Book picks similar to
The Political Economy of Customs and Culture: Informal Solutions to the Commons Problem by Terry L. Anderson
economics
economics-business-real-estate
environment
politicalscience-politicaleconomy
Viva the Entrepreneur: Founding, Scaling, and Raising Venture Capital in Latin America
Brian Requarth
He shows how to manage your own psychology and your operations, be it working with co-founders, building a culture, or managing a board of directors. Brian also reveals the secrets of scaling a business and best practices for raising venture capital in Latin America. You will develop an understanding of the most critical parts of an investor term sheet, and gain perspective into the inner workings of the venture capital game.
Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of ""Energy Independence""
Robert Bryce - 2008
Along the way, Bryce eviscerates the ethanol scam. Whether the issue is cost, water consumption, or food prices, corn ethanol is one of the longest-running robberies ever perpetrated on American taxpayers.Consumers concerned about peak oil and the future of global energy supplies need to understand that energy security depends on embracing free markets and the realities of interdependence. Gusher of Lies is illuminating, vital reading.
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket
Benjamin Lorr - 2020
What does it take to run the American supermarket? How do products get to shelves? Who sets the price? And who suffers the consequences of increased convenience and efficiency? In this exposé, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry. Combining deep sourcing and immersive reporting, Lorr leads a wild investigation in which we learn the secrets of Trader Joe's success from Trader Joe himself, why truckers call their job "sharecropping on wheels," what it takes for a product to earn certification labels like "organic" and "fair trade," the struggles entrepreneurs face as they fight for shelf space, including essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business, the truth behind the alarming slave trade in the shrimp industry and much more.
Shakedown Socialism: Unions, Pitchforks, Collective Greed, The Fallacy of Economic Equality, and other Optical Illusions of "Redistributive Justice"
Oleg Atbashian - 2010
Atbashian explains why Socialism cannot work. He exposes the injustice of "Collective Greed" and shows why Economic Equality is a fraud. The book is an eye-opener as the author illustrates his points with examples drawn from his life in the Soviet Union before 1994 and more recent events in the USA. "Oleg Atbashian has written a timely warning for Americans about the collectivists among us and their plans for the future. I hope everyone reads this book." -- David Horowitz, Author of One Party Classroom (2009) "In his brilliant, witty, and wonderfully illustrated Shakedown Socialism, Oleg Atbashian -- who grew up in the Soviet Union, shows what is happening in Obama's America today, and explains why it is putting us on the road to ruin. Shakedown Socialism is an enlightening, sobering, and wonderfully clear explanation of why statism kills -- and thus also of why and how Barack Obama is killing the American economy. This book shows why Obama's statist economic policies are a looming disaster for America and for the spirit of the free human individual." -- Pamela Geller, author, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War On America "Brightly written and filled with entertaining and illuminating illustrations, Oleg Atbashian's Shakedown Socialism is a clear and eye-opening guide to exactly what is wrong with socialism and state control of the means of production, and how it kills both the economy and human initiative. Shakedown Socialism is an essential and inspiring guide to the virtues of the free market." -- Robert Spencer, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad
Introduction to Modern Climate Change
Andrew E. Dessler - 2011
It is unique among textbooks on climate change in that it combines an introduction of the science with an introduction to the non-science issues such as the economic and policy options. Unlike more purely descriptive textbooks, it contains the quantitative depth that is necessary for an adequate understanding of the science of climate change. The goal of the book is for a student to leave the class ready to engage in the public policy debate on this issue. This is an invaluable textbook for any introductory survey course on the science and policy of climate change, for both non-science majors and introductory science students.
Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak
Kenneth S. Deffeyes - 2005
Smalley, University Professor, Rice University, and 1996 Nobel laureateWith world oil production about to peak and inexorably head toward steep decline, what fuels are available to meet rising global energy demands? That question, once thought to address a fairly remote contingency, has become ever more urgent, as a spate of books has drawn increased public attention to the imminent exhaustion of the economically vital world oil reserves. Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a geologist who was among the first to warn of the coming oil crisis, now takes the next logical step and turns his attention to the earth's supply of potential replacement fuels. In Beyond Oil, he traces out their likely production futures, with special reference to that of oil, utilizing the same analytic tools developed by his former colleague, the pioneering petroleum-supply authority M. King Hubbert."The bad news in this book is made bearable by the author's witty, conversational writing style. If my college econ textbooks had been written this way, I might have learned economics." —Rupert Cutler, The Roanoke Times
The God Species
Mark Lynas - 2011
This book examines this topic.
Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains
Kerri Arsenault - 2020
For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname “Cancer Valley.” Mill Town is an personal investigation, where Arsenault sifts through historical archives and scientific reports, talks to family and neighbors, and examines her own childhood to illuminate the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease. Mill Town is a moral wake-up call that asks, Whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?
