Book picks similar to
Macroeconomics by Olivier J. Blanchard
economics
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Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day
Daryl Collins - 2009
If you've never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food on the table, afford a home, and educate your children? How would you handle emergencies and old age? Every day, more than a billion people around the world must answer these questions. Portfolios of the Poor is the first book to systematically explain how the poor find solutions to their everyday financial problems.The authors conducted year-long interviews with impoverished villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money. The stories of these families are often surprising and inspiring. Most poor households do not live hand to mouth, spending what they earn in a desperate bid to keep afloat. Instead, they employ financial tools, many linked to informal networks and family ties. They push money into savings for reserves, squeeze money out of creditors whenever possible, run sophisticated savings clubs, and use microfinancing wherever available. Their experiences reveal new methods to fight poverty and ways to envision the next generation of banks for the "bottom billion."Indispensable for those in development studies, economics, and microfinance, Portfolios of the Poor will appeal to anyone interested in knowing more about poverty and what can be done about it.
Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
Henry Hazlitt - 1946
But it is also much more, having become a fundamental influence on modern “libertarian” economics of the type espoused by Ron Paul and others.Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was a libertarian philosopher, an economist, and a journalist. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine, an influential libertarian publication. Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson, his seminal work, in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy.Many current economic commentators across the political spectrum have credited Hazlitt with foreseeing the collapse of the global economy which occurred more than 50 years after the initial publication of Economics in One Lesson. Hazlitt’s focus on non-governmental solutions, strong — and strongly reasoned — anti-deficit position, and general emphasis on free markets, economic liberty of individuals, and the dangers of government intervention make Economics in One Lesson, every bit as relevant and valuable today as it has been since publication.
The Travels of A T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade
Pietra Rivoli - 2005
Over five years, business professor Pietra Rivoli traveled from a Texas cotton field to a Chinese factory to a used clothing market in Africa, to investigate compelling questions about the politics, economics, ethics, and history of modern business and globalization. Using the story of the t-shirt to illustrate the major issues of the globalization debate, this uniquely entertaining business book offers a surprising, enlightening, and balanced look at one of the major topics of our time. It has won the prize or award - Business Book of the Year 2005, Finalist; AAP Awards for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing, 2006.
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
Albert O. Hirschman - 1970
Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one, "exit," is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product, and the other, "voice," is for members or customers to agitate and exert influence for change "from within." The efficiency of the competitive mechanism, with its total reliance on exit, is questioned for certain important situations. As exit often undercuts voice while being unable to counteract decline, loyalty is seen in the function of retarding exit and of permitting voice to play its proper role. The interplay of the three concepts turns out to illuminate a wide range of economic, social, and political phenomena. As the author states in the preface, "having found my own unifying way of looking at issues as diverse as competition and the two-party system, divorce and the American character, black power and the failure of 'unhappy' top officials to resign over Vietnam, I decided to let myself go a little."
The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy
Charles Fishman - 2006
But no book until this one has managed to penetrate its wall of silence or go beyond the usual polemics to analyze its actual effects on its customers, workers, and suppliers. Drawing on unprecedented interviews with former Wal-Mart executives and a wealth of staggering data (e.g., Americans spend $36 million an hour at Wal-Mart stores, and in 2004 its growth alone was bigger than the total revenue of 469 of the Fortune 500), The Wal-Mart Effect is an intimate look at a business that is dramatically reshaping our lives.
Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
Andrew W. Lo - 2017
This is one of the biggest debates in economics and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hang on the outcome. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Lo cuts through this debate with a new framework, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, in which rationality and irrationality coexist.Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency isn't wrong but merely incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo's new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought--a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation.A fascinating intellectual journey filled with compelling stories, Adaptive Markets starts with the origins of market efficiency and its failures, turns to the foundations of investor behavior, and concludes with practical implications--including how hedge funds have become the Galapagos Islands of finance, what really happened in the 2008 meltdown, and how we might avoid future crises.An ambitious new answer to fundamental questions in economics, Adaptive Markets is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how markets really work.
