Koncocoo

Best Environmental Economics

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems. Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. [Klein] writes of a decisive battle for the fate of the earth in which we either take back control of the planet from the capitalists who are destroying it or watch it all burn.” (Roy Scranton Rolling Stone). “This may be the first truly honest book ever written about climate change.” (Bryan Walsh Time). It sets the most important crisis in human history in the context of our other ongoing traumas, reminding us just how much the powers-that-be depend on the power of coal, gas and oil. She skillfully blends politics, economics and history and distills out simple and powerful truths with universal applicability.” (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ). Drawing on an impressive volume of research, Ms. Klein savages the idea that we will be saved by new technologies or by an incremental shift away from fossil fuels: Both approaches, she argues, are forms of denial. Ms. Klein is aware of the intractability of the problems she describes, but she manages optimism nonetheless.” (Nathaniel Rich The New York Times). We haven't made significant progress, Klein argues, because we've been expecting solutions from the very same institutions that created the problem in the first place. Klein's sharp analysis makes a compelling case that a mass awakening is part of the answer.” (Chris Bentley The Chicago Tribune). For those with whom her message does resonate — and they are likely to be legion — her book could help catalyze the kind of mass movement she argues the world needs now.” (Mason Inman San Francisco Chronicle). “Powerfully and uncompromisingly written, the impassioned polemic we have come to expect from Klein, mixing first-hand accounts of events around the world and withering political analysis. Her stirring vision is nothing less than a political, economic, social, cultural and moral make-over of the human world.” (Mike Hulme New Scientist). Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and author of the New York Times and #1 international bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism . Klein is a contributing editor for Harper’s and reporter for Rolling Stone and writes a syndicated column for The Nation and the Guardian .
Reviews
"While she spends an entire chapter explaining why Virgin Airlines owner, Richard Branson, and other Green billionaires won't save us, she devotes three meager sentences to the most violent, wasteful, petroleum-burning institution on Earth--the US military. It props up the most reactionary petro-tyrannies; devours enormous quantities of oil to fuel its war machine; and spews more dangerous toxins into the environment than any corporate polluter. This odious relationship stands out in bold relief in the Middle East where Washington arms the region's repressive regimes with the latest weaponry and imposes a phalanx of bases where American soldiers, mercenaries, and drones are deployed to guard the pumps, pipelines, and sea lanes for Exxon-Mobil, BP, and Chevron. In response, the Pentagon is gearing up to fight "climate wars" over resources threatened by (or revealed by) atmospheric disruption, like Arctic deep sea oil, fresh water, arable land, and food. The current fall in oil prices also reflects the slowdown of the global economy (especially in China), as well as Saudi Arabia's determination keep production levels high in order to punish its political enemies (Iran & Russia) and drive its economic competitors (North American frackers) out of the market. In their estimation, global fossil fuel supplies will drop dramatically relative to rising demand because society will require ever-increasing amounts of energy just to find and extract the remaining dirty, unconventional hydrocarbons. But she avoids the deeper question this raises: if capitalism lacks the abundant, cheap energy needed to sustain growth, how will the climate movement respond when stagnation, recession, and depression become the new normal and carbon emissions begin falling as a result? How will a climate movement respond if credit freezes, financial assets vaporize, currency values fluctuate wildly, trade shuts down, and governments impose draconian measures to maintain their authority? In the midst of deep recession and dramatic reductions in carbon emissions would climate chaos remain a central public concern and a galvanizing issue for the Left? Will the public be receptive to calls for curbing carbon emissions to save the climate if burning cheaper hydrocarbons seems like the fastest way to kick start growth, no matter how temporary? Under these conditions, the movement will only survive if it transfers its focus from climate change to building a stable, sustainable recovery free from addiction to vanishing reserves of fossil fuels. If they initiate nonprofit forms of socially responsible banking, production, and exchange that help people survive systemic breakdowns, they will earn valuable public approval. And if they can rally people to protect their savings and pensions and prevent foreclosures, evictions, layoffs, and workplace shutdowns, then popular resistance to catabolic capitalism will grow dramatically. To nurture the transition toward a thriving, just, ecologically stable society, all of these struggles must be interwoven and infused with an inspirational vision of how much better life could be if we freed ourselves from this dysfunctional, profit-obsessed, petroleum-addicted system once and for all. To survive catabolic capitalism and germinate an alternative, movement activists will have to anticipate and help people respond to multiple crises while organizing them to recognize and root out their source. If the movement lacks the foresight to anticipate these cascading calamities and change its focus when needed, we will have squandered a vital lesson from Klein's previous book, The Shock Doctrine. If the Left cannot build a movement strong enough and flexible enough to resist the ecological, economic, and military emergencies of declining industrial civilization and begin generating hopeful alternatives it will quickly lose momentum to those who profit from disaster."
"Read it and Weep."
"This is a highly informative and exceedingly well researched work."
"This book not only explains the what of the current carbon-climate problem, it explains the why, including why it is proving so difficult to make the transition to renewable energy."
"It is a great read, very informative."
"This work offers a profound analysis of climate modification due to human activities, a circumstance and dilemma different in kind and magnitude than any mankind has yet faced."
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Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
Reported by-effects include increased determination and a sense of grounded hope.” —Per Espen Stoknes, Author, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming “There’s been no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. The public is hungry for this kind of practical wisdom.” —David Roberts, Vox “This is the ideal environmental sciences textbook—only it is too interesting and inspiring to be called a textbook.” —Peter Kareiva, Director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth’s warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. Reported by-effects include increased determination and a sense of grounded hope.” —Per Espen Stoknes, Author, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming “There’s been no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. “This is the ideal environmental sciences textbook—only it is too interesting and inspiring to be called a textbook.” —Peter Kareiva, Director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA. It is a promising story that has the potential to engage every person on the planet with at least one solution to climate change, whether it is educating girls, improved rice cultivation, creating walkable cities, eating a plant-rich diet, household recycling, or any of the other solutions.” —Karen O'Brien, cCHANGE. “In the course of 20-some years of investigating and writing about global warming I’ve become all too familiar with that dynamic of gloom/doom/shame/fear/apathy, and I think Hawken has put his finger on exactly why we haven’t made more policy progress. The biggest anchor dragging behind this boat isn’t climate denial or even indifference but, I suspect, the almost unspeakably deep, defeatist conviction that no response really matters because we are already so thoroughly screwed. If so, read this book — not just as an antidote to fear and despair but as foundation for understanding and supporting the kinds of change that really could be coming, and at every scale from your household to your company, your community, your county and state and national government.” —Ron Meador, MinnPost. But a new book might change that—and serve as a blueprint for what comes next if the U.S. government (and the global community) begins to aggressively focus on altering the climate future. Paul Hawken’s simple, elegant genius in leading this approach, can inspire rapid, catalytic action. “At a time when the Trump administration is working to dismantle much of the nation’s efforts to minimize climate change, Paul Hawken’s new book swoops onto the scene like a knight in shining armor. Refreshingly absent of political analysis, it’s grounded in scientific reality and will likely go a long way toward inciting people to action.” —The Portland Tribune “ Drawdown is likely the most hopeful thing you’ll ever read about our ability to take on global warming.” —Joel Makower, GreenBiz “This book is a beautiful, inspiring, and deeply satisfying read. He has founded successful, ecologically-conscious businesses, and consulted with heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy. He has written seven books including four national bestsellers: The Next Economy , Growing a Business , and The Ecology of Commerce, and Blessed Unrest . Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution , co-authored with Amory Lovins, has been referred to by several heads of state including President Bill Clinton who called it one of the most important books in the world at that time.
Reviews
"I'm also puzzled that the book is called "The most comprehensive plan every proposed to reverse global warming". As such it's an essential contribution to our collective knowledge about climate change action. It's wildly optimistic, and unsupported by the evidence, to suggest, as Drawdown does, that we can reverse climate change even if most of these remedies are not fully implemented until 2050. Unless we almost fully decarbonize and drawdown in a decade or two, we're doomed to 5 -10 degrees F of warming by the end of the century. That level of warming will destabilize our politics, our economy, our food production, our social cohesion and our infrastructure to such an extreme degree that the organized productive work necessary to implement these remedies will be next to impossible to sustain. Yet reading Drawdown suggests that the market and human creativity is enough - or almost enough - to reverse climate change without mass mobilization and radical changes in how we invest, regulate, consume and organize our daily lives."
"After spending the last 17 years being actively involved in the green movement, I have to confess that I've been guilty of thinking "game over" when it comes to the fate of our very own human race, especially considering the current administration but also because of population growth, increased meat production to meet the demand of a new middle class in China, and many, many other things. However, thank God I got to learn more about what my amazing friend Paul Hawken has been up to the past few years. He started a nonprofit with his own money called "DRAWDOWN" - and the result is this beautifully illustrated book with the top 80 things we can do to REVERSE global warming."
"The book has two glaring deficits that make it a work that may ultimately harm our ability to move forward. It requires abundant animal life in order to do much of the job of creating oxygen and sequestering carbon--for instance, the trophic cascade driven by whale populations down to plankton numbers. This book assumes, based on solutions presented, that we just have to swap our current technologies with carbon reducing ones and we have some hope of solving things. We have spent hundreds of years getting into the situation we are in; this critical juncture requires an unswerving look at the nature of our addiction to possessing and extracting, which many of the posited solutions ignore."
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Irrational Exuberance: Revised and Expanded Third Edition
In this revised, updated, and expanded edition of his New York Times bestseller, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Shiller, who warned of both the tech and housing bubbles, cautions that signs of irrational exuberance among investors have only increased since the 2008–9 financial crisis. Robert J. Shiller, Co-Winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in EconomicsA New York Times Bestseller. Winner of the 2000 Commonfund Prize for the Best Contribution to Endowment Management Research. has done more than any other economist of his generation to document the less rational aspects of financial markets." Shiller ranges widely his explanations, laying them out in the first 168 pages in easy-to-read, sometimes passionate prose. --Louis Uchitelle, New York Times Book Review. [I]t presents a message investors would be wise to head: Make sure your portfolio is adequately diversified. Save more and don't count on double-digit gains of the past decades continuing to bail you out during retirement." "Although its message may be unwelcome to many, this important book should be read by anyone interested in economics or the stock markets." "Shiller contends that investor psychology is so given to herd behavior that it's almost impossible to manipulate or even influence.
Reviews
"The second edition, in 2005, added an analysis of the real estate bubble as similar to the stock market bubble that preceded it, and warned that "Significant further rises in these markets could lead, eventually, to even more significant declines." The good news is that, while Professor Shiller says that returns in all asset classes are likely to be subpar for some years given today's elevated asset prices, the mood is less somber than in previous editions, and there are no warnings of imminent doom, as in previous editions. In particular, he does not see a classic "bubble" in bonds, due to the lack of "exuberance" -- prices for bonds are being bid up reluctantly by investors, he says, which is not the formula for a bubble."
"As what he has to say runs counter to most of what passes for wisdom regarding the selling and buying of homes it's important for most households to consider what he has to say."
"Extraordinary summarization of key fundamental financial data on market performance utilizing an appropriate time horizon for the real creation and destruction of wealth as the sum of many decisions over a decade or longer period(s) in businesses, rather than the useless chatter provided in most market analysis."
"If you are interested in Behavioral Economics then I recommend Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, Richard Thaler's Misbehaving, and this book."
"Anyway, if you are interested in reading non-mainstream economics, this book is for you."
"The author first mentioned the twelve precipitating factors. for a bubble. "New-era thinking' was another reason bubbles formed."
"written in 2005 but many suggestions are still relevant, especially his calculation of the P/E ratio (adjusted by his formula) of the the S&P 500."
"One of the best economic books I've ever read."
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Best International Economics