Hope in Hell: A decade to confront the climate emergency
Jonathon Porritt - 2020
This book is a clarion call to action, and action now. After reading this, we know for sure that nothing, not even a pandemic, must divert us from the most serious problem facing every living creature on the planet. In plain language, Jonathon Porritt is spelling it out. This is our last chance. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Then act.' Michael Morpurgo Climate change is the defining issue of our time - we know, beyond reasonable doubt, what that science now tells us. Just as climate change is accelerating, so too must we – summoning up a greater sense of urgency, courage and shared endeavour than humankind has ever seen before. The Age of Climate Change is an age of superlatives: most extreme this, biggest that, most costly ever. The impacts worsen every year, played out in people’s backyards and communities, and more and more people around the world now realise this is going to be a massive challenge for the rest of their lives. In Hope in Hell, Porritt confronts that dilemma head on. He believes we have time to do what needs to be done, but only if we move now – and move together. In this ultimately optimistic book, he explores all these reasons to be hopeful: new technology; the power of innovation; the mobilisation of young people – and a sense of intergenerational solidarity as older generations come to understand their own obligation to secure a safer world for their children and grandchildren.
Patriots
David Frum - 2012
A new leader tries to pull the country out of a terrible recession—only to face a devilish plot from inside his own party. David Frum's darkly comic satire PATRIOTS is not only a warning about the future of American politics. It is a scorching, intimate explanation of why the U.S. political system has so badly failed the American people over the years just past.PATRIOTS tells the story of Walter Schotzke, the aimless young heir to America's largest mustard fortune. Walter is sent by his tough-minded grandmother to work in the office of a distinguished U.S. Senator. She hopes her otherwise worthless only grandchild might find purpose, and even appreciation for his country, from political service. Perhaps the job will also help Walter overcome the tragic loss of both his parents—especially that of his famous father, a genuine American hero, whose example Walter can't ever hope to live up to.
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
William McDonough - 2002
But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, such an approach only perpetuates the one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic amounts of waste and pollution in the first place. Why not challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model for making things? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we consider its abundance not wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective.Waste equals food. Guided by this principle, McDonough and Braungart explain how products can be designed from the outset so that, after their useful lives, they will provide nourishment for something new. They can be conceived as "biological nutrients" that will easily reenter the water or soil without depositing synthetic materials and toxins. Or they can be "technical nutrients" that will continually circulate as pure and valuable materials within closed-loop industrial cycles, rather than being "recycled" -- really, downcycled -- into low-grade materials and uses. Drawing on their experience in (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, McDonough and Braungart make an exciting and viable case for putting eco-effectiveness into practice, and show how anyone involved with making anything can begin to do as well.
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
Paul Mason - 2015
Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change - economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust - and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a change so big, so profound, that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system by which entire societies function, has reached its limits and is changing into something wholly new.At the heart of this change is information technology: a revolution that, as Mason shows, has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value; and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership - in fact, he contends, it is already doing so. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes of economic life are changing.. Goods and services that no longer respond to the dictates of neoliberalism are appearing, from parallel currencies and time banks, to cooperatives and self-managed online spaces. Vast numbers of people are changing their behaviour, discovering new forms of ownership, lending and doing business that are distinct from, and contrary to, the current system of state-backed corporate capitalism.In this groundbreaking book Mason shows how, from the ashes of the recent financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy. Moving beyond capitalism, he shows, is no longer a utopian dream. This is the first time in human history in which, equipped with an understanding of what is happening around us, we can predict and shape, rather than simply react to, seismic change.
Outskirts: Living Life on the edge of the Green Belt
John Grindrod - 2018
It charts their genesis, which grew from romantic Victorian notions of the countryside and our past, but evolved into something more complex and divisive, and would become a key part of the landscape and psyche of post-war Britain. Outskirts is at once a witty and deeply affecting memoir and a fascinating exploration of a defining, but poorly understood, facet of our national story.
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
Alex Epstein - 2014
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.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Charles C. Mann - 2011
More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he ended that separation at a stroke. Driven by the economic goal of establishing trade with China, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as researchers call it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. More important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitched along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; bacteria, fungi, and viruses; rats of every description—all of them rushed like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before, changing lives and landscapes across the planet. Eight decades after Columbus, a Spaniard named Legazpi succeeded where Columbus had failed. He sailed west to establish continual trade with China, then the richest, most powerful country in the world. In Manila, a city Legazpi founded, silver from the Americas, mined by African and Indian slaves, was sold to Asians in return for silk for Europeans. It was the first time that goods and people from every corner of the globe were connected in a single worldwide exchange. Much as Columbus created a new world biologically, Legazpi and the Spanish empire he served created a new world economically.As Charles C. Mann shows, the Columbian Exchange underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest research by ecologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In such encounters, he uncovers the germ of today’s fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars.In 1493, Charles Mann gives us an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination