Book picks similar to
Politics as Public Choice by James M. Buchanan
economics
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The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization
Wayne Ellwood - 2001
From the richest country to the poorest, every aspect of life is affected by global economics and communications. We all benefit...or do we?This No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization distills the arguments into a clear, concise commentary. It examines the debt trap, the acceleration of neo-liberalism and the “free trade” model, competition for energy resources, and the links between the war on terror, the arms trade, and privatization. It looks at civil society alternatives to corporate globalization and the latest trade justice initiatives.
Freedom and the Law
Bruno Leoni - 1961
In modern democratic societies, legislative bodies increasingly usurp functions that were, and should be, exercised by individuals or groups rather than government.Bruno Leoni (1913–1967) was an attorney and Professor of Legal Theory and the Theory of the State at the University of Pavia, Italy.Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
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.
Coming Apocalypse
Vernon Coleman - 2020
In Coming Apocalypse he explains how and why the 'crisis' developed and explains the sort of future we can expect now that lockdowns have destroyed the global economy and changed our way of life. Our world will never be as it was in January 2020. Dr Coleman explains what he believes we can expect.
The Big Reset: War on Gold and the Financial Endgame
Willem Middelkoop - 2014
Probably even before 2020, the world’s financial system will need to find a different anchor. The dollar has been at the center of the monetary system since the Second World War, but decades of money printing have caused a gradual but relentless dollar devaluation. In a desperate attempt to maintain this dollar system, the United States has waged a secret war on gold since the 1960s. China and Russia have pierced through the American smokescreen around gold and the dollar and are no longer willing to continue lending to the United States. Both countries have been accumulating enormous amounts of gold, positioning themselves for the next phase of the global financial system. There are only two options: a financial reset planned well in advance, or a hastily implemented one on the back of a dollar crisis. The United States, realizing the dollar will lose its prominent role, seems to be planning a monetary reset that will surprise many. It will be designed to keep the United States in the driving seat, but will include strong roles for the Euro and China’s Renminbi. And it is likely gold will be reintroduced as one of the pillars of this next phase of the global financial system. Insiders claim gold could be revalued up to $7,000 per troy ounce during this process.
Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class
Robert H. Frank - 2007
To pay for them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. In a book that explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today, Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off "expenditure cascades" that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class. Writing in lively prose for a general audience, Frank employs up-to-date economic data and examples drawn from everyday life to shed light on reigning models of consumer behavior. He also suggests reforms that could mitigate the costs of inequality. Falling Behind compels us to rethink how and why we live our economic lives the way we do.Copub: Russell Sage Foundation
Property and Freedom
Richard Pipes - 1999
He contrasts England, a country where property rights and parliamentary government advanced hand-in-hand, with Russia, where restrictions on ownership have for centuries consistently abetted authoritarian regimes; finally he provides reflections on current and future trends in the United States. Property and Freedom is a brilliant contribution to political thought and an essential work on a subject of vital importance.
Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance
David McNally - 2010
In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, this study challenges the view that capitalism's source lies in financial deregulation, and highlights the emergence of new patterns of world inequality and new centers of accumulation, particularly in East Asia, and the profound economic instabilities these have produced. This original account of the “financialization” of the world economy during this period explores the intricate connections between international financial markets and new forms of debt and dispossession. Analyzing the massive intervention of the world’s central banks to stave off another Great Depression, this study shows that while averting a complete meltdown, this intervention also laid the basis for recurring crises for poor and working class people: job loss, increased poverty and inequality, and cuts in social programs. Taking a global view of these processes, exposing the damage inflicted on countries in the Global South, as well as the intensification of racism and attacks on migrant workers, this book also traces new patterns of social and political resistance—from housing activism and education struggles, to mass strikes and protests in Martinique, Guadeloupe, France, and Puerto Rico—as indicators of the potential for building anticapitalist opposition to the damage that neoliberal capitalism is inflicting on the lives of millions.
The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth
Benjamin M. Friedman - 2005
Friedman examines the political and social histories of the large Western democracies–particularly of the United States since the Civil War–to demonstrate the fact that incomes on the rise lead to more open and democratic societies. He explains that growth, rather than simply a high standard of living, is key to effecting political and social liberalization in the third world, and shows that even the wealthiest of nations puts its democratic values at risk when income levels stand still. Merely being rich is no protection against a turn toward rigidity and intolerance when a country’s citizens lose the sense that they are getting ahead.With concrete policy suggestions for pursuing growth at home and promoting worldwide economic expansion, this volume is a major contribution to the ongoing debate about the effects of economic growth and globalization.