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Lewis 's rare gift as a guide through the world of credit default swaps and sovereign debt doesn t come simply from his deep understanding of how the global financial system works . --Chuck Leddy. Michael Lewis possesses the rare storyteller 's ability to make virtually any subject both lucid and compelling. Combining his easy familiarity with finance and the talents of a travel writer, Mr. Lewis sets off in these pages to give the reader a guided tour through some of the disparate places hard hit by the fiscal tsunami of 2008, like Greece, Iceland and Ireland, tracing how very different people for very different reasons gorged on the cheap credit available in the prelude to that disaster. And in this book he weaves their stories into a sharp-edged narrative that leaves readers with a visceral understanding of the fiscal recklessness that lies behind today 's headlines about Europe 's growing debt problems and the risk of contagion they now pose to the world. Lewis's rare gift as a guide through the world of credit default swaps and sovereign debt doesn't come simply from his deep understanding of how the global financial system works . Michael Lewis possesses the rare storyteller's ability to make virtually any subject both lucid and compelling. Combining his easy familiarity with finance and the talents of a travel writer, Mr. Lewis sets off in these pages to give the reader a guided tour through some of the disparate places hard hit by the fiscal tsunami of 2008, like Greece, Iceland and Ireland, tracing how very different people for very different reasons gorged on the cheap credit available in the prelude to that disaster. And in this book he weaves their stories into a sharp-edged narrative that leaves readers with a visceral understanding of the fiscal recklessness that lies behind today's headlines about Europe's growing debt problems and the risk of contagion they now pose to the world. Combining his easy familiarity with finance and the talents of a travel writer, Mr. Lewis sets off in these pages to give the reader a guided tour through some of the disparate places hard hit by the fiscal tsunami of 2008, like Greece, Iceland and Ireland, tracing how very different people for very different reasons gorged on the cheap credit available in the prelude to that disaster. And in this book he weaves their stories into a sharp-edged narrative that leaves readers with a visceral understanding of the fiscal recklessness that lies behind today s headlines about Europe s growing debt problems and the risk of contagion they now pose to the world. Lewis s rare gift as a guide through the world of credit default swaps and sovereign debt doesn t come simply from his deep understanding of how the global financial system works .
Reviews
"He's talking about European countries that drank the elixir of seemingly endless and cheap credit prior to the bursting of the recent financial bubble. What would you call a man who owns a 40,000 square foot ranch located on thousands of acres in the middle of nowhere with its own water supply and an arsenal of automatic weapons? to various governments, to the point that eventually markets would question the credibility of these governments. Just as Bass bought credit default swaps on subprime mortgages prior to the financial crisis, Bass later bought credit default swaps on Greek government bonds, because he was convinced that Greece would be one of the first countries to experience real problems. Ireland: "But while the Icelandic male used foreign money to conquer foreign places--trophy companies in Britain, chunks of Scandinavia--the Irish male used foreign money to conquer Ireland. Germany: "Either Germans must agree to integrate Europe fiscally, so that Germany and Greece bear the same relationship to each other as, say, Indiana and Mississippi (the tax dollars of ordinary Germans would go into a common coffer and be used to pay for the lifestyles of ordinary Greeks) or the Greeks (and probably, eventually, every non-German) must introduce `structural reforms,' a euphemism for magically and radically transforming themselves into a people as efficient and productive as the Germans." We've got the core of the average lizard.'. Wrapped around this reptilian core is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. 'The only problem is our passions are still driven by the lizard core.'."
"Just like all Michael Lewis books, a good read."
"the most engrossing 20/20 hindsight of the year."
"I found the discussion riveting on how each country, state, or city adjusts to the problems of unfunded retirement accounts, out of control deficits and the greed that drives us all."
""Boomerang" transfers that unique ability fromthe world of individual cut throats on Wall Street to the world of short sighted politicians in small countries."
"Just a quick reading review of what happened the last time our economies went belly up... Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat and all that...."
"From Iceland and Greece to Ireland, Germany and California, Michael Lewis takes the reader on an entertaining, irreverent and insightful ride through the international debt crisis and the sociologies of the places he examines. Economics 101 or a little time in front of CNN will give the reader enough financial knowledge to enjoy "Boomerang," so don't let the lack of a PhD keep you from tackling it."
"Item is exactly as described."
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Best Green Business

The Urban Farmer: Growing Food for Profit on Leased and Borrowed Land
Access to land is a major barrier for many people who want to enter the agricultural sector, and urban and suburban yards have huge potential for would-be farmers wanting to become part of this growing movement. Curtis Stone is the owner/operator of Green City Acres, a commercial urban farm growing vegetables for farmers markets, restaurants, and retail outlets. The Urban Farmer is a comprehensive, hands-on, practical manual to help you learn the techniques and business strategies you need to make a good living growing high-yield, high-value crops right in your own backyard (or someone else's). Based on a scalable, easily reproduced business model, The Urban Farmer is your complete guide to minimizing risk and maximizing profit by using intensive production in small leased or borrowed spaces.
Reviews
"How to acquire the needed resources: urban land, primarily lawns and some equipment. Although he is known as "the bike farmer" in this Canadian town where he lives, and thus might be taken for a counter-culture sort, he is very forthright in saying that this identity is a marketing tool. The book is relentlessly focused on the bottom line rather than being wedded to any idealistic principles. Farming is a business, and he tells you how to optimize every aspect of the operation to make it profitable. Call them crunchy cons, yuppies, urban aesthetes, or whatever else, anybody familiar with the American or Canadian social scene will recognize his customer base. There are people who did not want mass-produced, mass marketed food, and are willing to pay a premium for fresh, pure, locally grown produce. Stone serves three sets of customers: local farmers' markets, Community Supported Agriculture, and restaurants. The other outlets being more profitable, Stone devotes more space to describing how to establish oneself with farmers markets and restaurants. The first is that there is a broad market in North America for the kind of high quality, organic produce he is able to grow. They account for between 30 and 60 percent of urban water use, and take a lot of time and gasoline to mow. The most amazing observation I found in the book is how little land it takes to succeed in urban farming. Observe that quarter acre lots are extremely common in the suburbs, and you can conclude that it is not difficult to satisfy the land requirements. Going to the bottom line, Stone writes about generating incomes in the five figure range, comparable with teachers and other professionals who will be among his customers. The urban farmer doesn't need to spend a lot of money on clothes, a car to get to and from work, and the other trappings of a professional life. Being reliant on a bicycle (perhaps battery assisted, to pull around a Rototiller on a trailer) is an immediate money saver. However, the book will be useful to me in planning how to lay out our garden plots, how to use plastic tunnels to extend the growing season, how to control pests and weeds, and how to decide what to plant. Stone writes about the qualities one looks for in an employee "Paying for labor is worth it only if it allows you to do tasks that cannot be delegated as easily." In terms of the human capital that he himself evidently brings, it includes yeoman farmer attributes that we would all like to impute to our ancestors, but we have to observe are rather rare today. Here is the human capital that Stone himself appears to possess: • An innate sense of entrepreneurship. Throughout Stone's day he comes in contact with many, many potential customers, and has the patience and the graciousness to talk with all of them. Stone acquires the knowledge he shares in this book by talking to people, reading, and tinkering and figuring things out. Stone describes how he uses spreadsheets extensively to plan his operations and record his outcomes. So, on the one hand, he started from nothing: no education in farming, no real experience, and precious little capital. These kids emerge from the University chock-full of formal education but with no practical experience, and quite specifically, little notion of the fact that one earns a living by providing the kinds of goods and services that people are willing to pay for. What a blessing it would be to a 16-year-old with no discernible direction in life to get involved in something like urban farming and learn the self-discipline and the talents required to make a success of this fairly basic undertaking. Quick Breakdown of Economics. --- A Viable Farming Business On ½ Acre Or Less. 4."
"So inspirational, informative, and extremely generous account of his trials as well as his successes."
"There is no reason why any human living decently close to a city cannot make a profit from urban farming with this guide, even part time."
"This was a very informative work."
"If you follow his YouTube channel, you will really love the book."
"Great book and can be scaled down for home use."
"This book is everything you need to eat well from your own yard, and kick your boss to the curb and make a new life for yourself."
"Really great book !"
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Best Oil & Energy Industry

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
Deemed "the best history of oil ever written" by Business Week and with more than 300,000 copies in print, Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the global pursuit of oil, money, and power has been extensively updated to address the current energy crisis. Following on from there, The Prize , winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, is a comprehensive history of one of the commodities that powers the world--oil. Energy consultant Yergin limns oil's central role in most of the wars and many international crises of the 20th century.
Reviews
"It focuses on the effects of oil on the economies of both consuming and producing nations as well how access to oil affects the political power of nations."
"It makes no sense to export a precious finite resource, and it makes a lot of sense to use our enemy's supply first."
"This is the third copy of this book that I have purchased."
"The sentiments of various people and groups towards oil (good or bad) were negligible in the book which gave it almost a sterile feel. I now have a much stronger understanding of just how oil plays its enormous role in the global society. I can't say enough about how well this book informs its reader in an enjoyable and insightful way. It may at points be dry material, but in no way did i feel like this book was written over my head."
"Although concentrated on the oil industry, this book is really an incredible history of the twentieth century, which makes a lot of sense considering the paramount of oil to that era and now."
"This is a long book, but if you want to write a comprehensive story of oil and its impact on the economy spanning more than a century, it's going to be long."
"This is one of the best histories of the Oil Business."
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Best Interest Economics

