Public Economics

In America’s early days, most immigrants entered America through New York. For many, New York was synonymous with America and the American dream itself - a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. Now, for the first time ever, people are fleeing New York by the millions. Thanks to the policies of Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, the glory days of the Empire State and the Big Apple are long behind them, and this book examines why.

In State Capitalism, Joshua Kurlantzick ranges across the world - China, Thailand, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, and more - and argues that the increase in state capitalism across the globe has, on balance, contributed to a decline in democracy. He isolates some of the reasons for state capitalism's resurgence: the fact that globalization favors economies of scale in the most critical industries and the widespread rejection of the Washington Consensus in the face of the problems that have plagued the world economy in recent years.

While some semblance of stability has returned to the financial markets, the economies on which these markets must ultimately depend remain structurally weak, and the path toward sustained growth will be difficult. In order to set the economy on a sounder path, we need to understand the sources of instability that caused the failure of the financial system, rethink established ideas, and challenge the intellectual and moral authority of the institutions that control the world's capital.

In recent years, small Greece, often associated with ancient philosophers and marble ruins, whitewashed villages and cerulean seas, has been at the center of a debt crisis that has sown economic and social ruin, spurred panic in international markets, and tested Europe's decades-old project of forging a closer union. In The Full Catastrophe, James Angelos makes sense of the contrasting images of Greece, a nation both romanticized for its classical past and castigated for its dysfunctional present.

Bitter fighting over deficits, taxes, and spending bedevils Washington, D.C., even as partisan gridlock has brought the government to the brink of default. Yet the more politicians on both sides of the aisle rant and the citizenry fumes, the more things seem to remain the same. White House Burning looks squarely at the burgeoning national debt and proposes to defuse its threat to our well-being without forcing struggling middle-class families and the elderly into poverty.

According to Unintended Consequences, the conventional wisdom masks the real causes of our economic disruption and puts us at risk of a slew of unintended—and potentially dangerous—consequences. It’s a fascinating and contrarian case for how the economy really works, what went wrong over the past decade, and what steps we can take to start growing again.

Critically acclaimed author Clyde Prestowitz reveals the shocking extent of the deterioration of American economic strength that has put the United States on the brink of irreversibly losing our supremacy on the world stage and our prosperity at home. While the financial crisis has been a devastating blow, he shows that the wreckage of our economic might started much earlier.

Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, was asked by the British government to direct the largest study ever conducted into the reality of global warming and the possible ways of remedying it. Backed by full government resources, Stern answers the most urgent questions of our time: what will be the cost of global warming - and what can we do about it?

AlterNet editor Joshua Holland demolishes the Right's biggest and most outrageous myths about the economy. Taxes kill growth. Labor unions hurt their members. Government regulation destroys jobs. These are just a few of the biggest lies in the web of misinformation spun by conservatives and the chamber of commerce. Holland's book dissects each malicious fiction to show how the Right is just plain wrong on the economy, wrong on jobs, wrong on the deficit, wrong on taxes, wrong on trade.

Did Wall Street cause the mess we are in? Should Washington place stronger regulations on the financial industry? Can we lower unemployment rates by controlling the free market? Answer: no. Not only is free-market capitalism good for the economy, it is our only hope for recovery. As the nation’s longest-serving CEO of one of the top 25 financial institutions, John Allison has had a unique inside view of the events leading up to the financial crisis.

Perhaps nothing is more unfair in America than the vast chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Tax policy, as practiced in the US, consists basically of tinkering around the edges. It concludes and argues that only a small tax on wealth is fair and how elimination of all other taxes and fees will result in a more perfect free-market economy, elimination of government's borrowing at the expense of future generations, and a society more like the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. It also discusses what it will take to bring about such a taxation revolution.

È giunto il momento di smontare uno dei luoghi comuni più duraturo della storia repubblicana, ovvero quello secondo il quale il fascismo è morto e sepolto da fine aprile 1945. Già nel secondo dopoguerra, infatti, la dottrina della continuità dello Stato riportò ai vertici di prefetture e polizia personaggi di schietta fede fascista. Poi si è permessa la ricostituzione di un partito fascista come il Movimento sociale italiano che, tra manganello e doppiopetto, ha avuto un ruolo negli scontri di piazza e ha contribuito perfino all’elezione di presidenti della Repubblica (da Antonio Segni a Giovanni Leone).

Conventional wisdom holds that Western economies are on the threshold of fast-and-furious technological development. Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel refute this idea, bringing together a vast array of data and case studies to tell a very different story. With expertise spanning academia and the business world, Erixon and Weigel illustrate how innovation is being hampered by existing government regulations and corporate practices.

Durante los gobiernos de Vicente Fox Quesada y Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, se desarrolla el "cártel negro", un conglomerado de funcionarios, trabajadores, empresarios, contratistas, inspectores, contralores, agentes aduanales, dirigentes y miembros del sindicato petrolero, políticos, ordeñadores, tapineros, huachicoleros, extorsionadores, defraudadores, contrabandistas y lavadores de dinero que, alineados con los traficantes de droga, se consolidan como una organización empresarial paralela a Pemex.

In the 1930s, battered and humbled by the Great Depression, the US financial sector struck a grand bargain with the federal government. Bankers gained a safety net in exchange for certain curbs on their freedom: transparency rules, record-keeping and anti-fraud measures, and fiduciary responsibilities. By the free-market era of the 1980s and 90s, however, Wall Street argued that rules embodied in New Deal-era regulations to protect consumers and ultimately taxpayers were no longer needed - and government agreed.

How much government control is too much control? How much can government spend? How can government influence the level of unemployment? As Bernstein shows how to navigate an ever-changing economic landscape, his timeless insights throughout this audiobook make The Price of Prosperity as vital and important today as when it appeared in an environment fundamentally different from our own.

This is a searing indictment of America's oil economy, in which Tamminen shows how demanding accountability could help pave the road to sustainable energy.

Pessimism is ubiquitous throughout the Western world as the pressing issues of massive debt, high unemployment, and anemic economic growth divide the populace into warring political camps. Right-and left-wing ideologues talk past each other, with neither side admitting the other has any good ideas. In American Gridlock, leading economist and political theorist H. Woody Brock bridges the left/right divide, illuminating a clear path out of our economic quagmire. Brock reveals fresh ideas for tackling issues central to the 2012 US Presidential election.

The bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers was the pivotal event of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. Ever since the bankruptcy, there has been heated debate about why the Federal Reserve did not rescue Lehman in the same way it rescued other financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and AIG. The Fed's leaders from that time, especially former Chairman Ben Bernanke, have strongly asserted that they lacked the legal authority to save Lehman because it did not have adequate collateral for the loan it needed to survive.

If Europe is to return to an innovative and dynamic economy - and if there is to be shared prosperity, social solidarity, and justice - then EU countries need to break with their current, destructive trajectory. This volume offers concrete strategies for renewal that would also reinvigorate the project of European integration, with fresh ideas in the areas of both macroeconomics and microeconomics, including central banking, public investment, corporate governance and competition policy, social policy, and international trade.