With his customary wit and insight, Reich shows how widening inequality of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and corporate corruption are merely the logical results of a system in which politicians are more beholden to the influence of business lobbyists than to the voters who elected them. Powerful and thought-provoking, Supercapitalism argues that a clear separation of politics and capitalism will foster an enviroment in which both business and government thrive, by putting capitalism in the service of democracy, and not the other way around.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Now is the time to learn to target where the market is going to be, not where it has been, so you can invest successfully. Financial expert John Mauldin makes a powerful, almost irrefutable case regarding the future direction of the markets. He then details a new approach to investing that will allow you to adjust to the new reality of investing. You'll consider options beyond traditional stock portfolios as you learn to choose between the stable and secure investments that will enable you to profit in turbulent markets. Buy your copy of this must-read investment roadmap today.

    Baker—recently hailed as “one of the most consistently enticing writers of our time” by The New York Times Book Review—moves from political controversy to the intimacy of his own life, from forgotten heroes of pacifism to airplane wings, telephones, paper mills, David Remnick, Joseph Pulitzer, the OED, and the manufacture of the Venetian gondola. In the book’s title essay, Baker surveys our fascination with video games while attempting to beat his teenage son at Modern Warfare 2; in a celebrated essay on Wikipedia, he describes his efforts to stem the tide of encyclopedic deletionism. Through all these pieces (for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications), Baker shines the light of an inexpugnable curiosity; The Way the World Works is a keen-minded, generous-spirited compendium by a modern American master.

    New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Thomas Fleming takes us back to the days of the founders, detailing the surprising facts of American life in 1776 - including its resemblance to today.

    In 1900, the Automobile Club of America sponsored the nation’s first car show in New York’s Madison Square Garden. The event was a spectacular success, attracting seventy exhibitors and nearly fifty thousand visitors. Among the spectators was  an obscure would-be automaker named Henry Ford, who walked the floor speaking with designers and engineers, trying to gauge public enthusiasm for what was then a revolutionary invention. His conclusion: the automobile was going to be a fixture in American society, both in the city and on the farm—and would make some people very rich. None, he decided, more than he.Drive! is the most complete account to date of the wild early days of the auto age. Lawrence Goldstone tells the fascinating story of how the internal combustion engine, a “theory looking for an application,” evolved into an innovation that would change history. Debunking many long-held myths along the way, Drive! shows that the creation of the automobile was not the work of one man, but very much a global effort. Long before anyone had heard of Henry Ford, men with names like Benz, Peugeot, Renault, and Daimler were building and marketing  the world’s first cars. Goldstone breathes life into an extraordinary cast of characters: the inventors and engineers who crafted engines small enough to use on a “horseless carriage”; the financiers who risked everything for their visions; the first racers—daredevils who pushed rickety, untested vehicles to their limits; and such visionary lawyers as George Selden, who fought for and won the first patent for the gasoline-powered automobile. Lurking around every corner is Henry Ford, a brilliant innovator and an even better marketer, a tireless promoter of his products—and of himself. With a narrative as propulsive as its subject, Drive! plunges us headlong into a time unlike any in history, when near-manic innovation, competition, and consumerist zeal coalesced to change the way the world moved.Advance praise for Drive!“A splendid dissection of the Selden/Ford patent face-off and its place in automotive historiography, this work will be enjoyed by business, legal, transportation, social, and intellectual historians; general readers; and all libraries.”—Library Journal (starred review)   “This book contains the great names in automotive history—the Dodge brothers, Barney Oldfield, all the French (they seemed, until Ford, to lead the Americans in development of the vehicle)—and it is fascinating. . . . An engaging new take on the history of technological innovation.”—Booklist “Business history as you have never read it before. Lawrence Goldstone tells the tale of the important but now forgotten legal fight over the patent for the automobile. With more plot twists than a murder mystery and a cast of well-known industrial titans, Drive! takes the reader down the road from the dawning age of the automobile, when Henry Ford’s dream almost turned into a nightmare.”—James McGrath Morris, author of Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power “Utterly compelling and filled with fascinating stories and larger-than-life characters, Drive! is a joyride. I’ll never get behind the wheel of my car again without thinking about Drive!”—Howard Blum, author of Dark Invasion and American Lightning

    The allure of money is especially strong. Coins represent real value. The warmth of silver and the weight of gold are irresistible to some. Coins travel throughout the world and through time itself, representing and absorbing history as they pass from one person to the next. Oh the stories coins could tell if they only had voices.Coin-collecting is a relaxing and inexpensive (although it can be very expensive!) hobby. If you buy properly, coins can be an excellent place to park your money for a rainy day, and if you buy the right coins and the market improves, you may even be able to make a profit on your collection. In fact, n"umismatics" (the fancy term for coin collecting) offers more riches than you may realize. This rewarding hobby also opens the door to some serious life skills, such asHistoryGeographyObservational skillsOrganizational skillsAnalytical tools.This book is designed to appeal to collectors at every level, from beginner to advanced. This is not a hardcore coin book; rather, "Coin Collecting For Dummies" is a great general reference that points you in different directions for further investigation. Perhaps the most important goal of this book is to get you excited - and to keep you excited - about coin collecting. "Coin Collecting For Dummies" covers all these topics and more: Deciding what to collectStoring your collection correctlyFinding out about repaired, restored, and recolored coinsPricing world coinsFinding a good coin dealerBuying at auctionUnderstanding that condition equals valueExploring the wild side with rare, expensive, and esoteric coinsSelling your coinsNo one needs coins, but if you decide to collect them, you certainly need this book. Coin collecting can sometimes be a confusing maze of choices sprinkled with little traps along the way. Sure, you can go it alone, but why not make your journey into numismatics a lot easier by picking the brain of an expert collector and learning from the mistakes of others.

