Showing titles in Economic History

From investors and monetary authorities to governments and policy makers, almost everyone had assumed inflation was dead and buried. But now people the world over are confronting a poisonous new economic reality and, with it, the prospect of vast and increasing wealth inequality. How have we arrived in this situation? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Celebrated economist Stephen D. King—one of the few to warn ahead of time about the latest inflationary upheaval—identifies key lessons from the history of inflation that policy makers chose not to heed.

Many believe that despite its destructive character, war ultimately boosts long-term economic growth. For the United States this view is often supported by appeal to the experience of the Second World War, understood as a triumph of both production and productivity. Alexander Field shows that between 1941 and 1945 manufacturing productivity actually declined, depressed by changes in the output mix and resource shocks from enemy action, including curtailed access to natural rubber and, on the Eastern Seaboard, petroleum.

Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America's founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith's ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention.

"A proposta de uma revolução copernicana na análise e interpretação da história do Brasil—esta é a marca identificadora do novo livro de Jorge Caldeira. Valendo-se de novos dados, antes de difícil acesso organizado, investiga a formação da riqueza em nosso país, desde a Colônia, para atribuir nova dimensão ao papel do mercado interno."

The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) is a political economy book by Thorstein Veblen which examines the growing corporate domination of culture and the economy. At its core, The Theory of Business Enterprise is an analysis of two intertwined but clashing motivations: that of business and that of industry. Business is the making of profits. Industry is the making of goods.

With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socioeconomic consequences as a result of living in a slave society.

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.

There is no single theory of what caused the Great Depression and never will be, Morris argues. Macreconomics is a social science, and such a massive event always takes its shape from a terrible confluence of factors. The mismanagement of the gold standard, the growth in consumer credit, the insistence on deflation, and the inability of the major European belligerents of World War I to agree on a reconstruction agenda are just a few of the shocks that pushed the world into an economic Armageddon.

"La crise. On ne parlait que de ça, mais sans savoir réellement qu'en dire, ni comment en prendre la mesure. Tout donnait l'impression d'un monde en train de s'écrouler."

First published in 1776, the book offers one of the world's first collected descriptions of what builds nations' wealth. A fundamental work in classical economics. The book touches upon such broad topics as the division of labour, productivity, and free markets.

The untold story of how America once created the most successful economy the world has ever seen—and how we can do it again. The American economy glitters on the outside, but the reality is quite different. Job opportunities and economic growth are increasingly concentrated in a few crowded...

This myth shattering book reveals the methods Nouriel Roubini used to foretell the current crisis before other economists saw it coming and shows how those methods can help us make sense of the present and prepare for the future. Renowned economist Nouriel Roubini electrified his profession and...

Crack explains why, in a de-industrializing America in which market forces ruled and entrepreneurial risk-taking was celebrated, the crack industry was a lucrative enterprise for the "Horatio Alger boys" of their place and time. These young, predominately African American entrepreneurs were profit-sharing partners in a deviant, criminal form of economic globalization. Hip Hop artists often celebrated their exploits but overwhelmingly, Americans - across racial lines - did not. Crack takes a hard look at the dark side of late 20th-century capitalism.

In The Bank War: Andrew Jackson, Nicholas Biddle, and the Fight for American Finance, historian Paul Kahan explores one of the most important and dramatic events in American political and economic history, from the idea of centralized banking and the First Bank of the United States to Jackson's triumph, the era of "free banking", and the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Relying on a range of primary and secondary source material, the book also shows how the Bank War was a manifestation of the debates that were sparked at the Constitutional Convention....

Economist and syndicated journalist Loretta Napoleoni argues that the world is undergoing rapid and unexpected great transformations fueled by what she calls rogue economics. Eagerly awaited around the world (translation rights have already been sold throughout Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia), Napoleoni's account is based on top-to-bottom primary-source interviews from banking executives in New York to Russian prostitutes to London morgue workers.

The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents - and to do so it had to build and equip a military that was all but nonexistent before the war began. Never in the nation's history did it have to create, outfit, transport, and supply huge armies, navies, and air forces on so many distant and disparate fronts.The Axis powers might have fielded better trained soldiers, better weapons, better tanks and aircraft.

He doesn’t breathe. He doesn’t bleed. He doesn’t age. But he can sue you, fire you, poison you, and replace you. THE MAN MADE OF PAPER is the terrifying true story of how a legal illusion became the most powerful “person” on Earth. Born from charters, shielded by law, and fed by profit, this artificial entity now owns your labor, your government, your identity, and your future. From the rise of the East India Company to the algorithmic firms of today, JJ walks step by step through the machine’s construction.

'Pulls off the rare feat of making you laugh, think and feel like you happened upon a top secret dossier' GEOFF NORCOTT 'MONEYMANIA is a page-turner and a must read if you wonder why the world is so screwed up.' PATRICK ALLEY, author of VERY BAD PEOPLE The anonymous author of TAXTOPIA takes us...

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company’s practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall.

From Daron Acemoglu, 2024 Nobel laureate in economics and coauthor of Why Nations Fail, an ambitious and expansive inquiry into the biggest story in global politics over the last hundred years: the rise and fall of liberal democracy With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed like we...