Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Economics

Natural resources empower the world's most coercive men. Autocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend oil money on weapons and repression. ISIS and Congo's militias spend resource money on atrocities and ammunition. For decades resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists have forced endless crises on the West - and the ultimate source of their resource money is us, paying at the gas station and the mall.

In this acclaimed investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth.' Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, he portrays a far more complex reality. The chav stereotype, he argues, is used by governments as a convenient fig leaf to avoid genuine engagement with social and economic problems and to justify widening inequality.

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries.

In a radical break with the past, information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into its stream. Individuals and companies can no longer rely on the stocks of knowledge that theyve carefully built up and stored away. Information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into the stream.

When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day, no matter how distant from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics, far from being a "dismal science," is a positive force for the common good.

Proper stewardship of natural assets and liabilities is a matter of planetary urgency: natural resources have the potential either to transform the poorest countries or to tear them apart, while the carbon emissions and agricultural follies of the rich world could further impoverish them. The Plundered Planet charts a course between unchecked profiteering on the one hand and environmental romanticism on the other to offer realistic and sustainable solutions to dauntingly complex issues.

An acclaimed classic detailing the economic history of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and exposing the capitalist giants who changed the world. Frederick Lewis Allen’s insightful financial history of the United States - from the late 1800s through the stock market collapse of 1929 - remains a seminal work on what brought on America’s worst economic disaster: the Great Depression.

In Does Capitalism Have a Future?, a global quintet of distinguished scholars cut their way through to the question of whether our capitalist system can survive in the medium run. Despite the current gloom, conventional wisdom still assumes that there is no real alternative to capitalism. The authors argue that this generalization is a mistaken outgrowth of the optimistic nineteenth-century claim that human history ascends through stages to an enlightened equilibrium of liberal capitalism.

Armed with clear and powerful evidence, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi reveal in House of Debt how the Great Recession and Great Depression, as well as the current economic malaise in Europe, were caused by a large run-up in household debt followed by a significantly large drop in household spending. Though the banking crisis captured the public's attention, Mian and Sufi argue strongly with actual data that current policy is too heavily biased toward protecting banks and creditors.

In the months before the 2008 financial meltdown, bankers and hedge funds perverted the market to keep their lavish bonuses flowing. Their machinations made the collapse much worse. This Pulitzer Prize-winning series reveals how they did it.

Jude Wanniski's masterpiece defined the policies at the heart of the Reagan economic boom that continues today and promises a coming century of global peace and prosperity. Writing with a simplicity and liveliness uncommon to his subject, Wanniski offers a fresh general theory of the world's political evolution that explains how and why economies fail and succeed, now and as far as we can imagine.

In 1972, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. was America's greatest store, accounting for over 1 percent of the gross national product. Suddenly, profits plummeted and the stock price collapsed. Sears was at civil war and in need of a new leader. In 1978, Edward R. Telling became the Sears chairman, and by 1984 Sears was back on top, bigger than ever. Telling turned things around so dramatically it seemed like a miracle. But the resurrection of Sears as a great American merchant was no miracle, but the result of the power, vision, and will of strong leadership.  

>An invaluable guide to arrive at better business decisions. We make decisions, and these decisions make us and our organisations. And in theory, decision-making should be easy: a problem is identified, the decision-makers generate solutions, and choose the optimal one - and powerful mathematical tools are available to facilitate the task. Yet if it is all so simple why do organisations, both private and public sector, keep making mistakes - the results of which are borne by shareholders, employees, taxpayers, and ultimately society at large?

From the invention of interest in Mesopotamia and the origin of paper money in China, to the creation of mutual funds, inflation-indexed bonds, and global financial securities, here is a sweeping survey of financial innovations that have changed the world. Written by a distinguished group of experts - including Robert Shiller, Niall Ferguson, Valerie Hansen, and many others - The Origins of Value traces the evolution of finance through 4,000 years of history.

This wide-ranging treatment of how money secretly influences our lives includes chapters on the many forms of money, why money is so easily worshipped, why money sometimes feels more important than life, hoarding money, the source of riches, inheritance, and the stock market. Crawford, a teller of entertaining tales, gathers stories and myths from around the world that help us understand why money is so much more than the useful tool that we may think it to be.

As scientific and observational evidence on global warming piles up every day, questions of economic policy in this central environmental topic have taken center stage. But as author and prominent Yale economist William Nordhaus observes, the issues involved in understanding global warming and slowing its harmful effects are complex and cross disciplinary boundaries. For example, ecologists see global warming as a threat to ecosystems, utilities as a debit to their balance sheets, and farmers as a hazard to their livelihoods.

A radically revised new edition of this highly readable, popular guide aimed at everyone from students to statesmen who want to make sense of the modern economy and grasp how economic theory works in practice. It starts with the basics, and from the underlying theory it moves to the specifics of the world economy, including an analysis of the recent recession. The closing part puts the usefulness and the failings of economics under the spotlight, and looks at the innovative approaches being developed to address these failings.

This groundbreaking book is the first to both identify the wide range of political risks that global firms face and show investors how to effectively manage them. Written by two of the world's leading figures in political risk management, it reveals that, while the world remains exceedingly risky for businesses, it is by no means incomprehensible. The authors provide a wealth of unique methods, tools, and concepts to help understand political risk, showing when and how political risk analysis works - and when it does not.

Art today is defined by its relationship to money as never before. Prices of living artists' works have been driven to unprecedented heights, conventional boundaries within the art world have collapsed, and artists now think ever more strategically about how to advance their careers. Artists no longer simply make art, but package, sell, and brand it. Noah Horowitz exposes the inner workings of the contemporary art market, explaining how this unique economy came to be, how it works, and where it's headed.

The Money Formula takes you inside the engine room of the global economy to explore the little-understood world of quantitative finance, and show how the future of our economy rests on the backs of this all-but-impenetrable industry. Written not from a post-crisis perspective - but from a preventative point of view - this book traces the development of financial derivatives from bonds to credit default swaps, and shows how mathematical formulas went beyond pricing to expand their use to the point where they dwarfed the real economy.