Showing titles in Economic Conditions

A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear. Progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity. With their breakthrough economic theory and manifesto for a better society, Acemoglu and Johnson provide the vision needed to reshape how we innovate and who really gains from technological advances.

Early in the 21st century, a quiet revolution occurred. For the first time, the major developed economies began to invest more in intangible assets, like design, branding, R&D, or software, than in tangible assets, like machinery, buildings, and computers. For all sorts of businesses, from tech firms and pharma companies to coffee shops and gyms, the ability to deploy assets that one can neither see nor touch is increasingly the main source of long-term success.

Our world is being transformed by the Internet and the near limitless choice that it provides to consumers; tomorrow's markets belong to those who can take advantage of this. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance, an entirely new model for business that is just starting to show its power as unlimited selection reveals new truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it.

In recent years the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world's superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality.

When Hu Jintao, China's then vice president, came to visit the New York Stock Exchange and Ground Zero in 2002, he asked Hank Paulson to be his guide. It was a testament to the pivotal role that Goldman Sachs played in helping China experiment with private enterprise. In Dealing with China, the best-selling author of On the Brink draws on his unprecedented access to both the political and business leaders of modern China to answer several key questions.

In this controversial, hard-hitting account of today’s explosive market, Robert J. Shiller, a leading expert on market volatility, evokes Alan Greenspan’s infamous 1996 reference, “irrational exuberance,” to explain the alternately soaring and declining stock market. Shiller’s unconventional yet persuasive argument credits an unprecedented confluence of events with driving stocks to uncharted heights, and he analyzes the structural, cultural, and psychological factors behind these levels of growth not reflected in any other sector of the economy.

By one reading, things look pretty good for Americans today: The country is richer than ever before, and the unemployment rate is down by half since the Great Recession. But a closer look shows that something is going seriously wrong. This is the collapse of work - especially among America's men. Political economist Nicholas Eberstadt shows that while "unemployment" has gone down, America's work rate is also lower today than a generation ago - and that the work rate for US men has been spiraling downward for half a century.

There was no single, dramatic event that set the current financial crisis off. A whole series of very questionable decisions by many people, in many places, over a period of years, built up the pressures that led to a sudden collapse of the housing market and of financial institutions that began to fall like dominoes as a result of investing in securities based on housing prices. This book is designed to unravel the tangled threads of that story.

The turn of the 2020s will mark an extremely rare convergence of low points for multiple political, economic, and demographic cycles. The result will be a major financial crash and global upheaval that will dwarf the Great Recession of the 2000s - and maybe even the Great Depression of the 1930s. We're facing the onset of what Dent calls "Economic Winter". In Zero Hour, he and Andrew Pancholi explain all of these cycles, which influence everything from currency valuations to election returns, from economic growth rates in Asia to birthrates in Europe.

In this vital work, author Michael Levine offers compelling evidence that problems in business, large and small, typically stem from inattention to tiny details. Social psychologists and criminologists agree that if a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, soon thereafter the rest of the windows will be broken - and the perception will build that crime in that neighborhood is out of control. The same principle applies to business.

There are factors that produce immense profits and these occur rarely. Investors stand at a unique point in monetary history where the death of paper currencies on a global scale is taking place before their eyes. Because most are frozen into inside-the-box thinking, few investors will ride the next move as silver (and gold) skyrocket in the years ahead. In fact the primary purpose of this book is to educate the listener as to why there is no way out of the financial morass created by the financial elite.

In A World of Three Zeros, Yunus describes the new civilization emerging from the economic experiments his work has helped to inspire. He explains how global companies like McCain, Renault, Essilor, and Danone got involved with this new economic model through their own social action groups, describes the ingenious new financial tools now funding social businesses, and sketches the legal and regulatory changes needed to jumpstart the next wave of socially driven innovations.

The updated edition of Mancur Olson's award-winning book The Rise and Decline of Nations.

In Alpha Girls, award-winning journalist Julian Guthrie takes listeners behind the closed doors of venture capital, an industry that transforms economies and shapes how we live. We follow the lives and careers of four women who were largely written out of history - until now. These women, juggling work and family, shaped the tech landscape we know today while overcoming unequal pay, actual punches, betrayals, and the sexist attitudes prevalent in Silicon Valley and in male-dominated industries everywhere.

Over the past four years, world-renowned economist Thomas Piketty documented his close observations on current events through a regular column in the French newspaper Le Monde. His pen captured the rise and fall of Trump, the drama of Brexit, Macron’s ascendance to the French presidency, the unfolding of a global pandemic, and much else besides, always through the lens of Piketty’s fight for a more equitable world. This collection brings together those articles.

In the last decade, No Logo has become an international phenomenon and a cultural manifesto for the critics of unfettered capitalism worldwide. As America faces a second economic depression, Klein's analysis of our corporate and branded world is as timely and powerful as ever. Equal parts cultural analysis, political manifesto, mall-rat memoir, and journalistic exposé, No Logo is the first book to put the new resistance into pop-historical and clear economic perspective. Naomi Klein tells a story of rebellion and self-determination in the face of our new branded world.

Today, there are three Americas. At one extreme are the brain hubs with workers who are among the most productive, creative, and best-paid on the planet. At the other extreme are former manufacturing capitals that are rapidly losing jobs and residents. The rest of America could go either way. For the past 30 years, the three Americas have been growing apart at an accelerating rate. This divergence is one the most important developments in the history of the US and is reshaping the very fabric of our society. But the winners and losers aren't necessarily who you'd expect.

Filled with keen economic insight and advice for citizens, executives, policymakers, and educators, When More Is Not Better is the must-listen guide for saving democratic capitalism.

One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now: What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers - right from the belly of the beast. In A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) was one of the most important documents to come out of World War I – specifically the period of the Armistice and the subsequent settlement negotiations. And, a century on, it remains of particular relevance to our times – an uncompromising and forthright analysis of how international diplomacy can be suffused by personalities, prejudices, personal ambition and outright, uncontrolled feelings of revenge.