The post-industrial society’s dimensions would include the spread of a knowledge class, the change from goods to services and the role of women. All of these would be dependent on the expansion of services in the economic sector and an increasing dependence on science as the means of innovating and organizing technological change.Bell prophetically stated in The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society that we should expect “… new premises and new powers, new constraints and new questions—with the difference that these are now on a scale that had never been previously imagined in world history.”

    The West’s initial successes in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan weakened their support still further.Today, as renowned Middle East commentator Patrick Cockburn sets out in this explosive new book, that’s all changed. Exploiting the missteps of the West’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, as well as its misjudgments in relation to Syria and the uprisings of the Arab Spring, jihadist organizations, of which ISIS is the most important, are swiftly expanding. They now control a geographical territory greater in size than Britain or Michigan, stretching from the Sunni heartlands in the north and west of Iraq through a broad swath of north-east Syria. On the back of their capture of Mosul and much of northern Iraq in June 2014, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been declared the head of a new caliphate that demands the allegiance of all Muslims.The secular, democratic politics that were supposedly at the fore of the Arab Spring have been buried by the return of the jihadis. As the Islamic State announced by ISIS confronts its enemies, the West will once again become a target. Cockburn cites an observer in southern Turkey interviewing Syrian jihadi rebels early in 2014 and finding that “without exception they all expressed enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same thing would happen in Europe as well as the US.”How could things have gone so badly wrong? Writing in these pages with customary calmness and clarity, and drawing on unrivaled experience as a reporter in the region, Cockburn analyzes the unfolding of one of the West’s greatest foreign policy debacles and the rise of the new jihadis.

    The Swiss Army is so quietly efficient at the art of war that the Isrealis carefully patterned their own military on the Swiss model.

    Klein and Michael Pettis show in this book, they are often the unexpected result of domestic political choices to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of workers and ordinary retirees.   Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today’s trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States over the past thirty years. Across the world, the rich have prospered while workers can no longer afford to buy what they produce, have lost their jobs, or have been forced into higher levels of debt. In this thought-provoking challenge to mainstream views, the authors provide a cohesive narrative that shows how the class wars of rising inequality are a threat to the global economy and international peace—and what we can do about it.

    Soon after the World Trade Center towers fell, leaving ashes floating over journalist Lee Smith’s Brooklyn neighborhood, he left for Cairo to find out “why the Arabs hate us.” He spent eight years reporting from Cairo, Beirut, and Jerusalem and discovered that the anger and disorder in the Middle East are not caused by a clash of civilizations between East and West, as is so often contended. Instead, he found a clash among Arab civilizations that led him to reassess America’s efforts to bring a “freedom agenda” to the Arab world. In The Strong Horse, Lee Smith offers paradigm-shifting insight into how the Arab world works and what America’s role should be in that world today.The Strong Horse combines evocative reporting with brilliant analysis that gracefully overturns many of the myths held about the region. Perhaps the most important myth that hobbles policy in the Middle East is the idea that the turmoil there is the legacy of Western interference. In fact, Smith shows, violence has been the only currency of power in the region for centuries. Another myth is that dictators are the main cause of widespread oppression in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Yet Smith finds that much of the repression that stagnates Arab society happens at the level of the family where rigorous redlines of social and religious behavior are enforced. What’s more, in a region seething with minorities, with no liberal tradition, no reverence for individual rights, and no tolerance for difference, authoritarian regimes exist because the alternative, as has been seen most recently in Lebanon and Iraq, is endless sectarian violence. In The Strong Horse, Smith reveals the Arab world to be defined by a tribal culture where support goes to “the strong horse.” Technology and democracy will not transform the Arab world, Smith convincingly demonstrates. Rather, Arab peoples and governments naturally align themselves with the strongest power, even when that power is the United States or Israel. Smith’s groundbreaking book redefines America’s role in the Middle East as “benevolent strong horse” and offers an important corrective to our understanding of the Arab world.

    Although capitalism could have only grown to current levels in the soil of democracies, Benjamin Barber argues that global capitalism now tends to work against the very concept of citizenship, of people thinking for themselves and with their neighbors. Too often now, how we think is the product of a transnational corporation (increasingly, a media corporation) with headquarters elsewhere. And although self-determination is one of the most fundamental of democratic principles, unchecked it has lead to a tribalism (think Bosnia, think Rwanda) in which virtually no one besides the local power elite gets a fair shake. The antidote, Barber concludes, is to work everywhere to resuscitate the non-governmental, non-business spaces in life--he calls them "civic spaces" (such as the village green, voluntary associations of every sort, churches, community schools)--where true citizenship thrives.

    Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their constituents. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of today’s developing countries—with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.Francis Fukuyama, author of the bestselling The End of History and the Last Man and one of our most important political thinkers, provides a sweeping account of how today’s basic political institutions developed. The first of a major two-volume work, The Origins of Political Order begins with politics among our primate ancestors and follows the story through the emergence of tribal societies, the growth of the first modern state in China, the beginning of the rule of law in India and the Middle East, and the development of political accountability in Europe up until the eve of the French Revolution.Drawing on a vast body of knowledge—history, evolutionary biology, archaeology, and economics—Fukuyama has produced a brilliant, provocative work that offers fresh insights on the origins of democratic societies and raises essential questions about the nature of politics and its discontents.

    A ten-volume analysis of the rise and fall of human civilizations, it is a work of breath-taking breadth and vision. D.C. Somervell's abridgement, in two volumes, of this magnificent enterprise, preserves the method, atmosphere, texture, and, in many instances, the very words of the original. Originally published in 1947 and 1957, these two volumes are themselves a great historical achievement.Volume 1, which abridges the first six volumes of Toynbee's study, includes the Introduction, The Geneses of Civilizations, and The Disintegrations of Civilizations. Volume 2, an abridgement of Volumes VII-X, includes sections on Universal States, Universal churches, Heroic Ages, Contacts Between Civilizations in Space, Contacts Between Civilizations in Time, Law and Freedom in History, The Prospects of the Western Civilization, and the Conclusion.Of Somervell's work, Toynbee wrote, "The reader now has at his command a uniform abridgement of the whole book, made by a clear mind that has not only mastered the contents but has entered into the writer's outlook and purpose."

    Eugene McCarraher reveals how mammon ensnared us and how we can find a more humane, sacramental way of being in the world.If socialists and Wall Street bankers can agree on anything, it is the extreme rationalism of capital. At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the "disenchantment" of the world, stripping material objects and social relationships of their mystery and sacredness. Ignoring the motive force of the spirit, capitalism rejects the awe-inspiring divine for the economics of supply and demand.Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether or not it is acknowledged. Capitalist enchantment first flowered in the fields and factories of England and was brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit. Later, the corporation was mystically animated with human personhood, to preside over the Fordist endeavor to build a heavenly city of mechanized production and communion. By the twenty-first century, capitalism has become thoroughly enchanted by the neoliberal deification of "the market."Informed by cultural history and theology as well as economics, management theory, and marketing, The Enchantments of Mammon looks not to Marx and progressivism but to nineteenth-century Romantics for salvation. The Romantic imagination favors craft, the commons, and sensitivity to natural wonder. It promotes labor that, for the sake of the person, combines reason, creativity, and mutual aid. In this impassioned challenge, McCarraher makes the case that capitalism has hijacked and redirected our intrinsic longing for divinity--and urges us to break its hold on our souls.

    This was the warning which Friedrich Hayek, the great architect of the 20th-century revival of classical liberal ideas, issued in 1949 with this essay. Hayek described intellectuals as 'professional second-hand dealers in ideas', people who are in a position to become familiar with new ideas and to promote them through their writings and speeches.He believed the importance of this class had been ignoted by supporters of the free market, with serious consequences. For example, socialism had never, and nowhere, been at first a working-class movement. It adoption by policy makers had been preceded by a long period in which it had been of interest only to intellectuals, who had promoted it relentlessly. Hayek believe that the classical liberal ideal of liberty and free markets had lost its appeal for young, intelligent people: the challenge was to 'make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure'. Hayek ended the essay by asking: 'Will it be in time?' A foreword by Edwin J. Feulner, President of the Heritage Foundation, and an introduction by John Blundell, General Director of the IEA, testify to the impact of this essay, together with Hayek's other writings, in stimulating the backlash against socialism through the many institutes founded by those who were won over to classical liberal ideas - just in time.

