complicated asthey evolve; and how financial crises can be foreseen and prevented in the future.

    It'll give you a firmer grasp of the essential trading rules and skills. This Study Guide, based on the bestselling trading book of all time, was created by its author to help you master the key points of his classic book.The Study Guide's 170 multiple-choice questions are divided into 11 chapters, each with its own rating scale. They cover the entire range of trading topics, from psychology to system design, from risk management to becoming an organized trader. Each question is linked to a specific chapter in the main book, while the Answers section functions like a mini-textbook. It doesn't just tell you that A is right or B is wrong--it provides extensive comments on both the correct and incorrect answers.This Study Guide also contains 17 charts that challenge you to recognize various trading signals and patterns. Everything is designed to help you become a better trader.Consider getting two books as a package--the Study Guide and The New Trading for a Living. They're designed to work together as a unique educational tool. The Study Guide for The New Trading for a Living is a valuable resource for any trader who wants to achieve sustainable market success.

    Prior to the financial crisis, mainstream economics argued simultaneously for small government on taxation, regulation and spending, but big government on monetary policy. After the financial crisis, economics is now arguing for more government spending and for less government spending. The premise of this book is that the internal inconsistencies between economic theories - the apparently unresolvable debates between leading economists and the incoherent policies of our governments - are symptomatic of economics being in a crisis. Specifically, in a scientific crisis. The good news is that, thanks to the work of scientist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, we know what needs to be done to fix a scientific crisis. Moreover, there are two scientists in particular whose ideas could show how to do this for economics: Charles Darwin, the man who discovered evolution, and William Harvey, doctor to King Charles I and the first man to understand blood flow and the workings of the human heart. In Money, Blood and Revolution, bestselling financial writer George Cooper explains how the ideas of Darwin and Harvey could revolutionise economics, making it more scientific and understandable, and might even reveal the true origin of economic growth and inequality. Taking readers on a gripping tour of scientific revolution, social upheaval and the secrets of money and debt, this is an unmissable read for anyone curious to understand how the world really works - and the amazing future of economics. #autoshambles

    But the meeting at Bretton Woods in 1944 was different. It was the only time countries from around the world have agreed to overhaul the structure of the international monetary system. Against all odds, they were successful. The system they set up presided over the longest, strongest and most stable period of growth the world economy has ever seen. Its demise some decades later was at least partly responsible for the periodic economic crises that culminated in the financial collapse of the 2000s.But what everyone has always assumed to be a dry economic conference was in fact replete with drama. The delegates spent half the time at each other's throats and the other half drinking in the hotel bar. The Russians nearly capsized the entire project. The French threatened to walk out, repeatedly. All the while war in Europe raged on.At the very heart of the conference was the love-hate relationship between the Briton John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of his day, who suffered a heart attack at the conference itself and who was a true worldwide celebrity - and his American counterpart Harry Dexter White (later revealed to be passing information secretly to Russian spies). Both were intent on creating an economic settlement which would put right the wrongs of Versailles. Both were working to prevent another world war. But they were also working to defend their countries' national interests.Drawing on a wealth of unpublished accounts, diaries and oral histories, this brilliant book describes the conference in stunning color and clarity. Bringing to life the characters, events and economics and written with exceptional verve and narrative pace, this is an extraordinary debut from a talented new historian.

    It provides an exhaustive account of post-Keynesian economics and of the developments that have occurred in post-Keynesian theory and in the world economy over the last twenty years. Topics covered include open-economy issues, the methodological foundations of heterodox economics, consumer theory, firms and pricing, money and credit, effective demand and employment, inflation theory, and growth theories.

    May everything you thought you knew about investing be wrong? The Austrian School’s approach provides the needed respite for investors caught in inflationary treadmills. Conventional investment experts often overlook economic developments which may become a hazard for mainstream investors. Instead, the Austrian School of Economics has proved itself as an independent approach beyond the interests of politicians and bankers. The financial system is shaking. This book presents new paths through the shaky grounds between the tectonic plates of inflation and deflation to both private and professional investors. "This book is a must-have for every responsible investor!" (Felix W. Zulauf, Investor) "I am grateful to the authors of this book for not only highlighting the fundamental principles of the Austrian School but also for showing how investors can make practical use of them. " (Dr. Marc Faber, Investor) "For the first time an extensive compendium has been published in which the theoretical foundations developed by the 'Austrians' have been made useful for the investor's practical needs. The authors develop a remarkable 'Austrian investment philosophy'." (Prof. Guido Hülsmann, University of Angers) "The Austrian School’s perception helps us to see long-term patterns and opportunities that today are often hidden. […] For the authors and their important work I hope for the widest possible audience of a bestseller." (Prince Philipp von und zu Liechtenstein, Chairman LGT Group)

    In this volume political leaders, scholars, and policymakers assess the lessons learned from the “great rebirth” of capitalism, highlighting the policies that were the most successful in helping countries make the transition to stable and prosperous market economies, as well as those cases of countries reverting to political and economic authoritarianism. The authors of these essays conclude that visionary leadership, and a willingness to take bold and comprehensive steps, achieved the best outcomes, and that privatization of state-owned enterprises and deregulation were essential to success. Recent backsliding, such as the reversal of economic and democratic reforms in Russia and Hungary, has cast a shadow over the legacy of the transition a quarter century ago, however.

