Economic Theory

Discover the fundamentals and practical applications of microeconomics with this comprehensive and accessible book. This is an essential guide for students, professionals, and enthusiasts who want to understand economic agents' behavior, price formation, and market dynamics.

Economics is broken. It has failed to predict, let alone prevent, financial crises that have shaken the foundations of our societies. Its outdated theories have permitted a world in which extreme poverty persists while the wealth of the super-rich grows year on year. And its blind spots have led to policies that are degrading the living world on a scale that threatens all of our futures. Can it be fixed?

Suppose I told you there was a “pin” which burst every major economic bubble of the industrial age. And suppose that “pin” left a signal in data preceding the ensuing economic crash. Suppose that prior to 1929, 1973, 1980, and 2008, that “pin” appeared months and sometimes years before the crisis went mainstream. In Breakdown: The economic impact of peak oil, Tim Watkins argues that the “pin” was a shortage of the world’s primary energy source. In 1927, a global coal shortage caused prices to spike upward, raising costs across the economy and - particularly in the USA - ...

The yield curve is now as widely followed by the financial press as movie stars are followed by paparazzi. The tabloids often comment on any noticeable changes in the physical features of the celebrities they stalk. Similarly, the financial paparazzi are obsessed with the shape of the yield curve. The spread between the “long end” and the “short end” of the curve is widely deemed to be a great leading indicator of recessions when it goes negative. Such yield “inversions” do have a good track record of occurring several months before the start of recessions. In this Topical Study...

What is economics? How does the global economy work? What do different economic theories tell us about the world? Ha-Joon Chang explains how the global economy works and why anyone can understand the dismal science. Unlike many economists who claim there is only one way of 'doing economics', he introduces listeners to a wide range of economic theories, from classical to Keynesian, revealing how they all have their strengths, weaknesses and blind spots.

Great companies can fail: not because they do anything wrong, but because they do everything right. Meeting customers' current needs leads firms to reject breakthrough innovations, "disruptive technologies", that create the products and opportunities of the future.

FROM CHAPT 1: It has been shown recently in my work that golden ages have followed a particular path of inheritance from the Chinese concept of the dead ancestor and the venerated family member. Within Europe, Chinese knowledge was regarded with suspicion, and the concepts were treated as superstitions which had the power of philosophy. Religions converted the same dichotomy in the West into a division between the abstract and the material. Most of this text is a meaningful, exceedingly well-written, and systematic exposition on the concepts of exponential knowledge and exponential ...

Mises wrote this book for the ages, and it remains the most spirited, thorough, and scientifically rigorous treatise on money ever to appear. This classic treatise was the first really great integration of microeconomics and macroeconomics, and it remains the definitive book on the foundations of monetary theory. As Rothbard points out in his introduction to "the best book on money ever written," economists have yet to absorb all its lessons.

This work offers a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the main concepts, theories, and policies that shape the global economy. Structured in six parts, it explores from the fundamentals of macroeconomics to advanced topics such as secular stagnation, financial crises, and the challenges of contemporary economic policies.

Inequality, social immobility, and political polarization are only a few crucial phenomena driven by the inevitability of social structures. Social structures determine who has power and influence, account for why people fail to assimilate basic facts, and enlarge our understanding of patterns of contagion - from the spread of disease to financial crises. Despite their primary role in shaping our lives, human networks are often overlooked when we try to account for our most important political and economic practices.

Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they explore the hidden side of...well, everything. The inner working of a crack gang...the truth about real-estate agents...the secrets of the Klu Klux Klan. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking, and Freakonomics will redefine the way we view the modern world.

In Exile Economics, Ben Chu lays out the dangers of the current obsession with isolationism. By focusing on some key internationally traded commodities - agriculture, energy, metals and high-technology - he demonstrates just how thoroughly enmeshed and almost unfathomably interconnected our economies have become. Exile Economics will be an essential guide to this new world in all its promise and peril.

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories.

Best-selling author and world-renowned historian Niall Ferguson has won widespread acclaim for thought-provoking works such as Civilization and High Financier. The Great Degeneration tackles nothing less than the decline of Western civilization. Ferguson posits that slowing growth, outrageous debt, and antisocial behavior are contributing to the erosion of the West’s once rock-solid foundations. Ferguson excavates the causes and shows how heroic leadership and radical reform are needed to right the course.

In Universal Man noted biographer and historian Richard Davenport-Hines revives our understanding of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the 20th century's most charismatic and revolutionary economist.

Roger Lowenstein, the bestselling author of Buffett, captures Long-Term's roller-coaster ride in gripping detail. Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein crafts a story that reads like a first-rate thriller from beginning to end. He explains not just how the fund made and lost its money, but what it was about the personalities of Long-Term's partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the late-nineties culture of Wall Street that made it all possible.

A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This "bigger mind" - human and machine capabilities working together - has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results?

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

Assume nothing, question everything. This is the message at the heart of Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner's rule-breaking, iconoclastic book about crack dealers, cheating teachers and bizarre baby names that turned everyone's view of the world upside-down and became an international multi-million-copy-selling phenomenon.

(First edition) To become more useful and efficient in sustaining the Earth's health, economics must undergo a paradigm shift in its thinking. From a humanistic perspective, humans should be the center of everything. However, from the standpoint of physics and the universe, this is not the case. As a species, having a planet among the millions in the universe where humans can survive and thrive is already a great fortune. Through this book, we also try to answer one of our long-standing questions: why has economics learned so little from physics, the oldest and most rigorous academic ...