    Another Great Depression? Not quite. Noted economist and China expert Michael Pettis argues instead that we are undergoing a critical rebalancing of the world economies. Debunking popular misconceptions, Pettis shows that severe trade imbalances spurred on the recent financial crisis and were the result of unfortunate policies that distorted the savings and consumption patterns of certain nations. Pettis examines the reasons behind these destabilizing policies, and he predicts severe economic dislocations--a lost decade for China, the breaking of the Euro, and a receding of the U.S. dollar--that will have long-lasting effects.Pettis explains how China has maintained massive--but unsustainable--investment growth by artificially lowering the cost of capital. He discusses how Germany is endangering the Euro by favoring its own development at the expense of its neighbors. And he looks at how the U.S. dollar's role as the world's reserve currency burdens America's economy. Although various imbalances may seem unrelated, Pettis shows that all of them--including the U.S. consumption binge, surging debt in Europe, China's investment orgy, Japan's long stagnation, and the commodity boom in Latin America--are closely tied together, and that it will be impossible to resolve any issue without forcing a resolution for all.Demonstrating how economic policies can carry negative repercussions the world over, The Great Rebalancing sheds urgent light on our globally linked economic future.

    It is exactly these forces, de Soto argues, that prevent houses, land, and machines from functioning as capital does in the West -- as assets that can be leveraged to create more capital. Under the Fujimori government, de Soto's Institute for Liberty and Democracy wrote dozens of laws to promote property rights and bring people out of the informal economy and into the legitimate one. The result was not only an economic boon for Peru but also the defeat of the Shining Path, the terrorist movement and black-market force that was then threatening to take over the Peruvian government. In a new preface, de Soto relates his work to the present moment, making the connection between the Shining Path in the 1980's and the Taliban today.

    How did this marvel of self-organized complexity evolve? How is wealth created within this system? And how can wealth be increased for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and society? In The Origin of Wealth, Eric D. Beinhocker argues that modern science provides a radical perspective on these age-old questions, with far-reaching implications. According to Beinhocker, wealth creation is the product of a simple but profoundly powerful evolutionary formula: differentiate, select, and amplify. In this view, the economy is a "complex adaptive system" in which physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs continuously interact to create novel products, new ideas, and increasing wealth. Taking readers on an entertaining journey through economic history, from the Stone Age to modern economy, Beinhocker explores how "complexity economics" provides provocative insights on issues ranging from creating adaptive organizations to the evolutionary workings of stock markets to new perspectives on government policies. A landmark book that shatters conventional economic theory, The Origin of Wealth will rewire our thinking about how we came to be here—and where we are going.

    financial system, which had grown far too complex for its own good-and too unregulated for the public good-experienced a perfect storm beginning in 2007. When America's financial structure crumbled, the damage proved to be not only deep, but wide. It took the crisis for the world to discover, to its horror, just how truly interconnected-and fragile-the global financial system is. The second part of the story explains how American and international government intervention kept us from a total meltdown. Many of the U.S. government's actions, particularly the Fed's, were previously unimaginable. And to an amazing-and certainly misunderstood-extent, they worked. The worst did not happen. Blinder offers clear-eyed answers to the questions still before us, even if some of the choices ahead are as divisive as they are unavoidable. After the Music Stopped is an essential history that we cannot afford to forget, because one thing history teaches is that it will happen here again.

    The discoveries made, however, are so far-reaching that a large portion of economics literature will have to be modified to accommodate another half to the macro economic spectrum of possibilities that conventional theorists have overlooked. In particular, Japan's Great Recession showed that when faced with a massive fall in asset prices, companies typically jettison the conventional goal of profit maximization and move to minimize debt in order to restore their credit ratings. This shift in corporate priority, however, has huge theoretical as well as practical implications and opens up a whole new field of study. For example, the new insight can explain fully the precise mechanism of prolonged depression and liquidity trap which conventional economics - based on corporate profit maximization - has so far failed to offer as a convincing explanation. The author developed the idea of yin and yang business cycles where the conventional world of profit maximization is the yang and the world of balance sheet recession, where companies are minimizing debt, is the yin. Once so divided, many varied theories developed in macro economics since the 1930s can be nicely categorized into a single comprehensive theory, i.e., the Holy Grail of macro economics The policy implication of this new discovery is immense in that the conventional aversion to fiscal policy in favor of monetary policy will have to be completely reversed when the economy is in the yin phase. The theoretical implications are also immense in the sense that the economics profession will no longer have to rely so much on various rigidities to explain recessions that have become the standard practice within the so-called New Keynesian economics of the last twenty years.