Government Finance

In this timely and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from education, medicine, business and finance, government, the police and military, and philanthropy and foreign aid, this brief and accessible book explains why the seemingly irresistible pressure to quantify performance distorts and distracts, whether by encouraging "gaming the stats" or "teaching to the test"....

How important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine.

For years, one group of Americans has worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the planet. In the process, they've not only entrenched dictatorships and spread kleptocratic networks, but they've secretly guided U.S. policy without the rest of America even being aware. And now, some of them have begun turning their sights on American democracy itself. These Americans are known as foreign lobbyists, and many of them spent years ushering dictatorships directly into the halls of Washington, all while laundering the reputations of the most heinous regimes in the process.

Health insurance, student loan debt, retirement savings, child care, work-life balance, access to home ownership - these are the issues driving America's current political debates. And they are all linked, as this brilliant and timely book reveals, by a single question: should we allow the free market to determine our lives? In the tradition of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, noted economic commentator Mike Konczal answers this question with a resounding no. Freedom from the Market blends passionate political argument and a bold new take on American history....

The Shifts and the Shocks is not another detailed history of the crisis, but the most persuasive and complete account yet published of what the crisis should teach us about modern economies and economics. The audiobook identifies the origin of the crisis in the complex interaction between globalization, hugely destabilizing global imbalances and our dangerously fragile financial system.

In January 2015, Yanis Varoufakis, an economics professor teaching in Austin, Texas, was elected to the Greek parliament with more votes than any other member of parliament. He was appointed finance minister, and, in the whirlwind five months that followed, everything he had warned about was confirmed as the "troika" (the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Commission) stonewalled his efforts to resolve Greece's economic crisis.

Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone profound changes - economic cycles that veer from boom to bust - from which it has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason's Postcapitalism argues that we are on the brink of a change so big and so profound that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system within which entire societies function, will mutate into something wholly new.

From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it.

The legal home to over a million companies, Delaware has more registered businesses than residents. Why do virtually all of the biggest corporations in the United States register there? This book reveals how a systematic enterprise lies behind the business-friendly corporate veneer, one that has kept the state afloat financially by diverting public funds away from some of the poorest people in the United States and supporting dictators and criminals across the world.

The Chinese economy appears destined for failure, the financial bubble forever in peril of popping, the real estate sector doomed to collapse, the factories fated for bankruptcy. Orlik games out what will happen if the bubble that never pops finally does. The magnitude of the shock to China and the world would be tremendous. For those in the West nervously watching China's rise as a geopolitical challenger, the alternative could be even less palatable.

Oxford economist E. F. Schumacher provides an enlightening study of our economic system and its purpose, challenging the current state of excessive consumption in our society. Offering a crucial message for the modern world struggling to balance economic growth with the human costs of globalisation, Small Is Beautiful puts forward the revolutionary yet viable case for building our economies around the needs of communities, not corporations.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx’s lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century.

Global demand for power is doubling every two decades, but electricity remains one of the most difficult forms of energy to supply and do so reliably. Today, some three billion people live in places where per-capita electricity use is less than what's used by an average American refrigerator. How we close the colossal gap between the electricity rich and the electricity poor will determine our success in addressing issues like women's rights, inequality, and climate change.

Author Jeremy Rifkin presents an insider's account of the next great economic era: the Third Industrial Revolution, when a new ethic of sustainability will revolutionize the world we live in.

What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather than making things, they simply connect people. The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last 10 years.

In The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century, economist and best-selling author Richard Duncan lays out a farsighted strategy to maximize the United States' unmatched financial and technological potential. In compelling fashion, the author shows that the United States can and should invest in the industries and technologies of the future on an unprecedented scale in order to ignite a new technological revolution that would cement the country's geopolitical preeminence, greatly enhance human well-being, and create unimaginable wealth.

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.

Economics isn't just about numbers: It's about politics, psychology, history, and so much more. We are all economists - when we work, save for the future, invest, pay taxes, and buy our groceries. Yet many of us feel lost when the subject arises. Award-winning professor Timothy Taylor here tackles all the key questions and hot topics of both microeconomics and macroeconomics, so you can understand and discuss economics on a personal, national, and global level.

No one, from economists to bankers to politicians, has been able to quantify exactly how much of the world's assets are currently hidden - until now. Gabriel Zucman is the first economist to offer reliable insight into the actual extent of the world's money held in tax havens. And it's staggering. In The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Zucman offers an inventive and sophisticated approach to quantifying how big the problem is, how tax havens work and are organized, and how we can begin to approach a solution.

In this revelatory narrative covering the years 1967 to 2017, Steven Brill gives us a stunningly cogent picture of the broken system at the heart of our society. He shows us how, over the last half-century, America's core values - meritocracy, innovation, due process, free speech, and even democracy itself - have somehow managed to power its decline into dysfunction.