Showing results by publisher "Macmillan Audio" in Economics

In the face of unprecedented global change, New York Times best-selling author Alec Ross proposes a new social contract to restore the balance of power between government, citizens, and business.

An accessible, story-driven look at the future of the global economy, written by a leading expert, Extreme Economies revives a foundational idea from medical science to turn the logic of modern economics on its head, arguing that the outlier economies are the place to learn about our own future. Whether following Punjabi migrants through the lawless Panamanian jungle or visiting a day-care for the elderly modeled after a casino, Davies brings a storyteller’s eye to places where the economy has been destroyed, distorted, and even turbocharged.

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.

The best-selling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America's ailing middle class what she did for the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the world of the white-collar unemployed.

In How Do I Tax Thee?, libertarian commentator and rising media star Kristin Tate takes us on a tour of the ways the government bleeds us dry in innumerable daily transactions and at various stages of life. We all know the government taxes our pay: Federal, state, and local taxes are withheld by employers, as are Social Security payments. But what about the many other ways the government drains money from our wallets?

If business is so bad, why does it remain so integral to the basic functioning of America? Economist and best-selling author Tyler Cowen says our biggest problem is that we don’t love business enough. In Big Business, Cowen puts forth an impassioned defense of corporations and their essential role in a balanced, productive, and progressive society. He dismantles common misconceptions and untangles conflicting intuitions.

What does a middle-class democracy look like when it comes apart? When, after 40 years of economic triumph, America’s winners persuade themselves that they owe nothing to the rest of the country? Rendezvous with Oblivion is a collection of interlocking essays examining how inequality has manifested itself in our cities, in our jobs, in the way we travel - and of course in our politics, where in 2016, millions of anxious ordinary people rallied to the presidential campaign of a billionaire who meant them no good.

At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, and inequality are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company to Apple. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics.

The author of The Celebration Chronicles - an exposé of Disney’s small town community development - returns to the outskirts of the Magic Kingdom with Sunbelt Blues, an eye-opening investigation of America’s rural and suburban homelessness crisis, told through a searing portrait of precarious living in Disney World’s backyard.

While history teaches that successful revolutions depend on participation by the common man, the establishment of a stable and independent United States first required wealthy colonials uniting to disrupt the very system that had enriched them, and then funding a very long war. While some fortunes were made during the war at the expense of the poor, many of the wealthy embraced the goal of obtaining for their poorer countrymen an unprecedented equality of opportunity, along with independence.

George Washington: general, statesman...businessman? Most people don't know that Washington was the country's first true entrepreneur, responsible for innovations in several industries. In George Washington, Entrepreneur, John Berlau presents a fresh, surprising take on our forefather's business pursuits. History has depicted Washington as a gifted general and political pragmatist, not an intellectual heavyweight. But he was a serious inventor and inveterate tinkerer and just as intelligent as Jefferson or Franklin.

One in three American workers is now a freelancer. This “gig economy” - one that provides neither the guarantee of steady hours nor benefits - emerged out of the digital era and has revolutionized the way we do business. High-profile tech start-ups such as Uber and Airbnb are constantly making headlines for the disruption they cause to the industries they overturn. But what are the effects of this disruption, from Wall Street down to Main Street? What challenges do employees and job seekers face at every level of professional experience?

Six Billion Shoppers takes listeners on an exciting and colorful journey around the world to visit the next e-commerce mega markets and explore how a new e-commerce boom is opening opportunities for entrepreneurs and global brands alike. Traveling through Nigeria, China, India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, Porter Erisman addresses e-commerce across these new markets and what it means for Western brands.

From a best-selling author with unprecedented access to Pope Francis, an investigative look at the recent financial scandals at the highest levels of the Vatican. A veritable war is waging in the church: On one side there is Pope Francis' strong message for one church of the poor and all; on the other there is the old Curia, with its endless enemies, and the old and new lobbies struggling to preserve their not-so-Christian privileges.

The first half of Chris Hughes's life played like a movie reel right out of the "American Dream". He grew up in a small town in North Carolina. His parents were people of modest means, but he was accepted into an elite boarding school and then Harvard, both on scholarship. There, he met Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz and became one of the co-founders of Facebook. In telling his story, Hughes demonstrates the powerful role fortune and luck play in today's economy. Through the rocket ship rise of Facebook, Hughes came to understand how a select few can become ultra-wealthy nearly overnight.

A leading thinker's groundbreaking examination of women's economic empowerment. Scholar and activist Linda Scott argues that women’s systematic exclusion from economic participation has created an alternate system that she calls “The Double X Economy”: having suffered from a consistent list of severe and worldwide economic exclusions applied throughout history, women have been shaped into an entirely different economic practice. Yet the women’s economy, when empowered, is more careful, cooperative, and focused on long-term outcomes than the world's current economic order.

The story of how Victoria’s Secret skyrocketed from a tiny chain of boutiques to a retail juggernaut with more than $8 billion in annual sales at its peak—all while defining an impossible beauty standard for generations of American women—before the brand’s tight grip on the industry finally slipped.

His assignment was to write about a real-estate frenzy lighting up the Redneck Riviera. So Ryan Dezember settled in and bought a home nearby himself. Then the market crashed, and he became one of the millions of Americans who suddenly owed more on their homes than they were worth. A flood of foreclosures made it impossible to sell. It didn't help that his quaint neighborhood fell into disrepair and drug-induced despair. He had no choice but to become a reluctant and wildly unprofitable landlord to move on.

Thirty years ago, “greed is good” and “maximizing shareholder value” became the new mantras woven into the fabric of our business culture, economy, and politics. Although, around the world, free-market capitalism has lifted more than a billion people from poverty, in the US, most of the benefits of economic growth have been captured by the richest 10 percent, along with providing justification for squeezing workers, cheating customers, avoiding taxes, and leaving communities in the lurch. As a result, Americans are losing faith that a free-market economy is the best system.

Friedman brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy - both of which could poison our world if we do not act quickly and collectively. His argument speaks to all of us who are concerned about the state of America in the global future.