Economic Theory

In the original 1992 version of The Winner’s Curse, Richard Thaler introduced readers to behavioral economics, challenging the notion of traditional economics that people are selfish, rational optimizers and behave accordingly every time. Three decades later, Thaler has teamed up with economist Alex Imas to provide fresh insights in this fully updated edition. They revisit Thaler’s original columns on economic anomalies, some written with collaborators like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and explore how these anomalies hold up today.

In his best-selling The Russians, Hedrick Smith took millions of readers inside the Soviet Union. In The Power Game, he took us inside Washington’s corridors of power. Now Smith takes us across America to show how seismic changes, sparked by a sequence of landmark political and economic decisions, have transformed America. As only a veteran reporter can, Smith fits the puzzle together, starting with Lewis Powell’s provocative memo that triggered a political rebellion that dramatically altered the landscape of power from then until today.

One of the most unique aspects of anarchism as a political philosophy is that it seeks to abolish the state. But what exactly is “the state”? The State is like a vast operating system for ordering and controlling relations among human society, the economy, and the natural world, analogous to a digital operating system. Anyone concerned with entrenched power, income inequality, lack of digital privacy, climate change, the response to COVID-19, or military-style policing will find eye-opening insights into how states operate and build more power for themselves—at our expense.

En un mundo completamente transformado a raíz de la crisis global, regresa el economista camuflado. En este libro Tim Harford amplía el foco para ayudarnos a entender cómo funciona en realidad la economía del mundo, prescindiendo de terminologías huecas. Este libro plantea respuestas a cuestiones como: ¿qué sucedería si se cancelara la deuda de todo el mundo?, ¿por qué los bancos continúan pagando unos bonus de escándalo?, ¿cómo se crea realmente empleo?, o ¿llegarán los países emergentes a controlar la economía mundial?

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, capitalism was stuck. It had no answers to a host of problems, including disease, inequality, the digital divide and, perhaps most blatantly, the environmental crisis. Taking her inspiration from the 'moonshot' programmes which successfully co-ordinated public and private sectors on a massive scale, Mariana Mazzucato calls for the same level of boldness and experimentation to be applied to the biggest problems of our time.

In this sometimes shocking and always riveting book, Robert G. Kaiser who has covered Congress, the White House and national politics for The Washington Post since 1963, explains how and why over the last four decades, Washington became a dysfunctional capital.

Beginning in January 2009, The Payoff lays bare Washington’s culture of power and plutocracy. It’s the story of the 20-month struggle by Senator Ted Kaufman and Jeff Connaughton, his chief of staff, to hold Wall Street executives accountable for securities fraud, stop stock manipulation by high-frequency traders, and break up too-big-to-fail megabanks. This book takes us inside their dogged crusade against institutional inertia and industry influence as they encounter an outright reluctance.

As the chief economist at Spotify, Will Page has had the best seat in the house for witnessing - and harnessing - the power of disruptive change. Music has often been the canary in the coal mine for major technological and societal shifts, and if there’s one thing Page learned from the digital revolution, it’s that businesses must be ready to pivot. Drawing practical lessons from a variety of fresh case studies covering Radiohead, Starbucks, and even Groucho Marx, Page examines the eight principles that disruption has thrown into sharp relief as keys to survival in any sector.

Jede politische Ökonomie umkreist die Fragen nach der Evolution von Ungleichheit, der Konzentration von Wohlstand und den Chancen für ökonomisches Wachstum. Aber befriedigende Antworten gab es bislang kaum. Thomas Piketty untersucht Daten aus 20 Ländern, mit Rückgriffen bis ins 18. Jahrhundert, um die entscheidenden ökonomischen und sozialen Muster freizulegen. Seine Ergebnisse setzen die Agenda für eine neue Diskussion über Wohlstand und Ungleichheit.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Chronicles: On Our Troubled Times by Thomas Piketty, narrated by Charlie Anson. The return of the best-selling, award-winning economist extraordinaire. With the same powerful evidence and range of reference as his global best seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Chronicles sets out Thomas Piketty's analysis of the financial crisis, what has happened since and where we should go from here.

In Un-Civilizing America: How Win-Win Deals Make Us Better, bestselling author William Bonner delivers an incisive and engrossing account of the American economy, the four simple steps to earning money the honest way, and why many choose the dishonest way instead.

Without question one of the most significant books in modern history, The Communist Manifesto is a brief, populist pamphlet that distils the core ideas of communism into accessible prose. Published just months before violent uprisings threatened to destabilise much of the European establishment, it outlines a view of history as a constant battle between the classes that will inevitably result in revolution.

The Mind of the Market will change the way we think about the economics of everyday life. Drawing on research from neuroeconomics, Michael Shermer explores what brain scans reveal about bargaining, snap purchases, and how trust is established in business. Utilizing experiments in behavioral economics, Shermer shows why people hang on to losing stocks and failing companies, why business negotiations often disintegrate into emotional tit-for-tat disputes, and why money does not make us happy.

Ben Price reveals that our constitution and legal system were intentionally designed to give more rights to the wealthy propertied class than the rest of us, and exposes how this hamstrings our ability to effectively address a host of pressing social and environmental problems - and what we can do about it. Many of today’s most serious issues - homelessness, gun violence, fracking, prison privatization, predatory lending, and many more - resist resolution because the “rights of property” undermine the rights of people.

Games are everywhere: Drivers maneuvering in heavy traffic are playing a driving game. Bargain hunters bidding on eBay are playing an auctioning game. The supermarket's price for corn flakes is decided by playing an economic game. This Very Short Introduction offers a succinct tour of the fascinating world of game theory, a groundbreaking field that analyzes how to play games in a rational way.

Countless enterprises fall apart the moment they scale; their positive results fizzle, they lose valuable time and money and the great electric charge of potential that drove them early on disappears. In short, they suffer a voltage drop. Yet success and failure are not about luck - in fact, there is a rhyme and reason as to why some ideas fail and why some make it big. Certain ideas are predictably scalable, while others are predictably destined for disaster.

The central message of the Austrian school of economics, writes Mark Skousen in this wide-ranging audiobook, is that economics is about human beings. That outlook has direct implications for financial markets and personal investing. And this is why the Austrian school has had a huge impact Wall Street. A Viennese Waltz Down Wall Street, then, is a tutorial on both economics and investment that sheds new light on both fields. Consider the opening metaphor of the dance.

Proper stewardship of natural assets and liabilities is a matter of planetary urgency: natural resources have the potential either to transform the poorest countries or to tear them apart, while the carbon emissions and agricultural follies of the rich world could further impoverish them. The Plundered Planet charts a course between unchecked profiteering on the one hand and environmental romanticism on the other to offer realistic and sustainable solutions to dauntingly complex issues.

This book examines one of the most important economic outcomes in American history - the breakdown of the Keynesian Revolution. Drawing on economic literature, the memoirs of economists and politicians, and the popular press, Eric Crouse examines how economic decline in the 1970s precipitated a political revolution. Keynesian thought flourished through the presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, until stagflation devastated American workers and Jimmy Carter’s economic policies faltered, setting the stage for the 1980 presidential campaign.

In The Silo Effect, award-winning journalist Gillian Tett examines the structural development of institutions such as UBS, Sony and the Bank of England. While the world is increasingly interlinked in some senses, it remains profoundly fragmented in others. As organisations become larger and more global than ever before, they are apt to be divided and sub-divided into numerous different departments to facilitate productivity. However, there is a trap to the inevitability of these silos.