The Minimalist Budget: A Practical Guide On How To Save Money, Spend Less And Live More With A Minimalist Lifestyle
We'll look at how money is not the only resource that needs to be managed, and a “life budget” that acknowledges your emotional, behavioral, social and even spiritual capital is more likely to lead to smarter decisions. We'll explore shopping and spending habits, identify problem areas, think about debt and make achievable goals for home, work and more. If you can pair your budget plan with a more nuanced understanding of your relationship with money and how it ties into how you want to live, the changes you make will be more authentic and longer lasting. Money and material things can make our time on this earth better, and they can help us move closer to what we find meaningful and worthwhile. I currently work as a life coach and health counselor with people who want to make realistic, autonomous, and lifelong changes in various areas of their lives.
Reviews
"Includes case studies and a weekly planner to change your life."
"The author also provides some good tips on how to save and taking on a minimalist life style."
"Before I bought the book, I read some of negative comments and because dollar in my currency is a little different, I doubted about that its useful for me."
"Thanks for the attention and care in shipping this item."
"My new years resolution is to start budgeting better so I bought a few books to aid me."
"It’s definitely not just another cut-and-save type of book."
"A life changing book... the author is a wise human been...too much to learn & challenges to face."
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Best Urban & Regional Economics

Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia
The longtime home of the Soviet nuclear program, the Chelyabinsk region contained beautiful lakes, shuttered factories, mysterious closed cities, and some of the most polluted places on earth. As Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on power and war in Ukraine leads to Western sanctions and a lower standard of living, the local population mingles belligerent nationalism with a deep ambivalence about their country’s direction. Correcting the misconceptions of Putin’s supporters and critics alike, Garrels’s portrait of Russia’s silent majority is both essential and engaging reading at a time when cold war tensions are resurgent. [Garrels's] clear, patient, sympathetic portraits of teachers, children, prostitutes, doctors―the whole raft of Russian humanity―provide a pointillist landscape and an understanding of the country, and its mentalities, that eludes many more overtly political books." The search for a post-Soviet ideology has, in Chelyabinsk and across Russia, led to a strange mishmash, at once faithful and mystical, distrustful and fatalistic." Garrels keeps her cool and listens quietly as she gathers locals’ narratives and opinions, no matter how disturbing . Two of the best chapters, “The Taxi Driver” and “The Forensic Expert,” are like nonfictional short stories, wherein we become familiar with the long arcs of the protagonists’ tumultuous lives." Anne Garrels burrows deep into the heartland and enlists a diverse cast of authentic Russians to show why Putin happened, how he remains popular, and what might threaten his hold on power." "More than twenty years ago, Anne Garrels began visiting the formerly ‘secret’ city of Chelyabinsk, closed to foreigners because of its military and industrial installations. With great journalistic skill, Garrels helps us understand the complex emotions of people still in transition, trying to define what it means to be Russian." Save yourself a trip to Chelyabinsk―Anne Garrels gives you the grime and glitz, the hangovers and heartbreak, of today’s Russia, and all without a visa!" ―Stephen Sestanovich, author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama and U.S. ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union, 1997–2001. ―Jack F. Matlock, Jr., author of Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended and U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987–1991. "A critical and crucial study of a country with which America has always had a volatile connection, Garrels’s essays cover vital ground and are essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the myriad issues that inform U.S.-Russian relations." "Former NPR foreign correspondent Garrels offers finely delineated, meticulously researched dispatches from a region in Russia that seemed to her both typical of a certain Russian provincialism and arbitrarily chosen: Chelyabinsk, on the southern edge of the Ural Mountains . In essence, Garrels shows how the gloomy sense of ‘Russian fatalism’ poisons all aspects of society.
Reviews
"Anne coming back home to Norfolk, CT brings into perspective what we take for granted as Anne conveys the real side of America."
"I just finished Anne Garrels book about her experiences in the Southern Urals area of Russia."
"Given the authors's perspective being in and out of the country over a number a years, this book seems to provide the informed commentary that it purports to on the effect of Putinism on the everyday lives of Russians in the hinterlands."
"Anne Garrels immersed herself into the culture and lives of people who became her friends in Cheylabinsk."
"Well written and very informative."
"Fascinating reporting from an interesting perspective: a 20 plus friendship with a Siberian city and how it has changed from the fall of the Soviet Union to today, focusing on the impact on the people in the town."
"Comparable to Hedrick Smith's "The Russians" as a look at the current status of a country with a long and tortured history."
"I found this book to be very informative."
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Best Comparative Economics

