s/t: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries

    He asks how today's scientists can claim to predict future climate events when even three-day forecasts prove a serious challenge. Can we predict and control epidemics? Can we accurately foresee our financial future? Or will we only find out about tomorrow when tomorrow arrives?

    How did the West—Europe, Canada, and the United States—escape from immemorial poverty into sustained economic growth and material well-being when other societies remained trapped in an endless cycle of birth, hunger, hardship, and death? In this elegant synthesis of economic history, two scholars argue that it is the political pluralism and the flexibility of the West's institutions—not corporate organization and mass production technology—that explain its unparalleled wealth.

    Giving a glimpse of the essential science of economics, this book tells the story of what has come to be called the new growth theory: the paradox identified by Adam Smith, its disappearance and occasional resurfacing in the 19th century, and the development of various technical tools in the 20th century.

    The news was crazy, incredible. The biggest merger ever, it was, according to the media, an "awesome megadeal" and "a fusion of guts and glory." It was "the deal of the century" and "a mega-marriage of earth and cyberspace." An Internet upstart, AOL was buying the world's most powerful media and entertainment company. "A company that isn't old enough to buy beer," marveled the Wall Street Journal, "has essentially swallowed an ancien régime media conglomerate that took most of a century to construct."Two years later, after the smoke had cleared, $200 billion of shareholder value had vanished into cyberspace. On the trail of possible fraud, the SEC and the Justice Department started investigating AOL Time Warner's accounting practices. Meanwhile, a civil war had broken out inside the company, complete with backstabbing and personal betrayals. Before long, almost every major player was out of the company, discredited, and humiliated. Jerry Levin, Time Warner's "resident genius," lost his job, lost his reputation, and, in the view of some people, simply "lost it." Steve Case, the visionary leader of AOL, was forced out of the company he had created. Gone too was the telegenic wonder-boy Bob Pittman, and his gang of fast-talking salesmen. As for Ted Turner, he resigned from his post as vice-chairman of AOL Time Warner in early 2003, bitter, wiser, and $8.5 billion poorer.Fools Rush In is the definitive account of one of the greatest fiascos in the history of corporate America. In a narrative fraught with drama, Nina Munk reveals the overweening ambition and moral posturing that brought down the Deal of the Century. With painstaking reporting and the remarkable eye for detail she's known for, Munk lays out, step by step, the anatomy of a debacle. Irreverent, witty, and iconoclastic, she sees through it all brilliantly."As in all great Greek tragedies, you knew the plot before it played out," one perceptive insider told Munk on the subject of the AOL Time Warner deal; "you knew who'd be sacrificed at the altar." Here's what we discover in Fools Rush In: In their single-minded quest for power, Steve Case and Jerry Levin were at each other's throats even before the deal was announced. Bob Pittman was regarded as a "windup CEO" by Case, and viewed as a hustler by just about everyone at Time Warner. Ted Turner underestimated Jerry Levin's ruthlessness badly. And Levin himself, convinced he was creating a great legacy comparable to that of Time Inc.'s founder, Henry Luce, refused to acknowledge the obvious: that, with a remarkable sense of timing, Steve Case had used grossly inflated Internet paper to buy Time Warner.

    Based on Knight's PhD dissertation, this 1921 work, balancing theory with fact to come to stunning insights, is a distinct pleasure to read. FRANK H. KNIGHT (1885-1972) is considered by some the greatest American scholar of economics of the 20th century. An economics professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 until 1955, he was one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, which influenced Milton Friedman and George Stigler.

    And that evolution has huge implications for everything we see, buy and do online. Rejecting the zero-sum, vending-machine model of ecommerce practiced by other leading internet retailers, who view the Internet purely as a facilitator of speed and profit, Hiroshi Mikitani argues for an alternate model that benefits merchants, consumers, and communities alike by empowering players at every step in the process. He envisions retail "ecosystems," where small and mid-sized brick-and-mortar businesses around the world partner with online marketplaces to maximize their customer bases and service capabilities, and he shows why emphasizing collaboration over competition, customization over top-down control, and long-term growth over short-term revenue is by far the best use of the Internet's power, and will define the 3.0 era.Rakuten has already pioneered this new model, and Marketplace 3.0 offers colorful examples of its success in Japan and around the world. Mikitani reveals how the company enforces a global mindset (including the requirement that all its employees speak English, even in Tokyo); how it incorporates new acquisitions rather than seeking to completely remake or sell them for a quick profit; and how it competes with other retailers on speed and quality, without sacrificing the public good. Marketplace 3.0 is an exciting new vision for global commerce, from a company that's challenging all the accepted wisdom.

