American Economics

Born in Italy, University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales witnessed firsthand the consequences of high inflation and unemployment - paired with rampant nepotism and cronyism - on a country’s economy. This experience profoundly shaped his professional interests, and in 1988 he arrived in the United States, armed with a political passion and the belief that economists should not merely interpret the world, but should change it for the better.

What was the Great Depression? What caused it, and how was it addressed? This educational resource dives deep into the economic problems and solutions prevalent during the Great Depression. It also includes lessons on the new economic deals, which have been designed to counter the negative effects of the Depression.

In The Black Boom, Jason L. Riley—acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute—digs into the data and concludes that the economic lives of black people improved significantly under policies put into place during the Trump administration.

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.

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.

Despite exponential growth in the fishing industry, the global wild fish catch reached a plateau and stagnated. As numerous scientific reports showed, many fish stocks around the world collapsed, creating a genuine global overfishing crisis. Analyzing the ramifications of overfishing for the United States by investigating how fishers, seafood processors, retailers, government officials, and others have worked together to respond to the crisis, historian Mansel G. Blackford examines how these players took steps to make fishing in some American waters sustainable.

In Sovereign Soldiers, Grant Madsen tells the story of how this cast of characters assumed an unfamiliar and often untold policymaking role. Seeking to avoid the harsh punishments meted out after World War I, military leaders believed they had to rebuild and rehabilitate their former enemies; if they failed they might cause an even deadlier World War III.

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...

Un examen profundo de cómo el racismo ha roto el pacto social, erosionado el bien común y dañado las vidas de todos los estadounidenses; un análisis sincero de cómo estas profundas heridas pueden comenzar a sanar. Si se compara con otras naciones industrializadas, Estados Unidos está perdiendo terreno en casi todos los indicadores de bienestar social.

By providing historical context and a thorough yet easily accessible explanation of US financial markets, authors Norbert Michel and Jennifer Schulp provide a much-needed counterpoint to current debates and criticisms. "Financing Opportunity" not only busts many popular myths about financial markets but also proposes ways to improve how our financial markets function. With financial markets and American opportunity so closely tied, financial policy is vital to supporting growth, productivity, and prosperity.

In The Hellhound of Wall Street, Michael Perino recounts in riveting detail the 1933 hearings that put Wall Street on trial for the Great Crash. Never before in American history had so many financial titans been called to account before the public, and they had come within a few weeks of emerging unscathed. By the time Ferdinand Pecora, a Sicilian immigrant and former New York prosecutor, took over as chief counsel, the investigation had dragged on ineffectively for nearly a year and was universally written off as dead....

Of the world's 200 largest economies, more than half are corporations. They have more influence on our lives than any other institution, but while boards of directors are supposed to police CEOs and provide independent leadership, they have become enabling lapdogs rather than trustworthy watchdogs.

In an era when people live longer and want (or need) to work past the traditional retirement age, the Vita Needle Company of Needham, Massachusetts, provides inspiration and important lessons about the value of older workers. Vita Needle is a family-owned factory that was founded in 1932 and makes needles, stainless steel tubing and pipes, and custom fabricated parts. As part of its unusual business model, the company seeks out older workers; the median age of the employees is seventy-four.

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.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice.

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.

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.

Long before the advent of conservative talk radio and Fox News, Robert Ringer was an outspoken advocate for the cause of freedom and free enterprise. In this classic work - updated for the 21st century - Ringer's basic premise is that liberty must be given a higher priority than all other objectives.

In Dreams of the Overworked, Christine M. Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian offer vivid sketches of daily life for nine families, capturing what it means to live, work, and parent in a world of impossible expectations, now amplified unlike ever before by smart devices. We are invited into homes and offices, where we recognize the crushing pressure of unraveling plans, and the healing warmth of being together. Moreover, we witness the constant planning that goes into a "good" day, often with the aid of phones and apps.

For 75 years, the basic patterns of world politics and the contours of international economic activity took place in the shadow of American leadership and the institutions it designed—an order designed to avoid the horrors of previous eras, including, most poignantly, two world wars and the Great Depression. But all things must pass. The global financial crisis of 2008, the legacy of two long, losing wars, and the polarizing and tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump all suggest that global affairs have reached a turning point. The implications of this are profound.