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
The main driver of inequality—returns on capital that exceed the rate of economic growth—is again threatening to generate extreme discontent and undermine democratic values. It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century , the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty , will be the most important economics book of the year―and maybe of the decade. Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. Capital in the Twenty-first Century does all these things… Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore. Like [Paul] Kennedy a generation ago, Piketty has emerged as a rock star of the policy-intellectual world… But make no mistake, his work richly deserves all the attention it is receiving… Piketty, in collaboration with others, has spent more than a decade mining huge quantities of data spanning centuries and many countries to document, absolutely conclusively, that the share of income and wealth going to those at the very top―the top 1 percent, .1 percent, and .01 percent of the population―has risen sharply over the last generation, marking a return to a pattern that prevailed before World War I… Even if none of Piketty’s theories stands up, the establishment of this fact has transformed political discourse and is a Nobel Prize–worthy contribution. Whether or not his idea ultimately proves out, Piketty makes a major contribution by putting forth a theory of natural economic evolution under capitalism… Piketty writes in the epic philosophical mode of Keynes, Marx, or Adam Smith… By focusing attention on what has happened to a fortunate few among us, and by opening up for debate issues around the long-run functioning of our market system, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a profoundly important contribution. It is easy to overlook the achievement of Thomas Piketty ’s new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , as a work of economic history. But on any given page, there is data about the total level of private capital and the percentage of income paid out to labor in England from the 1700s onward, something that would have been impossible for early researchers… Capital reflects decades of work in collecting national income data across centuries, countries, and class, done in partnership with academics across the globe. But beyond its remarkably rich and instructive history, the book’s deep and novel understanding of inequality in the economy has drawn well-deserved attention… [Piketty’s] engagement with the rest of the social sciences also distinguishes him from most economists… The book is filled with brilliant moments… The book is an attempt to ground the debate over inequality in strong empirical data, put the question of distribution back into economics, and open the debate not just to the entirety of the social sciences but to people themselves. What makes Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century such a triumph is that it seems to have been written specifically to demolish the great economic shibboleths of our time… Piketty’s magnum opus. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics has done the definitive comparative historical research on income inequality in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century . Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vast empirical material Piketty and his colleagues collected… In a short review, it is impossible to do even partial justice to the wealth of information, data, analysis, and discussion contained in this book of almost 700 pages. He has re-emphasized the distinction between ‘unearned’ and ‘earned’ income that had been tucked away for so long under misleading terminologies of ‘human capital,’ ‘economic agents,’ and ‘factors of production.’ Labor and capital―those who have to work for a living and those who live from property―people in flesh―are squarely back in economics via this great book. Instantly influential… [Its] euphoric reception is richly merited… [ Piketty ’s] chief intellectual accomplishment is to show how the basic forces of capitalism tend inevitably toward an ever-greater accumulation of wealth at the tip of the pyramid… Over the past couple decades, we have started to realize that capitalism is no longer delivering for the vast majority of people in most Western democracies. Piketty has now delivered the most empirically grounded, intellectually coherent explanation of what is going on… His masterwork… That’s why the most successful societies of the 21st century will be the ones whose plutocrats read Piketty and help come up with the political answers to the economic forces he so powerfully describes. Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the 21st Century is the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade… Capital in the 21st Century essentially takes the existing debate on income inequality and supercharges it. [A] magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality… The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties… Piketty has written a truly superb book. It’s a work that melds grand historical sweep―when was the last time you heard an economist invoke Jane Austen and Balzac?―with painstaking data analysis… A tour de force of economic modeling, an approach that integrates the analysis of economic growth with that of the distribution of income and wealth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame… Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes it clear that public policy can make an enormous difference, that even if the underlying economic conditions point toward extreme inequality, what Piketty calls ‘a drift toward oligarchy’ can be halted and even reversed if the body politic so chooses… His masterwork… Sometimes it seems as if a substantial part of our political class is actively working to restore Piketty’s patrimonial capitalism. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to. Piketty ’s new volume offers a fresh perspective and a wealth of newly compiled data that will go a long way in helping us understand how capitalism actually works. It makes for fascinating, grim and alarming reading… Piketty’s book provides a valuable explanatory context for America’s economic woes… Piketty gives us the most important work of economics since John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory . It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years… Although the contours of Piketty ’s history confirm what economic historians already know, his anatomizing of the 1 percent’s fortunes over centuries is a revelation. Magnificent…Even though it is a work more concerned with the past 200 years, it’s no coincidence that the full title of Piketty ’s book is Capital in the Twenty-First Century . [ Piketty ] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation…He makes his case in a clear and rigorous manner that debunks everything that capitalists believe about the ethical status of making money…He demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that capitalism can ever solve the problem of inequality, which he insists is getting worse rather than better. This is why his book has crossed over into the mainstream--it says what many people have already been thinking…Unlike many economists he insists that economic thinking cannot be separated from history or politics…As poverty increases across the globe, everyone is being forced to listen to Piketty with great attention. Piketty has researched data over more than a century in order to derive his understanding of the dynamics of modern capitalism. Magisterial… Piketty ’s Capital feels very much like a Category 4 hurricane that hasn’t yet made landfall…Piketty draws on a vast store of historical data to argue that the broad dissemination of wealth that occurred during the decades following World War I was not, as economists then mistakenly believed, a natural state of capitalist equilibrium, but rather a halcyon interval between Belle Époque inequality and the rising inequality of our own era…Piketty’s most provocative argument is that the discrepancy between the high returns to capital and much more modest overall economic growth--briefly annulled during the mid-century--ensures that the gulf between the rich (who profit from capital investments) and the middle class (who depend chiefly on income from labor) will only continue to grow…The best reason to raise tax rates is not to punish the rich, of course, but to raise the revenue which the United States needs to invest in infrastructure and research, not to mention to pay for Social Security and health care. Defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism…[It] suggests that traditional liberal government policies on spending, taxation and regulation will fail to diminish inequality…Without what [ Piketty ] acknowledges is a politically unrealistic global wealth tax, he sees the United States and the developed world on a path toward a degree of inequality that will reach levels likely to cause severe social disruption. If already existing agglomerations of wealth tend to grow faster than incomes from work, it is likely that the role of inherited wealth in society will increase relative to that of recently earned and therefore more merit-based fortunes…The arithmetic suggests that the concentration of wealth and its ability to grow will favor an increasing weight of inheritance as compared with talent…If the ownership of wealth in fact becomes even more concentrated during the rest of the twenty-first century, the outlook is pretty bleak unless you have a taste for oligarchy…Wouldn’t it be interesting if the United States were to become the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the last refuge of increasing inequality at the top (and perhaps also at the bottom)? The blockbuster economics book of the season, Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century , argues that the great equalizing decades following World War II, which brought on the rise of the middle class in the United States, were but a historical anomaly. Anyone remotely interested in economics needs to read Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the 21st Century . In its magisterial sweep and ambition, Piketty ’s latest work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , is clearly modeled after Marx’s Das Kapital . And where Marx foresaw capitalism’s collapse leading to a utopian proletariat paradise, Piketty sees a future of slow growth and Gilded Age disparities in which the wealthy--owners of capital--capture a steadily larger share of global wealth and income…Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years. Piketty offers a timely and well-reasoned reminder that there is nothing inevitable about the dominance of human capital over financial capital, and that there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity. This mountain of data allows Piketty to tell a simple and compelling story…The database on which the book is built is formidable, and it is difficult to dispute his call for a new perspective on the modern economic era, whether or not one agrees with his policy recommendations… We are all used to sneering at communism because of its manifest failure to deliver the sustained rates of growth managed by market economies. Piketty wants to return his field to what the 19th century called ‘political economy’: a discipline about power, justice, and--also, but not first--wealth…[Piketty spoils] the longstanding conventional wisdom, supported by economics Nobel winners like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, plus lots of less controversial characters, that capitalism is democracy’s best friend…It shows a world getting radically more unequal, the return of hereditary wealth, and--at least in the U.S.--an economy so distorted that much of what happens at the very top can be fairly described as class-based looting. Magisterial… Piketty provides a sweeping, data-driven narrative about inequality trends in the United States and other Western economies over the past century or more, identifies a worrisome increase in income and wealth concentration in a small percentage of the population since 1980, and warns that this trend won’t likely correct itself…Piketty is not optimistic that the forces of greater income and wealth inequality will abate on their own, but he is not an economic determinist. Piketty ’s new book is an important contribution to understanding what we need to do to produce more growth, wider economic opportunity and greater social stability. The book has made everyone with a stake in capitalism sit up and take notice…[ Piketty ’s] analysis should challenge Americans to rethink our notions of wealth and poverty and whether any semblance of ‘equal opportunity’ actually exists…Piketty has made an important contribution. Capital in the Twenty-First Century is written in the tradition of great economic texts… Piketty and his colleagues have spent recent years putting together a World Top Incomes Database, their detailed investigation into income in countries around the globe, spanning several decades…Informed by this historical, cross-country data, Piketty evaluates--and rejects--a number of generally accepted conclusions in economic thought, while being careful to note the limitations of inevitably “imperfect and incomplete” sources. The main finding of his investigation is that capital still matters…This book is significant for its findings, as well as for how Piketty arrives at them. When it comes to economics…you need to get yourself a hold of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty …Piketty’s study will have readers plotting capital’s downfall because what it shows is that the growing inequalities we are seeing between the haves and have nots are endemic to the system. Piketty , whose previous work we are indebted to for providing statistical verification that the top 1 percent of the population possesses a outsize percentage of wealth, has written a magisterial book about the ever-increasing inequality. Piketty 's magnum opus…But unlike many other authors of tracts from the ‘dismal science,’ this distinguished French economist has rendered an eminently readable account of the history and dynamics of capitalism and inequality…A lucid tale of why inequality in the world is increasing, and what we should be doing about it. The right leaning crowd may be dismayed with his prescriptions of stiff global wealth taxes, but neither leftists nor rightists can dispute the data that he presents…According to Piketty, the only real corrective to capital’s concentration is a global capital tax (because it is freely globally mobile), and a stiff inheritance tax. Piketty has looked at centuries of tax archives to formulate a theory of capitalism that is evidence-based and rigorously researched, but also attempts to answer the most basic questions in economic theory. Much of the debate over inequality in recent years is the result of the work of Thomas Piketty and his fellow researchers…This book contains important lessons for economists. Over the last decade or so, economist Thomas Piketty has made his name central to serious discussions of inequality…Piketty expands upon his empirical work of the last 10 years, while also setting forth a political theory of inequality. If Piketty is right, there are big political implications, and the beauty of the book is that he never refrains from drawing them…The book’s terms and explanations are utterly simple; with a myriad of historical data, Piketty reduces the story of capitalism to a clear narrative arc. Piketty’s Capital , unlike Marx’s Capital , contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself. The big questions that concerned Mill, Marx and Smith are now rearing their heads afresh… Thomas Piketty-- who spent long years, during which the mainstream neglected inequality, mapping the distribution of income--is making waves with Capital in the Twenty-First Century . [ Capital in the Twenty-First Century ] has jolted the right, who are scrabbling around for an answer to its main message: rising inequality is killing capitalism…It is a big book in every sense of the word, using empirical evidence from 30 countries to describe how capitalism has evolved over the past 300 years and is now reverting to what Piketty calls the Downton Abbey world of a century ago. Where much modern writing about economics is cloaked in impenetrable jargon, Piketty is not afraid to draw on literature and popular culture to make his points…Piketty’s book seems to explain the brutal world of the Great Recession and its aftermath rather better than trickle-down economics…It is rare for economics books to fly off the shelves. Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shares its title with Marx’s work but its argumentative verve with Mill’s, and it has been a runaway bestseller in the United States. Piketty’s economics is ‘data driven,’ while Marx was short of useful data, did not make good use of what data he had and generalized wildly from a few exceptional cases of capital-intensive industries…The book is a terrific achievement. Not since John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 has a work of political theory been as rapturously received on the left as Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the 21st Century …In this supposedly superficial and anti-intellectual age, his 690-page treatise on inequality, rich in empirical research, has resonated because it speaks to one of the central anxieties of our time: that society is becoming ever more fragmented as the very rich pull away from the rest. As Piketty elegantly demonstrates, as long as the rate of return on what he calls capital continues to exceed the growth rate of the economy (as it has done since the 1970s), inequality will widen to levels unknown since the Victorian era. The strength of Piketty’s book is his close attention to the different sources of inequality, the massive documentation underpinning his history and conclusions, and his impressive culls from sociology and literature, which exhibit the richness of ‘political economy’ compared to its thin mathematical successor that has attained such prominence…Piketty’s book is a timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes. Thomas Piketty …has written a 700 page book on inequality which has achieved something few would have thought possible. To read the tidal wave of reviews by economics professors and others across the world is to get a sense of the impact that Piketty’s conclusions are having: that inequality is even more extreme than most experts thought, is worse than at any time since the 19th century and is set to reach nightmare proportions in the years ahead. Drawing on hundreds of years of economic data (some of which has only recently become available to researchers) Piketty reaches a simple but disturbing conclusion: In the long run, the return on capital tends to be greater than the growth rate of the economies in which that capital is located. What this means is that in a modern market economy the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the already-rich is as natural as water flowing downhill, and can only be ameliorated by powerful political intervention, in the form of wealth redistribution via taxes, and to a lesser extent laws that systematically protect labor from capital…Readers can already guess the dire conclusion that flows from combining Piketty’s theory with the plausible assumption that unregulated wealth leads to plutocracy: If the only way to avoid plutocracy would be to employ political processes that the plutocrats themselves will eventually buy lock, stock and barrel, then the only way to avoid being ruled by the Lords of Capital is to become one of them. [ Piketty ] has been perhaps the most important thinker on inequality of the past decade or so… With his book, he’s handed liberals a coherent framework that justifies the discomfort that they probably already felt about the wealth gap… Capital will change the political conversation in a more subtle way as well, by focusing it on wealth, not income… Whether or not Piketty’s grand unified theory is exactly correct, he’s moving the popular conversation in the right direction. Basically, Piketty has finally put to death, with data, the fallacies of trickle down economics and the Laffer curve, as well as the increasingly fantastical notion that we can all just bootstrap our way to the Forbes 400 list… We can only hope that the politicians crafting today’s economic programs will take this book to heart. In Capital in the Twenty-first Century , Piketty sums up his research, tracing the history and pattern of economic inequality across a number of countries from the eighteenth century to the present, analyzing its causes, and evaluating some policy fixes. Clearly written, ambitious in scope, rooted in economics but drawing on insights from related fields like history and sociology, Piketty’s Capital resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned work of political economy by the likes of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes. His original and rigorously well-documented insights into the deep structures of capitalism show us how the dynamics of capital accumulation have played out historically over the past three centuries, and how they’re likely to develop in the century to come… America’s twenty-first-century inequality crisis is, if anything, even more daunting and complex than the one we experienced a century ago. Thomas Piketty ’s new book, Capital in the 21st Century, painstakingly details the dynamics of wealth and income inequality throughout the last two centuries, and offers a somewhat grim picture of the future of economic inequality. Indeed, Piketty argues that it is a feature of capitalism itself―unless governments take action to rein in capitalism’s excesses… But the value of Piketty’s work is that it shows that capitalism’s postwar heyday―in which incomes at the bottom and the top actually converged ―was a historical anomaly. Thomas Piketty ’s magisterial study of the structure of capitalism since the 18th century, Capital in the 21st Century , is such a book… As leaders from Pope Francis to Barack Obama have proclaimed, growing inequality is the defining issue of our time. Piketty ends his book with a ringing call for the global taxation of capital. Reading Thomas Piketty ’s famous book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, after all the fuss about it, is a bit of a shock. It’s both much more radical and much less radical than its reputation…I was anticipating a left-wing rant, but Piketty’s tone is modest and polite--not at all what you expect from a rock-star French intellectual…Piketty and his book remind me of my favorite economist, the 19th-century American Henry George, and his best-selling book, Progress and Poverty (1879). Capital in the Twenty-First Century might be more aptly titled Inequality in the Twenty-First Century… Piketty is relentless in his indictment of inequality…Piketty assembles a mountain of numbers and tables to demonstrate that economic inequality is intensifying; that the wealthier are wealthier; and that the rich own more…Piketty hits bullseye after bullseye about the exacerbating inequalities that disfigure society--especially American society…For [those] who suffer from the relentless blather about why the minimum wage cannot be raised; why ‘job creators’ cannot be taxed; and why American society remains the most open in the world, Piketty is what the doctor ordered. Piketty is concerned with the dynamics of income and wealth since the eighteenth century to draw lessons for the century ahead. Piketty’s overall analysis and conclusions cannot be waved away by those who feel threatened by the book’s analysis and policy recommendations…In addition to uncovering [some] fundamental contradictions of capitalism and documenting the ensuing inequality in great detail, Piketty’s book contains a large number of less central, but nevertheless very arresting insights and findings…Very importantly, Piketty goes beyond uncovering the dynamics of capitalism and the ensuing inequalities and goes on to suggest policy measures to arrest/reverse them. As befits a book of such size, Capital is broad-ranging, both historically and geographically…This impressive book contains the odd equation and chart that might not appeal to the general reader, but I hope this work will not go the way of A Brief History of Time-- a book more talked about than read. Riveting…[ Piketty ] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream…One of Piketty’s main messages is that the structures of inequality societies choose to live with are the results of political choices, not natural or immutable economic tendencies, and that to pretend otherwise is an ‘ideological’ fiction…Capital inequality has dispossessed us of our ‘democratic sovereignty,’ and that’s something we should all really worry about… His book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality…When Piketty’s insights are eventually fused into new histories of economic and political thinking about global competition from the French Revolution to the present, the results will be...electrifying, particularly when it comes to revisiting the political and economic ideas of the global wars of the first half of the twentieth century…[This book] will certainly also shake the foundations of many university courses in political philosophy. Piketty darkly hints that the last time this happened, the world tore itself to pieces, twice, in an orgy of destruction that left millions dead and whole nations in ruin…It’s a rare thing to see economists, especially pro-capitalist economists, praising taxation itself, but Piketty--careful, unemotional Piketty--dares…Besides, he says, the thing every red-blooded entrepreneur wants to see is people getting rich by their wits and deeds, not by the birthright of kings…Piketty wants desperately to salvage captalism, even if that means proposing something that every capitalist will hate: a global wealth tax. The impact of the book will be [deep] and long lasting… Piketty has elevated many issues to a higher level by making the study of inequality as one of political economy embedded in history, data and configuration of socio-political groups… This book has all the makings of a classic. A book of such magisterial sweep… Piketty deserves huge credit for kickstarting a debate about inequality and illuminating the distribution of income and wealth. Using sophisticated computer modeling and analyses, the professor from the Paris School of Economics debunks a long-held assumption--that income from wages will tend to grow at roughly the same rate as wealth--and instead makes a compelling case that, over time, the apparatus of capitalism grows wealth faster than wages. Capital in the Twenty-First Century convinces because Piketty supports his arguments about inequality with two innovative forms of evidence largely neglected by his predecessors on both the left and the right. The first is an unprecedented trove of historical economic data, which Piketty uses to demonstrate increasing inequality due to the long-term tendency of returns on capital to outpace economic growth. Many who were content to ignore the warnings of [David] Harvey and company that our economic system will produce unsustainable levels of inequity find that they cannot ignore Piketty’s…His book challenges both mainstream economists’ faith in untested mathematical models, as well as radicals’ resistance to subjecting Marx’s economic theory to rigorous testing. New research from the Fed shows incomes of the richest Americans are bouncing back strongly after the crisis while average incomes have fallen…In essence, French economist Thomas Piketty ’s contention that wealth breeds wealth--and that increasing inequality is part of capitalism’s inherent structure, rather than an occasional condition--looks largely correct, at least since the early 1990s. Piketty demonstrates in terrifying detail, with painstaking statistical research, that free-market capitalism, in the absence of major state redistribution, produces profound economic inequalities. When the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate (which [ Piketty ] says is what happened until the beginning of the 20th century and is likely to happen again as growth slows), then the money that rich people make from their wealth piles up while wages rise more slowly if at all. This past July, I felt compelled to read Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century after reading several reviews and hearing about it from friends. [A] sweeping study of wealth in the modern world… Piketty makes his case with three centuries’ worth of economic data from around the world organized in a trove of detailed but lucid tables and graphs. He still uses formal economic theory but regards economics as a sub-discipline of social science, alongside history, sociology, anthropology and political science and prefers to characterize his work as political economy rather than economic science. Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics. The book is important, first and foremost, because it brings together a vast trove of research by Piketty and others on the evolution of income and wealth over two centuries. Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows how privateers use privatization, debt creation and capital inflation as a mechanism for rent extraction, with catastrophic consequences for public services. Thomas Piketty ’s Capital in the 21st Century is arguably the most important popular economics book in recent memory. Piketty ’s great achievement, and one possible reason for the enthusiastic reception of his book, is his effective empirical demonstration of a fact long denied by neoclassical economics and its champions throughout the world: markets, when left to their own devices, do not provide individuals with rewards that are proportional to their efforts and contributions towards producing goods and services, nor do they ensure the most optimal distribution of those goods and services. Instead, they tend to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, giving rise to what Piketty calls a system of ‘patrimonial’ capitalism in which a few major players derive disproportionate benefit simply by virtue of possessing high amounts of capital… As a work of economic history, and a source of data, it effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality, reward effort and innovation, and deliver the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people.
Reviews
"This is a classic - truly a life changer in the way I now think about capital."
"Amazing work here, changed the way I think about inequality and how to approach it."
"I am learning so much from this book."
"Important book, even if long and complex."
"Good info comparing the US to Europe on upward mobility and politics as the primary cause of our inequality."
"While I do not necessarily agree with all of its conclusion, I found it Best discussion in at least 30 years on how capital functions in modern economies particualry for non economists."
"Good book but the same could have been said in half the words."
"Only economics course I've ever taken was Econ 100 so I found this book both informative and fascinating."
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Best Development & Growth Economics

