The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money


John Maynard Keynes - 1935
    In his most important work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), Keynes critiqued the laissez-faire policies of his day, particularly the proposition that a normally functioning market economy would bring full employment. Keynes's forward-looking work transformed economics from merely a descriptive and analytic discipline into one that is policy oriented. For Keynes, enlightened government intervention in a nation's economic life was essential to curbing what he saw as the inherent inequalities and instabilities of unregulated capitalism.

Why We Want You To Be Rich: Two Men, One Message


Donald J. Trump - 2006
    Kiyosaki and celebrity rich man Donald J. Trump join forces to come to the aid of America's shrinking middle class. These thriving multimillionaires give advice designed to help average readers expand their wealth in the harsh economy. Firm steps towards financial literacy.From book cover:The world is facing many challenges and one of them is financial. The entitlement mentality is epidemic, creating people who expect their countries, employers, or families to take care of them. Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki, both successful businessmen, are natural teachers and have joined forces to address these challenges. They believe you cannot solve money problems with money. You can only solve money problems with financial education. Trump and Kiyosaki want to teach you to be rich."Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."They each could have written a book on the subject, but they chose instead to write a book together because of their shared passion for education and their desire to bring emphasis to the importance of financial education. In addition they have designated a portion of the profits from each book to be donated to charitable and educational organizations that also support financial education.

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age


James Crabtree - 2018
    But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country's top 1% now own nearly 60% of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India's new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of yesterday, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption.James Crabtree's The Billionaire Raj takes readers on a personal journey to meet reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world's most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste.

Essays on political economy


Frédéric Bastiat - 1968
    This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers


John Kay - 2020
    The insurance industry’s actuarial tables and the gambler’s roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000, no one—not least Steve Jobs—knew what a smartphone was; how could anyone have predicted how many would be sold in 2020? And financial advisers who confidently provide the information required in the standard retirement planning package—what will interest rates, the cost of living, and your state of health be in 2050?—demonstrate only that their advice is worthless.The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence. In most critical decisions there can be no forecasts or probability distributions on which we might sensibly rely. Instead of inventing numbers to fill the gaps in our knowledge, we should adopt business, political, and personal strategies that will be robust to alternative futures and resilient to unpredictable events. Within the security of such a robust and resilient reference narrative, uncertainty can be embraced, because it is the source of creativity, excitement, and profit.

The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane


Randall Lane - 2010
    Randall Lane never set out to become a Wall Street power broker. But during the decade he calls the Zeroes, he started a small magazine company that put him near the white-hot center of the biggest boom in history. Almost by accident, a man who drove a beat-up Subaru and lived in a rented walk-up became the go-to guy for big shots with nine-figure incomes. Lane's saga began with a simple idea: a glossy magazine exclusively for and about traders, which would treat them like rock stars and entice them to splurge on luxury goods. Trader Monthly was an instant hit around the world. Wall Streeters loved the spotlight, and advertisers like Gulfstream, Maybach, and Bulgari loved the marketing opportunity. To accelerate the buzz, Lane's staff threw parties featuring celebrities, premium steaks, cigars, and top-shelf vodka. Nothing was too expensive or too outrageous. Private jets in Napa Valley. Casino nights in London. And $1,000-a- seat boxing matches in New York, where traders from Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns pounded each other in front of tuxedoed throngs. Before long, Wall Street's rich and powerful trusted Lane as a fellow insider- the guy who could turn an anonymous trader into a cover model and media darling. And the rest of the world sought him out as a way to tap into Wall Street's riches. As he emptied his bank account to help keep his little company afloat, he became a nexus for the absurd. Traders who turned 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina into multimillion-dollar windfalls. John McCain closing out the craps tables during an all-night gambling binge. Pop artist Peter Max hustling hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling traders paint-by-numbers portraits. Al Gore, John Travolta, Moby. Corrupt Caribbean rulers, the mobsters from Goodfellas, the pope. And a retired baseball star turned market guru named Lenny Dykstra, whose rise and fall was a great metaphor for the decade. All played roles in Lane's increasingly surreal world. When the crash of 2008 hit, Lane's company and life savings were destroyed along with the high-flying traders and dealmakers his magazines exalted. But Lane walked away with something more lasting: an incredible true story, told by a skilled writer and reporter who sat squarely in the middle of one of the critical periods in modern financial and cultural history. People will turn to The Zeroes for many years to come, to find out what the era was really like.

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update


Donella H. Meadows - 1972
    Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global 'overshoot,' or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now, preeminent environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows have teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Global Update.Meadows, Randers, and Meadows are international environmental leaders recognized for their groundbreaking research into early signs of wear on the planet. Citing climate change as the most tangible example of our current overshoot, the scientists now provide us with an updated scenario and a plan to reduce our needs to meet the carrying capacity of the planet.Over the past three decades, population growth and global warming have forged on with a striking semblance to the scenarios laid out by the World3 computer model in the original Limits to Growth. While Meadows, Randers, and Meadows do not make a practice of predicting future environmental degradation, they offer an analysis of present and future trends in resource use, and assess a variety of possible outcomes.In many ways, the message contained in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a warning. Overshoot cannot be sustained without collapse. But, as the authors are careful to point out, there is reason to believe that humanity can still reverse some of its damage to Earth if it takes appropriate measures to reduce inefficiency and waste.Written in refreshingly accessible prose, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update is a long anticipated revival of some of the original voices in the growing chorus of sustainability. Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update is a work of stunning intelligence that will expose for humanity the hazy but critical line between human growth and human development.

Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean


Karen Berman - 2006
    But many managers can't read a balance sheet, wouldn't recognize a liquidity ratio, and don't know how to calculate return on investment. Worse, they don't have any idea where the numbers come from or how reliable they really are. In Financial Intelligence, Karen Berman and Joe Knight teach the basics of finance--but with a twist. Financial reporting, they argue, is as much art as science. Because nobody can quantify everything, accountants always rely on estimates, assumptions, and judgment calls. Savvy managers need to know how those sources of possible bias can affect the financials and that sometimes the numbers can be challenged. While providing the foundation for a deep understanding of the financial side of business, the book also arms managers with practical strategies for improving their companies' performance--strategies, such as "managing the balance sheet," that are well understood by financial professionals but rarely shared with their nonfinancial colleagues. Accessible, jargon-free, and filled with entertaining stories of real companies, Financial Intelligence gives nonfinancial managers the financial knowledge and confidence for their everyday work. Karen Berman and Joe Knight are the owners of the Los Angeles-based Business Literacy Institute and have trained tens of thousands of managers at many leading organizations. Co-author John Case has written several popular books on management.

Multiple Streams of Income: How to Generate a Lifetime of Unlimited Wealth


Robert G. Allen - 1998
    For this book, Allen researched hundreds of income-producing opportunities and narrowed them down to ten surefire moneymakers anyone can profit from. This revised edition includes a new chapter on a cutting-edge investing technique.

Engineering Economy


William G. Sullivan - 1999
    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

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression


Richard A. Posner - 2009
    How could it have happened, especially after all that we've learned from the Great Depression? Why wasn't it anticipated so that remedial steps could be taken to avoid or mitigate it? What can be done to reverse a slide into a full-blown depression? Why have the responses to date of the government and the economics profession been so lackluster? Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it. No previous acquaintance on the part of the reader with macroeconomics or the theory of finance is presupposed. This is a book for intelligent generalists that will interest specialists as well.Among the facts and causes Posner identifies are: excess savingsflowing in from Asia and the reckless lowering of interest rates by theFederal Reserve Board; the relation between executive compensation, short-term profit goals, and risky lending; the housing bubble fuelled bylow interest rates, aggressive mortgage marketing, and loose regulations; the low savings rate of American people; and the highly leveraged balance sheets of large financial institutions.Posner analyzes the two basic remedial approaches to the crisis, which correspond to the two theories of the cause of the Great Depression: the monetarist--that the Federal Reserve Board allowed the money supply to shrink, thus failing to prevent a disastrous deflation--and the Keynesian--that the depression was the product of a credit binge in the 1920's, a stock-market crash, and the ensuing downward spiral in economic activity. Posner concludes that the pendulum swung too far and that our financial markets need to be more heavily regulated.Read Richard Posner's blog, and his latest article in The Atlantic.

Why Not Capitalism?


Jason Brennan - 2014
    As Adam Smith put it, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." Capitalism works better than socialism, according to this thinking, only because we are not kind and generous enough to make socialism work. If we were saints, we would be socialists.In "Why Not Capitalism"?, Jason Brennan attacks this widely held belief, arguing that capitalism would remain the best system even if we were morally perfect. Even in an ideal world, private property and free markets would be the best way to promote mutual cooperation, social justice, harmony, and prosperity. Socialists seek to capture the moral high ground by showing that ideal socialism is morally superior to realistic capitalism. But, Brennan responds, ideal capitalism is superior to ideal socialism, and so capitalism beats socialism at every level.Clearly, engagingly, and at times provocatively written, "Why Not Capitalism? "will cause readers of all political persuasions to re-evaluate where they stand vis-a-vis economic priorities and systems as they exist now and as they might be improved in the future.

Quicklet Outliers Malcolm Gladwell


The Quicklet Team - 2011
    Attributing achievements to a combination of long hours of practice, strong community support, and just being born at the right time, Gladwell analyzes the small factors which lead to success. If you want to learn everything you want to know about Outliers without reading more than 300 pages, our Quicklet book and eBook is for you - fast, fun, and the best material up front!CHAPTER OUTLINEQuicklet On OutliersIntroductionList Of Important PeopleKey Terms & DefinitionsIntroduction Summary: The Roseto Mystery...and much more

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else


Hernando de Soto - 2000
    Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly informal, extralegal ownership to a formal, unified legal property system. In the West we've forgotten that creating this system is also what allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth. This persuasive book will revolutionize our understanding of capital and point the way to a major transformation of the world economy.

None of My Business


P.J. O'Rourke - 2018
    J. O'Rourke takes on his scariest subjects yet--business, investment, finance, and the political chicanery behind them. Want to get rich overnight for free in 3 easy steps with no risk? Then don't buy this book. (Actually, if you believe there's a book that can do that, you shouldn't buy any books because you probably can't read.) P.J.'s approach to business, investment, and finance is different. He takes the risks for you in his chapter "How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other." He proposes "A Way to Raise Taxes That We'll All Love"--a 200% tax on celebrities. He offers a brief history of economic transitions before exploring the world of high tech innovation with a chapter on "Unnovations," which asks, "The Internet--whose idea was it to put all the idiots on earth in touch with each other?" He misunderstands bitcoin, which seems "like a weird scam invented by strange geeks with weaponized slide rules in the high school Evil Math Club." He closes with a fanciful short story about the morning that P.J. wakes up and finds that all the world's goods and services are free! This is P.J. at his finest, a book not to be missed.