Economic Theory

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.

We are in the midst of a startup revolution. The growth and proliferation of innovation-driven startup activity is profound, unprecedented, and global in scope. Today, it is understood that communities of support and knowledge-sharing go along with other resources. The importance of collaboration and a long-term commitment has gained wider acceptance. The Startup Community Way explores what makes startup communities thrive and how to improve collaboration in these rapidly evolving, complex environments.

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 Skyscraper Curse is Dr. Mark Thornton's definitive work on booms and busts, and it explains why only Austrian economists really understand them. It makes business cycle theory accessible to a whole new 21st-century audience. And they need it, especially those under 40. Many of the brilliant quants working on Wall Street and at the Fed barely remember the Crash of 2008, much less understand it. But Mark Thornton does, and his book is a warning about overheated equity markets, overinflated housing prices, and clueless central bankers.

In The Progress Illusion, Jon D. Erickson charts the rise of the economic worldview and its infiltration into our daily lives as a theory of everything. Drawing on his own experience as a young economist inoculated in the 1980s era of "greed is good," Erickson shows how pseudoscience came to dominate economic thought. He pokes holes in the conventional wisdom of neo-classical economics, illustrating how flawed theories about financial decision-making and maximizing efficiency ignore human psychology and morality.

Informed by meticulous research, field experience, and classroom-tested strategies, Dealmaking offers essential insights for anyone involved in buying or selling everything from cars to corporations. Leading business scholar Guhan Subramanian provides a lively tour of both negotiation and auction theory, then takes an in-depth look at his own hybrid theory, outlining three specific strategies listeners can use in complex dealmaking situations.

Few economists or historians write like McCloskey - her ability to invest the facts of economic history with the urgency of a novel, or of a leading case at law, is unmatched. She summarizes modern economics and modern economic history with verve and lucidity yet sees through to the really big scientific conclusion. Not matter, but ideas. Big books don't come any more ambitious or captivating than Bourgeois Equality.

In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

We are in the midst of one of the greatest status revolutions ever, and it's a brave new world indeed. Who better to guide us through it than Michael Lewis, whose subversive, trenchant humor is the perfect match to his subject matter. Here is an audiobook as fresh as tomorrow's headlines, and as entertaining as its best selling predecessors.

Like F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises moved beyond economics in his later years to address questions regarding the foundation of all social science. But unlike Hayek's attempts, Mises' writings on these matters have received less attention than they deserve. Theory and History, writes Rothbard in his introduction, "remains by far the most neglected masterwork of Mises". Here Mises defends his all-important idea of methodological dualism: one approach to the hard sciences and another for the social sciences.

A generation of Americans came of age boycotting grapes, swept up in a movement that vanquished California's most powerful industry and accomplished the unthinkable: dignity and contracts for farm workers. Four decades later, Cesar Chavez's likeness graces postage stamps, and dozens of schools and streets have been renamed in his honor. But the real story of Chavez's farm workers' movement - both its historic triumphs and its tragic disintegration - has remained buried beneath the hagiography.

Everything we know about solving the world’s problems is wrong. Out: Plans, experts and above all, leaders. In: Adapting - improvise rather than plan; fail, learn, and try again. In this groundbreaking new book, Tim Harford shows how the world’s most complex and important problems - including terrorism, climate change, poverty, innovation, and the financial crisis - can only be solved from the bottom up by rapid experimenting and adapting.

In this controversial, hard-hitting account of today’s explosive market, Robert J. Shiller, a leading expert on market volatility, evokes Alan Greenspan’s infamous 1996 reference, “irrational exuberance,” to explain the alternately soaring and declining stock market. Shiller’s unconventional yet persuasive argument credits an unprecedented confluence of events with driving stocks to uncharted heights, and he analyzes the structural, cultural, and psychological factors behind these levels of growth not reflected in any other sector of the economy.

First published in 1776, the book offers one of the world's first collected descriptions of what builds nations' wealth. A fundamental work in classical economics. The book touches upon such broad topics as the division of labour, productivity, and free markets.

Economics can explain everything, from why people behave the way they do to how governments and businesses organize themselves. As the blockbuster best-seller Freakonomics demonstrated, economics can explain everything - from why people behave the way they do to how governments and businesses organize themselves. But are the basic assumptions and conclusions in Freakonomics true? Does the free market usually lead to unintended and negative consequences?

In 1991 India faced its 'Greece moment': an unprecedented financial crisis against the backdrop of political uncertainty and crumbling investor confidence. On 21 June 1991, P. V. Narasimha Rao became prime minister and appointed Dr Manmohan Singh as finance minister. In less than 35 days, the Rao-Singh duo ushered in momentous changes in economic policy - those that transformed the country.

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.

7 Secrets of Persuasion is the first book to take the latest scientific insights about the mind and apply them to the art of persuasion. It directly translates the revolution in neuroscience that has occurred over the last 40 years into practical new techniques for effective persuasion.

This book - the first comprehensive transatlantic history of the rise of neoliberal politics - presents a surprising answer. Based on archival research and interviews with leading participants in the movement, Masters of the Universe traces the ascendancy of neoliberalism from the academy of interwar Europe to supremacy under Reagan and Thatcher and in the decades since. Daniel Stedman Jones argues that there was nothing inevitable about the victory of free-market politics.

This scathing critique of US political culture is a brilliant analysis of the Iran-Contra scandal. Chomsky offers a message of hope, reminding us resistance is possible.