American Economics

Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.

Every day of the week in contemporary America (and especially on Sundays) people raise money for their religious enterprises - for clergy, educators, buildings, charity, youth-oriented work, and more. In a fascinating look into the economics of American Protestantism, James Hudnut-Beumler examines how churches have raised and spent money from colonial times to the present and considers what these practices say about both religion and American culture.

The best educated and most prosperous have the most stable families, while working class families have seen the greatest increase in relationship instability. Why? The book provides the answer: greater economic inequality has profoundly changed marriage markets, the way men and women match up when they search for a life partner. It has produced a larger group of high-income men than women; written off the men at the bottom; and left a larger group of women with a smaller group of comparable men...

In Bad Money, Phillips describes the consequences of our misguided economic policies, our mounting debt, our collapsing housing market, our threatened oil, and the end of American domination of world markets. America's current challenges (and failures) run striking parallels to the decline of previous leading world economic powers - especially the Dutch and British.

In November, GM CEO Rick Wagoner appeared before Congress to ask for $25 billion to bail out the struggling Big Three automakers. To critics like Thomas Freidman and Mitt Romney, it was a sign that the American auto industry should be led out to pasture; if the Japanese are better at making cars, they said, then we should let them do it. To defenders, the loss of the country's largest manufacturing sector would be an incomprehensible disaster.

In 2000, after the Tribune Company acquired Times Mirror Corporation, it comprised the most powerful collection of newspapers in the world. How then did Tribune nosedive into bankruptcy and public scandal? In The Deal from Hell, veteran Tribune and Los Angeles Times editor James O'Shea takes us behind the scenes of the decisions that led to disaster in boardrooms and newsrooms from coast to coast, based on access to key players, court testimony, and sworn depositions.

Behind every financial crisis lurks a "political bubble" - policy biases that foster market behaviors leading to financial instability. Rather than tilting against risky behavior, political bubbles - arising from a potent combination of beliefs, institutions, and interests - aid, abet, and amplify risk.

From the 1830s onward, a succession of well-born Britons headed west to the great American wilderness to find adventure and fulfillment. They brought their dogs, sporting guns, valets, and all the attitudes and prejudices of their class. Prairie Fever explores why the West had such a strong romantic appeal for them at a time when their inherited wealth and passion for sport had no American equivalent.

A Tale of Two Economies details the ongoing battle between the material and the monetary economies. The good news is that the development of modern technology in our material economy has us on the brink of prosperity. The bad news is that a turf war over the money supply in our monetary economy is destroying our prospects for enjoying this success. Thus, we have rampant inflation and a growing gap between the rich and the poor today.

With 1.1 billion residents, the world's largest democracy is poised to dominate the world stage. One of India's wealthiest men gives an insider's view into his country's dynamic transformation, revealing the forces and unique characteristics behind India's meteoric rise.

Judicial decisions assessing the constitutional rights of students in the nation’s public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education and illuminates contemporary disputes that continue to fracture the nation.

The idea of voting is simple, but the administration of elections in ways that ensure access and integrity is complex. In How We Vote, Kathleen Hale and Mitchell Brown explore how election officials work, how ballots are cast and counted, and how jurisdictions try to innovate while also protecting the security of the voting process.

This book chronicles the creation of Everglades National Park, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. Prior to the park's creation, the Everglades was seen as a reviled and useless swamp, unfit for typical recreational or development projects. Park advocates drew on new ideas concerning the value of biota and ecology, the importance of wilderness, and the need to protect habitats, marine ecosystems, and plant life to redefine the Everglades. Using these ideas, the Everglades began to be recognized as an ecologically valuable and fragile wetland.

One in eight Americans struggles with hunger, and more than 13 million children live in food-insecure homes. As Christians we are called to address the suffering of the hungry and poor: "For I was hungry, and you gave me food..." (Matthew 25:35). However, the problems of hunger and poverty are too large and too complex for any one of us to resolve individually. I Was Hungry offers not only an assessment of the current crisis but also a strategy for addressing it. Jeremy Everett, a noted advocate for the hungry and poor, calls Christians to work across ideological divides....

Over the last four decades, debt, bankruptcy, and home foreclosures have risen to epidemic levels, and the personal savings rate has sunk dangerously low. Why, in the richest nation on Earth, can't Americans hold on to their money? First published in 2008, Stuart Vyse's Going Broke described the epidemic of personal debt that existed in the years leading up to the Great Recession and anticipated the home mortgage crisis that started it. Ten years later, this fully updated new edition tackles the post-recession era of economic recovery.

For two and a half centuries, America has been held together by the belief that if you work hard and conduct yourself responsibly in this country, you will be able to prosper and leave a better life for your children. But over the past decade, that idea has come into crisis. In this story-driven manifesto on the future of American work, author Jay Richards argues that such thinking is counterproductive - making us more fragile, more dependent, and less equipped to succeed in a rapidly changing economy.

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?

Despite Brazil being part of the BRIC nations, those with the most potential for growth in the global economy, Brazil is considered economically backwards in many ways. You get an idea of this when you look deeper into its politics and economic policies. In this edition of Summary Shorts, we will analyze and summarize the ideas put forth in Brazillionaires, a book that truly exposes the dark side of Brazil's rise and arguably its inexorable fall.

The American dream is having a mid-life crisis! It doesn't matter if you are a high level executive or a high school dropout, in this day and age people are on the hunt for more meaningful work. People realize that time is short and want to do something special and unique with their working lives. A quest which has resulted in frustration for many; luckily, crowdfunding has swooped in to save the day. For those looking to make the most out of the crowdfunding wave, a better time has never been upon us.

One progressive social worker's observation and opinion as to the decline and collapse of the American social and economic system, in which the American dream is unfairly rigged from the moment we enter public education, where the rich continue to get richer and the rest of us are left to get it the best way we can.