Science Wealth

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery.

It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! confirms what we have all suspected: Washington and Wall Street have really screwed things up for the average American. Work has been devalued. Education costs are out of sight. Effort and ambition have never been so scantily rewarded. Political guru James Carville and pollster extraordinaire Stan Greenberg argue that our political parties must admit their failures and the electorate must reclaim its voice, because taking on the wealthy and the privileged is not class warfare—it is a matter of survival.

In this Very Short Introduction, Philip N. Jefferson explores how the answers to these questions lie in the social, political, economic, educational, and technological processes that impact all of us throughout our lives. The degree of vulnerability is all that differentiates us. He shows how a person's level of vulnerability to adverse changes in their life is very much dependent on the circumstances of their birth, including where their family lived, whether it was peacetime or wartime, whether they had access to clean water, and whether they are male or female.

The growing wealth inequality continues to dominate headlines. The divide between the haves and have nots in America is increasingly political and tensions are rising. On one side, the wealthy wield power and advantage, keeping the system operating in their favor, all while retreating into enclaves that separate them further and further from the poor and working class.

Minimalism will set you free. Minimalism is an idea that can be used for good living. It is a tool that leads to blissful liberation from whatever fear has come to plague the human population over time. It also offers freedom from the very world we have created about ourselves as consistent consumers. It allows us to stop worrying about everything. We have a choice to take control of our lives and become fulfilled.

Clyde W. Ford uses the lives of individual Black men and women as a lens to explore the role they have played in creating American institutions of power and wealth—in agriculture, politics, jurisprudence, law enforcement, culture, medicine, financial services, and many other fields—while not being allowed to fully participate or share in the rewards. Today, activists have taken the struggle for racial equity and justice to the streets.

The Science of Getting Rich is the classic guide to creating wealth through the Law of Attraction. First published in 1910, a hundred years later it inspired Rhonda Byrne's best-selling book and movie, The Secret. According to Wallace D. Wattles, "There is a science of getting rich, and it is an exact science, like algebra or arithmetic. There are certain laws which govern the process of acquiring riches; once these laws are learned and obeyed by any man, he will get rich with mathematical certainty."

Nari Alhara has one task—recover the private journal of Abdul Rahal, the late founder of Telsemar University and infamous treasure hunter. This shouldn’t be hard for the most cunning rogue of a formidable secret order. But things do not go according to plan. Another thief is also seeking the journal, and hidden hands are pulling both of their strings in unexpected directions. Nari cannot afford failure. She must rely on her sharp mind, natural instincts, and an unlikely ally to uncover the true source of Abdul Rahal’s wealth and power.

Since the Great Recession, most Americans' standard of living has stagnated or declined. Economic inequality is at historic highs. But inequality's impact differs by race; African Americans' net wealth is just a 10th that of White Americans, and over recent decades, White families have accumulated wealth at three times the rate of Black families. In our increasingly diverse nation, sociologist Thomas M. Shapiro argues, wealth disparities must be understood in tandem with racial inequities - a dangerous combination he terms "toxic inequality".

In a bold challenge to the conventional wisdom of both liberals and conservatives, Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, looks at the reasons for poverty in America and offers a detailed agenda for increasing wealth, incomes, and opportunity. The author argues that conservative critiques of a “culture of poverty” fail to account for the structural circumstances in which the poor live, especially racism, gender discrimination, and economic dislocation. However, he also criticizes liberal calls for fighting poverty through redistribution or new government programs.

As AI and robotics eliminate jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels - underfunded or nonexistent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction without comparable job creation - will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence as we fight over shrinking resources.

The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it? Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming - and blunt its effects - by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly. Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can't match.

Rev. Adam Hamilton, COR, Kansas writing about The Wealth of Poverty says, "Often the church’s efforts addressing poverty involve performing acts of service for or to the poor. These acts are sometimes motivated more by one’s own needs or self-interest than by a genuine concern for the poor. Tina Carter and Mindy Johnson-Hicks invite listeners to take a different approach...."

Many of the central concerns of the twenty-first century—racial inequity, white supremacy movements, greater inclusiveness of diverse peoples—are rooted in facing and overcoming prejudices, both common and hidden. Another great challenge—the role of wealth and innovation in solving the climate crisis—is also riddled with disabling prejudices about how corporations work, and about the rights and needs of consumers and world citizens. In his twenty-first book, Bruce Piasecki argues that a set of five recurring prejudices, from 1900 to 2020, have held up real progress on climate action.

What every human wants is fairness, a chance to belong that offers everyone opportunities to get ahead by our own merit and a say when decisions are made. Even before the global upheavals, our system was failing - it wasn’t fair at all. Now that it’s unraveling, it’s time for a new arrangement that’s actually sustainable on our resource-depleted planet that doesn’t favor wealthy insiders. Those gorging on inequality will never accept reforms that strip away their unearned privileges, and so the only practical way forward is a Hacker’s Teleology.

In the recent past, humanity marveled at the onset of an unparalleled technological revolution with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a culmination of decades of scientific fervor. As the frontiers of AI advanced daily, a select group of visionaries conceived a revelation that would thrust humanity into uncharted territory—a realization beyond mere algorithms and datasets.

Transformations in Portugal and Brazil followed the discovery of gold in Brazil's hinterland and the hinterland's subsequent settlement. Although earlier conquests and evangelizations had incorporated new lands and peoples into the monarchy, royal officials now argued that the extraction of gold and the imperatives of rivalry and commerce demanded new approaches to governance. Using archival records of royal and local administrations, Kirsten Schultz shows how the eighteenth-century Portuguese crown came to define and defend Brazil as a "colony" that would reinvigorate Portuguese power.

For decades now wealth and power have been shifting from states to markets. This experiment has been a failure for all but a privileged few. But this trend is beginning to reverse, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen the state play the most direct and positive role in citizens’ everyday lives in living memory. Graeme Garrard makes a powerful case for the state as our only realistic hope of countering the rising power of multinational corporations, organized crime, and international organizations that will always put their own interests first.

Ryan D'Agostino wanted to know how the extremely wealthy in America got that way. So he asked. Knocking on 500 doors in 20 neighborhoods in the most affluent ZIP codes in America, D'Agostino met with 50 regular (but very rich) men and women who welcomed him in and shared some of their most difficult financial decisions, toughest setbacks, greatest strategies, most triumphant moments, and deepest insights into what it means to have money.

It's time for planet Earth to get a new perspective on economics; it's time to breathe new life into a boring subject; it's about time someone plays around with your economic fancies. Is it really about the money, or is it really about what money buys? Can you imagine a whole new economy centered on liberty and freedom, a world in which many call the root of evil takes a back seat to civilized bartering?