    After doing hundreds of deals, the nation's most highly sought after expert reveals his exact system to find, analyze, renovate and sell houses earning $25,000 (or more per deal). From construction worker to millionaire, Jerry not only shows you his comprehensive, step-by step system to flip 40 deals (or more) per year in any market, regardless of expertise or experience, you will also learn how to: • Set up follow a step-by-step systematic approach to each aspect of the business • Beat the competition to the best deals • Consistently find deals each and every month • Accurately estimate repair costs on any deal in 15 minutes or less • Identify the ideal property and area to flip houses • Sell your properties in 30 days or less • Renovate a home with no delays even if you have no experience • Select the exact materials and the design to attract the ideal buyer • Organize and maintain a budget • Effectively find and manage the best subcontractors to do all the work • Determine the precise after-repair value (ARV) of any deal • Find unlimited sources of other people’s money (OPM) to fund your deals • Put the system and team in place to leverage your time (remove yourself from the model) Finally a practical, easy to follow approach to flipping houses. With dozens of examples and case studies, you finally have the blueprint to make a million dollars a year flipping houses...

    It looks like a convention of human exchange - a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. Associeties change the way they create money, they change the market itself - along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it.One particularly dramatic transformation in money's design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government monopolized money's creation. The Crown sold people coin for a fee in exchange for silver and gold. 'Commodity money' was a fragile and difficult medium; the first half ofthe book considers the kinds of exchange and credit it invited, as well as the politics it engendered. Capitalism arrived when the English reinvented money at the end of the 17th century. When it established the Bank of England, the government shared its monopoly over money creation for the firsttime with private investors, institutionalizing their self-interest as the pump that would produce the money supply. The second half of the book considers the monetary revolution that brought unprecedented possibilities and problems. The invention of circulating public debt, the breakdown ofcommodity money, the rise of commercial bank currency, and the coalescence of ideological commitments that came to be identified with the Gold Standard - all contributed to the abundant and unstable medium that is modern money. All flowed as well from a collision between the individual incentivesand public claims at the heart of the system. The drama had constitutional dimension: money, as its history reveals, is a mode of governance in a material world. That character undermines claims in economics about money's neutrality. The monetary design innovated in England would later spread, producing the global architecture of modern money.

    Both occurred against the backdrop of sharp credit booms, dubious banking practices, and a fragile and unstable global financial system. When markets went into cardiac arrest in 2008, policymakers invoked the lessons of the Great Depression in attempting to avert the worst. While their response prevented a financial collapse and catastrophic depression like that of the 1930s, unemployment in the U.S. and Europe still rose to excruciating high levels. Pain and suffering were widespread.The question, given this, is why didn't policymakers do better? Hall of Mirrors, Barry Eichengreen's monumental twinned history of the two crises, provides the farthest-reaching answer to this question to date. Alternating back and forth between the two crises and between North America and Europe, Eichengreen shows how fear of another Depression following the collapse of Lehman Brothers shaped policy responses on both continents, with both positive and negative results. Since bank failures were a prominent feature of the Great Depression, policymakers moved quickly to strengthen troubled banks. But because derivatives markets were not important in the 1930s, they missed problems in the so-called shadow banking system. Having done too little to support spending in the 1930s, governments also ramped up public spending this time around. But the response was indiscriminate and quickly came back to haunt overly indebted governments, particularly in Southern Europe. Moreover, because politicians overpromised, and because their measures failed to stave off a major recession, a backlash quickly developed against activist governments and central banks. Policymakers then prematurely succumbed to the temptation to return to normal policies before normal conditions had returned. The result has been a grindingly slow recovery in the United States and endless recession in Europe.Hall of Mirrors is both a major work of economic history and an essential exploration of how we avoided making only some of the same mistakes twice. It shows not just how the lessons of Great Depression history continue to shape society's response to contemporary economic problems, but also how the experience of the Great Recession will permanently change how we think about the Great Depression.

    The central question – how do we get more money to continue with our current approach – fails to adequately explain why our current approach has left us lacking funds in the first place. Political leaders say they want a “world class transportation system” but are not able to explain, in any credible way, how to bring that vision about. A World Class Transportation System explains why we are stuck, the consensus principles that can unite Americans and the practical – albeit paradigm-shifting – approach that can be used to build the highways, transit systems and local transportation investments we need to be economically competitive.

