Now, improving the economy has come to be seen as perhaps the most important task facing modern societies. Politics and policymaking are conducted in the language of economics and economic logic shapes how political issues are thought about and addressed. The result is that the majority of citizens, who cannot speak this language, are locked out of politics while political decisions are increasingly devolved to experts. The econocracy explains how economics came to be seen this way - and the damaging consequences. It opens up the discipline and demonstrates its inner workings to the wider public so that the task of reclaiming democracy can begin.

    This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.

    It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one's own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages.

    I.O.U. is the story of how we came to experience such a complete and devastating financial implosion, and how the decisions and actions of a select group of individuals had profound consequences for America, Europe, and the global economy overall. John Lanchester begins with "The ATM Moment," that seemingly magical proliferation of cheap credit that led to an explosion of lending, and then deftly outlines the global and local landscapes of banking and finance. Viewing the crisis through the lens of politics, culture, and contemporary history -- from the invention and widespread misuse of financial instruments to the culpability of subprime mortgages -- Lanchester draws perceptive conclusions on the limitations of financial and governmental regulation, capitalism's deepest flaw, and, most important, on the plain and simple facts of human nature where cash is concerned.Weaving together firsthand research and superbly written reportage, Lanchester delivers a shrewd perspective and a digestible, comprehensive analysis that connects the dots for the expert and casual reader alike. I.O.U. is an eye-opener of a book -- it may well provoke anger, amazement, or rueful disbelief -- and, as the author clearly reveals, we've only just begun to get ourselves back on track.

    By lobbying against competition, the biggest firms drive profits higher while depressing wages and limiting opportunities for investment, innovation, and growth.Why are cell-phone plans so much more expensive in the United States than in Europe? It seems a simple question. But the search for an answer took Thomas Philippon on an unexpected journey through some of the most complex and hotly debated issues in modern economics. Ultimately he reached his surprising conclusion: American markets, once a model for the world, are giving up on healthy competition. Sector after economic sector is more concentrated than it was twenty years ago, dominated by fewer and bigger players who lobby politicians aggressively to protect and expand their profit margins. Across the country, this drives up prices while driving down investment, productivity, growth, and wages, resulting in more inequality. Meanwhile, Europe--long dismissed for competitive sclerosis and weak antitrust--is beating America at its own game.Philippon, one of the world's leading economists, did not expect these conclusions in the age of Silicon Valley start-ups and millennial millionaires. But the data from his cutting-edge research proved undeniable. In this compelling tale of economic detective work, we follow him as he works out the basic facts and consequences of industry concentration in the U.S. and Europe, shows how lobbying and campaign contributions have defanged antitrust regulators, and considers what all this means for free trade, technology, and innovation. For the sake of ordinary Americans, he concludes, government needs to return to what it once did best: keeping the playing field level for competition. It's time to make American markets great--and free--again.

