American Economics

Who invented supply-side economics - the idea that cutting tax rates can result in more growth, more prosperity at all income levels, and even more tax revenue flowing into the IRS? Most people would credit the economic team that advised Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But in fact supply-side economics came of age two decades earlier. And the first president who embraced it was one of the biggest icons of the Democratic Party - John F. Kennedy.

IBM is in serious trouble. Big Blue, as the company is known, tends to rely for its success on magical thinking but that magic ran out a long time ago. The company got in trouble back in the 1990s and had to hire for the first time an outside CEO, Lou Gerstner, to save the day. Gerstner pushed IBM into services with spectacular results but this hurt the company, too. As services have became commoditized IBM could only compete by offshoring the work and quality suffered.

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.

One of the most respected voices on Wall Street, Meredith Whitney shot to global prominence in 2007 when her warnings of a looming crisis in the financial sector proved all too prescient. Now, in her first book, she expands upon her biggest call since the financial crisis. Whitney offers a sobering vision of the next few decades, with the coastal states continuing to struggle while the central corridor (Texas to North Dakota) contin­ues to thrive. Whitney also offers practical ideas to help the struggling parts of the country - before the fate of the states becomes irreversible.

The best-selling author of Perfectly Legal returns with a powerful new expose.

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.

This is an anecdotal approach to teaching high school students that history and economics are intertwined. The audiobook is designed to give the student a thumbnail sketch of a dozen events of merit in American history intertwined with the basic economic laws.

To ArcelorMittal Steel, Eliese is known as #6691: Utility Worker, but this was never her dream. Fresh out of college, eager to leave behind her conservative hometown and come to terms with her Christian roots, Eliese found herself applying for a job at the local steel mill. The mill is everything she was trying to escape, but it's also her only shot at financial security in an economically devastated and forgotten part of America. In Rust, Eliese brings the listener inside the belly of the mill and the middle American upbringing that brought her there in the first place.

Between 1865 and 1890, in the aftermath of the Civil War, virtually every important American labor reform organization advocated "cooperation" over "competitive" capitalism and several thousand cooperatives opened for business during this era. The men and women who built cooperatives were practical reformers and they established businesses to stabilize their work lives, families, and communities. Yet they were also utopians - envisioning a world free from conflict where workers would receive the full value of their labor.

Not since the Great Depression have so many Americans questioned the fundamental tenets of capitalism and expressed openness to a socialist alternative. We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism-American Style offers a road map to making this alternative a reality, giving listeners a practical vision of a future that is more democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable.

This groundbreaking study of agriculture's role in the war defies long-held notions that Northern industrialization and urbanization led to clashes between North and South. Huston argues that the ideological chasm between plantation owners in the South and family farmers in the North led to the political eruption of 1854-1856 and the birth of a sectionalized party system.

In Privilege Lost, Jessi Streib traces the lives of over 100 youth born into the upper-middle-class. Following them for over 10 years as they transition from teens to young adults, Streib examines who falls from the upper-middle-class, how, and why don't they see it coming. In doing so, she reveals the patterned ways that individuals' resources and identities push them onto mobility paths - and the complicated choices youth make between staying true to themselves and staying in their class position.

Marco Rubio's parents came to the United States in 1956. The country they found was truly a land of opportunity, where hardworking people with grade school educations could afford a home, a car, and college for their kids. A country where maids and bartenders could raise doctors, lawyers, small-business owners, and maybe even a US senator. That was the American Dream - our country's central promise to its people.

It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government. In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war.

Like every other prospering democracy, the United States developed a mixed economy that channeled the spirit of capitalism into strong growth and healthy social development. In this bargain, government and business were as much partners as rivals. Public investments in education, science, transportation, and technology laid the foundation for broadly based prosperity.

This audiobook examines the history of ideas regarding welfare economics, and in particular the American welfare state.

Politicians, voters, executives, and employees all want the answer to one question: How can America compete with cheap foreign labor, and restore skilled, well-paying jobs to our economy? American Drive answers that question.

Plastic surgery has become the answer for many Americans, and in American Plastic sociologist Laurie Essig explores how we arrived at this particular solution. Over the last decade there has been a 465 percent increase in cosmetic work, and we now spend over $12 billion annually on procedures like liposuction, face-lifts, tummy tucks, and boob jobs.

One of the greatest challenges for the African American community is a severe lack of power. Like caged animals in the zoo, millions of black people in America and across the world often feel that our lives are controlled by other people or that opportunities only enter our lives when they are created by our oppressors. This debilitating mindset can lead to hopelessness, depression and decision-making that is driven by fear rather than desire. Instead of believing that we possess the ability to improve our lives, we simply wait and hope that White Americans will one day have a change of heart.

Political gridlock in Washington…the lingering effects of the financial crisis…structural problems such as unemployment and the skills gap of our work force…the mediocre K-12 educational system. Are our best days behind us? Joel Kurtzman persuasively shows why all the talk about America's decline is not only baseless but dead wrong. Our best days, are, in fact, ahead of us.