House Economics

Between 1995 and 2010, millions of Americans moved between the states, taking with them over $2 trillion in adjusted gross incomes. Two trillion dollars is equivalent to the GDP of California, the ninth largest in the world. It's a lot of money. Some states, like Florida, saw tremendous gains ($86.4 billion), while others, like New York, experienced massive losses ($58.6 billion). People moved, and they took their working wealth with them. The question is, why?

Here is armed America - a land of machine-gun gatherings in the desert, lederhosened German shooting societies, feral-hog hunts in Texas, and Hollywood gun armories. Whether they’re collecting antique weapons, practicing concealed carry, or firing an AR-15 or a Glock at their local range, many Americans love guns - which horrifies and fascinates many other Americans, and much of the rest of the world. This lively, sometimes raucous book explores from the inside the American love affair with firearms.

In his 18 years as an opinion columnist for The New York Times, Herbert championed the working poor and the middle class. After filing his last column in 2011, he set off on a journey across the country to report on Americans who were being left behind in an economy that has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. The portraits of those he encountered fuel his new book, Losing Our Way.

The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the riveting story of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the bloody steelworkers’ strike that transformed their fabled partnership into a furious rivalry. Set against the backdrop of the Gilded Age, Meet You in Hell captures the majesty and danger of steel manufacturing, the rough-and-tumble of the business world, and the fraught relationship between “the world’s richest man” and the ruthless coke magnate to whom he entrusted his companies. The result is an extraordinary work of popular history.

In her acclaimed AOL.com, Kara Swisher chronicled the unlikely ascent of a group of underdog entrepreneurs and their influence on American net culture. This book picks up where the previous one left off, investigating AOL's merger with Time Warner and its aftermath. Journalists Swisher and Dickey have an ear for the comic and an appreciation for the larger-than-life personalities that propel the drama. After the merger, a troubled journey lies ahead both for AOL Time Warner and for its competitors.

Millennials are the first generation in Ireland to be worse off than their parents. Trapped in a game of rental roulette, stuck living at home as adults, and many on the brink of homelessness, the Irish housing crisis has defined the lives of an entire generation—and it is set to continue. With housing costs in Ireland the highest in the EU, the property ladder has been kicked from under thousands. So how did we get here…and how do we break the cycle?

Historian and professional investor Alasdair Nairn predicted both the dotcom and subprime collapses, and in this compelling new book shares the evidence that we are living through such a period of deadly excess right now. Markets appear to be going up and up, but they have gotten perilously ahead of themselves. Danger lies in every single investable asset class. What some have called the "Everything Bubble" has inflated to unprecedented proportions. And now the bubble is about to burst.

The author of The Celebration Chronicles - an exposé of Disney’s small town community development - returns to the outskirts of the Magic Kingdom with Sunbelt Blues, an eye-opening investigation of America’s rural and suburban homelessness crisis, told through a searing portrait of precarious living in Disney World’s backyard.

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, too, were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, and Boaz Weinstein, chess “life master” and king of the credit-default swap.

The Age of Awakening tells India's economic story since the country gained independence. It unfolds a tale of titanic figures, colossal failures, triumphant breakthroughs, and great moral shortcomings. Weaving together vivid history and economic analysis, this book makes for a gripping narrative.

The United States is the richest country on earth, yet has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. One in seven Americans live below the poverty line, a line which hasn't shifted over the last fifty years, despite the efforts of successive governments and extensive relief programs. Why is there so much scarcity in this land of dollars? In Poverty, by America, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond examines the nature of American poverty today and the stories we tell ourselves about it.

America’s self-invented tinkerers are back at it in their metaphorical garages - fiddling with everything from solar-powered cars to space elevators. In Bunch of Amateurs, Jack Hitt visits a number of different garages and has written a fascinating book that looks at America’s current batch of amateurs and their pursuits. Beginning with Ben Franklin’s kite and leading all the way to the current TV hit American Idol, Hitt argues that the nation’s love of self-invented obsessives has always driven the country to rediscover the true heart of the American dream.

El 17 de septiembre de 2008, dos días después de que se declarase la quiebra de Lehman Brothers, J. Volpi, uno de los genios financieros y mecenas de la ópera más respetados de Nueva York, abandonó intempestivamente sus oficinas de JV Capital Management. Ese mismo día las autoridades lo acusaron del desfalco de 15 mil millones de dólares.

Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (“flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons”); and more.

Waste. We spend a great deal of energy trying to avoid it, but once you train your eyes to look for it, you’ll see it all around you - in your home, your business, and your everyday life. In Wasted, futurist Byron Reese and entrepreneur Scott Hoffman take readers on a fascinating journey through this modern world of waste, drawing on science, economics, and human behavior to envision what a world with far less of it - or none of it at all - might look like.

In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham.

It was a time when anything seemed possible–instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury–and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors’ money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the “rob Peter to pay Paul” scam to an art form and raked in millions at his office in downtown Boston. Ponzi’s Scheme is the amazing true story of the irresistible scoundrel who launched the most successful scheme of financial alchemy in modern history–and uttered the first roar of the Roaring Twenties.

This brilliantly original book dismantles the underlying assumptions that drive the decisions made by companies and governments throughout the world, to show that our shared narrative of the global economy is deeply flawed. If left unexamined, they will lead corporations and countries astray, with dire consequences for us all.

In 1980 Doris Christopher, a former home economist and teacher, was itching to get back into the workforce after an eight-year hiatus as a stay-at-home mom. Drawing on her personal and professional expertise, and determined to make cooking easier and more convenient for families, she started selling high-quality kitchen tools through cooking demonstrations to groups of women in their homes. Today, the company she started in her basement, The Pampered Chef, is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

As a $3-trillion economy, India is on her way to becoming an economic superpower. Between 1991 and 2011, the period of our best growth, there was also a substantial decline in the number of people below the poverty line. Since 2011, however, there has been a marked retreat in the high growth performance of the previous two decades. What happened to the promise? Where have we faltered? How do we change course? As professional economists as well as former civil servants, Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah have spent most of their lives thinking about and working on these questions.