Political Finance

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 promise of green jobs and a clean energy future has roused the masses. But as Robert Bryce makes clear in this provocative book, that vision needs a major re-vision. We cannotand will notquit using carbon-based fuels at any time in the near future for a simple reason: they provide the horsepower that we crave. The hard reality is that oil, coal, and natural gas are here to stay.

Without question one of the most significant books in modern history, The Communist Manifesto is a brief, populist pamphlet that distils the core ideas of communism into accessible prose. Published just months before violent uprisings threatened to destabilise much of the European establishment, it outlines a view of history as a constant battle between the classes that will inevitably result in revolution.

This audiobook has a simple message for business leaders: your primary goal must be to serve and raise the poor. The poor need to enter the economic system to buy products, put money in banks, and move into the middle class. This is the only approach that can possibly save the American Dream. John Hope Bryant, successful self-made businessman and founder of the nonprofit Operation HOPE, says business and political leaders are ignoring the one force that could truly re-energize the stalled American economy: the poor.

Is socialism desirable? Is it even possible? In this concise book, one of the world's leading political philosophers presents with clarity and wit a compelling moral case for socialism and argues that the obstacles in its way are exaggerated. There are times, G. A. Cohen notes, when we all behave like socialists.

En Un pequeño empujón, considerado ya un clásico y uno de los mejores libros sobre economía y política de las últimas décadas, Cass R. Sunstein y Richard H. Thaler, premio Nobel de Economía, observan cómo nuestras percepciones y decisiones dependen del modo en que se organizan ante nosotros las diferentes opciones. Gobiernos y empresas, pero también padres, profesores y médicos, se convierten así en una especie de «arquitectos de la elección».

Nobel prize-winner F. A. Hayek is one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, but up to now there has been no book for the non-specialist that describes his ideas and explains their significance. Eamonn Butler's clear, systematic, perceptive study fills this gap. Starting with a short survey of Hayek's life, Dr. Butler goes on to analyze all the main elements in his thought under six basic headings: Understanding How Society Works; The Market Process; Hayek's Critique of Socialism; Criticism of Social Justice; The Institutions of a Liberal Order; and The Constitution of a Liberal State.

An eye-opening account of how Congress today really works - and doesn’t - that follows the dramatic journey of the sweeping financial reform bill enacted in response to the Great Crash of 2008. The founding fathers expected Congress to be the most important branch of government and gave it the most power. When Congress is broken - as its justifiably dismal approval ratings suggest - so is our democracy.

Historian Sean Wilentz presents two key insights that together reveal a clearer, much-needed vision of American political history. First, partisanship has almost always been a feature of American history and in fact has made possible the nation's greatest social reforms. There is little to be gained from a "postpartisan" political world. Second, the recent attention to economic inequality has a long history. From the founders' generation to the present, America's egalitarian tradition has appeared and reappeared like an underground river.

In Secondhand, Adam Minter delves into the vast, multibillion-dollar industry that resells used stuff around the world. He follows the trail of unwanted objects from the closets, garages, and storage units of Middle America to epic used-goods markets in Canada, Mexico, Japan, Ghana, India, Malaysia, and beyond. Secondhand takes us through the often painful and heartbreaking process of cleaning out a lifetime’s worth of possessions and shows that used stuff still has a place in a world that values the new and shiny.

In 1920-1921, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding met a deep economic slump by seeming to ignore it, implementing policies that most 21st-century economists would call backward. Confronted with plunging prices, wages, and employment, the government balanced the budget and, through the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates. No "stimulus" was administered, and a powerful, job-filled recovery was under way by late 1921. Yet by 1929, the economy spiraled downward as the Hoover administration adopted the policies that Wilson and Harding had declined to put in place.

Even after the ruinous financial crisis of 2008, America is still beset by the depredations of an oligarchy that is now bigger, more profitable, and more resistant to regulation than ever. Anchored by six megabanks, which together control assets amounting to more than 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product, these financial institutions (now more emphatically "too big to fail") continue to hold the global economy hostage.

In his best-selling The Russians, Hedrick Smith took millions of readers inside the Soviet Union. In The Power Game, he took us inside Washington’s corridors of power. Now Smith takes us across America to show how seismic changes, sparked by a sequence of landmark political and economic decisions, have transformed America. As only a veteran reporter can, Smith fits the puzzle together, starting with Lewis Powell’s provocative memo that triggered a political rebellion that dramatically altered the landscape of power from then until today.

From thriving Motor City to the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, Detroit has become the nation's cautionary tale. But what led to the fateful day of the filing, and how did the city survive this crisis? Journalist Nathan Bomey delivers the inside story of Detroit's decline and the people who fought to save it against impossible odds: Governor Rick Snyder, a self-proclaimed nerd; emergency manager Kevyn Orr, a lawyer with singular dedication; Judge Steven Rhodes, the city's conscience; and retirees who fought to ensure that Detroit kept its promises.

This slim primer distills Sharma's decades of experience into 10 rules for identifying nations that are poised to take off or crash. A wake-up call to economists who failed to foresee every recent crisis, including the cataclysm of 2008, 10 Rules is full of pioneering insights on signs of political, economic, and social change. Sharma explains, for example, why autocrats are bad for the economy; robots are a blessing, not a curse; and consumer prices don’t tell you all you need to know about inflation.

From the best-selling authors of The Right Nation, a visionary argument that our current crisis in government is nothing less than the fourth radical transition in the history of the nation-state. Dysfunctional government: It' s become a cliché, and most of us are resigned to the fact that nothing is ever going to change. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge show us, that is a seriously limited view of things. In fact, there have been three great revolutions in government in the history of the modern world.

Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

In Putinomics, Chris Miller examines the making of Russian economic policy since Vladimir Putin took power in 1999. Miller argues that Putin's economic strategy has functioned far more effectively than most Westerners realize. While acknowledging that part of Putin's successes - above all, quadrupling per capita GDP in just a decade and a half - can be attributed to cashing in on high oil prices, Miller details the government policies that have also been fundamental to Russia's growth.

Le bitcoin met en question une pratique ancestrale qui voulait que l'émission de la monnaie fusse un prérogative de l'État. Jusqu'à la création du bitcoin en 2009, les monnaies privées n'avaient ni notoriété ni perspective. L'apparition du bitcoin et des autres crypto-monnaies a été rendu possible par une technologie nouvelle : la blockchain. Comment "marche" le bitcoin ? Que peut-il devenir ? Que va-t-il changer dans nos vies ? S'agit-il d'une vraie révolution ou d'une simple vaguelette sur l'océan de la spéculation ?

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 - the blueprint for modern totalitarian government - promises utopia but delivers dictatorship, poverty and misery everywhere it's tried. Yet many of the tenets of this ideology endure among leftist thinkers, despite repeated and universal failure. The question is why? From barter to free markets, Wolfram explains the nature of money, the creation of wealth and the brilliance of a system based not on the state but rather on millions of unique individuals deciding what is best.