    Now in its fourth edition, A Concise Economic History of the World has been updated to reflect the stunning changes in the world economy since 1989. Truly a definitive history of globalization, the new edition has been expanded to include coverage of the most recent developments in the European Union, East Asia, and, in general, transition economies. Comprehensive and global in scope, this concise text features ample illustrations and a fully updated annotated bibliography that guides readers to the relevant scholarly literature. Now available in eleven languages, including Spanish (second edition), French, German (two volumes), Polish, and Chinese, this unique work remains an invaluable, lively, and accessible text for both undergraduate and graduate students of European economic history, the history of globalization, and world development.

    It's not in stocks. It's not in bonds. It's in commodities -and some smart investors will be riding that bull to record returns in the next decade. Before Jim Rogers hit the road to write his bestselling books "Investment Biker "and" Adventure Capitalist, " he was one of the world's most successful investors. He cofounded the Quantum Fund and made so much money that he never needed to work again. Yet despite his success, Rogers has never written a book of practical investment advice-until now. In "Hot Commodities, " Rogers offers the lowdown on the most lucrative markets for today and tomorrow. In 1998, gliding under the radar, a bull market in commodities began. Rogers thinks it's going to continue for at least fifteen years-and he's put his money where his mouth is: In 1998, he started his own commodities index fund. It's up 165% since then, with more than $200 million invested, and it's the single-best performing index fund in the world in any asset class. Less risky than stocks and less sluggish than bonds,, commodities are where the money is-and will be in the years ahead. Rogers's strategies are simple and straightforward. You can start small-a few thousand dollars will suffice. It's all about putting your money into stuff you understand, the basic materials of everyday life, like coal, sugar, cotton, corn, or crude oil. Once you recognize the cyclical and historical trading patterns outlined here, you'll be on your way. In language that is both colorful and accessible, but Rogers explains why the world of commodity investing can be one of the simplest of all-and how commodities are the bases by which investors can value companies, markets, and whole economies. To be a truly great investor is to know something about commodities. For small investors and high rollers alike, "Hot Commodities" is as good as gold . . . or lead, or aluminum, which are some of the commodities Rogers says could be as rewarding for investors.

    Now, a former Senior Editor for "Maxim gives a crash course on the men behind our favorite labels, including:

    For A Magazine Dedicated to debunking the nation's business culture, the final years of the twentieth century overflowed with bounty. "It was the most spectacular outbreak of mass delirium that we are likely to see in our lifetimes, " wrote the editors of The Baffler. What was for others the dawn of a "New Economy" was for The Baffler a cornucopia of absurdity--the costliest political and financial hustle in living memory. Reporting from places far from the white-hot centers of the libertarian revolution, Baffler writers were the people of whom it was fashionable to say they just don't get it. While New Democrats turned somersaults for Wall Street and economic commentary became puffery, these bold, talented, and very funny writers observed the crescendo of folly with which the century turned. Here their best writings are selected, updated, and reaffirmed, to sharpen our wits and inoculate us against follies yet to come.

    Simultaneously, in other parts of the world, hundreds of millions remain largely untouched by thesedevelopments.Through erudite storytelling, Vaclav Smil investigates the fascinating and complex interactions of these transitions. He argues that the moral imperative to share modernity's benefits has become more acute with increasing economic inequality, but addressing this imbalance would make it exceedinglydifficult to implement the changes necessary for the long-term preservation of the environment. Thus, managing the fifth transition--environmental changes from natural-resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and global warming--will determine the success or eventual failure of the grand transitionsthat have made the world we live in today.

    Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism, socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability of the global capitalist system. In response, Austrian intellectuals called for a new way of organizing the world. But they and their successors in academia and government, from such famous economists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to influential but lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin, did not propose a regime of laissez-faire. Rather they used states and global institutions--the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade Organization, and international investment law--to insulate the markets against sovereign states, political change, and turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social justice.Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale. It was a project, Slobodian shows, that changed the world, but that was also undermined time and again by the inequality, relentless change, and social injustice that accompanied it.

    Those origins, says Alan Brinkley, are paradoxically situated during the second term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal had made liberalism a fixture of American politics and society. The End of Reform shows how the liberalism of the early New Deal--which set out to repair and, if necessary, restructure America's economy--gave way to its contemporary counterpart, which is less hostile to corporate capitalism and more solicitous of individual rights. Clearly and dramatically, Brinkley identifies the personalities and events responsible for this transformation while pointing to the broader trends in American society that made the politics of reform increasingly popular. It is both a major reinterpretation of the New Deal and a crucial map of the road to today's political landscape.

    A radically new interpretation of the Progressive Era which argues that business leaders, and not the reformers, inspired the era’s legislation regarding business.