Economic Theory

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning-cost-benefit analysis-to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton reveals, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

Forbes editor John Tamny uses entertaining stories from sports, movies, popular culture, and famous businesses to demonstrate the basic principles of economics. The Rolling Stones, the Dallas Cowboys, and Paris Hilton become examples of good and bad tax policy. The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, and The Sopranos reveal the downside of antitrust regulation while the Michigan Wolverines' 2007 loss to Appalachian State explains why regulations often fail to achieve their intended purposes.

Who really creates wealth in our world? And how do we decide the value of what they do? At the heart of today's financial and economic crisis is a problem hiding in plain sight. In modern capitalism, value extraction is rewarded more highly than value creation: the productive process that drives a healthy economy and society. From companies driven solely to maximise shareholder value to astronomically high prices of medicines justified through big pharma's 'value pricing', we misidentify taking with making, and have lost sight of what value really means.

Economics can explain everything, from why people behave the way they do to how governments and businesses organize themselves. As the blockbuster best-seller Freakonomics demonstrated, economics can explain everything - from why people behave the way they do to how governments and businesses organize themselves. But are the basic assumptions and conclusions in Freakonomics true? Does the free market usually lead to unintended and negative consequences?

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.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, capitalism was stuck. It had no answers to a host of problems, including disease, inequality, the digital divide and, perhaps most blatantly, the environmental crisis. Taking her inspiration from the 'moonshot' programmes which successfully co-ordinated public and private sectors on a massive scale, Mariana Mazzucato calls for the same level of boldness and experimentation to be applied to the biggest problems of our time.

This is a collection of two important economic audiobooks: Economics in Three Lessons and One Hundred Economic Laws.

From the development of international trade fairs in the 12th century to the innovations made in China, India, and the Arab world, it turns out that historical economies were much more sophisticated that we might imagine, tied together by webs of credit and financial instruments much like our modern economy.

Ben Price reveals that our constitution and legal system were intentionally designed to give more rights to the wealthy propertied class than the rest of us, and exposes how this hamstrings our ability to effectively address a host of pressing social and environmental problems - and what we can do about it. Many of today’s most serious issues - homelessness, gun violence, fracking, prison privatization, predatory lending, and many more - resist resolution because the “rights of property” undermine the rights of people.

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.

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.

La historia de cómo Norteamérica ha pasado de ser un mercado abierto y competitivo a ser una economía en la que unas cuantas empresas dominan industrias clave. Los monopolios digitales como Google o Facebook actúan como guardianes del mundo digital. Nos da la impresión de que decidimos, pero para la mayoría de las decisiones críticas, cuando se trata de internet de alta velocidad, seguros médicos, atención sanitaria, redes sociales, búsquedas en internet o incluso bienes de consumo como la pasta de dientes, contamos solo con una o dos empresas.

The Skyscraper Curse is Dr. Mark Thornton's definitive work on booms and busts, and it explains why only Austrian economists really understand them. It makes business cycle theory accessible to a whole new 21st-century audience. And they need it, especially those under 40. Many of the brilliant quants working on Wall Street and at the Fed barely remember the Crash of 2008, much less understand it. But Mark Thornton does, and his book is a warning about overheated equity markets, overinflated housing prices, and clueless central bankers.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Chronicles: On Our Troubled Times by Thomas Piketty, narrated by Charlie Anson. The return of the best-selling, award-winning economist extraordinaire. With the same powerful evidence and range of reference as his global best seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Chronicles sets out Thomas Piketty's analysis of the financial crisis, what has happened since and where we should go from here.

We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intellectuals proclaimed, why have the era's darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?

The question of what constitutes a fair price has been at the center of market interactions since the time of Aristotle. Should a seller sell to the highest bidder, or is there some other standard, such as a morally defined price, to be applied? Charles R. Geisst traces the ways that philosophers, religious leaders, and economists have sought to answer that question, from antiquity through the modern era.

Economics makes the world go-round, whether you realize it or not. The world economy has a real effect on your daily life, and a better understanding of the principles at play in things like taxation and inflation can, quite literally, save you money every day. If you are interested in learning more, then Economics: A Beginner's Guide to Economics is just what you have been looking for.

You would have to live under a rock not to know who Alan Greenspan is. But that's probably about as much as you know. Leave it to investigative reporter Bob Woodward to uncover the story of Greenspan and the power he wields as head of the Federal Reserve.

One of the most unique aspects of anarchism as a political philosophy is that it seeks to abolish the state. But what exactly is “the state”? The State is like a vast operating system for ordering and controlling relations among human society, the economy, and the natural world, analogous to a digital operating system. Anyone concerned with entrenched power, income inequality, lack of digital privacy, climate change, the response to COVID-19, or military-style policing will find eye-opening insights into how states operate and build more power for themselves—at our expense.

Combining the authors' personal weight-loss stories with their passion for economics, this bold new behavioral approach to dieting recommends micro habits and meta-rules that will enable dieters to control their impulses to overeat, approach food in a healthier way, and lose weight once and for all. Chris Payne and Rob Barnett are two formerly obese economists who met while working at Bloomberg. When they finally decided to do something about it, they lost weight by applying what they know best - economics - to their waistlines.