Economic Life

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world - and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?

Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller’s exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book indelibly alters our image of this most enigmatic capitalist. Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world’s richest man by creating America’s most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded "the Octopus" by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America.

Going beyond the how and why of burnout, a former tenured professor combines academic methods and first-person experience to propose new ways for resisting our cultural obsession with work and transforming our vision of human flourishing.

We live under an ideology that preys on every aspect of our lives: our education and our jobs; our healthcare and our leisure; our relationships and our mental wellbeing; even the planet we inhabit – the very air we breathe. So pervasive has it become that, for most people, it has no name. It seems unavoidable, like a natural law. But trace it back to its roots, and we discover that it is neither inevitable nor immutable. It was conceived, propagated, and then concealed by the powerful few. It is time to bring it into the light - and, in doing so, to find an alternative worth fighting for.

Fooled by Randomness is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. Nassim Nicholas Taleb - veteran trader, renowned risk expert, polymathic scholar, erudite raconteur has penned a modern classic that turns on its head what we believe about luck and skill. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill - the world of trading - Fooled by Randomness provides captivating insight into one of the least understood factors in all our lives.

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.

You’re never too young to learn the language of money… and the lessons that his rich dad taught Robert. Like it or not, money is a part of our everyday lives and the more we understand it, the better the chance that we can learn to have our money work hard for us - instead of working hard for money all our lives. That starts with learning the language of money. This book, created from the international bestseller Rich Dad Poor Dad, shares Robert’s inspiring person story but teaches how to make smart choices.

Teaching kids about money isn't easy. So let Scott Pape, the Barefoot Investor, do it for you! Scott takes them on an epic, thrilling money ADVENTURE - with fun projects, inspiring stories from 45 kids, rewards and real-life stickers. It's easily the most unique finance book ever written. Kids will roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and learn the value of a buck the old-fashioned way.

Life After the State is a book that will change the way you think about money, education, healthcare and social justice forever. Combining the storytelling skills of Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money with the number-crunching investigative style of Tim Harford’s Undercover Economist, this is a quest into a topic too many of us take for granted–at our peril.

A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire.

Steven Levitt, the original rogue economist, and Stephen Dubner have been working hard, uncovering the hidden side of even more controversial subjects, from charity to terrorism and prostitution. And with their inimitable style and wit, they will take us on another even more gripping journey of discovery. Superfreakonomics will once again transform the way we look at the world.

Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is ascientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation. On the other hand, the idea that the universe itself is conscious is difficult to rule out entirely.

Living a Committed Life demonstrates the power of dedication that goes beyond the self and teaches how to live a committed life that enables you to draw on resources and capacities from your most authentic self. In five parts, Lynne Twist shows how to make and keep commitments, engage in individual and collective action, and discover ways to connect and collaborate to make a difference.

Do you ever feel like you're treading water, struggling to keep up with the rising tide of expenses? From groceries to housing to transportation, your cost of living continues to climb while your wages struggle to keep up. It's a frustrating and often isolating feeling. But the truth is, not only are you not alone in this struggle, but you are not the problem. The challenges we face stem from our money!

Here is a bold new history of economics, the dramatic story of how the great economic thinkers built a rigorous social science without peer.

At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat.

Will Thorne is a stalled poet, married to Judy, a wildly successful celebrity economist. Pressured by a starving fellow poet, Will establishes The Poets' Preservation Society, a genteel organization to help poets in need. But when Will meets his muse, the enigmatic and athletic Lily White, he becomes inspired not only to write, but to take guerrilla action in support of poets everywhere. Poetry meets parkour and culture clashes with commerce in this hilarious look at how we measure the value of art.

Brian Clegg was always fascinated by Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series of books, in which the future is predicted using sophisticated mathematical modelling of human psychology and behaviour. Only much later did he realise that Asimov's 'psychohistory' had a real-world equivalent: game theory. Originating in the study of probabilistic gambling games that depend on a random source—the throw of a dice or the toss of a coin—game theory soon came to be applied to human interactions: essentially, what was the best strategy to win, whatever you were doing?

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.

The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and the homes in which many of us live—all now swell asset managers' bulging investment portfolios. As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways. In this eye-opening follow-up to Rentier Capitalism, Brett Christophers peels back the veil on "asset manager society."