Government Finance

With a nation seemingly more divided than ever, many worry that Americans risk losing ground on solving the complex, interrelated problems the country faces - including rising inequality, the specter of climate change, astronomical health care costs, and economic stagnation. The renowned economist Jeffrey D. Sachs offers a practical approach to move America toward a new consensus: sustainable development.

In 2008, the American economy collapsed, taking with it millions of Americans' jobs, homes, and life savings. The impending financial crisis was devastating, and many are still feeling its effects today. Though the crisis was debilitating, the US government has yet to implement policies that would prevent a repeat of the Great Recession. Nothing Is Too Big to Fail holds a microscope to the very policies and corruption that led to this major economic recession.

In Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano reveal the worst perpetrators screwing America's high-skilled workers, how and why they're doing it - and what we must do to stop them. In this audiobook, they will name names and expose the lies of those who pretend to champion the middle class while aiding and abetting massive layoffs of highly skilled American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor.

In this fascinating new history, Judith Stein argues that in order to understand our current economic crisis we need to look back to the 1970s and the end of the age of the factory - the era of postwar liberalism, created by the New Deal, whose practices, high wages, and regulated capital produced both robust economic growth and greater income equality.

The global economy is entering an era of protracted stagnation, similar to what Japan has experienced for over a decade. That is the message of this brilliant and controversial summary of our current economic predicament from an internationally respected consultant and commentator on financial markets, who predicted the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The author challenges the assumption that growth can be perpetual and questions the ability of political leaders to enact the tough structural changes needed.

The conservation of natural resources, like that of any other asset, involves trade-offs. Yet, in a world faced with the harsh realities of climate change, crafting the right environmental policies is an increasingly urgent task. In Conservation, Charles Perrings and Ann Kinzig bring together new research in economics and biodiversity to investigate conservation decisions and the theory behind them.

Any group of people expected to work synergistically needs a system that structures their interactions. That system is “governance.” The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance takes a first principles approach to exploring the ways governance structures affect the humans living under them (and vice versa), with a special focus on how human psychology interacts with the structures that facilitate our interaction with other people.

In April 2020, the United States will embark on what has been called "the largest peacetime mobilization in American history": the decennial population census. It is part of a tradition of counting people that goes back at least three millennia and now spans the globe. In The Sum of the People, data scientist Andrew Whitby traces the remarkable history of the census, from ancient China and the Roman Empire, through revolutionary America and Nazi-occupied Europe, to the steps of the Supreme Court.

In September 2011, sheriff’s deputies in Iowa encountered three ethnic Chinese men near a field where a farmer was growing corn seed under contract with Monsanto. What began as a simple trespassing inquiry mushroomed into a two-year FBI operation in which investigators bugged the men’s rental cars, used a warrant intended for foreign terrorists and spies, and flew surveillance planes over corn country - all in the name of protecting trade secrets of corporate giants Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer.

Over the course of a decade spent reporting on the ground in China as a financial journalist, Dinny McMahon gradually came to the conclusion that the widely held belief in China’s inevitable economic ascent is dangerously wrong. Debt, entrenched vested interests, a frenzy of speculation, and an aging population are all pushing China toward an economic reckoning. China’s Great Wall of Debt unravels an incredibly complex and opaque economy, one whose fortunes - for better or worse - will shape the globe like never before.

The widening gap between rich and poor means dealing with one big, uncomfortable truth: If you're not at the top, you're at the bottom. The global labor market is changing radically thanks to growth at the high end and the low. About three quarters of the jobs created in the United States since the great recession pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Still, the United States has more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever, and we continue to mint them.

The rise of the Tea Party and the 2010 election results revealed that tens of millions of Americans are alarmed by big government but skeptical that anything can or will be done to stop the growth of the state. In Free Market Revolution, the keepers of Ayn Rand’s legacy argue that the answer lies in Rand’s pioneering philosophy of capitalism and self-interest—a philosophy that more and more people are turning to for answers.

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

VC tells the riveting story of how the industry arose from the United States' long-running orientation toward entrepreneurship. Venture capital has been driven from the start by the pull of outsized returns through a skewed distribution of payoffs - a faith in low-probability but substantial financial rewards that rarely materialize. Whether the gamble is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford or the newest startup in Silicon Valley, VC is not just a model of finance that has proven difficult to replicate in other countries.

“Don’t be evil” was enshrined as Google’s corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company’s cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous. Unfortunately, it’s been quite a while since Google, or the majority of the Big Tech companies, lived up to this founding philosophy. Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever.

The Federal Reserve, the U.S. central bank, was built for a monetary system composed primarily of investor-owned, government-chartered banks. But over the years, the erosion of banking law and the rise of alternative forms of money created outside of the banking system have pushed the Fed to take on more and more responsibilities to keep the economy out of recession, as it did during the 2008 crisis, and again during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it created $3 trillion to stop another financial panic.

Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships. Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China.

Money issues dominate the news, but economic jargon and the complexity of it all can be bamboozling for regular folks. Paul Sheard, a leading economist and research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, is known for his ability to see the forest and the trees and demystify complex economic phenomena. With The Power of Money, Sheard empowers listeners to become better-informed economic citizens by providing context for some of the biggest questions surrounding money.

The industrial age made possible by fossil fuels will surely decline as these fuels run out. In The Ecotechnic Future John Michael Greer alerts the listener to possible changes future generations may face as these dwindling fuel supplies lead first to a deindustrial age, then to a society which salvages the remnants of our current plenty, and eventually to a time in which people may learn to live in balance with the environment: an ecotechnic society.

America emerged from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal with strong democratic values and broadly shared prosperity. But for the past 30 years, American politics has been dominated by a conservative movement determined to undermine the New Deal's achievements. Now, the tide may be turning, and in The Conscience of a Liberal Paul Krugman, the world's most widely read economist and one of its most influential political commentators, charts the way to reform.