Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Economics

What was a Buddhist monk doing at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos lecturing the world's leaders on mindfulness? Why do many successful corporations have a chief happiness officer? What can the chemical composition of your brain tell a potential employer about you? In the past decade, governments and corporations have become increasingly interested in measuring the way people feel: the Happiness index, Gross National Happiness, well-being and positive psychology have come to dominate the way we live our lives.

The financial crisis that crested in 2008 destroyed the credibility of the economic thinking that had guided policymakers for a generation. But what will take its place? In How the Economy Works, one of our leading economists provides a jargon-free exploration of the current crisis, offering a powerful argument for how economics must change to get us out of it. Roger E. A. Farmer traces the swings between classical and Keynesian economics since the early 20th century, gracefully explaining the elements of both theories.

America faces a new culture war. It is not a war about guns, abortions, or gays; rather it is a war against the creeping changes to our entrepreneurial culture, the true bedrock of who we are as a people. The new culture war is a battle between free enterprise and social democracy. Many Americans have forgotten the evils of socialism and the predations of the American Great Society's welfare-state programs.

Consider, for example, the case of the Swedish match king. At one time, Ivar Kreuger, manufactured almost half of the world's matches, with monopolies in 16 countries. He had so much money that he was a reliable lender to many countries, becoming known as the 'saviour of Europe' for his willingness to give aid to banks crippled by World War I. At the time of the 1929 market crash, his was the most widely held stock in the world. When he killed himself three years later, the whole thing went up in flames.

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

Having awakened from its communist slumber, Russia in the roaring '90s is a place where everything and everyone is for sale and fortunes can be made and lost overnight. Into this maelstrom steps rookie Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Brzezinski. Assigned to make sense of the financial markets, he is instantly plunged into the crazed world of Russian capitalism, where corrupt Moscow bankers and American carpetbaggers preside over the greatest boom and bust in international financial history. Brzezinski knows he's in over his head; what he comes to realize is that "so is the entire country".

The recent economic crisis was a dramatic reminder that capitalism can both produce and destroy. It's a system that by its very nature encourages predators and creators, locusts and bees. But, as Geoff Mulgan argues in this compelling, imaginative, and important book, the economic crisis also presents a historic opportunity to choose a radically different future for capitalism, one that maximizes its creative power and minimizes its destructive force.

The dark side of the gig economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) and how to make it equitable for the users and workers most exploited.

Sheila Ramos’s story mirrors the lives of millions of Americans who have lost their homes since the beginning of the housing crisis in 2007. The Great American Foreclosure Story details with clarity and empathy the road that led Ramos and so many like her toward financial ruin. Alongside Ramos’s story are additional investigations documenting the systematic failures at banks, mortgage servicers, and government watchdogs that have exacerbated the country’s most severe foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression.

Questo è un libro sul surriscaldamento globale, sulla devastazione degli ecosistemi, sull’estinzione di massa ma non sull’Apocalisse. È, anzi, un libro sulla speranza. Possiamo ancora salvare il mondo, possiamo ancora cambiare il nostro destino, possiamo ancora sopravvivere all’antropocene. Dobbiamo però ripensare completamente il nostro modo di produrre e di consumare, abbandonando il paradigma della crescita economica infinita e dell’accumulazione, superando lo sfruttamento selvaggio delle risorse naturali.

P. V. Narasimha Rao (or PV, as he was popularly known) has been widely praised for enabling the economic reforms that transformed the country in 1991. From the vantage point of his long personal and professional association with the former prime minister, best-selling author Sanjaya Baru shows how PV's impact on the nation's fortunes went way beyond the economy.

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

The first major history of the Crash in over a decade, Rainbow's End tells the story of the stock market collapse in a colorful, swift-moving narrative that blends a vivid portrait of the 1920s with an intensely gripping account of Wall Street's greatest catastrophe. The book offers a vibrant picture of a world full of plungers, powerful bankers, corporate titans, millionaire brokers, and buoyantly optimistic stock market bulls.

James Howard Kunstler's critically acclaimed and best-selling The Long Emergency, originally published in 2005, quickly became a grassroots hit, going into nine printings in hardcover. Kunstler's shocking vision of our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders alike, and stimulated widespread discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels and our dysfunctional financial and government institutions.

The subprime mortgage crisis has already wreaked havoc on the lives of millions of people, and now it threatens to derail the U.S. economy and economies around the world. In this trenchant book, best-selling economist Robert Shiller reveals the origins of this crisis and puts forward bold measures to solve it.

Most global citizens are well aware of the explosive growth of the Chinese economy. Indeed, China has famously become the "workshop of the world." Yet, while China watchers have shed much light on the country's internal dynamics - China's politics, its vast social changes, and its economic development - few have focused on how this increasingly powerful nation has become more active and assertive throughout the world.

Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

Born in Italy, University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales witnessed firsthand the consequences of high inflation and unemployment - paired with rampant nepotism and cronyism - on a country’s economy. This experience profoundly shaped his professional interests, and in 1988 he arrived in the United States, armed with a political passion and the belief that economists should not merely interpret the world, but should change it for the better.

What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question can unlock the most intractable riddles of both business and culture. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing.

The Invisible Heart takes a provocative look at business, economics, and regulation through the eyes of Sam Gordon and Laura Silver, teachers at the exclusive Edwards School in Washington, D.C. Sam lives and breathes capitalism. He thinks that most government regulation is unnecessary or even harmful. He believes that success in business is a virtue. He believes that our humanity flourishes under economic freedom. Laura prefers Wordsworth to the Wall Street Journal.