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy , now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. Praise for Blue Ocean Strategy : A bestseller across 5 continents More than 3.6 million copies sold worldwide Translated into 44 languages A Wall Street Journal , BusinessWeek , and Fast Company bestseller Thinkers50 Strategy Award for Best Business Book of the decade The Fast Company Leadership Hall of Fame Winner of the Carl S. Sloane Award for Excellence in Management Consulting.
Reviews
"This book defines a way of thinking about business strategy."
"This edition of Blue Ocean Strategy is a wonderful update to the book that has forever changed the strategy field."
"Love the approach and have applied them quite often."
"This book offers ground-breaking on innovative thinking that has both business and technological aspects."
"Anyone interested in strategy articulation is, no doubt, steeped in the traditional approaches to strategy development."
"As the author of twenty-two books on organizational development, it pains me to say this but Blue Ocean Strategy is the finest book on business strategy that I have ever read. Then the authors show the six ways we can “systematically” think our way through on the demand side of the equation to a solution that is innovative and strongly needed by the market."
"This is a must read book for anyone stumped with a business situation to resolve."
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Best Microeconomics

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Cult bestseller, new buzz word... Freakonomics is at the heart of everything we see and do and the subjects that bedevil us daily: from parenting to crime, sport to politics, fat to cheating, fear to traffic jams. “If Indiana Jones were an economist, he’d be Steven Levitt… Criticizing Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae.” (Wall Street Journal). “Provocative… eye-popping.” (New York Times Book Review: Inside the List). He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more.
Reviews
"Indeed, the most common reaction I get from people when telling them that I am an economist is that they have read Freakonomics, which implies that they have at least seen some work similar to what I do at aguanomics. All I remember was a lot of math and curves.” This depressing outcome results from lecturers who merely reproduce problems and equations on the blackboard, without helping students understand either why those theories are used or how they came to be so popular with economists. Third, there are books like mine [pdf] that try to explain how to improve failing policies using basic economic insights and incentives. This book with a memorable (but useless) name provides readers with just-so stories that are good for cocktail conversations but not for understanding economics. What struck me is their ongoing attempts to hold onto at least some elements in the original claim in later blog posts in what I’d call a “my-ladydoth-protest-too-much” manner. Looking over their other chapters (on cheating sumo wrestlers, drug dealers who live with their moms, the KKK as a multilevel marketing organization, etc. ), I agree that the chapters are interesting and thought provoking, but they do not provide “lessons on the hidden side of everything.” Instead, they read like a series of magazine articles whose quirky “insights” might contribute to your next cocktail conversation. [7] I didn’t detect any reliable technique (except perhaps to collect a neat dataset and call Steve Levitt), and that’s where I was disappointed. In this case, street dealers are (a) NOT condemned to death, (b) not able to find other work with their experience, and (c) not aware of their statistical mortality as much as their potential wealth. Dubner and Levitt present interesting puzzles worthy of cocktail conversation, but they overstate their contributions and accuracy (“numbers don’t lie” but theory can be incomplete or just wrong). He's a fine person and excellent economist, but this book is too “pop” in its oversimplification of his work and hagiographic treatment of his insights. Yes, he brings interesting statistical tools to“freaky” questions, but he’s not a “rogue economist exploring the hidden side of everything.” He’s just a guy with a dataset and empirical theory who finds some strong correlations. (8) My years of experience traveling in 100+ countries leads me to respect the diversity of beliefs and institutions that result in a variety of outcomes. As another example, take Dubner on page 199, who writes “that paper [on police officer counts and crime] was later disputed… a gradate student found an obvious mathematical mistake in it — but Levitt’s ingenuity was obvious.” I’m not sure I’d say the same about someone whose claims rested on logic with “obvious mathematical mistakes”!"
"I enjoyed the many hidden causal connections that no one without the proper research could ever have put together."
"This book is absolutely brilliant."
"You may or may not agree with everything in here, but that is not the point."
"It takes an engaging and unique look at the world through the lens of an economist and the results are quite compelling."
"I thought this book was both thought provoking and interesting."
"Really a great book."
"As an economist I can say that for most people is just boring or impossible to understand economic theory."
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Best Sustainable Development Economics

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Harper Business Essentials)
Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day -- as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from other companies?" They set out to determine what's special about "visionary" companies--the Disneys, Wal-Marts, and Mercks, companies at the very top of their game that have demonstrated longevity and great brand image. The authors compare 18 "visionary" picks to a control group of "successful-but-second-rank" companies. This book, written by a team from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, compares what the authors have identified as "visionary" companies with selected companies in the same industry. The visionary companies, the authors found out, had a number of common characteristics; for instance, almost all had some type of core ideology that guided the company in times of upheaval and served as a constant bench mark.
Reviews
"I honestly think there are better books out there for this subject matter."
"If you have the good to great I feel all info are just copy paste."
"As a manager in a large company that is trying to reinvent itself, I found many parallels to both the visionary and non-visionary examples."
"This books offers great insights on how some of the most successful organizations had been built."
"30/Jul/2009 Update: One can not read this book in the right context and perspective without reading The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers - so far the best business book I've ever read!"
"One of the classics and very much enjoyed reading."
"This work from team Collins/Porras is a fine book and. a must read for any business savy person or executive. interested in tuning in to some basic and yet essential. precepts on keeping ahead of the inevitable changes. and cycles that consume so many companies and industries."
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Best Econometrics

