Book picks similar to
Handbook of Social Economics: Volume 1b by Jess Benhabib


economics
organization-psychology
rp
social-dynamics-and-evolution

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas


Markus Brunnermeier - 2016
    In this book, Markus Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau argue that the core problem with the Euro lies in the philosophical differences between the founding countries of the Eurozone, particularly Germany and France. But the authors also show how these seemingly incompatible differences can be reconciled to ensure Europe's survival.As the authors demonstrate, Germany, a federal state with strong regional governments, saw the Maastricht Treaty, the framework for the Euro, as a set of rules. France, on the other hand, with a more centralized system of government, saw the framework as flexible, to be overseen by governments. The authors discuss how the troubles faced by the Euro have led its member states to focus on national, as opposed to collective, responses, a reaction explained by the resurgence of the battle of economic ideas: rules vs. discretion, liability vs. solidarity, solvency vs. liquidity, austerity vs. stimulus.Weaving together economic analysis and historical reflection, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas provides a forensic investigation and a road map for Europe's future.

Foundations of Economic Prosperity


Daniel W. Drezner - 2013
    Professor Drezner takes you behind the headlines and into the debates to dispel common myths about prosperity and get at deeper truths. By taking a broad view of economics that includes psychology, sociology, political science, and history, his lectures lead you to fundamental insights about how the modern world works and a deeper understanding of the functioning of the U.S., European, Chinese, and other major economies, as well as an appreciation for the special problems faced by underdeveloped nations. You'll examine dozens of case histories that illustrate what works and doesn't work in the drive to increase economic growth. You'll also learn about intriguing examples of prosperity won or lost, including the Dutch tulip mania in 1637, the era of globalization that started in the 1850s and lasting through World War I, and Ukraine's economic missteps after the breakup of the Soviet Union. As a start on your own road to greater prosperity, take this step to invest in an unparalleled explanation of the prerequisites to achieve it.

Managing Innovation: Integrating Technological, Market and Organizational Change


Joe Tidd - 1997
    It is also widely used by managers in both the services and manufacturing sectors. Now in its fifth edition, Managing Innovation has been fully revised and now comes with a fully interactive e-book housing an impressive array of videos, cases, exercises and tools to bring innovation to life. The book is also accompanied by the Innovation Portal at www.innovation-portal.info which contains an extensive collection of additional digital resources for both lecturers and students.Features: The Research Notes and Views from the Front Line feature boxes strengthen the evidence-based and practical approach making this a must read for anyone studying or working within innovationThe Innovation Portal www.innovation-portal.info is an essential resource for both student and lecturer and includes the Innovation Toolkit - a fully searchable array of practical innovation tools along with a compendium of cases, exercises, tools and videosThe interactive e-book that accompanies the text provides enriched content to deepen the readers understanding of innovation concepts

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives


Nicholas A. Christakis - 2008
    Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her. A happy neighbor has more impact on your happiness than a happy spouse. These startling revelations of how much we truly influence one another are revealed in the studies of Dr. Christakis and Fowler, which have repeatedly made front-page news nationwide. In Connected, the authors explain why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, Connected overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm-that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives.

A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto


Jorge Ramos - 2009
    With anti-immigrant sentiment rising around the country, and presidential elections on the horizon, it’s no surprise immigration reform is on every candidate’s agenda. While some candidates offer viable solutions, others perpetuate negative stereotypes and unpractical resolve. Ramos fearlessly questions political tactics, and has undoubtedly become the voice of the Latino vote in the US. It is now more important than ever to remember the role immigrants play in enriching our economy and culture, and to find a way to incorporate the millions of productive, law-abiding workers who have been drawn to the United States by the inexorable pull of freedom and economic opportunity.  In this timely book, award-winning journalist Jorge Ramos makes the case for a practical and politically achievable solution to this poignant issue. Ramos argues that we have a simple choice: to take a pragmatic approach that deals with the reality of immigration, or to continue a cruel and capricious system that doesn’t work, wastes billions of dollars, and which stands in direct opposition to our national principles.

