Economic Theory

Forbes editor John Tamny uses entertaining stories from sports, movies, popular culture, and famous businesses to demonstrate the basic principles of economics. The Rolling Stones, the Dallas Cowboys, and Paris Hilton become examples of good and bad tax policy. The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, and The Sopranos reveal the downside of antitrust regulation while the Michigan Wolverines' 2007 loss to Appalachian State explains why regulations often fail to achieve their intended purposes.

This volume is a collection of some of the best-regarded editorials of Romanian national poet Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), showcasing his political and economic views. Also includes a new translation of his poem "Prayer of a Dacian" (paperback and Kindle editions only).

With the global economy recovering from a steep recession, and with that recovery challenging our long-held ideas about what careers and the market can be, learning the basics of economics has never been more essential. Principles such as gains from trade, the role of profit and loss, and the secondary effects of government spending, taxes, and borrowing risk continue to be critically important to the way America's economy functions, and critically important to understand for those hoping to further their professional lives - even their personal lives.

A compelling argument - masterfully researched and brilliantly articulated - that despite increasing prosperity for most of Earth’s inhabitants and an explosion of goods overall, consumption of natural resources such as metals, water, and timber has begun to decline. Best-selling author and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Andrew McAfee says there’s a new reason for optimism: We’re past the point of "peak stuff" - from here on out, it'll take fewer resources to make things and fewer dollars to lead a comfortable life.

File your taxes on a postcard? Impossible! Guess again, says Steve Forbes, in his important new audiobook Flat Tax Revolution. In fact, countries around the world have freed their taxpayers to do just that - and we can, too, with a simple flat tax that will slash tax rates, spur economic growth, and put the IRS out of business

Voters say they are disillusioned with capitalism, but a system so distorted by government interventions is a dysfunctional version of free market ideals. As a result, productivity and economic growth have slowed sharply, shrinking the pie for everyone and stoking popular anger. Since these flaws developed as the government expanded, building an even bigger state will only double down on what’s gone wrong. The answer Sharma offers is a series of seven fixes to restore the balance between state support and free markets and lay the path to a more prosperous and happier future.

Robert Conquest has been called by Paul Johnson "our greatest living modern historian". As a new century begins, Conquest offers an illuminating examination of our past failures and a guide to where we should go next. Graced with one of the most acute gifts for political prescience since Orwell, Conquest assigns responsibility for our century’s cataclysms not to impersonal economic or social forces but to the distorted ideologies of revolutionary Marxism and National Socialism.

America’s struggling economy needs a better philosophy than the college student’s lament,“I can’t be out of money, I still have checks in my checkbook!” We've tried a government spending spree, and we've learned it doesn't work. Now is the time to rededicate our country to the pursuit of free-market capitalism, before we’re buried under a mound of debt and unfunded entitlements. But how do we navigate between government spending that’s too big to sustain and financial institutions that are "too big to fail?"

We face a crisis of sexuality. During the last few years, we have witnessed an unprecedented breakdown of traditions and mores concerning sexuality and the family. Countries across the West have suddenly and seemingly irrevocably instituted same-sex marriage; a former athlete has won awards for publicly changing gender; and no one seems to know what restroom to use any more. What used to be taboo and frowned upon has become normal and even encouraged. What used to be normal and sought after is now viewed as unnecessary and possibly harmful.

Economists regularly promote Capitalism as the greatest system ever to grace the planet. With the same breath, they implore us to leave the job of understanding the magical powers of the market to the "experts." Despite the efforts of these mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many of us have begun to question why this system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms: in the form of a radical economic theory.

The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) is a political economy book by Thorstein Veblen which examines the growing corporate domination of culture and the economy. At its core, The Theory of Business Enterprise is an analysis of two intertwined but clashing motivations: that of business and that of industry. Business is the making of profits. Industry is the making of goods.

In this brilliantly enjoyable, challenging rallying-cry of a book, Kropotkin lays out the heart of his anarchist beliefs—beliefs which surged around the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and which have a renewed relevance and poignancy today. Humane, thoughtful—but also a devastating critique of how modern society is organized (with the brutal, narrow few clinging onto their wealth and privileges at the expense of the many), The Conquest of Bread is a book to be argued over, again and again.

The debate between the merits of capitalism and socialism has once again moved from the quiet halls of academia to the forum of public discourse. While these competing economic systems choose differing means, they both strive to achieve the same end: A stateless utopia on earth. Natural Law and the Theory of Economic System Fluidity provides the theoretical basis for allowing the strengths of each economic system to peacefully work together to achieve this end and examines both the natural laws which govern economics as well as the moral basis for the existence of the nation state.

In the new edition of this fascinating book, a book that has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, Slashdot.org, Lifehacker.com and in the New York Times, best-selling author Scott Berkun pulls the best lessons from the history of innovation, including the recent software and web age, to reveal powerful and surprising truths about how ideas become successful innovations - truths people can easily apply to the challenges of today.

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery.

In Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment. Judt masterfully crystallizes what we've all been feeling into a way to think our way into, and thus out of, our great collective dis-ease about the current state of things.

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members.

The music industry is a leading indicator of today's economy; it is among the first to be disrupted by the latest wave of technology. Drawing on interviews with leading band members, music executives, managers, promoters, and using the latest data on revenues, royalties, streaming tour dates, and merchandise sales, Rockonomics takes listeners backstage to show how the music industry really works - who makes money and how much, and how the economics of the music industry has undergone a radical transformation during recent decades.

Hebert Spencer coined the famous expression “survival of the fittest”. Spencer’s theory inspired Andrew Carnegie and William Graham Sumner's visions of unbridled and unrepentant capitalism of the United States in late 19th century. Carnegie interpreted Spencer's social theory as justifying merciless economic competition. Spencer's reputation was not recovered for many years from the interpretative caricatures of many scholars, thus marginalizing him to the hinterlands of intellectual history. Fortunately, recent scholarship has begun restoring and repairing his legacy.

In responding to the financial crash of 2008, both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have relied on prescriptions developed by John Maynard Keynes, the most important economist since Marx. But should we be relying on Keynes? What did Keynes actually say? Did he make his case? Hunter Lewis concludes that he did not. If Keynes was wrong then so are the economic policies of virtually all world governments today.