Showing titles in Economic History

With more than a million copies in print, Robert Allen's Nothing Down for the '90s has probably helped more people achieve success in real estate than any book in history. Countless numbers of his readers are now financially independent and many actual millionaires attribute their wealth to his...

Continuing his groundbreaking analysis of economic structures, Douglass North develops an analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies. Institutions exist due to the uncertainties involved in human interaction; they are the constraints devised to structure that interaction. Yet, institutions vary widely in their consequences for economic performance; some economies develop institutions that produce growth and development, while others develop institutions that produce stagnation.

Default is the riveting story of Argentina's sovereign debt drama, which reveals the obscure inner workings of sovereign debt restructuring. This detailed case study describes the intense fight over the role of the IMF in Argentina's 2005 debt restructuring and the ensuing bitter decade of litigation with holdout creditors, demonstrating that outcomes for sovereign debt are determined by a complex interplay between financial markets, governments, the IMF, the press, and the courts.

The East India Company was the largest commercial enterprise in British history, yet its roots in Tudor England are often overlooked. The Tudor revolution in commerce led ambitious merchants to search for new forms of investment, not least in risky overseas enterprises-and for these "adventurers" the most profitable bet of all would be on the Company. Through a host of stories and fascinating details, David Howarth brings to life the Company's way of doing business—from the leaky ships and petty seafarers of its embattled early days to later sweeping commercial success.

Today, a vast majority of us live under the economic system called capitalism―it touches almost every aspect of our lives, and most people alive have never known another. Yet, a cursory look at the world around us reveals that things can't stay this way forever: an economy built on infinite...

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.

All the Money in the World, a new HarperCollins book, full description to follow when available...

Arguing that rent gave birth to capital, this book shows us how rent's lost history has striking implications for capitalism's future.

A New York Times Notable Book A Financial Times Best Book of the Year "A learned, formidable and vivid story… Readers around the world will study and ponder this monumental work of history, agreeing and arguing with it, all the while affirming its generational importance, for decades to...

“A lively and compelling account . . . The cumulative effect is impressive. . . . Ahamed tells his story with an easy fluency and a high velocity.” —The New York Times Book Review “Superb . . . Ahamed thrillingly brings back to life a boom not unlike today's . . . In the process, he...

Milton Friedman on Economics: Selected Papers collects a variety of Friedman's papers on topics in economics that were originally published in the Journal of Political Economy. Opening with Friedman's 1977 Nobel Lecture, the volume spans nearly the whole of his career, incorporating papers from as early as 1948 and as late as 1990. An excellent introduction to Friedman's economic thought, Milton Friedman will be essential for anyone tracing the course of twentieth-century economics and politics.

Alex Gladstein has a lot to say about Bitcoin, human rights, financial privilege, and personal freedom. In Check Your Financial Privilege, he says it, starting with the fact that anyone born into a reserve currency like the euro, yen, or pound has financial privilege over the 89 percent of the world population born into weaker systems. As CSO of the Human Rights Foundation, Gladstein is uniquely positioned to detail the rise of Bitcoin from cypherpunk dream to the real-life Bitcoin stories happening to real people across the globe.

Economics has the capacity to offer us deep insights into some of the most formidable problems of life and offer solutions to them, too. Combining a global approach with examples from everyday life, Partha Dasgupta describes the lives of two children who live very different lives in different parts of the world: the Midwest USA and in Ethiopia. He compares the obstacles facing them and the processes that shape their lives, their families, and their futures. He shows how economics uncovers these processes, finds explanations for them, and how it forms policies and solutions.

A fascinating study of the legal underpinnings of capitalism, reasons why the system must be transformed, and actions we can take Even though capitalism has been conventionally described as an economic system, it is actually a deeply entrenched legal regime. Law provides the material for coding...

The classical era in the history of economics is an important part of the history of ideas in general, and its implications reach beyond the bounds of the economics profession. On Classical Economics is a book from which students can learn both history and economics. It is not simply a Cook’s tour of colorful personalities of the past but a study of how certain economic concepts and tools of analysis arose, and how their implications were revealed during the controversies that followed.

Early in the 21st century, a quiet revolution occurred. For the first time, the major developed economies began to invest more in intangible assets, like design, branding, R&D, or software, than in tangible assets, like machinery, buildings, and computers. For all sorts of businesses, from tech firms and pharma companies to coffee shops and gyms, the ability to deploy assets that one can neither see nor touch is increasingly the main source of long-term success.

This book - the first comprehensive transatlantic history of the rise of neoliberal politics - presents a surprising answer. Based on archival research and interviews with leading participants in the movement, Masters of the Universe traces the ascendancy of neoliberalism from the academy of interwar Europe to supremacy under Reagan and Thatcher and in the decades since. Daniel Stedman Jones argues that there was nothing inevitable about the victory of free-market politics.

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era.

Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been "privatized", or taken over by a private money cartel. Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions - including the private Federal Reserve.

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to The Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey's influential explanation of how we got rich.