The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism
David Harvey - 2010
In The Enigma of Capital, he delivers an impassioned account of how unchecked neoliberalism produced the system-wide crisis that now engulfs the world. Beginning in the 1970s, profitability pressures led the capitalist class in advanced countries to shift away from investment in industrial production at home toward the higher returns that financial products promised. Accompanying this was a shift towards privatization, an absolute decline in the bargaining power of labor, and the dispersion of production throughout the developing world. The decades-long and ongoing decline in wages that accompanied this turn produced a dilemma: how can goods--especially real estate--sell at the same rate as before if workers are making less in relative terms? The answer was a huge expansion of credit that fueled the explosive growth of both the financial industry and the real estate market. When one key market collapsed--real estate--the other one did as well, and social devastation resulted. Harvey places today's crisis in the broadest possible context: the historical development of global capitalism itself from the industrial era onward. Moving deftly between this history and the unfolding of the current crisis, he concentrates on how such crises both devastate workers and create openings for challenging the system's legitimacy. The battle now will be between the still-powerful forces that want to reconstitute the system of yesterday and those that want to replace it with one that prizes social justice and economic equality. The new afterword focuses on the continuing impact of the crisis and the response to it in 2010. One of Huffington Post's Best Social and Political Awareness Books of 2010 Winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for 2010 Praise for the Hardcover: "A lucid and penetrating account of how the power of capital shapes our world."--Andrew Gamble, Independent "Elegant... entertainingly swashbuckling... Harvey's analysis is interesting not only for the breadth of his scholarship but his recognition of the system's strengths."--John Gapper, Financial Times
Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
Matthew C. Klein - 2020
Klein and Michael Pettis show in this book, they are often the unexpected result of domestic political choices to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of workers and ordinary retirees. Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today’s trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States over the past thirty years. Across the world, the rich have prospered while workers can no longer afford to buy what they produce, have lost their jobs, or have been forced into higher levels of debt. In this thought-provoking challenge to mainstream views, the authors provide a cohesive narrative that shows how the class wars of rising inequality are a threat to the global economy and international peace—and what we can do about it.
Public Finance and Public Policy
Jonathan Gruber - 2004
The new edition, fully updated with the most recent data and research possible, includes new coverage of the Medicare drug benefit, changes in the tax code, Hurricane Katrina, and the ongoing debate over privatization.
Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy
Peter Dicken - 1986
Peter Dicken provides a comprehensive, balanced yet critical account of globalization processes and their sweeping, highly uneven effects on people's lives. Each timely chapter has been extensively rewritten to reflect current globalization and antiglobalization debates, the latest empirical developments, and new ideas about the shaping and reshaping of production, distribution, and consumption in the world economy.New in the Fifth Edition*An entirely new case study on the agro-foods industries*A substantially expanded discussion of problems of global governance (involving such institutions as the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF) and the increasing role of global civil society organizations*All statistical materials have been updated and are presented in nearly 250 specially designed figures and tables
A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics
David A. Moss - 2007
In A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics, David Moss leverages his many years of teaching experience at Harvard Business School to lay out important macroeconomic concepts in engaging, clear, and concise terms. In a simple and intuitive way, he breaks down the ideas into “output,” “money,” and “expectations.” In addition, Moss introduces powerful tools for interpreting the big-picture economic developments that shape events in the contemporary business arena. Detailed examples are also drawn from history to illuminate important concepts.This book is destined to become a staple in MBA courses—as well as the go-to resource for executives and managers at all levels seeking to brush up on their knowledge of macroeconomic dynamics.
Language, Society and Power: An Introduction
Annabelle MooneySian Preece - 1999
It seeks to answer such questions as: How can a language reflect the status of children and older people? Do men and women talk differently? How can our use of language mark our ethnic identity? It also looks at language use in politics and the media and investigates how language affects and constructs our identities, exploring notions of correctness and attitudes towards language use.This third edition of this bestselling book has been completely revised to include recent developments in theory and research and offers the following features:a range of new and engaging international examples drawn from everyday life: beauty advertisements, conversation transcripts, newspaper headlines reporting on asylum seekers, language themed cartoons, and excerpts from the television programme South Park and satirical news website The Onion new activities designed to give students a real understanding of the topic a new chapter covering 'Student Projects' giving readers suggestions on how to further explore the topics covered in the book updated and expanded further reading sections for each chapter and a glossary.While it can be used as a stand-alone text, this edition of Language, Society and Power has also been fully cross-referenced with the new companion title: The Language, Society and Power Reader. Together these books provide the complete resource for students of English language and linguistics, media, communication, cultural studies, sociology and psychology."
Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Martha C. Nussbaum - 2010
Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have rightly been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry both in the United States and abroad. Anxiously focused on national economic growth, we increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. Drawing on the stories of troubling--and hopeful--educational developments from around the world, Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.
Global Business Today
Charles W.L. Hill - 1998
The success of the first five editions of Global Business Today has been based in part upon the incorporation of leading edge research into the text, the use of the up-to-date examples and statistics to illustrate global trends and enterprise strategy, and the discussion of current events within the context of the appropriate theory. Our research has shown that students and instructors alike enjoy the interesting, informative, and accessible writing style of GBT - so much so that the writing has become Charles Hill's trademark. In addition to boxed material which provides deep illustrations in every chapter, Hill carefully weaves interesting anecdotes into the narrative of the text to engage the reader.