    This is not in dispute. By exactly what mechanism has China managed to grow so fast? There is more room for debate on this question. A widespread view is that private entrepreneurship, financial liberation, and political reforms played a minor role in explaining China's economic takeoff. Based on archival research and survey data, this book offers an alternative view: Private entrepreneurship, facilitated by access to capital and microeconomic flexibility, was at the center of China's takeoff in the 1980s. The political system, then as now, was authoritarian, but it was moving in a liberal direction. China lacked well-specified property rights, but it substantially improved security of proprietors. But given this initial success, how then to explain the substantial distortions in Chinese economy today? The key to getting the China story right is to recognize the existence of two Chinas - an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand, and the result was rapid as well as broad-based growth. In the 1990s, urban China triumphed when the Chinese state reversed many of the productive rural experiments of the previous decade. While this reversal does not show up in the GDP numbers, it shows up in the welfare implications of growth. Since the early 1990s, household income has lagged behind economic growth and the labor share of GDP has fallen. Social performance has deteriorated. The directional liberalism of China in the 1980s and the emerging India miracle today debunk the widespread notion that democracy is automatically anti-growth. As the country marks its 30th anniversary of reforms in 2008, China faces some of its toughest economic challenges and vulnerabilities. The long overdue political reforms are required to improve governance and accountability and to put China on a sustainable path of development.Professor Yasheng Huang teaches political economy international management at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He previously held faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at the Harvard Business School and as a consultant at the World Bank. He has published Inflation and Investment Controls in China (1996), FDI in China (1998), and Selling China (2003; Chinese version in 2005). His work on FDI in China has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Bloomberg, Businessworld, Le Monde, Economic and Political Weekly, and Economic Times, as well as in Chinese publications such as Nanfang Zhoumo, Nanfang Dushibao, Economic Observer, Global Entrepreneur, China Entrepreneur, Fortune Weekly, 21st Century Business Herald, Liangwang, and Xinhuanet. In addition to academic journal articles, he has written for Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and New York Times. In collaboration with other scholars, Professor Huang is conducting research on education and human capital in China and India, and non-performing loans, privatization, and entrepreneurship in China. At MIT, Professor Huang runs a "China Lab" and an "India Lab" that help entrepreneurial businesses in China and in India improve their management."Yasheng Huang is an insightful scholar of China's political economy. In this important book, he shows how China's rural economy took off in the 1980s, led by 'township and village enterprises' that were essentially private, only to be ignored in the 1990s by state-led development that focused on urban regions such as Shanghai. The 'Shanghai miracle,' he argues - and as any businessman who has worked there knows - was not the simple triumph of capitalism but of a stronger and more intrusive (and effective) state. If one wants to understand the policy origins of China's growing divide between rich and poor, urban and rural, one need look no further than this book." - William Kirby, Harvard University"Sure to generate a lively debate, Professor Huang's study provides a provocative and well-researched challenge to much current thinking on China's economic development. The widely shared gains of the 1980s have not been matched in more recent years. Danger signs include the stagnation in household incomes, growing inequality and illiteracy, and heightened governance problems. Huang argues that China will not be able to continue to grow unless the benefits of growth are widely shared through fundamental political and legal reforms." - Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale Law School

    Over five years, business professor Pietra Rivoli traveled from a Texas cotton field to a Chinese factory to a used clothing market in Africa, to investigate compelling questions about the politics, economics, ethics, and history of modern business and globalization. Using the story of the t-shirt to illustrate the major issues of the globalization debate, this uniquely entertaining business book offers a surprising, enlightening, and balanced look at one of the major topics of our time. It has won the prize or award - Business Book of the Year 2005, Finalist; AAP Awards for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing, 2006.

    In his most recent book, Baker shows that this upward redistribution was not the result of globalization and the natural workings of the market. Rather, it was the result of conscious policies that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of ordinary workers while protecting and enhancing the incomes of those at the top. Baker explains how rules on trade, patents, copyrights, corporate governance, and macroeconomic policy were rigged to make income flow upward.

    His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics, far from being a "dismal science," is a positive force for the common good.Economists are rewarded for writing technical papers in scholarly journals, not joining in public debates. But Tirole says we urgently need economists to engage with the many challenges facing society, helping to identify our key objectives and the tools needed to meet them.To show how economics can help us realize the common good, Tirole shares his insights on a broad array of questions affecting our everyday lives and the future of our society, including global warming, unemployment, the post-2008 global financial order, the euro crisis, the digital revolution, innovation, and the proper balance between the free market and regulation.Providing a rich account of how economics can benefit everyone, Economics for the Common Good sets a new agenda for the role of economics in society.