Big Data: Does Size Matter?


Timandra Harkness - 2016
    It can help us do things faster and more efficiently than ever before, from tracking wolves through Minnesota by GPS to predicting which crimes are likely to happen where. Mega data has led to scientific and social achievements that would have been impossible just a few years ago. But being too dazzled by the scale, the speed, and the geeky jargon can lead us astray. It's big, but it's not always clever.Timandra Harkness cuts through the hype to put data science into its real-life context using a wide range of stories, people, and places to reveal what is essentially a human science--demystifying big data, telling us where it comes from and what it can do. BIG DATA then asks the awkward questions: What are the unspoken assumptions underlying its methods? Are we being bamboozled by mega data's size, its speed, and its shiny technology?Nobody needs a degree in computer science to follow Harkness's exploration of what mega data can do for us--and what it can't or shouldn't. BIG DATA asks you to decide: Are you a data point, or a human being?

The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business


Erin Meyer - 2014
    Renowned expert Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain where people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together.When you have Americans who precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans who get straight to the point (“your presentation was simply awful”); Latin Americans and Asians who are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians who think the best boss is just one of the crowd—the result can be, well, sometimes interesting, even funny, but often disastrous.Even with English as a global language, it’s easy to fall into cultural traps that endanger careers and sink deals when, say, a Brazilian manager tries to fathom how his Chinese suppliers really get things done, or an American team leader tries to get a handle on the intra-team dynamics between his Russian and Indian team members.In The Culture Map, Erin Meyer provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business. She combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice for succeeding in a global world.

Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision


Thom Hartmann - 2007
    How did this happen? According to Air America radio host Thom Hartmann, the apologists of the Right have become masters of the subtle and largely subconscious aspects of political communication. It's not an escalation in Iraq, it's a surge; it's not the inheritance tax, it's the death tax; it's not drilling for oil, it's exploring for energy. Conservatives didn't intuit the path to persuasive messaging; they learned these techniques. There is no reason why progressives can't learn them too. In Cracking the Code, Hartmann shows you how. Drawing on his background as a psychotherapist and advertising executive as well as a national radio host, he breaks down the structure for effective communication, sharing exercises and examples for practical application.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies


Geoffrey B. West - 2017
    The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we need. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism's body. West's work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work's applicability to cities. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. For every doubling in a city's size, the city needs 15% less road, electrical wire, and gas stations to support the same population. More amazingly, for every doubling in size, cities produce 15% more patents and more wealth, as well as 15% more crime and disease. This broad pattern lays the groundwork for a new science of cities. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work on cities and biological life to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune, however diverse and unrelated they are to each other.From the Hardcover edition.

Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism


John Patrick Leary - 2018
    From Silicon Valley to the White House, from kindergarten to college, and from the factory floor to the church pulpit, we are all called to be innovators and entrepreneurs, to be curators of an ever-expanding roster of competencies, and to become resilient and flexible in the face of the insults and injuries we confront at work. In the midst of increasing inequality, these keywords teach us to thrive by applying the lessons of a competitive marketplace to every sphere of life. What’s more, by celebrating the values of grit, creativity, and passion at school and at work, they assure us that economic success is nothing less than a moral virtue. Organized alphabetically as a lexicon, Keywords explores the history and common usage of major terms in the everyday language of capitalism. Because the words in this book have successfully infiltrated everyday life in the English-speaking world, their meanings often seem self-evident, even benign. Who could be against empowerment, after all? Keywords uncovers the unexpected histories of words like innovation, which was once synonymous with “false prophecy” before it became the prevailing faith of Silicon Valley. Other words, like best practices and human capital, are relatively new coinages that promise us a kind of freedom within a marketplace extending its reach across the public sector and into our private lives. The new language of capitalism burnishes hierarchy, competition, and exploitation as leadership, collaboration, and sharing, modeling for us the habits of the economically successful person: be visionary, be self-reliant, and never, ever stop working.

Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future


Richard Heinberg - 2013
    This is the first book to look at fracking from both economic and environmental perspectives."

