Is it a sign of strength or of weakness that the US has suddenly shifted from a politics of consensus to one of coercion on the world stage? What was really at stake in the war on Iraq? Was it all about oil and, if not, what else wasinvolved? What role has a sagging economy played in pushing the US into foreign adventurism? What exactly is the relationship between US militarism abroad and domestic politics? These are the questions taken up in this compelling and original book. In this closely argued and clearly written book, David Harvey, one of the leading social theorists of his generation, builds a conceptual framework to expose the underlying forces at work behind these momentous shifts in US policies and politics. The compulsions behind the projection of US power on the world as a new imperialism are here, forthe first time, laid bare for all to see.

    Not anymore. In this richly detailed and eye-opening book, Rick Wartzman chronicles the erosion of the relationship between American companies and their workers. Through the stories of four major employers -- General Motors, General Electric, Kodak, and Coca-Cola -- he shows how big businesses once took responsibility for providing their workers and retirees with an array of social benefits. At the height of the post-World War II economy, these companies also believed that worker pay needed to be kept high in order to preserve morale and keep the economy humming. Productivity boomed. But the corporate social contract didn't last. By tracing the ups and downs of these four corporate icons over seventy years, Wartzman illustrates just how much has been lost: job security and steadily rising pay, guaranteed pensions, robust health benefits, and much more. Charting the Golden Age of the '50s and '60s; the turbulent years of the '70s and '80s; and the growth of downsizing, outsourcing, and instability in the modern era, Wartzman's narrative is a biography of the American Dream gone sideways. Deeply researched and compelling, The End of Loyalty will make you rethink how Americans can begin to resurrect the middle class.Finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize in current interestA best business book of the year in economics, Strategy+Business

    Meme Wars aims to accelerate the shift into this new paradigm that takes into account psychonomics, bionomics, and other aspects of our physical and mental environment that are often left out in discussions of economics. Like Adbusters, the book will be image heavy and full-color throughout. Lasn calls it "a textbook for the future" that provides the building blocks, in texts and visuals, for a new way of looking at and changing our world. Through an examination of alternative economies, Lasn hopes to spur students to become "barefoot economists" and to see that a humanization of economics is possible. Meme Wars will include contributions from Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Samuelson, George Akerlof, Lourdes Benería, Julie Matthaei, Manfred Max-Neef, David Orrell, Paul Gilding, Mathis Wackernagel and the father of ecological economics Herman Daly, among others.Based on ideas that were presented in a special issue of Adbusters entitled "Thought Control in Economics: Beyond the Growth Paradigm / An Activist Toolkit," Meme Wars will help move forward the Occupy Wall Street movement.

    Starting in the ramshackle but romantic capital of Havana, Peter Millar travels with ordinary Cubans, sharing anecdotes, life stories and political opinions to the far end of the island, the Guantanamo naval base and detention camp.

    This hands-on guide shows you how to maintain a successful bar, manage the business aspect of it, and stake your place in your town's nightlife. It provides informative tips on:Understanding the business and laws of owning a bar Developing a business plan Creating a menu, choosing decor, and establishing a theme Stocking up on equipment Choosing and dealing with employees Handling tough customers Controlling expenses, managing inventory, and controlling cash flow Getting the word out about your place Preparing for your grand opening, step-by-step This guide cues you in on how to keep your bar safe and clean, making sure everyone is having fun. It warns you about the pitfalls and no-nos that every owner should avoid. There are also helpful resources, such as contact information for State Alcohol Control Boards and Web sites with valuable information.

    Companies are shutting down and laying off workers, 401ks are melting away, and the government is spending $700 billion dollars to bail out banks and financial institutions -- and that's only the beginning. The financial services industry, and the many industries that depend on it -- from housing to cars -- is in intensive care. So what happened? How did we get to this point of financial disaster? Is the economy just a huge, Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme? It is a complicated and confusing story -- but Daniel Gross of Newsweek has a special gift for making complicated matters easy to understand and even entertaining. In Dumb Money, he offers a guide to the debacle and to what the future may hold. This is not so much a book about who did what, though that's part of the story. Rather, it pieces together the building blocks of the debt-fueled economy, and distills the theory and personalities behind our late, lamented easy money culture. Dumb Money is a book that finally lays it all out in an engaging way, and might just help people invest their money smartly until the gloom passes.

    The controversial book linking intelligence to class and race in modern society, and what public policy can do to mitigate socioeconomic differences in IQ, birth rate, crime, fertility, welfare, and poverty.

    By the nineteenth century British economist and author of The English Constitution. A valuable financial work.

    Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent—and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.

    In fact, you won’t be able to put this bestseller down. In our challenging economic climate, this perennial favorite of students and general readers is more than a good read, it’s a necessary investment—with a blessedly sure rate of return. This revised and updated edition includes commentary on hot topics such as automation, trade, income inequality, and America’s rising debt. Ten years after the financial crisis, Naked Economics examines how policymakers managed the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.Demystifying buzzwords, laying bare the truths behind oft-quoted numbers, and answering the questions you were always too embarrassed to ask, the breezy Naked Economics gives you the tools to engage with pleasure and confidence in the deeply relevant, not so dismal science.

    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.

    National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion, has been translated into 11 languages, and was named one of the "100 most influential books since the war" (1945–1995) by the U.K. Times Literary Supplement.

    In his analysis, Andrew Simms, director of the acclaimed think-and-do-tank the New Economics Foundation, and in association with tescopoly.org, tackles a subject that none of us can afford to ignore - what supermarkets in general, and Tesco in particular, are doing to the way we think we live our lives.

    His chief work, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, first published in 1817, had a profound impact and remains one of the groundworks of modern economics. Ricardo's labor theory of value, as well as his elaboration of the division of incomes, and the function of wages, rent, and trade, deeply influenced the economic philosophies of Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, and many others.

    It has sparked major international debates, dominated bestseller lists and generated a level of enthusiasm—as well as intense criticism—in a way no other recent economic or sociological work has. Piketty has been described as a new Karl Marx and placed in the same league as the economist John Maynard Keynes. The ‘rock star economist’s’ (Financial Times) underlying thesis: inequality under capitalism has reached dramatic proportions in the last few decades and continues to grow—and not by coincidence. Thus, a small elite becomes simultaneously richer and richer and more and more powerful.Given the sensational reception of the not-so-easily digested 800-page study that spans back to the eighteenth century, the question as to where the hype around Piketty’s book comes from deserves to be asked. What is correct in it? What are the criticisms of it? And what should we make of it—both of the book itself and of the criticism it has received? This book lays out the argument of Piketty’s monumental work in a compact and understandable format, while also investigating the controversies that this book has caused. In addition, the two authors demonstrate the limits, contradictions and errors of the so-called ‘Piketty revolution’.