    At one extreme: We just need to invest more resources. At the other: We've thrown billions down a sinkhole over the last fifty years and accomplished almost nothing.Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel present an entirely new approach that blazes an optimistic and realistic trail between these two extremes.In this pioneering book Karlan and Appel combine behavioral economics with worldwide field research. They take readers with them into villages across Africa, India, South America, and the Philippines, where economic theory collides with real life. They show how small changes in banking, insurance, health care, and other development initiatives that take into account human irrationality can drastically improve the well-being of poor people everywhere.We in the developed world have found ways to make our own lives profoundly better. We use new tools to spend smarter, save more, eat better, and lead lives more like the ones we imagine. These tools can do the same for the impoverished. Karlan and Appel's research, and those of some close colleagues, show exactly how.In America alone, individual donors contribute over two hundred billion to charity annually, three times as much as corporations, foundations, and bequests combined. This book provides a new way to understand what really works to reduce poverty; in so doing, it reveals how to better invest those billions and begin transforming the well-being of the world.

    Award-winning philanthropy executive Edgar Villanueva draws from the traditions from the Native way to prescribe the medicine for restoring balance and healing our divides.Though it seems counterintuitive, the philanthropic industry has evolved to mirror colonial structures and reproduces hierarchy, ultimately doing more harm than good. After 14 years in philanthropy, Edgar Villanueva has seen past the field's glamorous, altruistic facade, and into its shadows: the old boy networks, the savior complexes, and the internalized oppression among the "house slaves," and those select few people of color who gain access.All these funders reflect and perpetuate the same underlying dynamics that divide Us from Them and the haves from have-nots. In equal measure, he denounces the reproduction of systems of oppression while also advocating for an orientation towards justice to open the floodgates for a rising tide that lifts all boats. In the third and final section, Villanueva offers radical provocations to funders and outlines his Seven Steps for Healing.With great compassion--because the Native way is to bring the oppressor into the circle of healing--Villanueva is able to both diagnose the fatal flaws in philanthropy and provide thoughtful solutions to these systemic imbalances. Decolonizing Wealth is a timely and critical book that preaches for mutually assured liberation in which we are all inter-connected.

    Widely praised and much-discussed, this classic book explores how cooperation can emerge in a world of self-seeking egoists—whether superpowers, businesses, or individuals—when there is no central authority to police their actions. The problem of cooperation is central to many different fields. Robert Axelrod recounts the famous computer tournaments in which the “cooperative” program Tit for Tat recorded its stunning victories, explains its application to a broad spectrum of subjects, and suggests how readers can both apply cooperative principles to their own lives and teach cooperative principles to others.

    Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets?In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

    This Very Short Introduction offers an indispensable starting point for anyone who needs to quickly know the themes and controversies that have shaped modern China. Prize-winning author and scholar Rana Mitter examines the modern history, politics, economy, and thriving cultural scene of contemporary China, and its relations with the wider world. This lively guide covers a range of social issues from the decline of footbinding and the position of women in society, to the influence of television and film, and the role of the overseas Chinese diaspora. It covers many prominent figures as well, such as the Communist leaders, the last emperors, and prominent writers and artists throughout China's history.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam

    Too often, he found debates framed by old divisions or pro-market ideology that increasingly failed to capture whether economic policy was fostering exploitation, economic insecurity, and disillusionment that were too often invisible within our current framework. Now more than ever, at a moment when the very capacity of modern capitalism to avoid accelerating inequality, a hollowed-out middle class, and structural poverty is being questioned, we need to step back and reflect on our ultimate goals.Economic Dignity is Sperling's effort to do just that - to frame our thinking about the way forward in a time of wrenching economic change. His argument combines moral and intellectual seriousness with actual high-level policy experience. Economic dignity, Sperling maintains, can be seen as resting on three pillars. The first: the capacity to care for family without economic deprivation denying people the capacity to experience its greatest joys - the birth of one's children, the companionship of a loving partner, the love of family and friends, the fulfillment that comes from providing. The second: the right to the pursuit of potential and purpose, including the right to first and second chances - the right to a life of active striving. The third: economic participation with respect and without domination and humiliation. All three pillars are rooted in the highest and most noble values of the American project. But getting there is the rub, and in Economic Dignity, Sperling offers paths that policymakers and citizens can follow for years to come. As he puts it, if you live in times when major steps forward are needed, it is important to be clear on your destination - or at least to know the North Star that is guiding you. His answer, in two words, is economic dignity.