The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy
Noreena Hertz - 2001
The sales of General Motors and Ford are greater than the gross domestic product of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, and Wal-Mart now has a turnover higher than the revenues of most of the states of Eastern Europe. Yet few of us understand fully the growing dominance of big business.Widely acclaimed economist Noreena Hertz brilliantly reveals how corporations across the world manipulate and pressure governments by means both legal and illegal; how protest is becoming a more effective political weapon than the ballot-box; and how corporations are taking over from the state responsibility for everything from providing technology for schools to healthcare for the community.The Silent Takeover asks us to recognize the growing contradictions of a world divided between haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable wealth. In the face of these unacceptable extremes, Noreena Hertz outlines a new agenda to revitalize politics and renew democracy.
Saving Capitalism From The Capitalists: How Open Financial Markets Challenge the Establishment and Spread Prosperity to Rich and Poor Alike
Raghuram G. Rajan - 2003
Financial markets are the least understood and most highly criticized part of the capitalist system. The greed of participants involved in scandals like Enron adds fuel to the fire that these markets are a tool of the rich. Powerful interest groups oppose markets, especially financial markets, because markets undermine their power. Winners in the market want to entrench their position and prevent others from breaking through by suppressing markets. Losers would also like to suppress the market because they cannot compete. Saving Capitalism From the Capitalists explores how financial markets free human ingenuity, make nations competitive and are the basis for broadening prosperity.
The End of Laissez-Faire. The Economic Consequences of the Peace
John Maynard Keynes - 1995
During both world wars he was an adviser to the British treasury, and his theory of government stimulation of the economy through deficit spending influenced Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" administration. The mass unemployment caused by the Great Depression inspired his most famous work, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935-36).Keynes first gained widespread prominence immediately following World War I, when he attended the Versailles peace conference as an economic adviser to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Disgusted with the harshly punitive and unrealistic provisions of the Versailles Treaty, as well as the political chicanery and general incompetence of the chief participants, he published The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919. This book gained a good deal of notoriety because of its withering portraits of both French premier Georges Clemenceau and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Keynes described Clemenceau as motivated only by shortsighted nationalistic goals and vindictiveness, which aimed at crippling Germany for generations no matter what the consequences to the rest of Europe. He found fault with Wilson for his ivory tower idealism, lack of diplomatic savvy, and unfamiliarity with the political realities of Europe. This ineffectual combination ultimately dashed his best hopes for a League of Nations and a just resolution to the war in Europe. In a point-by-point analysis Keynes makes clear the ruinous consequences of the treaty to all of Europe and proposes substantial modifications. Unfortunately, few appreciated Keynes’s prescience, and he saw his worst fears realized in the rise of Hitler and the devastation of World War II.In The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) he presents a brief historical review of laissez-faire economic policy. Though he agrees in principle that a marketplace of free individuals pursuing their own self-interest without government interference has a better chance of improving society’s economic situation than socialist alternatives, he suggests that government can play a constructive role in protecting individuals from the worst harms of capitalism’s cycles, especially as concerns unemployment. Other useful government functions are the dissemination of information relating to business conditions, encouraging savings and investment along "nationally productive channels," and forming a national policy about the size of population.Keynes’s brilliant mind and lucid writing are evident on every page. Both of these works are still well worth reading for his many stimulating ideas and profound knowledge of economics.
The Ages of the Investor: A Critical Look at Life-cycle Investing (Investing for Adults)
William J. Bernstein - 2012
Just as grown-ups do not believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus, “Investing adults” know that there is no such creature as the Stock-picking Fairy or the Market-timing Fairy. Further, there is no Risk Fairy who will write you cheap options that will protect your stock holdings against loss. Investing adults are familiar with Gene Fama, Zvi Bodie, Jack Bogle, and Burton Malkiel, and understand that a mean variance optimizer does not blend vegetables. In other words, this series is not for beginners. Future topics will, with luck, include the limits of market efficiency and diversification in increasingly non-segmented global markets.
What Social Classes Owe to Each Other
William Graham Sumner - 1883
Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton PressClassic treatise on the importance of maintaining the rights of the individual in the face of expanding state control manipulated by organized pressure groups.
The Sages: Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets
Charles R. Morris - 2009
Though their experiences and styles vary—Buffett is the canny stock market investor; Soros is the reader of shifting global tides in trade and currencies; and Volcker is the regulator and governor, sheriff and clean-up crew—they have very much in common.All three men have more than fifty years of deep involvement in markets. All are skeptical of Wall Street frenzies. They believe that markets tend to be right, but usually only over the medium term. They have seen too many cycles of herd-driven, emotion-riding booms and busts to make their views hostage to the sweeping and simplistic assumptions of “efficient-markets” models.With the benefit of his own deep understanding of markets and finance, Morris brilliantly analyzes the records of these men, distilling their wisdom and experience—and argues for the importance of consistent values in navigating the treacherous terrain of today’s globalized world.