Freakonomics Rev Ed: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and 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. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.Bonus material added to the revised and expanded 2006 edition.The original New York Times Magazine article about Steven D. Levitt by Stephen J. Dubner, which led to the creation of this book.Seven “Freakonomics” columns written for the New York Times Magazine, published between August 2005 and April 2006. “Levitt dissects complex real-world phenomena, e.g. baby-naming patterns and Sumo wrestling, with an economist’s laser.” (San Diego Union-Tribune). This is bracing fun of the highest order.” (Kurt Andersen, host of public radio's Studio 360 and author of Turn of the Century). “Freakonomics challenges conventional wisdom and makes for fun reading.” (Book Sense Picks and Notables). Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the most influential American economist under forty. Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning journalist and radio and TV personality, has worked for the New York Times and published three non- Freakonomics books.
Reviews
"Indeed, the most common reaction I get from people when telling them that I am an economist is that they have read Freakonomics, which implies that they have at least seen some work similar to what I do at aguanomics. All I remember was a lot of math and curves.” This depressing outcome results from lecturers who merely reproduce problems and equations on the blackboard, without helping students understand either why those theories are used or how they came to be so popular with economists. Third, there are books like mine [pdf] that try to explain how to improve failing policies using basic economic insights and incentives. This book with a memorable (but useless) name provides readers with just-so stories that are good for cocktail conversations but not for understanding economics. What struck me is their ongoing attempts to hold onto at least some elements in the original claim in later blog posts in what I’d call a “my-ladydoth-protest-too-much” manner. Looking over their other chapters (on cheating sumo wrestlers, drug dealers who live with their moms, the KKK as a multilevel marketing organization, etc. ), I agree that the chapters are interesting and thought provoking, but they do not provide “lessons on the hidden side of everything.” Instead, they read like a series of magazine articles whose quirky “insights” might contribute to your next cocktail conversation. [7] I didn’t detect any reliable technique (except perhaps to collect a neat dataset and call Steve Levitt), and that’s where I was disappointed. In this case, street dealers are (a) NOT condemned to death, (b) not able to find other work with their experience, and (c) not aware of their statistical mortality as much as their potential wealth. Dubner and Levitt present interesting puzzles worthy of cocktail conversation, but they overstate their contributions and accuracy (“numbers don’t lie” but theory can be incomplete or just wrong). He's a fine person and excellent economist, but this book is too “pop” in its oversimplification of his work and hagiographic treatment of his insights. Yes, he brings interesting statistical tools to“freaky” questions, but he’s not a “rogue economist exploring the hidden side of everything.” He’s just a guy with a dataset and empirical theory who finds some strong correlations. (8) My years of experience traveling in 100+ countries leads me to respect the diversity of beliefs and institutions that result in a variety of outcomes. As another example, take Dubner on page 199, who writes “that paper [on police officer counts and crime] was later disputed… a gradate student found an obvious mathematical mistake in it — but Levitt’s ingenuity was obvious.” I’m not sure I’d say the same about someone whose claims rested on logic with “obvious mathematical mistakes”!"
"I bought a few copies as gifts for my kids' history teacher, math teacher, and language teacher. I think it's better than the following books but they are also entertaining."
"I enjoyed the many hidden causal connections that no one without the proper research could ever have put together."
"This book is absolutely brilliant."
"You may or may not agree with everything in here, but that is not the point."
"It takes an engaging and unique look at the world through the lens of an economist and the results are quite compelling."
"I thought this book was both thought provoking and interesting."
"Really a great book."
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Best Statistics Economics

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto)
Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill–the world of business– Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, iconoclastic, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood forces in all of our lives. This eccentric and highly personal exploration of the nature of randomness meanders from the court of Croesus and trading rooms in New York and London to Russian roulette, Monte Carlo engines, and the philosophy of Karl Popper. Using his own investing experience and examples of others' successes and disappointments, he discusses theories like Monte Carlo math (easy; considered cheating by purists) and the concept of Russian roulette.
Reviews
"This book is fun to read."
"Starts off kind of slow but then picks up."
"This reflects a couple of things from this book, which is interesting for people who might want to read it. Taleb tells his opinion very raw and in doing so he doesn't mind potentially offending a lot of people. Some people found it simplistic or not missing substance, but they did have a fairly strong reaction to it. There is no attempt to make it short, it is a bit like the author just talking a good glass of wine. Nicolas Taleb tries to point out the randomness in the world and then shows how it fooled us. Yet, I still enjoyed Fooled by Randomness and it caused me to reflect on a lot of things."
"It also questions the assertions of skill made by individuals when favourable outcomes help them score important victories in their respective professions or fields of interest."
"Reading this is like being stuck in a cage with a combination of the most fearlessly intelligent teacher you remember, an orangutan, a rampant egotist getting revenge on the world which didn't value him enough (at the time) and the really personable nice teacher you had when you were little."
"Who knows, but if they were inspecting for this kind of failure, they missed it on this plane."
"Cons: - At times it felt like the writing was just a flagrant assertion of Taleb's intellectual depth in areas such as mythology, philosophy, and a few other subjects he appears to be well read in. Rather he just tells you "I always take positions in which I lose almost nothing under normal circumstances, but make an enormous profit when a rare event occurs"."
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Best Macroeconomics

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
Since 2014, international monetary agencies have been issuing warnings to a small group of finance ministers, banks, and private equity funds: the U.S. government’s cowardly choices not to prosecute J.P. Morgan and its ilk, and to bloat the economy with a $4 trillion injection of easy credit, are driving us headlong toward a cliff. "If you are curious about what the financial Götterdämmerung might look like you’ve certainly come to the right place... Rickards believes -- and provides tantalizing snippets of private conversations with those who dwell in the very eye-in-the-pyramid -- that the current world monetary and financial system is on the verge of insolvency and that the world financial elites already have a successor system for which they are laying the groundwork." An adviser on international economics and financial threats to the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence community, he served as a facilitator of the first-ever financial war games conducted by the Pentagon.
Reviews
"I find Jim Rickards to be a gifted teacher - he successfully explains numerous complicated concepts in layman terms. Thanks to his writings in this particular book, I feel I have a basic working knowledge of some troubling issues that may very well threaten the long term success of not just my own family, but America in general. I found his suggestions to be tersely worded and lacking the "fleshing out" helpfulness characteristic in Rickards previous chapters. When I finished this much anticipated section I sensed Rickards had deliberately withheld information the average reader needed to understand and apply his suggestions and ideas."
"Rickards speaks of "elites," but as an amorphous group bound together by shared goals rather than as a dark organization dedicated to evil. The typical free trade policies have led to the gutting of US manufacturing, and the loss of the jobs on which the middle class used to depend. If President Trump can shift our trade policies so that a certain amount of manufacturing returns to the US, he will have done generations of Americans a great favor."
"I realize this is a sensitive issue with our society, but when I was on the ground at 2 am, January 1st of 2015, fighting a guy who had tried to assault me, you bet I sure loved the blue squad cars that delivered public servants who took over and arrested the social blight that tried to harm me."
"Also, does it bother anyone else that someone who previously worked for the CIA and has all this present day high level clearance, is just allowed to tell everything he knows without being offed?"
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Best Economics Commercial Policy

Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti-Globalization in the Era of Trump
Immediately upon publication, Globalization and Its Discontents became a touchstone in the globalization debate by demonstrating how the International Monetary Fund, other major institutions like the World Bank, and global trade agreements have often harmed the developing nations they are supposedly helping. His book clearly explains the functions and powers of the main institutions that govern globalization--the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization--along with the ramifications, both good and bad, of their policies. In recent years, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization have promoted world financial stability, prosperity and free trade, yet Stiglitz wonders why so many revile these organizations' programs to the point of rioting in the streets. Stiglitz shares inside information from cabinet meetings when he served on Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and from his years as chief economist at the World Bank, divulging debates in Washington's conference rooms, naming names and raising his eyebrows at those who refuse to question certain IMF policies' repeated shortcomings.
Reviews
"Still, I found his coverage and insights into events that now seem like ancient history, that is, the transition of Russia from communism to (mafia) capitalism, and the East Asian financial crisis of the late `90's to be fascinating. ), and when the government devalued, after the "Big Boys" got their money out at very favorable rates, then the poor are saddled with the obligation to pay off the loan. It is enough to give capitalism a bad name (and it has in such countries)! Another key point that the author makes concerns Adam Smith, who started the wonderful "invisible hand" of the marketplace business, but also clearly identified market failures. Numerous times he is straightforward in his critique, such as: "The billions of dollars in Cayman Islands and other such centers are not there because those islands provide better banking services that Wall Street, London or Frankfurt; they are there because the secrecy allows them to engage in tax evasion, money laundering, and other nefarious activities. Only after September 11 was it recognized that among those other nefarious activities was financing of terrorism." Numerous redundancies, numerous inane reminders that farmers need to buy seeds, and tautologies like the following: "A real and effective banking system requires strong banking regulation.""
"This should be considered a companion book of a trilogy to those wishing to learn from highly educated, directly-experienced and politically objective experts - those who have "been there, done that" - who reveal to us the inner workings of world politics and why it is so ineffective and counter-productive the way it is currently being managed. Incredible as his story is, it also dovetails precisely with what these other authors - a Nobel prize winner, a counsellor to the Secretary of commerce and special economic envoy to Japan, and a New York Times journalist- have consistently and convincingly presented as the same story and delivered as a remarkably similar conclusion from their different perspectives."
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Best Economic History

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
The real story of the crash began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can't pay their debts. Although Lewis is perhaps best known for his sports-related nonfiction (including The Blind Side ), his first book was the autobiographical Liar's Poker , in which he chronicled his disillusionment as a young gun on Wall Street in the greed is good 1980s. He returns to his financial roots to excavate the crisis of 2007–2008, employing his trademark technique of casting a microcosmic lens on the personal histories of several Wall Street outsiders who were betting against the grain—to shed light on the macrocosmic tale of greed and fear. Lewis returns on the final disc for a 10-minute interview about the crisis's aftermath, including a savvy assessment of the wisdom of the financial bailout and where-are-they-now updates on the book's various heroes and villains.
Reviews
"A lot of folks have already reviewed The Big Short, and generally I don’t do big write-ups on traditionally published works."
"Read the book before watching the movie, and I think it was a great portrayal of the mechanics of how the american housing market was manipulated by those using their own bottom line as apposed to the individuals obtaining mortgages."
"But in the indiscriminate bailouts that occurred in 2008 (reward the guilty, punish the innocent), our government (our tax dollars) has enabled the unthinkable -- this could happen again."
"I'd like to start out by saying that I work in finance so I found this particularly interesting."
"Had heard about Paulson before, whom the media has made famous for his contrarian call (and deservedly so), but learning about Michael Burry, Greg Lippmann, et al. REALLY enforced the need not just to be patient, but to have the patience of Job with our best investing ideas."
"The bank, the investors, the mortgage loan officers and even the borrowers, who could sell their house properties after a two year time frame (Bush tax laws and escape paying any tax at all) were the players receiving benefit."
"Michael Lewis has a gift for explaining the complicated & esoteric in a very simple & straightforward manner."
"I'm very keen to see the movie based on this book. Also, the people involved here are more interesting than any characters I've seen in financial movies."
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Best Economic Theory

