If so, you’re rather psychologically peculiar.Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves—their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries?In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition—laying the foundation for the modern world.Provocative and engaging in both its broad scope and its surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history. Include black-and-white illustrations.

    Sometimes the fear derives from a pre-existing threat. At other times, crises are created or intensified to invoke a sense of panic and anxiety where none previously existed.This pattern is as predictable as it is destructive. The end result is the same: a loss of liberty. Policies that are costly, oppressive, and harmful are supported by people who abandon any interest in freedom or personal responsibility in hopes of feeling safe.Manufactured fear, with its negative impact on liberty, is a societal plague. There have been widespread casualties. We need an antidote. Feardom offers its readers a much-needed immunization.

    The chiefs of staff, often referred to as "the gatekeepers," wield tremendous power in Washington and beyond; they decide who is allowed to see the president, negotiate with Congress to push POTUS's agenda, and--most crucially--enjoy unparalleled access to the leader of the free world. Each chief can make or break an administration, and each president reveals himself by the chief he picks.Through extensive, intimate interviews with all seventeen living chiefs and two former presidents, award-winning journalist and producer Chris Whipple pulls back the curtain on this unique fraternity. In doing so, he revises our understanding of presidential history, showing us how James Baker's expert managing of the White House, the press, and Capitol Hill paved the way for the Reagan Revolution--and, conversely, how Watergate, the Iraq War, and even the bungled Obamacare rollout might have been prevented by a more effective chief.Filled with shrewd analysis and never-before-reported details, The Gatekeepers offers an essential portrait of the toughest job in Washington.

    . . Columbus statues attacked with red paint. They started with slave-owning Confederate generals, but they’re not stopping there. The vandals are only pretending to care about the character of particular American heroes. In reality, they hate what those heroes represent: the truths asserted in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution. And they are bent on taking America down and replacing our free society with a socialist utopia. All that stands in their way is Americans’ reverence for our history of freedom. Which is why that history simply has to go. Now, Jarrett Stepman, editor at The Daily Signal and host of Right Side of History, exposes the true aims of the war on our history:The war on America: World history is full of conquests and suffering indigenous peoples. Why target Christopher Columbus? What they really want to tear down is America.The war on Thanksgiving: World history is full of colonists. Why target the Pilgrims? What they really want to tear down is American freedom and prosperity.The war on the Founding: World history is full of slavery. Why target Thomas Jefferson? What they really want to tear down are the rights endowed by our Creator.The war on the common man: World history is full of victorious generals and populist politicians. Why target Andrew Jackson? What they really want to tear down is democracy.The war on the South: World history is full of civil strife. Why target Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee? What they really want to tear down is respect for America’s past and the reconciliation that renewed our Union.The war on patriotism: World history is full of national pride. Why target Teddy Roosevelt? What they really want to tear down is the idea of American greatness.The war on the American century: World history is full of bloody wars. What they really want to tear down is America’s defeat of totalitarianism. If America is to survive this assault, we must rally to the defense of our illustrious history. The War on History is the battle plan.

    Quoting from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Lindqvist muses on what bodybuilding's increasing popularity says about contemporary society. "Bench Press" is an intoxicating blend of philosophical and political insight, emotional candor, and forgotten annals of the history of exertion.

    Geoghegan makes his argument for labor with stories, sometimes humorous but more often chilling, about the problems working people like his own clients—from cabdrivers to schoolteachers—now face, increasingly powerless in our union-free economy. He explains why a new kind of labor movement (and not just more higher education) is the real program the Democrats should push—not just to save the middle class from bankruptcy but to revive Keynes’s original and sometimes forgotten ideas for getting the rich to invest and reducing our balance of trade, and to promote John Dewey’s vision of a “democratic way of life,” one that would start in the schools and continue in our places of work.A “public policy” book that is compulsively readable, Only One Thing Can Save Us is vintage Geoghegan, blending acerbic, witty commentary with unparalleled insight into the real dynamics (and human experience) of working in America today.

