Showing titles in Theory

It can be said of very few books that the world was changed as a result of its publication - but this is certainly the case of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1818-1883). Volume 1 appeared (in German) in 1867, and the two subsequent volumes appeared at later dates after the author's death - completed from extensive notes left by Marx himself.

An engrossing and deeply human chronicle of the past fifty years of American economic and social upheaval, viewed through the consequential life of the most powerful woman in American economic history, Janet Yellen, and her unconventional partnership in marriage and work with Nobel Laureate George Akerlof.

SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as: How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa? What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common? Can eating kangaroo save the planet? Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else.

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.

How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat it poses to individual freedom? In this classic book, Milton Friedman provides the definitive statement of his immensely influential economic philosophy - one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.

Seeing What's Next is a framework for predicting industry winners and losers. Every day, individuals take action based on how they believe innovation will change industries. Yet these beliefs are largely based on guesswork and incomplete data, and can lead to costly errors in judgment. Internationally renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen and his research partners, Scott D. Anthony and Erik A. Roth, present this guide for predicting outcomes in the evolution of any industry.

How do you get your dinner? That is the basic question of economics. When economist and philosopher Adam Smith proclaimed that all our actions were motivated by self-interest, he used the example of the baker and the butcher as he laid the foundations for the “economic man”. He argued that the baker and butcher didn't give bread and meat out of the goodness of their hearts. It's an ironic point of view coming from a bachelor who lived with his mother for most of his life - a woman who cooked his dinner every night.

Over the past two centuries, economic growth has freed billions from poverty and made our lives far healthier and longer. As a result, the unfettered pursuit of growth defines economic life around the world. Yet this prosperity has come at an enormous price. At this time of uncertainty about growth and its value, award-winning economist Daniel Susskind provides an essential reckoning. In a sweeping analysis full of historical insight, he argues that we cannot abandon growth but shows instead how we must redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value.

Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the US government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved.

In a radical break with the past, information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into its stream. Individuals and companies can no longer rely on the stocks of knowledge that theyve carefully built up and stored away. Information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into the stream.

The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and the homes in which many of us live—all now swell asset managers' bulging investment portfolios. As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways. In this eye-opening follow-up to Rentier Capitalism, Brett Christophers peels back the veil on "asset manager society."

"The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph," writes Hernando de Soto, "is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis." In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail?

Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this postcapitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism might actually entail.

China's economic growth is sputtering, the Euro is under threat, and the United States is combating serious trade disadvantages. Another Great Depression? Not quite. Noted economist and China expert Michael Pettis argues instead that we are undergoing a critical rebalancing of the world economies.

¿Cómo podemos beneficiarnos de las promesas del Gobierno y evitar al mismo tiempo la amenaza que éste supone para la libertad individual? En este audiolibro Milton Friedman presenta el compendio definitivo de su influyente filosofía económica. Su objetivo principal es analizar el papel del capitalismo competitivo.

In Saving Capitalism, Robert Reich reveals the entrenched cycles of power and influence that have damaged American capitalism, perpetuating a new oligarchy in which the 1 percent get ever richer and the rest - middle and working class alike - lose ever more economic agency, making for the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity since World War II.

In Naked Economics, journalist Charles Wheelan does “the impossible”—he makes economic principles relevant, interesting and fun. Brimming with scores of down-to-earth examples and sprinkled with humorous anecdotes, this comprehensive overview will keep listeners smiling and wide awake.

In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking 10 of the most common objections to Marxism - that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on - he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx's own thought these assumptions are.

The second edition of the fun and fascinating guide to the main ideas of the Austrian School of economics, written in sparkling prose, especially for the non-economist. Gene Callahan shows that good economics isn't about government planning or statistical models - it's about human beings and the choices they make in the real world. This may be the most important book of its kind since Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Though written for the beginner, it has been justly praised by scholars too, including Israel Kirzner, Walter Block, and Peter Boettke.

Chronicling the rise and fall of the efficient market theory and the century-long making of the modern financial industry, Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market is as much an intellectual whodunit as a cultural history of the perils and possibilities of risk. The book brings to life the people and ideas that forged modern finance and investing, from the formative days of Wall Street through the Great Depression and into the financial calamity of today.