89 Books found for subject: Economics

Rampant speculation. Record trading volumes. Assets bought not because of their value but because the buyer believes he can sell them for more in a day or two, or an hour or two. Welcome to the late 1920s. There are obvious and absolute parallels to the great bull market of the late 1990s, writes Galbraith in a new introduction dated 1997. Of course, Galbraith notes, … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: John Kenneth Galbraith | Subjects: Economics, History

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries. Using a novel … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Gregory Clark | Subject: Economics

The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat…It is, first and foremost, a very detailed look at 200 years’ worth of data on the distribution of income and wealth across the rich world (with some figures for large emerging markets also included). This mountain of data allows Piketty to … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Thomas Piketty | Subject: Economics

Identity Economics provides an important and compelling new way to understand human behavior, revealing how our identities–and not just economic incentives–influence our decisions. In 1995, economist Rachel Kranton wrote future Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof a letter insisting that his most recent paper was wrong. Identity, she argued, was the missing element that would help to explain why people–facing the same economic circumstances–would make different choices. … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: George Akerlof, Rachel Kranton | Subject: Economics

Gary B. Gorton of Yale University’s School of Management explains in some detail how in August 2007, the financial markets found themselves in the grip of a phenomenon thought to have been rendered impossible by various safeguards: a banking panic of the sort that rocked global capitalism a dozen times between 1837 and 1907. This time, however, the spectacle did not consist of individual depositors … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Gary B. Gorton | Subject: Economics

Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay?

In What Money Can’t Buy, … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Michael J. Sandel | Subject: Economics

Contemporary American society has the look of a split-level structure. Its political and social institutions distribute rights and privileges universally and proclaim the equality of all citizens. Yet economic institutions, with efficiency as their guiding principle, create disparities among citizens in living standards and material welfare. This mixture of equal rights and unequal economic status breeds tensions between the political principles of democracy and the … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Arthur M. Okun | Subject: Economics

In a sweeping narrative, the author of the megabestseller 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 economics rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Sylvia Nasar | Subject: Economics

With the British Industrial Revolution, part of the world’s population started to experience extraordinary economic growth—leading to enormous gaps in wealth and living standards between the industrialized West and the rest of the world. This pattern of divergence reversed after World War II, and now we are midway through a century of high and accelerating growth in the developing world and a new convergence with … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Michael S. Deimler, Michael Spence | Subjects: Economics, International

American capitalism is in dire straits, caught in a perilous pattern of increasing volatility, decreasing investor returns, and ongoing bad behavior by executives. And it’s getting worse. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, we’ve seen two massive value-destroying market meltdowns and a string of ethics breaches, including accounting scandals, options-backdating schemes, and the subprime mortgage debacle.

Just what is going on here? Is it the … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Roger L. Martin | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Economics, Management

The financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent Great Recession demolished many cherished beliefs—most significantly, the theory that financial markets always get things right. Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market explains where that idea came from, and where it went wrong. As much an intellectual whodunit as a cultural history of the perils and possibilities of risk, it also brings to life the people … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Justin Fox | Subjects: Economics, History

When the world financial system failed in 2008, world governments intervened decisively. Guided by economics teams with impeccable credentials, they intended not only to “stimulate” the economy, but to “jolt” it back to borrowing and spending as usual. All of these actions were taken from a playbook devised by British economist John Maynard Keynes, by far the most influential social thinker of the past century.

But … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Hunter Lewis | Subject: Economics

Financial Times world trade editor Beattie combines economic history, psychology and political analysis to identify the factors that predispose economies to sickness or health. The author takes a human interest, Freakonomics-style approach to such economic riddles as why Islamic nations stay mired in poverty (he argues that one reason might be the Qur’an’s dictum against usury and interest-earning) and why Africa is dependent on exporting … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Alan Beattie | Subject: Economics

Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Andrew Ross Sorkin | Subjects: Economics, Finance

Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state. However, as Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback–say … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Stephen A. Marglin | Subject: Economics

The antidote to capitalism, written by one of its best critics, who just happened to be a Marxist. An unconventional perspective, but a valuable one. Unlike many books on economics, this one by the late Andrew Glyn has charts that are blissfully self-explanatory and place the current crisis in a long historical context.

Content: Book | Author: Andrew Glyn | Subject: Economics

As the “invisible hand” of the free market and the competitive individualism it engenders increasingly dominate public life, contends UMass-Amherst economist and MacArthur fellow Folbre (Who Pays for the Kids?), we risk losing the other necessary component of a healthy society: “the invisible heart,” a care system for children, the aged and the infirm. The market does not provide such support, and in the prescribed … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Nancy Folbre | Subject: Economics

A former reporter and editor at the New York Times and the Harvard Business Review who now works at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Kurtzman here offers insight into how the stock and bond markets function. He explains how these markets operate and what they do (e.g., package debt in the form of bond offerings, establish pricing for securities and commodities, connect those who seek capital with those who … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Joel Kurtzman | Subject: Economics

In this biography, Pulitzer Prize winner McCraw neatly divides his emphasis between Schumpeter’s professional and personal life. He portrays his subject as a somewhat self-absorbed insatiable scholar not entirely comfortable with his contemporaries, which might explain marriages and affairs with much older and younger women, as well as his affinity with students and often-strained relations with colleagues of his own generation. McGraw lucidly addresses Schumpeter’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Thomas K. McCraw | Subjects: Economics, History, People

Economists have long counseled reliance on markets rather than on government to decide a wide range of questions, in part because allocation through voting can give rise to a “tyranny of the majority.” Markets, by contrast, are believed to make products available to suit any individual, regardless of what others want. But the argument is not generally correct. In markets, you can’t always get what … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Joel Waldfogel | Subject: Economics