Throughout history, the only way for humanity to grow was by degrading the Earth: chopping down forests, fouling the air and water, and endlessly digging out resources. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, the reigning argument has been that taking better care of the planet means radically changing course: reducing our consumption, tightening our belts, learning to share and reuse, restraining growth. Is that argument correct? Absolutely not. In More from Less, McAfee argues that to solve our ecological problems we don’t need to make radical changes. Instead, we need to do more of what we’re already doing: growing technologically sophisticated market-based economies around the world. How can he possibly make this claim? Because of the evidence. America—a large, high-tech country that accounts for about 25% of the global economy—is now generally using less of most resources year after year, even as its economy and population continue to grow. What’s more, the US is polluting the air and water less, emitting fewer greenhouse gases, and replenishing endangered animal populations. And, as McAfee shows, America is not alone. Other countries are also transforming themselves in fundamental ways. What has made this turnabout possible? One thing, primarily: the collaboration between technology and capitalism, although good governance and public awareness have also been critical. McAfee does warn of issues that haven’t been solved, like global warming, overfishing, and communities left behind as capitalism and tech progress race forward. But overall, More from Less is a revelatory, paradigm-shifting account of how we’ve stumbled into an unexpectedly better balance with nature—one that holds out the promise of more abundant and greener centuries ahead.

    In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.How did we get here? With Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.Mixing deft political analysis, timely social commentary, and deep historical understanding, Twilight of the Elites describes how the society we have come to inhabit – utterly forgiving at the top and relentlessly punitive at the bottom – produces leaders who are out of touch with the people they have been trusted to govern. Hayes argues that the public's failure to trust the federal government, corporate America, and the media has led to a crisis of authority that threatens to engulf not just our politics but our day-to-day lives.Upending well-worn ideological and partisan categories, Hayes entirely reorients our perspective on our times. Twilight of the Elites is the defining work of social criticism for the post-bailout age.

    Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it’s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What’s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history. With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do? This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can’t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.

    In this innovative book, Paul Spencer Sochaczewski explores why he collects Ganesha images, examines the psychology of collecting, and recounts personal adventures in his 40-year quest for just one more (but it’s gotta be special) Ganesha statue. He provides enough iconography to give the reader a grounding in Ganesha’s obstacle-removing prowess, but this is neither an academic nor a religious tome. Museum-quality photographs of some 80 statues, carvings, and amulets from his 150-piece collection illustrate how Hindu public relations experts retrofitted Ganesha into the Mahabharata, under what circumstances benevolent Ganesha can be an aggressive crusader, why he loves sweets, what inspiration Hindu branding experts took from nature, and why his “vehicle” is a humble mouse. Why does Sochaczewski appreciate (but not worship) the god? “Ganesha isn’t a stern, don’t-touch-my-hair super-god, and therefore artists can flex their creative muscles when portraying him,” he says. “And simply because he’s cool.”

    She’d grown accustomed to shopping at outlet malls, discount stores like T.J. Maxx, and cheap but trendy retailers like Forever 21, Target, and H&M. She was buying a new item of clothing almost every week (the national average is sixty-four per year) but all she had to show for it was a closet and countless storage bins packed full of low-quality fads she barely wore—including the same sailor-stripe tops and fleece hoodies as a million other shoppers. When she found herself lugging home seven pairs of identical canvas flats from Kmart (a steal at $7 per pair, marked down from $15!), she realized that something was deeply wrong. Cheap fashion has fundamentally changed the way most Americans dress. Stores ranging from discounters like Target to traditional chains like JCPenney now offer the newest trends at unprecedentedly low prices. Retailers are pro­ducing clothes at enormous volumes in order to drive prices down and profits up, and they’ve turned clothing into a disposable good. After all, we have little reason to keep wearing and repairing the clothes we already own when styles change so fast and it’s cheaper to just buy more. But what are we doing with all these cheap clothes? And more important, what are they doing to us, our society, our environment, and our economic well-being? In Overdressed, Cline sets out to uncover the true nature of the cheap fashion juggernaut, tracing the rise of budget clothing chains, the death of middle-market and independent retail­ers, and the roots of our obsession with deals and steals. She travels to cheap-chic factories in China, follows the fashion industry as it chases even lower costs into Bangladesh, and looks at the impact (both here and abroad) of America’s drastic increase in imports. She even explores how cheap fashion harms the charity thrift shops and textile recyclers where our masses of cloth­ing castoffs end up. Sewing, once a life skill for American women and a pathway from poverty to the middle class for workers, is now a dead-end sweatshop job. The pressures of cheap have forced retailers to drastically reduce detail and craftsmanship, making the clothes we wear more and more uniform, basic, and low quality. Creative inde­pendent designers struggle to produce good and sustainable clothes at affordable prices. Cline shows how consumers can break the buy-and-toss cycle by supporting innovative and stylish sustainable designers and retailers, refash­ioning clothes throughout their lifetimes, and mending and even making clothes themselves. Overdressed will inspire you to vote with your dollars and find a path back to being well dressed and feeling good about what you wear.