    ExxonMobil’s annual revenues are larger than the economic activity in the great majority of countries. In many of the countries where it conducts business, ExxonMobil’s sway over politics and security is greater than that of the United States embassy. In Washington, ExxonMobil spends more money lobbying Congress and the White House than almost any other corporation. Yet despite its outsized influence, it is a black box.Private Empire pulls back the curtain, tracking the corporation’s recent history and its central role on the world stage, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The action spans the globe, moving from Moscow, to impoverished African capitals, Indonesia, and elsewhere in heart-stopping scenes that feature kidnapping cases, civil wars, and high-stakes struggles at the Kremlin. At home, Coll goes inside ExxonMobil’s K Street office and corporation headquarters in Irving, Texas, where top executives in the “God Pod” (as employees call it) oversee an extraordinary corporate culture of discipline and secrecy.The narrative is driven by larger than life characters, including corporate legend Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond, ExxonMobil’s chief executive until 2005. A close friend of Dick Cheney’s, Raymond was both the most successful and effective oil executive of his era and an unabashed skeptic about climate change and government regulation.. This position proved difficult to maintain in the face of new science and political change and Raymond’s successor, current ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, broke with Raymond’s programs in an effort to reset ExxonMobil’s public image. The larger cast includes countless world leaders, plutocrats, dictators, guerrillas, and corporate scientists who are part of ExxonMobil’s colossal story.The first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil, Private Empire is the masterful result of Coll’s indefatigable reporting. He draws here on more than four hundred interviews; field reporting from the halls of Congress to the oil-laden swamps of the Niger Delta; more than one thousand pages of previously classified U.S. documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; heretofore unexamined court records; and many other sources. A penetrating, newsbreaking study, Private Empire is a defining portrait of ExxonMobil and the place of Big Oil in American politics and foreign policy.Winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2012

    But with confusing things like GDP and interest rates, it's often hard to get you head around.So What do you really need to know about economics? Find out:What economic growth is and why it matters How inflation happens How jobs are created and lost How the property market works What central banks do and how it affects the rest of us The impact of government spending on the economy What You Need to Know About Economics cuts through the theory to help you to do your job and understand the world around you better.Read More in the What You Need to Know Series and Ger Up to Speed on The Essentials... Fast.

    Democracy no longer ends with a bang--in a revolution or military coup--but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one.Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die--and how ours can be saved.

    Empires were abolished and replaced by a global arrangement enforced by the U.S. Navy. With all the world's oceans safe for the first time in history, markets and resources were made available for everyone. Enemies became partners.We think of this system as normal - it is not. We live in an artificial world on borrowed time.In The Accidental Superpower, international strategist Peter Zeihan examines how the hard rules of geography are eroding the American commitment to free trade; how much of the planet is aging into a mass retirement that will enervate markets and capital supplies; and how, against all odds, it is the ever-ravenous American economy that - alone among the developed nations - is rapidly approaching energy independence. Combined, these factors are doing nothing less than overturning the global system and ushering in a new (dis)order. For most, that is a disaster-in-waiting, but not for the Americans. The shale revolution allows Americans to sidestep an increasingly dangerous energy market. Only the United States boasts a youth population large enough to escape the sucking maw of global aging. Most important, geography will matter more than ever in a de-globalizing world, and America's geography is simply sublime.

    Written over 150 years ago in 1848, a period of history with great upheaval, it continues to be an important work on political economy, especially as we enter the dawn of the global economy. Politicians, business leaders, acamdemics and students of very different persuasions find the manifesto a basic and essential treatise to be understood. It has had a tremendous effect throughout history and will continue to influence the future of mankind. A Collector's Edition.

    Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue unabated, and demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated. Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government, and that we must find new solutions. A critical voice in the most pressing debates of our time, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.

    A page-turning true story of international scandal and corruption at the very highest levels of corporate America, this thriller unveils botched crimes, courtroom drama, suicide attempts, and an immense tangle of lies and deception.

    Through the eyes of key people--Jacob Lew, White House director of the Office of Management and Budget; Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office; Blackstone founder and former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson; and more--Wessel gives readers an inside look at the making of our unsustainable budget.

    Google's AdWords platform enables you to create pay-per-click advertisements that appear as 'sponsored links' when someone searches for content related to your product or service. You bid for the position to place your ad, and you only pay when someone clicks. It's that simple. If used correctly, AdWords can garner higher targeted traffic, which in turn will increase your conversion rates and profits. So, AdWords will definitely help your business, but you have no idea how to utilize them. What should you do? Take a couple of hours to read this book. Google AdWords for Beginners is designed to teach you the fundamentals of AdWords, how it works, why it works, and the proven techniques that you can use to make it work for you and your business. Additionally, this book details an eight-step blueprint that has consistently delivered positive results for companies. Upon completion, you'll be armed with the knowledge to launch profitable campaigns or drastically improve an existing one.