Cowboy Ethics


James P. Owen - 2005
    Owen shares his new perspective on Wall Street and how the Code of the West can and should be applied to business practices and the corporate world. The book is beautifully illustrated with David Stoecklein's western photography

Who painted my money white


Sree Iyer - 2019
    The money is quickly distributed to members of a minority community using a network of 100 Chartered accountants. The bulk of the money finds its way back into fake firms, shell corporations and charities with the sole aim of destabilizing the country. A DIABOLICAL PLAN BY THE FREEDOM PARTY TO WEAKEN INDIA Greedy politicians of the Freedom Party want to ensure that the opposition can never come to power. Pander to the largest minority, enrich them beyond their expectations and ensure they will be with the party. To this end, a plan is hatched to print high denomination money and try and increase the velocity of money, thereby creating the illusion of growth. A compromised Finance Minister is forced to buy paper from the same sources as India’s rival Pakistan. Their intelligence wing gets hold of the security threads being used in Indian notes through honey trapping and comes up with notes that are almost as good as the real ones. The fake money brought in slowly starts moving around the country, driving up inflation and real estate prices, mixing with good notes. Because of a series of scams, the government gets voted out and a single party (People’s Voice) gets absolute majority. The new party responds to a terrorist attack with a surgical strike deep in the enemy territory. Pakistan decides to retaliate by flooding India with fake currency, by tripling its fake currency production. India responds by demonetizing the 500- and 1000-rupee notes and printing new notes of a different size. But despite the best attempts, a porous border with Nepal and Bangladesh results in a significant amount of the fake currency entering Indian banks. When the notes were tallied, instead of 87% of printed notes coming back to the Reserve Bank, 113% comes! The counterfeit money is used to spawn different types of nefarious activities including a plot to assassinate the newly elected Prime Minister. Will the Intelligence Bureau track the assassin and protect the PM? Read this to find out.

Investing To Save The Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference


Alice Ross - 2020
    Together, we can and must act now' Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States 'Everyone's savings account and pension can meaningfully contribute. Ross tells us how in this clear, easy to understand yet transformative book' Christiana Figueres, Founding Partner, Global Optimism and Former Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 'I can't imagine a more important book at the moment. A detailed, action-oriented guide on how to make our money matter and save us and the planet we live on' Richard Curtis, Writer, Director, Co-Founder of Red Nose Day and UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocate Investing responsibly is one of the most powerful ways that you can fight climate change. No longer a niche sector for rebel fund managers, conscious investing has the potential to raise huge sums of money to the companies and organisations on the front line fighting the climate crisis and make investors positive returns in the process. In this essential introduction to green investing, Alice Ross shows you how you can turn your savings and pensions, however big or small, into a force for change. You will learn: - Which sectors are leading the charge by developing cutting-edge solutions; from smart farming to renewable energy- How to cut through 'alphabet soup' jargon and identify 'greenwashing' - The ways you can maximise your economic power and hold those you're investing in to account 'Changing the way that we invest is one of the most powerful levers we have for solving climate change. This hugely interesting and immensely practical book not only explains why changing how we invest is so critically important but also provides a set of powerful tools for actually doing it' Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University and author of Reimagining Capitalism 'Explains the power you have, through your investment choices, to accelerate the path toward a sustainable clean energy future. Read this book and be empowered to create a better future for the planet' Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor, Penn State University, author of The New Climate War

The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India


Vijay Gokhale - 2021
    A disconcerting read, but indispensable.'-ASHLEY J. TELLISIndia's relations with the People's Republic of China have captured the popular imagination ever since the 1950s but have rarely merited a detailed understanding of the issues. Individual episodes tend to arouse lively debate, which often dissipates without a deeper exploration of the factors that shaped the outcomes. This book explores the dynamics of negotiation between the two countries, from the early years after Independence until the current times, through the prism of six historical and recent events in the India-China relationship. The purpose is to identify the strategy, tactics and tools that China employs in its diplomatic negotiations with India, and the learnings for India from its past dealings with China that may prove helpful in future negotiations with the country.