Freakonomics Rev Ed: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and 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. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.Bonus material added to the revised and expanded 2006 edition.The original New York Times Magazine article about Steven D. Levitt by Stephen J. Dubner, which led to the creation of this book.Seven “Freakonomics” columns written for the New York Times Magazine, published between August 2005 and April 2006. “Levitt dissects complex real-world phenomena, e.g. baby-naming patterns and Sumo wrestling, with an economist’s laser.” (San Diego Union-Tribune). This is bracing fun of the highest order.” (Kurt Andersen, host of public radio's Studio 360 and author of Turn of the Century). “Freakonomics challenges conventional wisdom and makes for fun reading.” (Book Sense Picks and Notables). Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the most influential American economist under forty. Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning journalist and radio and TV personality, has worked for the New York Times and published three non- Freakonomics books.
Reviews
"Indeed, the most common reaction I get from people when telling them that I am an economist is that they have read Freakonomics, which implies that they have at least seen some work similar to what I do at aguanomics. All I remember was a lot of math and curves.” This depressing outcome results from lecturers who merely reproduce problems and equations on the blackboard, without helping students understand either why those theories are used or how they came to be so popular with economists. Third, there are books like mine [pdf] that try to explain how to improve failing policies using basic economic insights and incentives. This book with a memorable (but useless) name provides readers with just-so stories that are good for cocktail conversations but not for understanding economics. What struck me is their ongoing attempts to hold onto at least some elements in the original claim in later blog posts in what I’d call a “my-ladydoth-protest-too-much” manner. Looking over their other chapters (on cheating sumo wrestlers, drug dealers who live with their moms, the KKK as a multilevel marketing organization, etc. ), I agree that the chapters are interesting and thought provoking, but they do not provide “lessons on the hidden side of everything.” Instead, they read like a series of magazine articles whose quirky “insights” might contribute to your next cocktail conversation. [7] I didn’t detect any reliable technique (except perhaps to collect a neat dataset and call Steve Levitt), and that’s where I was disappointed. In this case, street dealers are (a) NOT condemned to death, (b) not able to find other work with their experience, and (c) not aware of their statistical mortality as much as their potential wealth. Dubner and Levitt present interesting puzzles worthy of cocktail conversation, but they overstate their contributions and accuracy (“numbers don’t lie” but theory can be incomplete or just wrong). He's a fine person and excellent economist, but this book is too “pop” in its oversimplification of his work and hagiographic treatment of his insights. Yes, he brings interesting statistical tools to“freaky” questions, but he’s not a “rogue economist exploring the hidden side of everything.” He’s just a guy with a dataset and empirical theory who finds some strong correlations. (8) My years of experience traveling in 100+ countries leads me to respect the diversity of beliefs and institutions that result in a variety of outcomes. As another example, take Dubner on page 199, who writes “that paper [on police officer counts and crime] was later disputed… a gradate student found an obvious mathematical mistake in it — but Levitt’s ingenuity was obvious.” I’m not sure I’d say the same about someone whose claims rested on logic with “obvious mathematical mistakes”!"
"LOVE THIS BOOK!"
"I enjoyed the many hidden causal connections that no one without the proper research could ever have put together."
"This book is absolutely brilliant."
"You may or may not agree with everything in here, but that is not the point."
"It takes an engaging and unique look at the world through the lens of an economist and the results are quite compelling."
"I thought this book was both thought provoking and interesting."
"Really a great book."
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Best Economic Conditions

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
#1 New York Times Bestseller — With a new Afterword. “Remarkable… Michael Lewis has a spellbinding talent for finding emotional dramas in complex, highly technical subjects.”. - Financial Times. “ Flash Boys richly deserves to be the first chapter in a new discussion of market rules and abuses… Lewis raises troubling and necessary questions.”. - The American Conservative. “When it comes to narrative skill, a reporter’s curiosity and an uncanny instinct for the pulse of the zeitgeist, Lewis is a triple threat.”. - James B. Stewart, New York Times. He’s doing essential work, and anything that embarrasses fat cats and encourages reform is a flash in the right direction.”. - Julie Hinds, Detroit Free Press. “Lewis, as always, is exceedingly good at describing the complexities and absurdities of the subculture he portrays here… A deeply entertaining book, and one that illuminates how much our world has changed in less than a decade.”. - Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times.
Reviews
"But other times when execution really matters, it was all real, the price you were willing to trade at just got shifted permanently right before your eyes and somebody "front-run" you. I learned a while ago, if the first million can't make you happy, that you have to accumulate more, you will never be content. If you have to play the rigged game to add more riches to your money pile that most human beings will never see in their lifetime, I feel sorry for you. Granted, true free market doesn't exist in the financial world (no matter where you look, New York/London/Chicago/Tokyo). Only the naive will expect any market to give all participants the same level of positioning to engage in any transaction. When I show up to buy strawberries, some farmers/dealers have way more information on the supply and demand, and have inventory to reflect their view. For those who deny the unfairness of HFT front-running, either you haven't seen it (which should disqualify you from commenting on this topic) or you are so jaded that you can't see its harm (which begs questions about your integrity)."
"One can get caught up in the epic battle between the "good guys" and the "Big guys" or rather the secret traders and big banks versus those who were trying to make the system transparent."
"Interesting story about automated trading and how some folks tried to beat the market by getting there first."
"High Frequency Traders (HFT), a relatively new market parasite, have combined the technology of high-speed trading and "front running" algorithms to attach themselves to an astonishing percentage of market trades and "rig" the market."
"It is possible that this book helped a close family member avoid an irreversible financial mistake because he thought he was making an error (he did not immediately realize that the system whereby the "regular" guy executes trades is now more rigged than ever before!). Btw, I don't care about the arguments related to this book... My concern was the financial wellbeing of a family member, who is retired and cannot make up a loss over a period of time."
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Best Labor & Industrial Economic Relations

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. Written with a sparkling voice and breakneck pace, The Radium Girls fully illuminates the inspiring young women exposed to the "wonder" substance of radium, and their awe-inspiring strength in the face of almost impossible circumstances. "Kate Moore's new book will move, shock and anger you" -- The Big Issue Kate Moore is a Sunday Times bestselling writer with more than a decade's experience in writing across varying genres, including memoir and biography and history.
Reviews
"In The Radium Girls Kate Moore tells the story of these young women, seemingly so fortunate, who were poisoned by the jobs they felt so lucky to have. After some of the women died and more became ill the companies making large profits on radium rushed to dismiss any hint that the work was unsafe. Eventually publicity stemming from lawsuits filed by some of the victims (using their own scanty resources) focused enough attention on the problem that governments felt compelled to set safety standards and regulations. The safety regulations and restrictions which were finally put into place hardly seem adequate, and the Epilogue and Postscript giving details of the women's later lives, as well as an account of another industry that made careless use of radium as late as the 1970s, are especially harrowing."
"This is one these books that will stay with you long after you finished reading it."
"One of the best books I have read in a long time!"
"I learned so much from this book."
"This was such a heartfelt story bringing to life the stories of such brave women and their suffering."
"This a book that should be read by people of all ages and occupation."
"Awesome book could not stop thinking about it for weeks such a long fight these woman had n some did not make it sadly."
"I have not read many of these types of books about real life stories about history and I found this fascinating."
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Best Economic Policy & Development

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
In Zero to One , legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places. What Thiel is after is the revitalization of imagination and invention writ large…" – The New Republic "Might be the best business book I've read...Barely 200 pages long and well lit by clear prose and pithy aphorisms, Thiel has written a perfectly tweetable treatise and a relentlessly thought-provoking handbook." “ This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.” - Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook “Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.” - Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. This is a classic.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan “Thiel has drawn upon his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic readings in philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, and culture to become perhaps America’s leading public intellectual today” - Fortune "Peter Thiel, in addition to being an accomplished entrepreneur and investor, is also one of the leading public intellectuals of our time. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long- term thinking about the future.
Reviews
"For example "we never invest in entrepreneurs who turn up for the interview in a suit" or "four of the founders of PayPal had built bombs as children." Memo to Peter Thiel: you are successful despite your prejudice against people who don't share your sartorial taste, and your partners made it to adulthood despite having been poorly supervised as children. He was not beaten by a better provider of software, he was superseded by a shift in technology toward powerful mobile devices, tablets and the cloud, all of which, in turn, were motivated by other entrepreneurs' desire to obtain monopoly profits. So Steve Jobs dominated many of these arenas for long enough to enjoy monopoly profits and other people will some day take this all further. Even the government is in on the act, Peter Thiel claims, or else it would not be granting patents to inventors or freedom from competition from generic drugs to the pharmaceutical companies that first develop new medications. My mom taught me that "necessity is the mother of invention:" GM did not develop the Volt till it was up against the wall, Archimedes discovered how to screw water upwards during the Roman siege of Syracuse, the Germans developed jet propulsion, the swept wing and the rocket we later sent to the moon when they had pretty much already lost WWII. And then we have the cases where, as the author says, it's clear that you need to incentivize people to innovate (drugs spring to mind, where the US has a lead) and that's where patents come in. And it was crystal clear to everybody with a modicum of common sense that both Intel and Microsoft were not helping the world along when they used dirty tricks to hurt AMD and Netscape. The author takes us on a (rather gratuitous) trip from Plato and Aristotle to Nozick and Rawls via Epicurus, Lucretius, Hegel and Marx to discuss when optimism is and isn't warranted and the bottom line is that you're only allowed to be an optimist if you have "definite optimism" based on a specific Design (my capital D) for a business. Peter Thiel takes a massive swipe at the Malcolm Gladwells of the world who overemphasize chance, serendipity and fate with facile arguments about the similarity in Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' birthdates. It's the Nassim Nicholas Taleb idea, and he duly appears on the back cover to endorse the book. For the best book on the subject I'd swerve around NNT's work and turn to Benoit Mandelbrot's masterpiece, "The (Mis)behaviour of Markets." The fourth idea is no more original, but Thiel puts it well: "there are many more secrets left to find, but they will yield only to relentless searchers." The fifth idea is you need to pick your partners i.e. your investors, your fellow managers and your (ideally 3) directors very carefully in order to make sure you all want the same thing out of the company (and it had better not be immediate rewards). But once they have their first billion and don't need to run their ideas by anyone else to get them funded they very often go do something stupid (dunno, like go mine asteroids) with exactly the same fervour they previously applied to the sensible endeavour that made them rich. The more grounded ones keep their further investments close to home and direct their creativity toward giving lectures and writing books."
"Along with business strategy, Thiel outlines how successful innovation shapes society and shares an intriguing vision. Rather than offer scripts or formulas, Thiel discusses the logic of starting a company that will make a truly meaningful and unique impact on the world. Blake did a great job of adapting and presenting the contents, many of which were delivered when Thiel taught at Stanford. Keeping in mind that companies growing 1000x often carry entire portfolios, Peter gives a good argument for successful moonshots and grand visions. He also highlights the dangers of trying to disrupt entrenched competitors and avoid extra resistance and burn rates on marketing. Rather, Tesla began by making powertrains, then started with high end luxury models to which no solid alternative existed. His strong argument for monopolies are both for novelty and to develop early market dominance should competitors arise later. I found a Monopoly Index by Forbes that showed these types of companies outperforming the Dow and S&P by 33%, which was a pleasant result of some due diligence. Even if you make a product that’s a 3x improvement over a market leader, you aren’t creating anything truly new, and well funded competitors are likely to catch up. It looks at economics, globalization, artificial intelligence, and historical trends along with founder characteristics and the qualities of great salespeople. If you like diving really deep into the mind of a founder across many life experiences, check out Tony Hseih’s Delivering Happiness."
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Best Free Enterprise