    His regular sterling wit and pithy insights are combined with his own unique brand of cartoons, which, as he describes, “are about what I would have produced in my childhood, had I started drinking that early.” He expertly wields his humor to tackle standard libertarian irritants, from indignity over needing a Segway license, to the spectacular failure of cupcake regulation, farm bills, the Drug War, and social intolerance. Heaton tackles his subjects with a fresh and upbeat attitude, as if Dave Barry were running for Congress.” – Last House Standing Books

    Only the second revolution in accounting since double-entry bookkeeping began, it is of seismic proportions, driven by the 2008 financial crash and our ongoing environmental crisis. The changes it will wreak are profound and far-reaching and not only will transform the way the world does business but also will alter the nature of capitalism.While the wealth of nations and corporations has been vital to the global economy, increasingly the world is coming to realize that such endless growth is limited by the earth's resources and comes at a huge price to the planet and to human well-being. It simply cannot be sustained.This revolution demands that we go beyond merely accounting for traditional financial and industrial capital and take account of the benefits and detriments to the natural world and society. It urges us to include four new categories of wealth: intellectual (such as intellectual property), human (skills, productivity, and health), social and relationship (shared norms and values), and natural (environment). Making them part of our financial statements and GDP figures may be the only way to address the many calamities we face.Just two years ago this revolution seemed idealistic and unlikely. Today it is quickly unfolding. In 2012, the sea-change year, two key initiatives took root: an international movement to transform how corporate accounting is calculated and the rise of incorporating the effects on the environment to the accounting of national and global economies. Six Capitals tells the story of this coming new age in capitalism, evaluating its promise and the disaster that lies ahead if it is not implemented.

    America's entitlement state is threatening to bankrupt us, and new schemes such as ObamaCare are hastening the collapse. What should we do? In this provocative look at America before and after Social Security, Don Watkins argues that the answer is as simple as it is controversial: Abolish the entitlement state, starting with the retirement program that created it. This is not another book for policy wonks about the financial trouble the entitlement state is in. This is the story of the role that Social Security has played in eroding the eagerness, energy, and optimism that once defined America. And it is a guide for fighting back.

    Lending to the Borrower from Hell looks at one famous case--the debts and defaults of Philip II of Spain. Ruling over one of the largest and most powerful empires in history, King Philip defaulted four times. Yet he never lost access to capital markets and could borrow again within a year or two of each default. Exploring the shrewd reasoning of the lenders who continued to offer money, Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth analyze the lessons from this important historical example. Using detailed new evidence collected from sixteenth-century archives, Drelichman and Voth examine the incentives and returns of lenders. They provide powerful evidence that in the right situations, lenders not only survive despite defaults--they thrive. Drelichman and Voth also demonstrate that debt markets cope well, despite massive fluctuations in expenditure and revenue, when lending functions like insurance. The authors unearth unique sixteenth-century loan contracts that offered highly effective risk sharing between the king and his lenders, with payment obligations reduced in bad times. A fascinating story of finance and empire, Lending to the Borrower from Hell offers an intelligent model for keeping economies safe in times of sovereign debt crises and defaults.

    These narrators — including phone manufacturers in China, copper miners in Zambia, garment workers in Bangladesh, and farmers around the world — reveal the secret history of the things we buy, including lives and communities devastated by low wages, environmental degradation, and political repression. Sweeping in scope and rich in detail, these stories capture the interconnectivity of all people struggling to support themselves and their families. Narrators include Kalpona, a leading Bangladeshi labor organizer who led her first strike at 15; Han, who, as a teenager, began assembling circuit boards for an international electronics company based in Seoul; Albert, a copper miner in Zambia who, during a wage protest, was shot by representatives of the Chinese-owned mining company that he worked for; and Sanjay, who grew up in the shadow of the Bhopal chemical disaster, one of the worst industrial accidents in history.

    Author Edward D. Kleinbard explains how the public's preoccupation with tax policy alone has obscured any understanding of government's ability to complement the private sector through investment and insuranceprograms that enhance the general welfare and prosperity of our society at large.He argues that when we choose how government should spend and tax, we open a window into our fiscal soul, because those choices are the means by which we express the values we cherish and the regard in which we hold our fellow citizens. Though these values are being diminished by short-sighteddecisions to starve government, strategic government spending can directly make citizens happier, healthier, and even wealthier.Expertly combining the latest economic research with his insider knowledge of the budget process into a simple yet compelling narrative, he unmasks the tax mythologies and false arguments that too often dominate contemporary discourse about budget policies. Large quantities of comparative data aresuccinctly distilled to situate the United States among its peer countries, so that readers can judge for themselves whether contemporary budget choices really reflect our aspirational fiscal soul.Kleinbard's presentation takes a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on economics, finance, law, political science and moral philosophy. He uniquely weaves economic research and moral philosophy together by emphasizing our welfare, not just our national income, and by contrasting the actual beliefsof Adam Smith, a great moral philosopher, with the cartoon version of the man presented by proponents of the most extreme forms of private market triumphalism.

    It offers a complete overview including sections on: retail banking, investment banking, international banking, regulation, assests, liabilities and capital, bond markets, swaps and derivatives.

    So how can we achieve a truly free-market system, especially at this historical moment when capitalism seems to be in crisis?The answer, says John C. Médaille, is to stop pretending that economics is something on the order of the physical sciences; it must be a humane science, taking into account crucial social contexts. Toward a Truly Free Market argues that any attempt to divorce economic equilibrium from economic equity will lead to an unbalanced economy—one that falls either to ruin or to ruinous government attempts to redress the balance.In Toward a Truly Free Market, Médaille not only points out the problems, but also offers viable solutions, showing how we can:Slash the federal budget by halfReduce the tax code from nine million words to a couple of pagesDrastically curb the government’s sprawling bureaucracyManage natural resources safely, while cutting the budget in halfEnd the bailoutsReally reform the health care systemAnd much moreIn Toward a Truly Free Market, Médaille makes a refreshingly clear case for the economic theory—and practice—known as distributism. Unlike many of his fellow distributists, who argue primarily from moral terms, Médaille enters the economic debate on purely economic terms.

