Showing titles in Economic History

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

In Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy, the revolutionary, acclaimed book, radio series and podcast, best-selling economist Tim Harford introduced us to a selection of 50 radical inventions that changed the world. Along the way he entertained us with a myriad of great stories and revealed some of the most surprising landmarks in our history.

Vividly written, The Infidel and the Professor is a compelling account of a great friendship of two towering Enlightenment thinkers that had great consequences for modern thought. David Hume is widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, but during his lifetime, he was attacked as "the Great Infidel" for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism.

Tower of Basel is the first investigative history of the world's most secretive global financial institution. Based on extensive archival research in Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, and in-depth interviews with key decision-makers—including Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England; and former senior Bank for International Settlements managers and officials—Tower of Basel tells the inside story of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS): the central bankers' own bank.

In September 2008 the Great Financial Crisis, triggered by the collapse of Lehman brothers, shook the world. A decade later its spectre still haunts us. As the appalling scope and scale of the crash was revealed, the financial institutions that had symbolised the West's triumph since the end of the Cold War, seemed - through greed, malice and incompetence - to be about to bring the entire system to its knees.

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

Having made the U.S. financial crisis comprehensible for us all in The Big Short, Michael Lewis realised that he hadn't begun to get grips with the full story. How exactly had it come to hit the rest of the world in the face too? Just how broke are we really? Boomerang is a tragi-comic romp across Europe, in which Lewis gives full vent to his storytelling genius.

The story of Ethereum begins with Vitalik Buterin, a supremely gifted 19-year-old autodidact who saw the promise of blockchain when the technology was in its earliest stages. He convinced a crack group of coders to join him in his quest to make a super-charged, global computer. The Infinite Machine introduces Vitalik’s ingenious idea and unfolds Ethereum’s chaotic beginnings. It then explores the brilliant innovation and reckless greed the platform has unleashed and the consequences that resulted as the frenzy surrounding it grew.

In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, author Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.

The defining, behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and dominant pop cultural entities in America’s history - Marvel Comics - and the outsized personalities who made Marvel, including Martin Goodman, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby.

The never-before-told inside story of how the Premier League became the wildest, richest, most popular entertainment business on the planet. How did English football - once known for its stale pies, bad bookkeeping and hooligans - become a commercial powerhouse and the world's premium popular entertainment? This was a business empire built in only 25 years on ambition, experimentation and gambler's luck.

China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® is a concise introduction to the most astonishing economic growth story of the last three decades. In the 1980s, China was an impoverished backwater, struggling to escape the political turmoil and economic mismanagement of the Mao era. Today it is the world's second biggest economy, the largest manufacturing and trading nation, the consumer of half the world's steel and coal, the biggest source of international tourists, and one of the most influential investors in developing countries from southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America.

Alex Gladstein has a lot to say about Bitcoin, human rights, financial privilege, and personal freedom. In Check Your Financial Privilege, he says it, starting with the fact that anyone born into a reserve currency like the euro, yen, or pound has financial privilege over the 89 percent of the world population born into weaker systems. As CSO of the Human Rights Foundation, Gladstein is uniquely positioned to detail the rise of Bitcoin from cypherpunk dream to the real-life Bitcoin stories happening to real people across the globe.

A revelatory and entertaining book about the pitfalls of how we measure our economy and how to correct them, by an award-winning editor of The Financial Times. According to GDP, the economy is in a golden era: economic growth has risen steadily over the past 70 years and shows no sign of stopping. But if this is the case, why are we living in such fractured times, with global populism on the rise and wealth inequality as stark as ever?

In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations for the scientific advances and pioneering inventions that would instigate explosive technological and economic development.

The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Google, Goldman Sachs and Kraft Foods combined. But very few people have ever heard of Koch Industries because the billionaire Koch brothers want it that way. Now, in Kochland, Christopher Leonard has managed what no other journalist has done before: to tell the explosive inside story of how the largest private company in the world became that big. In doing so, Leonard also tells the epic tale of the evolution of corporate America over the last half century, in all its glory and rapaciousness.

With high stock and bond prices and the rising cost of housing, the post-subprime boom may well turn out to be another illustration of Shiller's influential argument that psychologically driven volatility is an inherent characteristic of all asset markets. In other words, Irrational Exuberance is as relevant as ever. Previous editions covered the stock and housing markets - and famously predicted their crashes. This edition expands its coverage to include the bond market, so that the book now addresses all of the major investment markets.

The coronavirus pandemic, the deepening economic crash, dangerously divisive political responses, and exploding social tensions have thrown an already declining American capitalist system into a tailspin. The consequences of these mounting and intertwined crises will shape our future. In this unique collection of over 50 essays, The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself, Richard D. Wolff argues clearly that "returning to normal" no longer responds adequately to the accumulated problems of US capitalism.

In this unique exploration of the role of risk in our society, Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past. Against the Gods chronicles the remarkable intellectual adventure that liberated humanity from oracles and soothsayers by means of the powerful tools of risk management that are available to us today.

In the 1860s a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: 'capitalism'. The global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848. It was the triumph of a society which believed that economic growth rests on competitive private enterprise, on success in buying everything in the cheapest market (including labour) and selling it in the dearest.