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
Hazlitt’s focus on non-governmental solutions, strong — and strongly reasoned — anti-deficit position, and general emphasis on free markets, economic liberty of individuals, and the dangers of government intervention make Economics in One Lesson every bit as relevant and valuable today as it has been since publication. "A magnificent job of theoretical exposition."
Reviews
"This is an enlightening book."
"a new issue of one of the best summaries on political economy - easy study for the general audience."
"More people need to read this book; Great lesson and so practical."
"An outstanding book!"
"A must read for anyone interested in quickly coming up to speed on economics."
"Even if you have some or zero knowledge of economics, this book breaks it down so simple."
"new copy, but I know the book well."
"If you don't understand economics, then one read through this will open your eyes to how easy it is to understand things when you have the correct principles and right perspective on things."
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Best Money & Monetary Policy

The Internet of Money
While many books explain the how of bitcoin, The Internet of Money delves into the why of bitcoin. With The Internet of Money, he's matchedthat feat by compiling his talks into one of the best books on Bitcoinfor a broad audience. That required people to grasp not only how thisunorthodox technology worked but also its profound promise for society.No one has done more than Andreas Antonopoulos to get them over thathurdle. As an engaging public speaker, teacher and writer, Andreas makes complex subjects accessible and easy to understand.
Reviews
"When I dove down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin in late 2013, Andreas' YouTube talks and podcasts pulled me further in, and this book is a compilation of these entertaining and informative talks."
"This study of Bitcoin is truly turning out to be an elemental experience where Andreaus' approach gives me the power to create endless scenarios about the world we live in."
"The objective of this book is not to be a technical guide on Bitcoin, but rather to offer a philosophical background on why we need Bitcoin/why it's important."
"Although almost three years old, this is still a stimulating read in terms of a well-grounded vision, and an excellent introduction to the ideas underlying what many think of merely as a fledgling alternative currency to fiat ones, but which is actually a decentralized, consensus-based paradigm for non-mediated transactions of all types."
"This book helped me understand that Bitcoin is more than a currency."
"If you can check your preconceived notions about Bitcoin at the door; I promise you will turn the last page a more educated individual for having read it."
"Could not put the book down very thought provoking."
"The author is a Bitcoin evangelist and makes a seductive presentation."
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Best Inflation

How to Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck (2nd Edition): A proven path to money mastery in only 15 minutes a week! (Simple Personal Finance Books) (Smart Money Blueprint)
This is a straightforward budget planning method that will completely transform your finances, and eliminate your money worries once and for all. Grady Harp. (Hall of Fame, Amazon Top 100 Reviewer, Vine Voice). " This is the rarest of all rarities - a really good ebook on personal finance. ". "Avery Breyer's self-help guide to consumer finances... is filled with great ideasfor getting out of a financial rut . I found her reasons for setting up a budget to be compelling and was impressed by the Money Tracker program she includes with the book... Avery Breyer is the best-selling author of the Smart Money Blueprint Series.Avery has been quoted on/in Woman's World magazine, Time.com, Fool.com (Motley Fool), MSN Money, GoBanking Rates, and featured as a guest on WOR 710 "The Voice of New York," on The Financial Quarterback , hosted by Josh Jalinski.
Reviews
"How you manage your money (however much or little it may be) affects every aspect of your life - your physical and emotional well-being, your relationships, what hobbies you can pursue and where you can live. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you can avoid taking control of your spending by simply getting a job that pays more. It's a wonderfully readable combination of advice, fascinating examples, and moral support. It's like sitting down with that favorite aunt or uncle (or grandparent) who understands that people make mistakes and who believes in your ability to turn things around."
"I bought this for myself."
"But if you don't know what the basics is, then read this book."
"I thoroughly enjoyed this book."
"I liked the plan a b c approach as we all know that even with the best intentions getting to our financial goals don't always go to plan."
"Avery Breyer uses a step by step systematic approach to the discipline of MONEY..."
"Really found this helpful and if you want simple tips to work with a budget - this is for you!"
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Best Public Finance

How to Day Trade for a Living: Tools, Tactics, Money Management, Discipline and Trading Psychology
In the book, I describe the fundamentals of day trading, explain how day trading is different from other styles of trading and investment, and elaborate on important trading strategies that many traders use every day. For beginner traders, this book gives you an understanding of where to start, how to start, what to expect from day trading, and how to develop your strategy. If you think you are beyond the stage of a novice trader, then you may want to jump ahead and start reading from Chapter 7 for an overview of the most important day trading strategies: ABCD Pattern Trading Bull Flag Momentum Trading Top Reversal Trading Bottom Reversal Trading Moving Average Trend Trading VWAP Trading Support and Resistance Trading. For each strategy, I explain: How to find the Stock in Play for trade What indicators I am using on my charts When I enter the trade When I exit the trade (profit taking) What is my stop loss. Day trading is not gambling. That's How to Day Trade for a Living . If you just wanted to get started in day trading, following Andrew's guidelines gets you stated on the right foot. There are a lot of other books on day trading that just give you basic philosophy and market theory. To be successful at day trading you need the right tools and you need to be motivated, to work hard, and to persevere. At the beginning of my trading career, a pharmaceutical company announced some positive results for one of its drugs and its stock jumped from $1 to over $55 in just two days. As such, I wake up early, go for a run, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, and fire up my trading station before the markets open in New York. I am motivated when I sit down and start working on the list of stocks I will watch that day. This morning routine has tremendously helped my mental preparation for coming into the market. Whatever your routine is, starting the morning in a similar fashion will pay invaluable dividends. Sitting at your computer in your pajamas or underwear does not put you in the right mindset to attack the market. In this book, I use simple and easy to understand words to explain the strategies and concepts you need to know to launch yourself into day trading on the stock market. This book is definitely NOT a difficult, technical, hard to understand, complicated and complex guide to the stock market. You can monitor my screen in real time, watch me trade the strategies explained in his book, and ask questions of me and other traders in our chat room. I know you will learn much about day trading and the stock market from studying my book.
Reviews
"Scanning for stocks in play and trading unknown stocks is an approach I have resisted for my entire career but I think I have to go there now. There is also good information on other topics for real beginners such as the importance of risk management, emotional control which are important."
"In other words -- the information seemed useful, but I wasn't sure OF the author's genuine intentions (to write a great book, versus suck people in for long-term profits). Aziz offers his readers a few recommendations relative to "tools of the trade," and given this was my first experience with this sort of text -- I was caught off guard by some of what felt like self-promotion from within... Yup, as "good" as CANSLIM has (apparently) proven itself over the years, IBD not only sucked me in -- but they continue to annoy the heck out of me -- AS A PAID SUBSCRIBER -- by constantly inundating me with ads... Her "tools," by the way, are actually pretty useful... My point though, is this: Though these authors (obviously) have something to gain by increasing their follower-ship, they are also simultaneously recommending invaluable resources for ANY "trader" genuinely interested in succeeding in this business. Believe it, or not, the guy (Aziz) would be doing his readers a disservice if he didn't recommend (and/or offer) tools for success... My experiences so far: Chat Room: When I first stumbled into his chatroom, I was caught off guard. I think I was expecting some sort of forum-based venue, where newbie's like me could browse topics of interest, ask redundant questions, and receive "platinum" membership status for posting 1 billion times... And when he (Aziz) loses money on the day, it speaks volumes toward: 1) Everybody is capable of failing, and even a professional trader has risk/reward factors to consider, and 2) he's not pretending to have a "secret sauce" that will guarantee billions of dollars overnight! To be honest, I never imagined I'd put forth any sort of tangible effort into a simulator (it was "beneath me"), but now that I have the experience -- I'm soooooooo glad that I humbled myself, and took his advice! I would also argue that Aziz cuts a lot of unnecessary fluff, and focuses on providing advice that actually works; rather than just including pages of theory in an attempt to convince us of his acumen. I'm now thankful that Aziz made it a point to help guys like me consider the "big picture" ---- while holding our hand(s) along the journey ---- before my accounts were wiped away like an open bag of leaves on a gusty day!"
"Probably the best, most concise book I've read on day trading."
"The terminologies are simple and the concepts are written for easy understanding with many real life trading examples."
"Also check out Ross Cameron’s book from Warrior Trading, I love his strategy and he explains it very simply too!"
"This is the book you want to buy if you want to day trade for a living."
"The best book on stocks and especially day trading I have come across."
"Good, easy read with tons of information."
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Best Commerce

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street
“ Business Adventures remains the best business book I’ve ever read.” —Bill Gates, The Wall Street Journal What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? But Brooks features another trait that modern business writers, whether James Stewart, Malcolm Gladwell, or Michael Lewis, do not. Brooks is truly willing to give up his own views to get inside the mind of all his subjects.” — National Review “More than two decades after Warren [Buffett] lent it to me—and more than four decades after it was first published— Business Adventures remains the best business book I've ever read . Brooks’s deeper insights about business are just as relevant today as they were back then.” —Bill Gates, The Wall Street Journal.
Reviews
"His observations leave room for the reader to consider events, their connections, their parallels to today, the importance of character, and the question of morality in business. John Brooks' perspective is firmly rooted in the past, when the book was written, and provides readers opportunity for a sense of omniscience since we can consider ramifications the author himself could not be aware of, at that time."
"Great book, bringing major financial/business events to the level of understanding."
"It might be dated, but if it's still good enough for Bill Gates, it's good enough for me."
"Otherwise a good and detailed book."
"read it because i saw in some articles that it was popular."
"Good book to understand many of the business issues faced today are the same ones in the 1950s/1960s just cloaked in new garments."
"Great story like presentations of real life examples from which to learn."
"I like the history of these big business and how it came about, but I had to read it very carefully to understand what was going on."
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