    The warning signs are clear, and the collapse of the Zimbabwean dollar after years of rampant money printing is a frightening example of what lies in store for world economies if painful reform is not executed. When Money Destroys Nations tells the gripping story of the disintegration of the once-thriving Zimbabwean economy and how ordinary people survived in turbulent circumstances. Analysing this case within a global context, Philip Haslam and Russell Lamberti investigate the causes of hyperinflation and draw ominous parallels between Zimbabwe and the world's developed economies. The looming currency crises and hyperinflation in these major economies, particularly the United States, have the potential to turn the current world order upside down. This story of how money destroys nations holds lessons that cannot be ignored.

    It has done this on a model of finance that rejects interest and promotes profit sharing. How is this possible? Yet the wealth potential of Islamic finance is far from being its most attractive feature. What is most compelling about Islamic finance are its ethical principles and strong corporate governance based on Shariah law. This SECOND EDITION explains and updates how conventional financial products work from mortgages and leases to trade finance and insurance before delving into their Islamic versions and contains three new topics on microfinance, the ethical company and wealth succession"

    The essays chronicle how efforts to remove the Saddam regime, initially supported by both major political parties, were cynically abandoned by the Democratic Party whose leaders then conducted a five year campaign against the war while American troops were still on the battlefield.These politicians were, Horowitz shows, acting in concert with "progressives" who, without overtly supporting the Saddam regime as their political ancestors had the Kremlin, were nonetheless resuming the left’s historic role as frontierguards for the enemies of the United States.

    When the wreckage he and his comrades had created became clear to him in the mid-1970s, he left.Three decades of second thoughts made him the Left's principle intellectual antagonist. "For better or worse," as Horowitz wrote in the first volume of his collected conservative writings, "I have been condemned to spend the rest of my days attempting to understand how the left pursues the agendas from which I have separated myself, and why."Volume I of the The Black Book of the American Left reflected on the turbulent years Horowitz spent collaborating with confrontational figures of the radical Left. In Volume II, Horowitz critiques the nature of the progressive outlook and its real-world consequences.

    SECTION–A: ISSUES IN DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING WITH REFERENCE TO INDIA1. The Concept of Growth and Development2. Characteristics of Underdeveloped Countries and the Indian Economy3. Determinants of Development4. Role of Physical and Human Capital Formation in Economic Development5. Development Strategy6. Population–A Challenge for India’s Development7. Some Issues of Population Growth in India8. Employment and Unemployment in India9. Challenge of Poverty10. Economic Inequality in India11. Economic Planning in India: Objectives, Strategy and Achievements12. Financing the Plans13. Saving and Investment in India14. Economic Reforms in India Since 1991 (New Economic Policy)15. Financial Relations Between the Centre and the StatesSECTION–B: SECTORAL ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN ECONOMY16. Agriculture in India: Importance and Growth17. Backwardness of Indian Agriculture: Causes and Remedial Measures18. Land Reforms in India19. New Agricultural Strategy and the Green Revolution20. Agricultural Credit in India21. Agricultural Labour in India22. Agricultural Marketing23. Agricultural Price Policy24. Farm Mechanisation and Choice of Technology25. Industrial Growth in India: Trends, Importance and Problems26. Industrial Policy27. Cottage and Small Scale Industries in India28. Industrial Finance29. Public Sector and Private Sector Enterprises in the Indian Economy30. Foreign Capital and Multinational Corporations in India31. India’s Foreign Trade32. Balance of Payments and Trade Policy33. India and the World Trade Organisation (WTO)34. Price Behaviour and Price Policies in India

    The naked woman having her body painted red and the drum circle, like the media's false reports demonizing the protestors for having sex in their tents and shitting on the sidewalk, were sideshows that distracted from the real meaning of the Occupy Wall Street protest. The city block that encompassed Zuccotti Park was lined with people holding small home-made signs. "Debt is slavery" was a common theme, with special emphasis on student debt. "F**k unpaid internships" was another. There was focus, even if no one could articulate it: This protest was about the conflict between usury and labor. The Occupy Wall Street protestors couldn't articulate their plight because they lacked the moral vocabulary necessary to do so. Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Labor and Usury by E. Michael Jones attempts to return the science of economics back to where Adam Smith found it when he wrote The Wealth of Nations, back to its proper matrix in moral philosophy

    Utilizing these theologically rich resources, an ethics of relational reflection, action, and construction is provided as an avenue for building viable strategies for social transformation.

