Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Economics

American economic policy ranks as something between bad and disgraceful. As leading economist Alan S. Blinder argues, a crucial cultural divide separates economic and political civilizations. Economists and politicians often talk - and act - at cross purposes: politicians typically seek economists' "advice" only to support preconceived notions, not to learn what economists actually know or believe. Politicians naturally worry about keeping constituents happy and winning elections. Some are devoted to an ideology.

Anyone can go online and buy a pair of pants - but the likelihood that we would do so depends to a significant degree on where we live. The presence of stores nearby, trendy and friendly neighbors, and local sales taxes play a large role in the decision-making process when it comes to buying online. Location Is (Still) Everything is for anyone who wants to understand the patterns underlying how and why we use the Internet to shop, sell, and search, including entrepreneurs, students, and investors.

A book for this moment: Both an assessment of our current political leadership and a vision of those who can bring substantive change. Who are the new progressive leaders emerging to lead the post-Trump return to democracy in America? National political correspondent and award-winning author D.D. Guttenplan's The Next Republic is an extraordinarily intense and wide-ranging account of the recent fall and incipient rise of democracy in America. The Next Republic profiles nine successful activists who are changing the course of American history right now.

When the Bush Administration invaded Iraq in 2003, it was promised that Iraqi Kurdistan would be developed into one of the most productive oil and natural gas regions in the world, and the profits would be used to win the war and rebuild the country. More than ten years later, those dreams lie in tatters. What happened to the oil wealth?

Consumers create a data trail by tapping their phones; businesses can tap into this trail to harness the power of the more than three trillion dollar mobile economy. According to Anindya Ghose, a global authority on the mobile economy, this two-way exchange can benefit both customers and businesses. In Tap, Ghose welcomes us to the mobile economy of smartphones, smarter companies, and value-seeking consumers.

Social Security law has changed! Get What's Yours has been revised and updated to reflect new regulations that take effect on April 29, 2016. Get What's Yours has proven itself to be the definitive book about how to navigate the forbidding maze of Social Security and emerge with the highest possible benefits. It is an engaging manual of tactics and strategies written by well-known financial commentators that is unobtainable elsewhere.

In The Smartest Places on Earth, van Agtmael and Bakker present a truly hopeful and inspiring investigation into the emerging sources of a new era of competitiveness for America and Europe that are coming from unlikely places - those cities and areas once known as "rustbelts" that have, from an economic perspective, been written off.

A growing chorus of prominent voices in Congress and elsewhere are calling for the expansion of our Social Security system - people who know that Social Security will not "go broke" and does not add a penny to the national debt. Social Security Works! will amplify these voices and offer a powerful antidote to the three-decade-long, billionaire-funded campaign to make us believe that this vital institution is destined to collapse. It isn't.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, one economic model emerged triumphant. Capitalism - spanning a spectrum from laissez-faire to authoritarian - shapes the market economies of all the wealthiest and fastest-growing nations. The trouble is cracking its shiny veneer. In the US, economic growth is no longer matched by economic development. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, natural resources are exploited for short-term profits, and good jobs are hard to find.

In The Leap, bestselling author Ulrich Boser shows how the emerging research on trust can improve our lives, rebuild our economy, and strengthen society. As part of this engaging and deeply reported narrative, Boser visits a radio soap opera in Rwanda that aims to restore the country’s broken trust, profiles the man who brought honesty to one of the most corrupt cities in Latin America, and explains how a college dropout managed to con his way into American high society.

In 2004, Argentina’s President, Nestor Kirchner, appointed Martín Redrado to lead their country’s Central Bank. It was the logical choice, considering that Harvard-educated and Wall Street-seasoned Redrado brought to the table an extensive knowledge of world economics. Redrado’s primary assignment as president was to provide monetary and financial stability to a country wrecked with cyclical breakups. In early 2010, Cristina Kirchner ordered the Central Bank to fund public spending and pay national debts. Martín Redrado refused.

Tipping is huge in America. Almost everyone leaves at least one tip every day. More than five million American workers depend on them, and we spend $66 billion on tips each year. And everyone recognizes that queasy feeling - in bars and restaurants, barbershops and beauty parlors, hotels and strip clubs, and everywhere else - when the check arrives or the tip jar looms. Omnipresent yet poorly understood, tipping has worked its way into almost every part of daily life.

The United States spends far more money on health care than any other country, and yet nearly 50 million Americans are uninsured at least part of the time each year. Health Care Reform Now! is written for anyone who cares enough about our health-care situation to consider serious alternatives to the current system.

Ideas about globalization have become so completely accepted that they are now embraced as the conventional. This book presents a very different position, based on a serious look at the history of globalization and a reader-friendly presentation of the economic data that dramatically refute the accepted truths advanced by so many commentators.

We are all fascinated by them - that enigmatic class of people often referred to as the rich. With all the emphasis on the rich and famous in America, it seems we would know everything about them. In reality, very few of us truly understand those who make up the very wealthiest Americans - those with liquid assets of $5 million or more. What is this new class of people, and how did they get that way?

It wasn’t surprising when the first abandoned bicycles were found along the dirt roads and farmland just across the border from Tijuana, but before long they were arriving in droves. The bikes went from curiosity, to nuisance, to phenomenon. But until they caught the eye of journalist Kimball Taylor, only a small cadre of human smugglers - coyotes - and migrants could say how or why they’d gotten there. This is the story of 7,000 bikes that made an incredible journey and one young man from Oaxaca who arrived at the border with nothing, built a small empire, and then vanished.

For the majority of young adults today, the transition to independence is a time of excitement and possibility. But nearly five million young people experience entry into adulthood as abrupt abandonment, a time of disconnection from school, work, and family. For this growing population of Americans, which includes kids aging out of foster care and those entangled with the justice system, life screeches to a halt when adulthood arrives. Abandoned is the first-ever exploration of this tale of dead ends and broken dreams.

Frederick Kaufman tackles the complex history of money, beginning with the earliest myths and wrapping up with Wall Street’s byzantine present-day doings. Along the way, he exposes a set of allegorical plots, stock characters, and stereotypical metaphors that have long been linked with money and commercial culture, from Melanesian trading rituals to the dogma of Medieval churchmen faced with global commerce, the rationales of Mercantilism and colonial expansion, and the U.S. dollar’s 1971 unpinning from gold.

Nearly 40 million people in the United States live below the poverty line - about $26,200 for a family of four. Low-income families and individuals are everywhere, from cities to rural communities. While poverty is commonly seen as a personal failure, or a deficiency of character or knowledge, it's actually the result of bad policy. Public policy has purposefully erected barriers that deny access to basic needs, creating a society where people can easily become trapped - not because we lack the resources to lift them out, but because we are actively choosing not to.

From the author of Popular Economics comes a surprisingly sunny projection of America's future job market. Forget the doomsday predictions of sour-faced nostalgists who say automation and globalization will take away your dream job. The job market is only going to get better and better, according to economist John Tamny, who argues in The End of Work that the greatest gift of prosperity, beyond freedom from painful want, is the existence of work that is interesting.