World Economics

Pasta, guita, plata, parné, duros. Da igual cómo lo llamemos, pero lo cierto es que el dinero importa ahora más que nunca. En El triunfo del dinero Niall Ferguson demuestra que la historia de las finanzas es el trasfondo de toda la Historia. ¿Cuándo pasó el dinero de metal a papel? ¿Por qué los tipos de interés suben y bajan como un yoyó? ¿Por qué la gente nunca aprende que las burbujas bursátiles siempre acaban estallando? ¿Por qué los seguros ya no son la mejor manera de protegerse contra el riesgo?

As children, we develop stories about how the world works, most of which get improved upon and amended over time. But some do not, even as we mature in other ways. Opinionated, self-centered, and fear-driven, these “child stories” are the source of the behavioral and emotional patterns that hold us back. When we learn to identify and rewrite these stories, limitless growth becomes possible.

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.

Everyone knows "what's wrong with millennials". Glenn Beck says we've been ruined by "participation trophies". Simon Sinek says we have low self-esteem. An Australian millionaire says millennials could all afford homes if we'd just give up avocado toast. Thanks, millionaire. This millennial is here to prove them all wrong.

Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships. Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China.

From seizing superyachts to manipulating the global price of oil to trying to block the sale of military technology to Russia, we learn how the White House coordinated with top officials in London and Brussels to freeze a staggering $300 billion in foreign currency reserves accumulated in the West by Russia’s central bank. Mobilizing an army of white collar-crime investigators and experts on international law, Baker explores how the West has cracked down on illicit Russian money by targeting oligarchs, one superyacht at a time, and their enablers around the world.

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.

The Blue Sweater is the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty. It all started back home in Virginia, with the blue sweater, a gift that quickly became her prized possession - until the day she outgrew it and gave it away to Goodwill. Eleven years later in Africa, she spotted a young boy wearing that very sweater, with her name still on the tag inside.

When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, most experts expected the WTO rules and procedures would liberalize China and make it "a responsible stakeholder in the liberal world order". But the experts made the wrong bet. China today is liberalizing neither economically nor politically but, if anything, becoming more authoritarian and mercantilist. In this book, renowned globalization and Asia expert Clyde Prestowitz describes the key challenges posed by China and the strategies America and the Free World must adopt to meet them.

Entrepreneurial Leap, Updated and Expanded Edition is an easy-to-use guide that will help you decide if entrepreneurship is right for you—because success as an entrepreneur depends on far more than just a great idea and a generous helping of luck. In this three-part book, Gino Wickman, bestselling author of Traction, reveals the six essential traits that every entrepreneur needs in order to succeed, based on real-world startups. If these traits ring true for you, you'll get a glimpse of what your life would look like as an entrepreneur.

George Friedman has forecasted the coming trends (politics, technology, population, and culture) of the next century in The Next 100 Years, and focused his predictions on the coming ten years in The Next Decade. Now, in Flashpoints, Friedman zooms in on the region that has, for 500 years, been the cultural hotbed of the world - Europe - and examines the most basic and fascinating building block of the region: culture.

In the 1860s a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: 'capitalism'. The global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848. It was the triumph of a society which believed that economic growth rests on competitive private enterprise, on success in buying everything in the cheapest market (including labour) and selling it in the dearest.

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.

We all know how identities - notably, those of nationality, class, culture, race, and religion - are at the root of global conflict, but the more elusive truth is that these identities are created by conflict in the first place. In provocative, entertaining chapters, Kwame Anthony Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with engrossing historical tales and reveals the tangled contradictions within the stories that define us.

In this eloquent challenge to the reigning wisdom on globalization, Dani Rodrik reminds us of the importance of the nation-state, arguing forcefully that when the social arrangements of democracies inevitably clash with the international demands of globalization, national priorities should take precedence. Combining history with insight, humor with good-natured critique, Rodrik’s case for a customizable globalization supported by a light frame of international rules shows the way to a balanced prosperity as we confront today’s global challenges in trade, finance, and labor markets.

Life sometimes seems illogical. Individuals do strange things: take drugs, have unprotected sex, mug each other. Love seems irrational, and so does divorce. On a larger scale, life seems no fairer or easier to fathom - why do some neighborhoods thrive and others become ghettos? Why is racism so persistent? Why is your idiot boss paid a fortune for sitting behind a mahogany altar? Thorny questions, and you might be surprised to hear the answers coming from an economist.

In a sweeping narrative, the author of the mega-bestseller A Beautiful Mind takes us on a journey through modern history with the men and women who changed the lives of every single person on the planet. It’s the epic story of the making of modern economics, and of how it rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands rather than in Fate. Nasar’s account begins with Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew observing and publishing the condition of the poor majority in mid nineteenth-century London, the richest and most glittering place in the world.

The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations. In The Great Escape, Angus Deaton - one of the foremost experts on economic development and on poverty - tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress, opening up gaps and setting the stage for today's disproportionately unequal world.

Imagine if every month the government deposited $1,000 into your bank account, with nothing expected in return. It sounds crazy. But it has become one of the most influential and hotly debated policy ideas of our time. Futurists, radicals, libertarians, socialists, union representatives, feminists, conservatives, Bernie supporters, development economists, childcare workers, welfare recipients, and politicians from India to Finland to Canada to Mexico - all are talking about UBI.

It was Adam Smith (1723 - 1790) who first established economics as a separate branch of knowledge, and many would say his work has never been surpassed. The Wealth of Nations, which appeared in 1776, is the definitive text for all who believe that economic decisions are best left to markets, not governments. At the heart of Smith’s doctrine is an optimistic view of the effects of self-interest.