    On the other hand, you have a city administration that is very costly and incapable of making any social progress.The schools have neither daycare centers nor lunch rooms, and your children have to wade through the mud in the winter in order to come home for lunch.In cities dominated by socialist elements, they make the effort to create means of social education, such as youth clubs, scientific conferences, and so forth.For these reasons we invite you to join us and examine with us those municipal issues that are of greatest interest to you.—Socialists of Bobigny, 1910

    Kids do this each day when they decide which shirt to wear, which TV show to watch or what to eat for lunch. In making these choices, they are using the economic principles of scarcity, supply, demand, opportunity costs and diminishing returns. Now is the perfect time to chat with your child about economics and prominent economist Dr. Arthur Laffer shows you how to get started. Written for families of elementary-age children, Let's Chat About Economics identifies and illustrates basic economic principles through familiar scenarios. This book provides a framework for adults (parents, grandparents and teachers) to discuss economics with young children and continue these observations and conversations throughout life. Children will recognize economics in action through everyday examples like shopping for groceries, planning a family trip, saving allowance and buying the latest, must-have tech gadget. When children understand the basic economic principles, they have a solid foundation of how the world works and can apply the same reasoning to make choices that serve their goals and unique purpose. Don't waste another minute, start chatting about economics with the children in your life today!

    This accessible, thoroughly researched book is Jennifer Taub’s response to such unfounded claims. Drawing on wide-ranging experience as a corporate lawyer, investment firm counsel, and scholar of business law and financial market regulation, Taub chronicles how government officials helped bankers inflate the toxic-mortgage-backed housing bubble, then after the bubble burst ignored the plight of millions of homeowners suddenly facing foreclosure.   Focusing new light on the similarities between the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s and the financial crisis in 2008, Taub reveals that in both cases the same reckless banks, operating under different names, received government bailouts, while the same lax regulators overlooked fraud and abuse. Furthermore, in 2013 the situation is essentially unchanged. The author asserts that the 2008 crisis was not just similar to the S&L scandal, it was a severe relapse of the same underlying disease. And despite modest regulatory reforms, the disease remains uncured: top banks remain too big to manage, too big to regulate, and too big to fail.

    Early Islam made a seminal but largely unrecognized contribution to the history of economic thought; it is the only religion founded by an entrepreneur. Descending from an elite dynasty of religious, civil, and commercial leaders, Muhammad was a successful businessman before founding Islam. As such, the new religion had much to say on trade, consumer protection, business ethics, and property. As Islam rapidly spread across the region so did the economic teachings of early Islam, which eventually made their way to Europe. Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism demonstrates how Islamic institutions and business practices were adopted and adapted in Venice and Genoa. These financial innovations include the invention of the corporation, business management techniques, commercial arithmetic, and monetary reform. There were other Islamic institutions assimilated in Europe: charities, the waqf, inspired trusts, and institutions of higher learning; the madrasas were models for the oldest colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. As such, it can be rightfully said that these essential aspects of capitalist thought all have Islamic roots.

    Yet in Greening the Global Economy, economist Robert Pollin shows that they are attainable through steady, large-scale investments--totaling about 1.5 percent of global GDP on an annual basis--in both energy efficiency and clean renewable energy sources. Not only that: Pollin argues that with the right investments, these efforts will expand employment and drive economic growth.Drawing on years of research, Pollin explores all aspects of the problem: how much energy will be needed in a range of industrialized and developing economies; what efficiency targets should be; and what kinds of industrial policy will maximize investment and support private and public partnerships in green growth so that a clean energy transformation can unfold without broad subsidies.All too frequently, inaction on climate change is blamed on its potential harm to the economy. Pollin shows greening the economy is not only possible but necessary: global economic growth depends on it.

    The model economy for which the theorem could be proved was mapped out in 1954 by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu collaboratively, and by Lionel McKenzie separately, and would become widely known as the “Arrow-Debreu Model.” While Arrow and Debreu would later go on to win separate Nobel prizes in economics, McKenzie would never receive it. Till Düppe and E. Roy Weintraub explore the lives and work of these economists and the issues of scientific credit against the extraordinary backdrop of overlapping research communities and an economics discipline that was shifting dramatically to mathematical modes of expression.Based on recently opened archives, Finding Equilibrium shows the complex interplay between each man’s personal life and work, and examines compelling ideas about scientific credit, publication, regard for different research institutions, and the awarding of Nobel prizes. Instead of asking whether recognition was rightly or wrongly given, and who were the heroes or villains, the book considers attitudes toward intellectual credit and strategies to gain it vis-à-vis the communities that grant it.Telling the story behind the proof of the central theorem in economics, Finding Equilibrium sheds light on the changing nature of the scientific community and the critical connections between the personal and public rewards of scientific work.

    Thomas Fazi argues that European Union (EU) elites have seized on the financial crash to push through damaging neoliberal policies, undermining social cohesion and vital public services. Drawing on a wealth of sources, Fazi argues that the EU’s austerity policies are not simply a case of political and ideological short-sightedness, but part of a long-term project by elites to remove the last remnants of the welfare state and complete the neoliberal project.As well as an urgent critique of the EU and monetary union as currently constituted, The Battle for Europe showcases a programme for progressive reform and outlines how citizens and workers of Europe can radically overhaul EU institutions.

