The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future


Andrew Yang - 2018
    The shift toward automation is about to create a tsunami of unemployment. Not in the distant future—now. One recent estimate predicts 45 million American workers will lose their jobs within the next twelve years—jobs that won't be replaced. In a future marked by restlessness and chronic unemployment, what will happen to American society? In The War on Normal People, Andrew Yang paints a dire portrait of the American economy. Rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and automation software are making millions of Americans' livelihoods irrelevant. The consequences of these trends are already being felt across our communities in the form of political unrest, drug use, and other social ills. The future looks dire-but is it unavoidable? In The War on Normal People, Yang imagines a different future—one in which having a job is distinct from the capacity to prosper and seek fulfillment. At this vision's core is Universal Basic Income, the concept of providing all citizens with a guaranteed income-and one that is rapidly gaining popularity among forward-thinking politicians and economists. Yang proposes that UBI is an essential step toward a new, more durable kind of economy, one he calls "human capitalism."

Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State


Gerard Casey - 2012
    The state is considered necessary for the provision of many things, but primarily for peace and security. In this provocative book, Gerard Casey argues that social order can be spontaneously generated, that such spontaneous order is the norm in human society and that deviations from the ordered norms can be dealt with without recourse to the coercive power of the state.Casey presents a novel perspective on political philosophy, arguing against the conventional political philosophy pieties and defending a specific political position, which he identifies as 'libertarian anarchy'. The book includes a history of the concept of anarchy, an examination of the possibility of anarchic societies and an articulation ofthe nature of law and order within such societies. Casey presents his specific form of anarchy, undergirded by a theory of human action that prioritises liberty, as a philosophically and politically viable alternative to the standard positions in political theory."

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism


Anne Case - 2020
    In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year--and they're still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. They demonstrate why, for those who used to prosper in America, capitalism is no longer delivering.Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today's America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America.This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses and make it work for everyone.

The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust


Robert Frank - 2011
    Starting in the early 1980s the top one percent (1%) broke away from the rest of us to become the most unstable force in the economy. An elite that had once been the flat line on the American income charts - models of financial propriety - suddenly set off on a wild ride of economic binges.              Not only do they control more than a third of the country’s wealth, their increasing vulnerability to the booms and busts of the stock market wreak havoc on our consumer economy, financial markets, communities, employment opportunities, and government finances.        Robert Frank’s insightful analysis provides the disturbing big picture of high-beta wealth. His vivid storytelling brings you inside the mortgaged mansions, blown-up balance sheets, repossessed Bentleys and Gulfstreams, and wrecked lives and relationships: • How one couple frittered away a fortune trying to build America’s biggest house —90,000 square feet with 23 full bathrooms, a 6,000 square foot master suite with a bed on a rotating platform—only to be forced to put it on the market because “we really need the money”.    • Repo men who are now the scavengers of the wealthy, picking up private jets, helicopters, yachts and racehorses – the shiny remains of a decade of conspicuous consumption financed with debt, asset bubbles, “liquidity events,” and soaring stock prices.  • How “big money ruins everything” for communities such as Aspen, Colorado whose over-reliance on the rich created a stratified social scene of velvet ropes and A-lists and crises in employment opportunities, housing, and tax revenues.  • Why California’s worst budget crisis in history is due in large part to reliance on the volatile incomes of the state’s tech tycoons.  • The bitter divorce of a couple who just a few years ago made the Forbes 400 list of the richest people, the firing of their enormous household staff of 110, and how one former spouse learned  the marvels of shopping at Marshalls,  filling your own gas tank, and flying commercial.  Robert Frank’s stories and analysis brilliantly show that the emergence of the high-beta rich is not just a high-class problem for the rich. High-beta wealth has national consequences: America’s dependence on the rich + great volatility among the rich = a more volatile America.   Cycles of wealth are now much faster and more extreme. The rich are a new “Potemkin Plutocracy” and the important lessons and consequences are brought to light of day in this engrossing book.  high-beta rich (hi be’ta rich) 1. a newly discovered personality type of the America upper class prone to wild swings in wealth. 2. the winners (and occasional losers) in an economy that creates wealth from financial markets, asset bubbles and deals. 3. derived from the Wall Street term “high-beta,” meaning highly volatile or prone to booms and busts. 4. an elite that’s capable of wreaking havoc on communities, jobs, government finances, and the consumer economy. 5. a new Potemkin plutocracy that hides a mountain of debt behind the image of success, and is one crisis away from losing their mansions, private jets and yachts.From the Hardcover edition.

Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do about It


Richard D. Wolff - 2009
    The book's essays engage the public discussion about basic structural changes and systemic alternatives needed to fix today's broken economy.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else


Chrystia Freeland - 2012
    Forget the 1%; it's the wealthiest .01% who are fast outpacing the rest of us. Today's colossal fortunes are amassed by the diligent toiling of smart, perceptive businessmen who see themselves as deserving victors in a cutthroat international competition.  Cracking open this tight-knit world is Chrystia Freeland, an acclaimed business journalist. At ease in Davos or Dubai, Freeland has reported on the lives and minds of these new super-elites for nearly a decade. Grounding her interviews in the economics and history of modern capitalism, she provides examples of the new wealth and its consequences. She showcases the $3 million birthday party of a New York financier months before the financial meltdown; details the closed-door 2005 SEC meeting where the US government allowed investment banks to write their own regulatory laws; and tells how the Bank of Canada's Mark Carney became a key figure in the central battle between the plutocracy and the rest of us.  Brightly written and powerfully researched, Freeland's Plutocrats will be a lightning rod event in the midst of the US election season.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk


Satyajit Das - 2011
    In "Extreme Money," best-selling author and global finance expert Satyajit Das tells how this happened and what it means. Das reveals the spectacular, dangerous money games that are generating increasingly massive bubbles of fake growth, prosperity, and wealth--while endangering the jobs, possessions, and futures of virtually everyone outside finance. ..".virtually in a category of its own -- part history, part book of financial quotations, part cautionary tale, part textbook. It contains some of the clearest charts about risk transfer you will find anywhere. ...Others have laid out the dire consequences of financialisation ("the conversion of everything into monetary form," in Das's phrase), but few have done it with a wider or more entertaining range of references...[Extreme Money] does... reach an important, if worrying, conclusion: financialisation may be too deep-rooted to be torn out. As Das puts it -- characteristically borrowing a line from a movie, Inception -- "the hardest virus to kill is an idea." -Andrew Hill "Eclectic Guide to the Excesses of the Crisis" ""Financial Times ""(August 17, 2011) Extreme Money named to the longlist for the 2011 FT and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award.

Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation


Danny Katch - 2015
    prefer socialism to capitalism. But after being declared dead and buried for decades, socialism has come to mean little more than something vaguely less cruel and stupid than what we have now. That's not exactly going to inspire millions to storm the barricades. Danny Katch brings together the two great Marxist traditions of Karl and Groucho to provide an entertaining and insightful introduction to what the socialist tradition has to say about democracy, economics and the potential of human beings to be something more than being bomb-dropping, planet-destroying racist fools.

Wage Labour and Capital


Karl Marx - 1891
    He published various books during his lifetime, with the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894), many of which were co-written with his friend, the fellow German revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels.The text of Wage Labour and Capital came from lectures Marx delivered to the German Workmen's Club of Brussels in 1847, a time of great political upheaval. The relationship between wage-labour to capital is a core concept in Marx's analysis of political economy and its relationship with capitalism. This book is an essential for anyone attempting to understand the development of Marxist theory.This edition of Wage Labour and Capital is specially formatted with a Table of Contents.

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy


Richard Duncan - 2012
    All previous constraints on money and credit creation were removed and a new economic paradigm took shape. Economic growth ceased to be driven by capital accumulation and investment as it had been since before the Industrial Revolution. Instead, credit creation and consumption began to drive the economic dynamic. In "The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy," Richard Duncan introduces an analytical framework, The Quantity Theory of Credit, that explains all aspects of the calamity now unfolding: its causes, the rationale for the government's policy response to the crisis, what is likely to happen next, and how those developments will affect asset prices and investment portfolios.In his previous book, "The Dollar Crisis" (2003), Duncan explained why a severe global economic crisis was inevitable given the flaws in the post-Bretton Woods international monetary system, and now he's back to explain what's next. The economic system that emerged following the abandonment of sound money requires credit growth to survive. Yet the private sector can bear no additional debt and the government's creditworthiness is deteriorating rapidly. Should total credit begin to contract significantly, this New Depression will become a New Great Depression, with disastrous economic and geopolitical consequences. That outcome is not inevitable, and this book describes what must be done to prevent it.Presents a fascinating look inside the financial crisis and how the New Depression is poised to become a New Great DepressionIntroduces a new theoretical construct, The Quantity Theory of Credit, that is the key to understanding not only the developments that led to the crisis, but also to understanding how events will play out in the years aheadOffers unique insights from the man who predicted the global economic breakdownAlarming but essential reading, "The New Depression" explains why the global economy is teetering on the brink of falling into a deep and protracted depression, and how we can restore stability.

A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics


Hadas Thier - 2018
    With the same breath, they implore us to leave the job of understanding the magical powers of the market to the “experts."Despite the efforts of these mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many of us have begun to question why this system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms: in the form of a radical economic theory.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story


Arundhati Roy - 2004
    India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product.Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism has subjugated billions of people to the highest and most intense forms of racism and exploitation.