    Why did the southern states secede from the Union? What did the north hope to achieve by fighting against the south? Was Abraham Lincoln really an abolitionist? Why is Ulysses S. Grant the most famous Union general, when he didn’t take command of all the Union armies until near the very end of the war? How did Robert E. Lee end up having to deal with issues left unresolved by George Washington’s will, and was he a hero or a traitor?This book provides an exhaustive summary, not just of the major battles and major personalities of the Civil War, but of the political issues that brought the United States to the point of a terrible internal conflict. You’ll learn how the founding fathers predicted a great national conflict over slavery, and how Thomas Jefferson’s political philosophies influenced secessionist thinking in the south. From the history of the abolitionist movement to the election of 1860 and the creation of the Republican party, this book will give you all the facts you need to understand how the Civil War started, why Lincoln was so fed up with his generals, and how the war affects American society today.

    Once the old, cantankerous Sam Clevenger and his wife, Charlotte, hired Frank Willson and John Johnson to help with the move, their fate took a dark turn. These true events were documented by journalists through the 1887 trial and well into the 1900s, and stories have been told of Sam’s unfound treasure for nearly 130 years. But, this is the first detailed, documented, and vetted account of their bizarre and fascinating tale.

    He planned to land a solid job after college, repay his student loan debt, and then simply forget the loans ever existed. Like millions of Americans, however, in spite of working hard, Collinge fell behind on payments and entered a labyrinthine student loan nightmare.High school graduates can no longer put themselves through college for a few thousand dollars in loan debt. Today, the average undergraduate borrower leaves school with more than $20,000 in student loans, and for graduate students the average is a whopping $42,000. For the past twenty years, college tuition has increased at more than double the rate of inflation, with the cost largely shifting to student debt. The Student Loan Scam is an exposé of the predatory nature of the $85-billion student loan industry. In this in-depth exploration, Collinge argues that student loans have become the most profitable, uncompetitive, and oppressive type of debt in American history. This has occurred in large part due to federal legislation passed since the mid-1990s that removed standard consumer protections from student loans-and allowed for massive penalties and draconian wealth-extraction mechanisms to collect this inflated debt.Collinge covers the history of student loans, the rise of Sallie Mae, and how universities have profited at the expense of students. The book includes candid and compelling stories from people across the country about how both nonprofit and for-profit student loan companies, aided by poor legislation, have shattered their lives-and livelihoods. With nearly 5 million defaulted loans, this crisis is growing to epic proportions. The Student Loan Scam takes an unflinching look at this unprecedented and pressing problem, while exposing the powerful organizations and individuals who caused it to happen. Ultimately, Collinge argues for the return of standard consumer protections for student loans, among other pragmatic solutions, in this clarion call for social action.

    As sociologist and network science pioneer Duncan Watts explains in this provocative book, the explanations that we give for the outcomes that we observe in life—explanation that seem obvious once we know the answer—are less useful than they seem.Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social trends often seem to have been driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these “influencers” in advance. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.Only by understanding how and when common sense fails, Watts argues, can we improve how we plan for the future, as well as understand the present—an argument that has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.

    

    While this has had the positive effect of equalizing access to knowledge, it also has lowered the bar on what depth of knowledge is required to consider oneself an "expert." A cult of anti-expertise sentiment has coincided with anti-intellectualism, resulting in massively viral yet poorly informed debates ranging from the anti-vaccination movement to attacks on GMOs. This surge in intellectual egalitarianism has altered the landscape of debates-all voices are equal, and "fact" is a subjective term. Browsing WebMD puts one on equal footing with doctors, and Wikipedia allows all to be foreign policy experts, scientists, and more. As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, there are a number of reasons why this has occurred-ranging from easy access to Internet search engines to a customer satisfaction model within higher education. The product of these interrelated trends, Nichols argues, is a pervasive distrust of expertise among the public coinciding with an unfounded belief among non-experts that their opinions should have equal standing with those of the experts. The experts are not always right, of course, and Nichols discusses expert failure. The crucial point is that bad decisions by experts can and have been effectively challenged by other well-informed experts. The issue now is that the democratization of information dissemination has created an army of ill-informed citizens who denounce expertise.When challenged, non-experts resort to the false argument that the experts are often wrong. Though it may be true, but the solution is not to jettison expertise as an ideal; it is to improve our expertise. Nichols is certainly not opposed to information democratization, but rather the enlightenment people believe they achieve after superficial internet research. He shows in vivid detail the ways in which this impulse is coursing through our culture and body politic, but the larger goal is to explain the benefits that expertise and rigorous learning regimes bestow upon all societies.

    It gives practical advice on how to:- Get a sale when your service is not the cheapest- Turn your customer into an ambassador- Build a positive attitude- Beat the competition- Close a saleThis is a valuable book, recognized as an effective and powerful sales-improvement guide.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s.To fight the “slavery” of FDR’s New Deal, businessmen enlisted religious activists in a campaign for “freedom under God” that culminated in the election of their ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The new president revolutionized the role of religion in American politics. He inaugurated new traditions like the National Prayer Breakfast, as Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the country’s first official motto. Church membership soon soared to an all-time high of 69 percent. Americans across the religious and political spectrum agreed that their country was “one nation under God.”Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how an unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.