    Retaining the unique 'paradox' approach of the previous editions whereby a series of contrasting viewpoints, readings and cases are provided to invite student and professional discussion and debate, this new edition takes the approach one step further to acknowledge the developmental role which China and India have had in the business world, and includes strategic thinking philosophies from these countries. Unlike many other books on the subject, the philosophy at the heart of Bob de Wit's Strategy text is that an understanding of the topic of strategy can only be gained by grappling with a wider diversity of insights from many prominent thinkers, and the clear recognition that there is no simple answer to the question of what strategy is. This new edition bridges West and East, North and South, with readings, cases, quotes, and insights from around the globe.

    Arguing that nature is niggardly and that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in "perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery," he found himself attacked on all sides--by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. Though Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. This book is at once a major reassessment of Malthus's ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment.Against the ferment of Enlightenment ideals about the perfectibility of mankind and the grim realities of life in the eighteenth century, Robert Mayhew explains the genesis of the Essay and Malthus's preoccupation with birth and death rates. He traces Malthus's collision course with the Lake poets, his important revisions to the Essay, and composition of his other great work, Principles of Political Economy. Mayhew suggests we see the author in his later writings as an environmental economist for his persistent concern with natural resources, land, and the conditions of their use. Mayhew then pursues Malthus's many afterlives in the Victorian world and beyond.Today, the Malthusian dilemma makes itself felt once again, as demography and climate change come together on the same environmental agenda. By opening a new door onto Malthus's arguments and their transmission to the present day, Robert Mayhew gives historical depth to our current planetary concerns.

    Liberal theory explains the relationship between capitalism and poverty as one based around the dichotomy of inclusion (into capitalism) vs exclusion (from capitalism). Within this discourse, the global capitalist system is portrayed as a sphere of economic dynamism and as a source of developmental opportunities for less developed countries and their populations. Development policy should, therefore, seek to integrate the poor into the global capitalist system. The Global Development Crisis challenges this way of thinking. Through an interrogation of some of the most important political economists of the last two centuries Friedrich List, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Schumpeter, Alexander Gerschenkron, Karl Polanyi and Amarta Sen, Selwyn argues that class relations are the central cause of poverty and inequality, within and between countries. In contrast to much development thinking, which portrays 'the poor' as reliant upon benign assistance, this book advocates the concept of labour-centred development. Here 'the poor' are the global labouring classes, and their own collective actions and struggles constitute the basis of an alternative form of non-elitist, bottom-up human development.

    Government programs are failing to meet modern needs. Material progress around the world is proceeding without them. The twentieth century, full of central planning and leviathan control, is being left behind, and a new age is dawning. It is a time of individual empowerment, astonishing entrepreneurial achievement, global communications and engagement, and a breathtaking pursuit of new possibilities. Liberty.me: Freedom Is a Do-It-Yourself Project documents how this is happening now and presents an agenda for liberty-minded individuals to push this further.Consider that most of the technologies that define our lives today — smartphones, email, Internet banking, infinite television and radio, instant knowability of nearly everything, global real-time video communication — didn't even exist just twenty years ago. They weren't even imagined. They are blessings bestowed on us through the combined forces of entrepreneurship, risk taking, enterprising initiative, crowd-sourced cooperation, and the disruptive impulse that seeks to make the world anew. And yet they are far more integral to life than any institution created by politics.This is humanity speaking and acting, one person at a time. All over the world, people are protesting against their rulers in whatever way is possible. This represents a paradigm shift away from despotism and toward the assertion of individual rights to control our own property and self, forming social and economic associations for ourselves. With state systems failing in every direction, this is the trajectory of history in a world of global communication and trade.Breaking through the regimentation of the barriers all around us requires political action and intellectual work, to be sure, but it must not stop there. In fact, these might be the least effective paths toward real change. Building a new liberty requires taking the bold step of actually innovating tools to live freer lives. It means creating and embracing new technologies, modes of communication, educational strategies, life paths, and leveraging the new technologies to build bridges out of the status quo and into a better future. This is an essential stage of any giant social change — the stage in which we stop asking leaders to grant us liberty in law but rather take the step of acting on the liberty that is our right.For too long, people have looked at liberty as something controlled by powerful people to make or take away. We are learning that the future of liberty is something that falls to the hands of those who believe most passionately in it. This is the source of all progress in our time.There are many muses behind this project and this book. Ludwig von Mises provides the economics, Murray Rothbard the ethical drive, Ayn Rand the motive force, Albert Jay Nock the conviction that life works without government, Garet Garrett the eye for the drama of the marketplace, F.A. Hayek the vision of a self-ordering social order, Leonard Read the perception that individuals can create their own liberty, Rose Wilder Lane the intransigent resistance to all forms of authoritarianism, plus a thousand other leading intellectual lights who have prepared the way for a new generation to make real what others could only dream about.The time is now to take the idea of human liberty seriously, not only as a political agenda but a life commitment, a value that drives personal ambitions. This is the essential way to make the structures of oppression that have consumed the social order decay as anachronisms and eventually become irrelevant and obsolete. This happens when the institutions we have created serve society more effectively than the decaying apparatus of coercion and compulsion ever did or can do in the future.

