Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in Economics

We live in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and shopping to binge eating and opioid abuse. Sugar can be as habit-forming as cocaine, researchers tell us, and social media apps are hooking our kids. But what can we do to resist temptations that insidiously and deliberately rewire our brains? Nothing, David Courtwright says, unless we understand the history and character of the global enterprises that create and cater to our bad habits.

This revelatory account of the ways silver shaped Chinese history shows how an obsession with “white metal” held China back from financial modernization. First used as currency during the Song dynasty in around 900 CE, silver gradually became central to China’s economic framework and was officially monetized in the middle of the Ming dynasty during the 16th century. However, due to the early adoption of paper money in China, silver was not formed into coins but became a cumbersome “weighing currency”....

Why are cellphone plans so much more expensive in the United States than in Europe? It seems a simple question. But the search for an answer took Thomas Philippon on an unexpected journey through some of the most complex and hotly debated issues in modern economics. Ultimately, he reached a surprising conclusion: American markets, once a model for the world, are giving up on healthy competition.

Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had limited success, and individual effort alone often invites backlash. Behavioral design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts.

In The New Road to Serfdom, British conservative Daniel Hannan argues forcefully and passionately that Americans must not allow Barack Obama to take us down the road to EU-style social democracy. Instead, he pleads with Americans not to abandon the founding principles that made their country a beacon of liberty for the rest of the world.

The bastard step-child of Milton Friedman and Anthony Bourdain, Socialism Sucks is a bar crawl through former, current, and wannabe socialist countries around the world. Free-market economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell travel to countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and Sweden to investigate the dangers and idiocies of socialism - while drinking a lot of beer.

Rejecting the old Left/Right ideologies, Rand develops a more pragmatic view capable of delivering practical solutions to this critical problem. A renewed capitalism harnessed to the task is the only way we might replace fossil fuels fast enough to mitigate severe climate risk. If we leave our dogma at the door, Rand argues, we might just build an economy that survives the century.

For most of us, the idea of life inside the golden triad of Park Avenue, Sagaponack, and St. Barths is just as exotic as the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. Luckily, Richard Kirshenbaum has a VIP pass to the Upper East Side and is willing to share the wealth - of gossip. His New York Observer column on uptown social life provides a fascinating glimpse behind the gilded curtain into the swanky restaurants and eye-popping vacation destinations where the one percent gathers.

Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 1800s turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial economy, and creatures like tyrannosaurus, brontosaurus, and triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs dominated the popular imagination, making front-page headlines and appearing in feature films.

The crisscrossing stories of Mark, a white devout Christian who sells his suburban home to move to Baltimore’s inner city, and Nicole, a Black mother determined to leave West Baltimore for the suburbs, chronicle how the region became so deeply segregated and why these fault lines persist today.

America's political and economic elite spent so long making such terrible decisions that they caused the collapse of 2008. So how can they continue down the same road? No one in charge wants to publicly acknowledge is that things are still pretty great for the people who run America. It was an accident of history, Jeff Faux explains, that after World War II the US could afford a prosperous middle class, a dominant military, and a booming economic elite at the same time. For the past three decades, all three have been competing, with the middle class always losing. Next the military.

There are only two ways that humans work together: They cooperate with one another or they coerce one another. And once you realize this fundamental fact, it will change how you see the world. In this myth-busting book, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan display their wisdom and talent for explaining complex topics; these skills have attracted a devoted audience to their weekly podcast, Words & Numbers, and made them popular speakers around the country.