    Sullivan Elin M. Wicks C. Patrick Koelling   A succinct job description for an engineer consists of just two words: problem solver. Broadly speaking, engineers use knowledge to find new ways of doing things economically. Engineering design solutions do not exist in a vacuum, but within the context of a business opportunity. Truly, every problem has multiple solutions, so the question is, “How does one rationally select the design solution with the most favorable economic result?” The answer to this question can also be put forth in two words: engineering economy. This field of engineering provides a systematic framework for evaluating the economic aspects of competing design solutions. Just as engineers model the stress on a support column or the thermodynamic properties of a steam turbine, they must also model the economic impact of their engineering recommendations. Engineering economy is the subject of this textbook.   Highlights of Engineering Economy, Fourteenth Edition: ×           Fifty percent of end-of-chapter problems are new or revised. ×           A bank of algorithmically generated test questions is available to adopting instructors. ×           Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam-style questions are included among the end-of-chapter problem sets. ×           Spreadsheet models are integratedthroughout. ×           An appendix on the basics of accounting is included in Chapter 2. ×           Chapter 3 on Cost Estimation appears early in the book. ×           An appendix on techniques for using Excel in engineering economy is available for reference. ×           Numerous comprehensive examples and case studies appear throughout the book. ×           Extended learning exercises appear in most chapters. ×           Personal finance problems are featured in most chapters. ×           Many pointers to relevant Web sites are provided.   ISBN-13: 978-0-13-614297-3 ISBN-10: 0-13-614297-4

    Many leadership books can be boring. Instead of reading another repetitive book about 100 leadership essentials by a corporate CEO, search no more for the perfect leadership book. In "The Diary of a West Point Cadet," by Captain Preston Pysh, the author teaches essential West Point leadership through the most fun and unique reading of any book in its class. If you are an aspiring cadet, a small-group leader, or even an emerging leader in corporate America, this book is for you. Each intriguing firsthand account of Preston's most memorable stories from attending West Point will capture your interest and imagination. At the conclusion of each gripping story, Preston efficiently summarizes how the experience taught him lessons about leadership, which later prepared him to be a combat commander. If you like twists and turns while reading and learning, you are in for a treat. Prepare to be glued to your seat and the text as you experience unforgettable stories and lessons from "The Point."

    5, 1948 sell for $140 million?            Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.            This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on  interviews with both past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a great deal that even experienced  auction purchasers do not know.

    With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.

    This is why Professor Michael Puett says to his students, “The encounter with these ideas will change your life.” As one of them told his collaborator, author Christine Gross-Loh, “You can open yourself up to possibilities you never imagined were even possible.”These astonishing teachings emerged two thousand years ago through the work of a succession of Chinese scholars exploring how humans can improve themselves and their society. And what are these counterintuitive ideas? Good relationships come not from being sincere and authentic, but from the rituals we perform within them. Influence comes not from wielding power but from holding back. Excellence comes from what we choose to do, not our natural abilities. A good life emerges not from planning it out, but through training ourselves to respond well to small moments. Transformation comes not from looking within for a true self, but from creating conditions that produce new possibilities.In other words, The Path upends everything we are told about how to lead a good life. Above all, unlike most books on the subject, its most radical idea is that there is no path to follow in the first place—just a journey we create anew at every moment by seeing and doing things differently.Sometimes voices from the past can offer possibilities for thinking afresh about the future.A note from the publisher: To read relevant passages from the original works of Chinese philosophy, see our free ebook Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi: Selected Passages, available on Kindle, Nook, and the iBook Store and at Books.SimonandSchuster.com.