    The former is basic: create a product or service with value and sell it intelligently. Then, reinvest profits for growth. The latter involves leveraging the cost of debt on customers to finance growth. In capitalism, excess corporate debt should be tempered by the implied threat to investors that comes from bad decision-making. However, when investors believe they may be bailed out during downturns, capitalism fails and feeds greed. This book is about a real business that for over seven decades succeeded without resorting to excessive debt, resulting in a positive outcome for investors, employees and a local community. It is a story of how a small organ builder in Macungie, Pennsylvania, USA introduced digital sound technology to the world in 1971, decades prior to CDs and MP3 players. It is also a story of a company that has maintained its manufacturing in the same community since 1953. This same company then successfully diversified into the data communication field, growing that subsidiary's sales 20 times and thriving even as the industry melted down shuttering many competitors. These successes were made possible because of prudent financial management. While debt has damaged companies, communities and even countries, the financial services industry profits by marketing leverage. This book shares real-life pitfalls of dealing with that industry and the inability of the judicial system to hold it accountable. Sworn testimony is used to show incompetence and a cover up.

    •How to shop for college, using the latest tools and strategies•How to budget for retirement•How to defeat the real enemy of 401Ks ― your mental biases•How to buy a home you can afford to keep•How to outsmart deceptive retailer tricks•How to maximize your Social Security benefits•How to save money with a minimum disruption of your lifestyle•How to safely increase your income from your retirement savings•How to get on top of your finances in 15 minutesEssential Money Guidebook respects the reader’s lifestyle choices. This book is not about self-denial and sacrifice. In fact, 90% of money management is making the right decisions at the right time. * EIFLE Book Award: Excellence in Financial Literacy Education awarded by the Institute for Financial Literacy.

    Using everyday terms and readily grasped concepts, Dr. Anthony M. Criniti IV, a former financial consultant and current university-level finance professor, sets out to expand off the new paradigm of the economic and financial concepts introduced in his previous book, The Necessity of Finance; explore the most important lessons in economics and finance; provide a platform for economic and financial entities to be able to better manage their wealth; and create a foundation for future research studies on these subjects. Dr. Criniti breaks down complex terminology and scholastic discoveries in economics and finance into layman’s terms, allowing readers of all levels of economic and financial acumen to put his powerful wealth management principles into practice. Starting with an introductory overview, moving forward to present the basic terminology necessary to understand the structure of this work, presenting in the process an elaboration on its scientific aspects, The Most Important Lessons in Economics and Finance will equip a variety of practitioners and students of these two sciences with vital information and a clear approach for continued study. This book is organized into a variety of categories of wealth management principles including: business, charity, debt, diversification, economics, ethics, financial psychology, health, human resources, international finance, investing, marketing, money, personal finance, planning, and saving.Dr. Criniti’s lessons evolved from his many years of various experiences in the financial field. Aiming for objectivity, he links his practical knowledge to the works of leading historical and contemporary economic and financial scholars, producing a work that stands as one of the most accessible and comprehensive collections of wealth management principles in publication. Mastering wealth management skills takes time and patience. With The Most Important Lessons in Economics and Finance, Dr. Criniti provides a foundation for this most essential task.

    Taught by Professor Connel Fullenkamp, an award-winning educator from Duke University, these lectures clearly explain the various kinds of financial markets, the different kinds of investments available to you, and the pros and cons of each. Even more important: The course shows you how to evaluate each of these in terms of your own financial situation.

    However, Ph.D. programs in economics are extremely competitive, with a high rate of attrition and a median time of seven years to completion. Also, economic professions come in many shapes and sizes, and while a doctoral degree is crucial training for some, it is less beneficial for others. How do you know whether a Ph.D. in economics is for you? How do you choose the right program--and how do you get the right program to choose you? And once you've survived years of rigorous and specialized training, how do you turn your degree into a lifelong career and meaningful vocation?Getting a Ph.D. in Economics is the first manual designed to meet the specific needs of aspiring and matriculating graduate students of economics. With the perspective of a veteran, Stuart J. Hillmon walks the reader though the entire experience--from the Ph.D. admissions process to arduous first-year coursework and qualifying exams to armoring up for the volatile job market. Hillmon identifies the pitfalls at each stage and offers no-holds-barred advice on how to navigate them. Honest, hard-hitting, and at times hilarious, this insider insight will equip students and prospective students with the tools to make the most of their graduate experience and to give them an edge in an increasingly competitive field.

    

    Business leaders and managers must be ready to respond and adapt in new, innovative ways. The authors of this groundbreaking book argue that business people must adopt what they call a "holonomic" way of thinking, as well as a dynamic and authentic understanding of the relationships within a business system and an appreciation of the whole. Complexity and chaos should not be feared; they are the foundation of successful business structures and economics.Holonomics presents a new worldview in which economics and ecology harmonize. Using real-world case studies and practical exercises, the authors guide the reader to a new, holistic approach to business and toward a more sustainable future in which both people and planet matter."A manifesto for mindful living." --Satish Kumar"A must-read for any forward thinking business." --Alan Moore, author of No Straight Lines: Making Sense of Our Non-Linear World and Designing for Transformation"While great poets, artists, and modern scientists intuitively see reality as relationships, economists, politicians, and business leaders fail to understand how parts and the whole relate to each other. Holonomics presents a powerful mode of thinking, for a new, life-enhancing approach to human economic activity." --H. Thomas Johnson, author of Profit Beyond Measure, and Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting"A timely, radical, and deeply insightful book." --Giles Hutchins, author of The Nature of Business"This remarkable book distills the essence of the ideas and values taught at Schumacher College and shows how these teachings can be applied, with many case studies of enlightened business. A powerful antidote to today's dominant culture." --Fritjof Capra, author of The Hidden Connections"What a gift to have these monumental, mind-changing ideas woven together skilfully in one book." --Margaret J Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science"I have no doubt that this lucid integration of holistic science and business practices that do not ruin the Earth will rapidly become a landmark text." --Stephan Harding, editor of Grow Small, Think Beautiful"'For those who think that we must choose between environmental well-being and economic stability, here is a book that challenges that division. The authors show how business leaders can move beyond narrowly materialistic, reductionist frameworks toward more creative, imaginative, and holistic visions of our sustainable, economic future." --Prof. Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, author of Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking Sustainable Development

    3D printing has broken out of its limited industrial uses and landed on a million desktops. New materials, such as graphene, will make it possible to print out complex and durable machines at costs approaching zero.Guy Rundle talks to the people at the frontline of this mind-boggling new world, and paints a vivid picture of how life will change as today’s emerging technologies become mainstream. There will be enormous implications not just for Australia, but for the global economy, international relations and the fundamental structures of our lives.

    In The Price of Paradise, David Dante Troutt argues that it is a lack of what he calls "regional equity" in our local decision making that has led to this looming crisis now facing so many cities and local governments. Unless we adopt policies that take into consideration all class levels, he argues, the underlying inequity affecting poor and middle class communities will permanently limit opportunity for the next generations of Americans. Arguing that there are "structural flaws" in the American dream, Troutt explores the role that place plays in our thinking and how we have organized our communities to create or deny opportunity. Through a careful presentation of this crisis at the national level and also through on-the-ground observation in communities like Newark, Detroit, Houston, Oakland, and New York City that all face similar hardships, he makes the case that America's tendency to separate into enclaves in urban areas or to sprawl off on one's own in suburbs gravely undermines the American dream. Troutt shows that the tendency to separate also has maintained racial segregation in our cities and towns, itself cementing many barriers for advancement. A profound conversation about America at the crossroads, The Price of Paradise is a multilayered exploration of the legal, economic, and cultural forces that contribute to the squeeze on the middle class, the hidden dangers of growing income and wealth inequality, and environmentally unsustainable growth and consumption patterns. David Dante Troutt is Professor of Law and Justice John J. Francis Scholar at the Rutgers University-Newark Law School. He also serves as Director of the Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity at Rutgers Law School. Troutt is a columnist, novelist, and the author of several works of nonfiction, most recently After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina.

    John Allison believes many of the problems in our economy are the direct result of leaders who have lost a sense of purpose in themselves and in their organization.Basing his conclusions on libertarian and Objectivist philosophy, Allison describes the values today's leaders must follow, which should guide decision making at the individual, corporate, and public policy level. He shares his real-world experience growing BB&T into the tenth largest financial services holding company in the U.S.John Allison is the author of The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure, CEO of the Cato Institute, and retired Chairman and CEO of BB&T Corporation.

    But as Sarah Mayorga-Gallo argues, multiethnic and mixed-income neighborhoods still harbor the signs of continued, systemic racial inequalities. Drawing on deep ethnographic and other innovative research from Creekridge Park, a pseudonymous urban community in Durham, North Carolina, Mayorga-Gallo demonstrates that the proximity of white, African American, and Latino neighbors does not ensure equity; rather, proximity and equity are in fact subject to structural-level processes of stratification. Behind the White Picket Fence shows how contemporary understandings of diversity are not necessarily rooted in equity or justice but instead can reinforce white homeowners' race and class privilege; ultimately, good intentions and a desire for diversity alone do not challenge structural racial, social, and economic disparities. This book makes a compelling case for how power and privilege are reproduced in daily interactions and calls on readers to question commonsense understandings of space and inequality in order to better understand how race functions in multiethnic America.

    Reinventing State Capitalism analyzes the rise of new species of state capitalism in which governments interact with private investors either as majority or minority shareholders in publicly-traded corporations or as financial backers of purely private firms (the so-called "national champions"). Focusing on a detailed quantitative assessment of Brazil's economic performance from 1976 to 2009, Aldo Musacchio and Sergio Lazzarini examine how these models of state capitalism influence corporate investment and performance.According to one model, the state acts as a majority investor, granting the state-owned enterprise (SOE) financial autonomy and allowing professional management. This form, the authors argue, has reduced many agency problems commonly faced by state ownership. According to another hybrid model, the state uses sovereign wealth funds, holding companies, and development banks to acquire a small share of equity ownership in a corporation, thereby potentially alleviating capital constraints and leveraging latent capabilities.Both models have benefits and costs. Yet neither model has entirely eliminated the temptation of governments to intervene in the operation of natural resource industries and other large strategic enterprises. Nevertheless, the longstanding debate over whether private ownership is superior or inferior to state capitalism has become irrelevant, Musacchio and Lazzarini conclude. Private ownership is now mingled with state capital on a global scale.