Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Money & Finance

Since 1946, Henry Hazlitt's best-selling Economics in One Lesson has popularized the belief that economics can be boiled down to one simple lesson: market prices represent the true cost of everything. But one-lesson economics tells only half the story. It can explain why markets often work so well, but it can't explain why they often fail so badly - or what we should do when they stumble. In Economics in Two Lessons, John Quiggin teaches both lessons, offering a masterful introduction to the key ideas behind the successes - and failures - of free markets.

Me 2.0 shows job seekers and established professionals alike how to leverage the power of online media for personal empowerment and career success. There is no job security anymore, which means that the way we manage our careers has forever changed. Now everyone in the world is your competition, and the single greatest differentiator you have is your personal brand. With social media tools, blogs, and mobile applications, there are endless opportunities to become known and connect with other people.

On an average day in America, seven young people aged 19 or under will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America, award-winning Guardian journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during the course of a single day in the United States. It could have been any day, but Younge has chosen November 23, 2013. Far from a dry account of gun policy in the United States or a polemic about the dangers of gun violence, the book is a gripping chronicle of an ordinary but deadly day in American life.

Every day, we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, and shop with credit cards. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the 21st century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to profile us as workers, shoppers, patients, voters, potential terrorists, even lovers. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior.

The Left has seized on our economic troubles as an excuse to “blame the rich guy” and paint a picture of capitalism and the free market as selfish, greedy, and cruel. Exactly the opposite is true, says Father Robert Sirico in his thought-provoking book Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy. Father Sirico argues that a free economy actually promotes charity, selflessness, and kindness. In Defending the Free Market, he shows why free-market capitalism is not only the best way to ensure individual success and national prosperity but also the surest route to a moral and socially just society.

Historian and geopolitical expert Michael Auslin argues that far from being a cohesive powerhouse, Asia is a fractured region threatened by stagnation and instability. Here he provides a comprehensive account of the economic, military, political, and demographic risks that bedevil half of our world, arguing that Asia, working with the United States, has a unique opportunity to avert catastrophe - but only if it acts boldly.

It’s no secret that hundreds of companies have been slashing pensions and health coverage earned by millions of retirees. Employers blame an aging workforce, stock market losses, and spiraling costs - a perfect storm of external forces that has forced them to take drastic measures. But this so-called retirement crisis is no accident. Award-winning investigative reporter Ellen E. Schultz reveals how large companies and the retirement industry - benefits consultants, insurance companies, and banks - have all played a huge, hidden role in the death spiral of American pensions and benefits.

For centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance - in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn't work, you didn't eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false.

As co-author of Outwitting the Devil, Think and Grow Rich,Three Feet from Gold, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Sharon Lechter’s advice has helped millions of people around the world improve their financial lives. Sharon is passionate about providing simple, actionable steps for you to take now that will dramatically impact your financial future.

Find the answers to your money questions. Whether you want to learn more about general financial planning principles or delve into issues that disproportionately affect women, The Feminist Financial Handbook has stories and advice from women who have been there, worked through the struggle, and achieved personal success.

Roger Lowenstein explains how corporations and governments ran up ruinous pension and health-care promises to workers - promises that are now coming due and that will hit America like a tsunami if nothing is done.

Negotiating high benefits means gambling with future finances - and when the farm gets sold out from underneath major corporations or public institutions, it affects all of us, and in ways we might not imagine. With his trademark narrative panache, Lowenstein unravels the truth about how pensions work in America and illuminates the impending crisis.

Compassionate conservatism is a new political force in the land, sweeping the grassroots of people of all faiths, races, and ethnicities. In its parts it offers solutions to many of our most intractable problems; in its whole it is nothing less than an innovative philosophy of government. No author is more qualified to explain its power and promise than Marvin Olasky, described by the New York Times as “the godfather of compassionate conservatism."

Like Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’ Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage - an intimate portrait of an invisible man. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology in college, and after college he learned how to repair television sets, cut suit lengths, and slice chicken. He has lived in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Surat, and Patna, but this evening he is stoned on a street in Sadar Bazaar, in North Delhi. The morning shall bring hangovers, whiskey breakfasts, and possibly answers to the lingering questions that haunt Ashraf.

The world’s largest company, WalMart Stores, has revenues higher than the gross domestic product of all but twentyfive of the world’s countries. Its employees outnumber the populations of almost one hundred nations. The world’s largest asset manager, a New York company called BlackRock, controls assets greater than the national reserves of any country on the planet.

George Gilder is one of the great technological visionaries, and "the man who put the 's' in telecosm" according to Telephony magazine. His long-awaited Telecosm is a bible of the new age of communications. Equal parts science story, business history, social analysis, and prediction, it is the one book you need to make sense of the titanic changes underway in our lives.

In this groundbreaking treatise, best-selling author and economist Ravi Batra identifies the roadblocks to world economic prosperity and what we need to do to overcome them. Batra takes on falling minimum wages, corporate scandals, rocketing oil prices, and many of the other crises facing the world economy. He offers an expansive, optimistic vision of how the international community can address them and bring about something historically unprecedented: true global economic prosperity.

Each year Americans lose billions of dollars to fraudulent activity. The Madoffs Among Us explains in graphic detail how and why people fall prey. Most importantly, it tells you how to easily identify the people who perpetrate these crimes and avoid their deceitful practices. Why do smart people fall for these cons? What are today’s most common scams? And how can you avoid becoming a victim?

In the history of the Moody Bible Institute, founded in 1886 by shoe salesman turned revivalist Dwight Lyman Moody, Timothy Gloege finds an answer to why Christian ethics seem to go hand in hand with free-market capitalism.

Recent public-health crises raise urgent questions about how our animal-derived food is raised and brought to market. In Animal Factory, best-selling author and investigative journalist David Kirby exposes the powerful business and political interests behind large-scale factory farms and tracks the far-reaching fallout that contaminates our air, land, water, and food.

Are you treading water financially? Or worse, are you sinking? Do credit-card interest, loan payments, and the cost of living take too big a bite out of your income? Let professional financial planner Robert Pagliarini give you a six-day financial makeover. Learn a great new system for identifying your dreams. Learn how you can save, even at your current income level, to reach your goals. Put your finances on autopilot. Identify your investment personality and invest with a purpose.