Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Economic History

Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics. This work now appears in English for the first time.

An acclaimed classic detailing the economic history of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and exposing the capitalist giants who changed the world. Frederick Lewis Allen’s insightful financial history of the United States - from the late 1800s through the stock market collapse of 1929 - remains a seminal work on what brought on America’s worst economic disaster: the Great Depression.

Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss--it's time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late 17th- and early 18th-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates' notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior.

While factories across the Midwest shutter their doors, Cleveland-based manufacturer Lincoln Electric has thrived for more than a century. In addition to being profitable and technologically innovative, through good times and bad, the company has fulfilled its unique promise of "guaranteed continuous employment." Workers are viewed as assets—not liabilities.

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.

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries.

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.

Every generation has looked up from the Earth and wondered at the beauty of the moon. 50 years ago, a few Americans became the first to do the reverse - with the whole world watching through their eyes. In this short but wide-ranging book, Oliver Morton explores the history and future of humankind's relationship with the moon. A counterpoint in the sky, it has shaped our understanding of the Earth from Galileo to Apollo. Its gentle light has spoken of love and loneliness; its battered surface of death and the cosmic.

Keynes's preeminent biographer, Robert Skidelsky, brilliantly synthesizes from Keynes' career and life the aspects of his thinking that apply most directly to the world we currently live in. In so doing, Skidelsky shows that Keynes's mixture of pragmatism and realism, which distinguished his thinking from the neo-classical or Chicago school of economics that has been the dominant influence since the Thatcher-Reagan era and which made possible the raw market capitalism that created the current global financial crisis, is more pertinent and applicable than ever.

The second book in the Easy Money trilogy discusses how the global financial system evolved in the aftermath of the First World War and how that finally led to the dot-com crash in the United States, in the early 2000s. It gives an overview of how in the aftermath of the First World War, Europe was in major trouble. The book also analyzes how the United Kingdom of Great Britain, which was once the premier nation of the world, lost out to its former colony, the United States of America.

We Sell Drugs is a study grounded in the transnational geography and political economy of the coca-leaf and coca-derived commodities market stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States. More than a narrow biography of one famous plant and its equally famous derivative products - Coca-Cola and cocaine - this audiobook situates these commodities within the larger landscape of drug production and consumption. Examining efforts to control the circuits through which coca traveled, Suzanna Reiss provides a geographic and legal basis for considering the historical construction of designations of legality and illegality.

The book also argues that the legal status of any given drug is largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed it and not on the qualities of the drug itself. Drug control is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society's habits and daily lives. In a historical landscape animated by struggles over political economy, national autonomy, hegemony, and racial equality, We Sell Drugs insists on the socio-historical underpinnings of designations of legality to explore how drug control became a major weapon in asserting control of domestic and international affairs.

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.

In The Futures, Emily Lambert, senior writer at Forbes magazine, tells us the rich and dramatic history of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade, which together comprised the original, most bustling futures market in the world. She details the emergence of the futures business as a kind of meeting place for gamblers and farmers and its subsequent transformation into a sophisticated electronic market where contracts are traded at lightning-fast speeds.

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.

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.

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.

In one lifetime GDP, or gross domestic product, has ballooned from a narrow economic tool into a global article of faith. It is our universal yardstick of progress. As The Little Big Number demonstrates, this spells trouble. While economies and cultures measure their performance by it, GDP ignores central facts such as quality, costs, and purpose.

Who is the richest person in the world, ever? Does where you were born affect how much money you'll earn over a lifetime? How would we know? Why, beyond the idle curiosity, do these questions even matter? In The Haves and the Have-Nots, Branko Milanovic, one of the world's leading experts on wealth, poverty, and the gap that separates them, explains these and other mysteries of how wealth is unevenly spread throughout our world, now and through time.

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.

Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents due to unforeseen circumstances. Rather, these fluctuations result from the complex bargains made between politicians, bankers, bank shareholders, depositors, debtors, and taxpayers.