Public Economics

An instant best seller, On Fire shows Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but also as a spiritual and imaginative one. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of “perpetual now,” to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of “climate barbarism,” this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink.

In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.

Judicial decisions assessing the constitutional rights of students in the nation’s public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education and illuminates contemporary disputes that continue to fracture the nation.

In Breaking Through Power, Ralph Nader draws from a lifetime waging - and often winning - David vs. Goliath battles against big corporations and the US government.

Chris Von der Ahe knew next to nothing about baseball when he risked his life’s savings to found the St. Louis Browns, the franchise that would become the St. Louis Cardinals. Yet the German-born beer garden proprietor would become one of the most important - and funniest - figures in the game’s history.

Los economistas pueden engañarnos cuando hablan de la economía como si ésta fuese una ciencia exacta que proporciona análisis y respuestas únicas, objetivas y ajenas a los valores y a los intereses de cada persona. Juan Torres López plantea cincuenta grandes preguntas relativas al funcionamiento más general de la economía para mostrar, a través de sus respuestas, que los problemas económicos tienen soluciones diferentes según las hipótesis de partida de cada economista y en función de a quién se quiera beneficiar con ellas.

This friendly guide is for technology people who work, or want to work, in the public sector. Cyd Harrell outlines the types of projects, partnerships, and people that civic technologists encounter, and the methods they can use to make lasting change. She focuses on principles to help technologists find the right way to do the most good, starting with finding the people already doing the work. Based on her years of government tech partnerships, Cyd offers practical advice on how to build alliances with public sector partners, what tech (and non-tech) skills are most useful, and more.

The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with the audacious idea of a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship. This volume in the Essential Knowledge series presents the first short, solid UBI introduction that is neither academic nor polemic. It takes a position in favor of UBI, but its primary goal remains the provision of essential knowledge by answering the fundamental questions about it: What is UBI? How does it work? What are the arguments for and against it? What is the evidence?

El 10 de enero de 2000 el Ecuador económico amaneció en calma. Las largas colas en los bancos desaparecieron y las tasas de interés se desplomaron. El día anterior, Jamil Mahuad Witt, entonces presidente de la República, anunció de manera oficial la dolarización de la economía ecuatoriana poniendo fin a una larga tormenta perfecta económica con crisis devaluatoria que había llegado a una tasa de cambio de 28.000 sucres por dólar estadounidense, fuga de capitales y brotes hiperinflacionarios.

A toxic ideology rules the world of extreme competition and individualism. It misrepresents human nature, destroying hope and common purpose. Only a positive vision can replace it, a new story that re-engages people in politics and lights a path to a better world. George Monbiot shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and co-operators.

In The Great Divide, Joseph E. Stiglitz expands on the diagnosis he offered in his best-selling book The Price of Inequality and suggests ways to counter America's growing problem. With his signature blend of clarity and passion, Stiglitz argues that inequality is a choice - the cumulative result of unjust policies and misguided priorities.

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 United States bills itself as the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can achieve success and a better life through hard work and determination. But the facts tell a different story - the US today lags behind most other developed nations in measures of inequality and economic mobility. For decades, wages have stagnated for the majority of workers while economic gains have disproportionately gone to the top one percent.

Families today are squeezed on every side - from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children.

In Pro-Child Politics, Katy Faust has mobilized a collection of experts who apply her children-before-adults approach to their areas of expertise. From porn to debt, foreign policy to religious liberty, each chapter explains how a child-first approach isn’t just nice—it’s a necessity. Contributors explain how the needs of children are being ignored and propose practical, bold reforms that will ensure the next generation will not only survive, but thrive.

Dexter Roberts lived in Beijing for two decades working as a reporter on economics, business and politics for Bloomberg Businessweek. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Roberts explores the reality behind today's financially-ascendant China and pulls the curtain back on how the Chinese manufacturing machine is actually powered.

“Don’t be evil” was enshrined as Google’s corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company’s cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous. Unfortunately, it’s been quite a while since Google, or the majority of the Big Tech companies, lived up to this founding philosophy. Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever.

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.

For decades, the Republican Party has been known as the party of the rich: arguing for “business-friendly” policies like deregulation and tax cuts. But this incisive political history shows that the current inequality crisis was also enabled by a Democratic Party that catered to the affluent. The result is one of the great missed opportunities in political history: a moment when we had the chance to change the lives of future generations and were too short-sighted to take it.

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.