    Many of our most hotly debate topics are shaped by Davos power brokers, woke college professors, TV talking heads, social media activists and feckless Washington swamp monsters who want you to only follow their narrative. Your teachers, your politicians, and your local paper are not likely to ever tell you: Racial minorities fare far better in the absence of race-based affirmative action policies. Latinos make up a little more than 50% of the Border Patrol, according to 2016 data. The U.S. settled more refugees in 2017 than any other nation. Between 2011 and 2016, the IRS documented 1.3 million identity thefts by Illegal aliens. Half of federal arrests are immigration-related. Welfare recipients in 34 states earn more than a person making minimum wage. Taxpayers doled out $2.6 billion in food stamps to dead people in less than two years. 1,700 private jets flew to Davos to discuss the impact of global warming. Google could swing an election by secretly adjusting its search algorithm, and we would have no way of knowing. Once you’re done reading 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know, you’ll never trust the powers that be to give you the whole truth again.

    They were phenomenal human beings. He asked, "Why are these wealthy people wealthy?" He wanted to know their secrets. So he watched them. He listened to them. He talked to them.He found out that they had a different set of habits.And for the past 12 years, he's incorporated these powerful habits in his life. The results have been incredible. From a poor missionary, he is now a millionaire missionary running 12 small businesses, but using only 10 percent of his time. Because all of them run on autopilot, he still devotes 90 percent of his time to his ministry.In this book, you'll learn the 8 Habits of the Happy Millionare, which include...* Finding Your Emotional Hunger* Being Consistently Aggressive* Creating Money Machines* Sticking to Your GameWhen you acquire these same habits, you'll find that wealth creation becomes automatic. Spontaneous. Systematic. Effortless. Fun!Read this book and change your financial life forever.

    For millions of years, humans have been seeking out tribes, be they religious, ethnic, economic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It's our nature.Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger. But more important, they're enabling countless new tribes to be born—groups of ten or ten thousand or ten million who care about their iPhones, or a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming. And so the key question: Who is going to lead us?The Web can do amazing things, but it can't provide leadership. That still has to come from individuals—people just like you who have passion about something. The explosion in tribes means that anyone who wants to make a difference now has the tools at her fingertips.If you think leadership is for other people, think again—leaders come in surprising packages. Consider Joel Spolsky and his international tribe of scary-smart software engineers. Or Gary Vaynerhuck, a wine expert with a devoted following of enthusiasts. Chris Sharma leads a tribe of rock climbers up impossible cliff faces, while Mich Mathews, a VP at Microsoft, runs her internal tribe of marketers from her cube in Seattle. All they have in common is the desire to change things, the ability to connect a tribe, and the willingness to lead.If you ignore this opportunity, you risk turning into a "sheepwalker"—someone who fights to protect the status quo at all costs, never asking if obedience is doing you (or your organization) any good. Sheepwalkers don't do very well these days.Tribes will make you think (really think) about the opportunities in leading your fellow employees, customers, investors, believers, hobbyists, or readers. . . . It's not easy, but it's easier than you think.

    Now it is viewed as a major threat to the future of the Euro, indeed to the European Union as a whole. Italy's political system is shorn of credibility as it struggles to deal with huge public debts and anemic levels of economic growth. Young people are emigrating in droves, frustrated at the lack of opportunity, while older people stubbornly cling to their rights and privileges, fearful of an uncertain future.In this lively, up-to-the-minute book, Bill Emmott explains how Italy sank to this low point, how Italians feel about it, and what can be done to return the country to more prosperous and more democratic times. With the aid of numerous personal interviews, Emmott analyzes "Bad Italy"—the land of disgraced Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, an inadequate justice system, an economy dominated by special interests and continuing corruption—against its contrasting foil "Good Italy," the home of enthusiastic entrepreneurs, truth-seeking journalists, and countless citizens determined to end mafia domination for good.