Health Economics

How do you create a budget? Clean a bathroom? Make a doctor’s appointment? If you're feeling a little overwhelmed by the responsibilities of growing up, you’re not alone—and Life Skills Book for Teens is here to help! It includes straightforward advice for handling your money, health, home, relationships, and more so you can take on adulthood with confidence.

Loneliness has become the defining condition of the 21st century. It is damaging our health, our wealth, and our happiness and even threatening our democracy. Never has it been more pervasive or more widespread, but never has there been more that we can do about it.

Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how - and why - we eat the way we do. We get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family.

Crack explains why, in a de-industrializing America in which market forces ruled and entrepreneurial risk-taking was celebrated, the crack industry was a lucrative enterprise for the "Horatio Alger boys" of their place and time. These young, predominately African American entrepreneurs were profit-sharing partners in a deviant, criminal form of economic globalization. Hip Hop artists often celebrated their exploits but overwhelmingly, Americans - across racial lines - did not. Crack takes a hard look at the dark side of late 20th-century capitalism.

Twenty-seven-year-old Sarah Thebarge had it all - a loving boyfriend, an Ivy League degree, and a successful career - when her life was derailed by an unthinkable diagnosis: aggressive breast cancer. After surviving the grueling treatments - though just barely - Sarah moved to Portland, Oregon, to start over. There, a chance encounter with an exhausted African mother and her daughters transformed her life again.

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes can make us poor and unhealthy. We often make bad decisions about education, personal finance, health care, family, and the environment.

A groundbreaking investigation of how inequality infects our minds and gets under our skin.

In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.

In 1920, at the end of the last major pandemic, global life expectancy was just over 40 years. Today, in many parts of the world, human beings can expect to live more than 80 years. As a species, we have doubled our life expectancy in just one century. There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this increased longevity.

In 2010, pioneering sociologist Catherine Hakim shocked the world with a provocative new theory: In addition to the three recognized personal assets (economic, cultural, and social capital), each individual has a fourth asset - erotic capital - that he or she can, and should, use to advance within society. In this bold and controversial book, Hakim explores the applications and significance of erotic capital, challenging the disapproval meted out to women and men who use sex appeal to get ahead in life.

For centuries, economics was dominated by the idea that we are rational individuals who optimize our own “utility”. Then, in the 1970s, psychologists demonstrated that the reality is a lot messier. We don’t really know what our utility is, and we care about people other than ourselves. We are susceptible to external nudges. And far from being perfectly rational, we are prone to “cognitive biases” with complex effects on decision-making, such as forgetting to prepare for retirement.

Many of the prices we pay seem to make little sense. We shell out $2.29 for a coffee at Starbucks when a nearly identical brew can be had at the corner deli for less than a dollar. We may be less willing to give blood for $25 than to donate it for free. Americans hire the cheap labor of illegal immigrants to fix the roof or mow the lawn and vote for politicians who promise to spend billions to keep them out of the country.

Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had limited success, and individual effort alone often invites backlash. Behavioral design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts.

As children, we develop stories about how the world works, most of which get improved upon and amended over time. But some do not, even as we mature in other ways. Opinionated, self-centered, and fear-driven, these “child stories” are the source of the behavioral and emotional patterns that hold us back. When we learn to identify and rewrite these stories, limitless growth becomes possible.

Why do three out of four professional football players go bankrupt? How can illiterate jungle dwellers pass a test that tricks Harvard philosophers? And why do billionaires work so hard - only to give their hard-earned money away? When it comes to making decisions, the classic view is that humans are eminently rational. But growing evidence suggests instead that our choices are often irrational, biased, and occasionally even moronic. Which view is right - or is there another possibility?

Dr. Arline T. Geronimus coined the term “weathering” to describe the effects of systemic oppression—including racism and classism—on the body. In Weathering, based on more than 30 years of research, she argues that health and aging have more to do with how society treats us than how well we take care of ourselves. She explains what happens to human bodies as they attempt to withstand and overcome the challenges and insults that society leverages at them, and details how this process ravages their health. And she proposes solutions.

Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life - and death - in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence.

In Curable journalist and health care advocate Travis Christofferson looks at medicine through a magnifying glass and asks an important question: What if the roots of the current US health care crisis are psychological and systemic, perpetuated not just by corporate influence and the powers that be, but by you and me? Curable outlines the future of medicine, detailing brilliant examples of new health care systems that prove we can do better. It turns out we have more control over our health (and happiness) than we think.

Popular progressive radio host and New York Times best-selling author Thom Hartmann reveals how and why attempts to establish affordable universal healthcare in the United States have been thwarted and what we can do to finally make it a reality.

We are living in a golden age of biomedical innovation, yet entrepreneurs still struggle with the so-called Valley of Death when seeking funding for their biotech start-ups. In Healthcare Finance, Andrew Lo and Shomesh Chaudhuri show that there are better ways to finance breakthrough therapies, and they provide the essential financial tools and concepts for creating the next generation of healthcare technologies.