Money Finance Economics

As machines become capable of doing most of the work people have performed for centuries, we are headed for a massive social reorganization. In The Five Forces That Change Everything, Steve Hoffman, venture capitalist and CEO of Founders Space, takes you on a journey to see what the most brilliant minds of our age are dreaming up.

Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in ancient Abyssinia to the advent of Starbucks. In this updated edition of the classic work, Mark Pendergrast reviews the dramatic changes in coffee culture over the past decade, from the disastrous "Coffee Crisis" that caused global prices to plummet to the rise of the Fair Trade movement and the "third-wave" of quality-obsessed coffee connoisseurs.

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world.

During the 20th century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled.

When they met in Philadelphia in 1787, everyone understood real money as Spanish gold doubloons and silver pieces of eight. The Founders hid a clause in the Constitution that allowed states to use pirate money as legal tender. Adding current technology, their secret can be used to stop the threats of inflation, federal overreach, and the Great Reset while preserving personal liberty and privacy.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help your company persevere through economic challenges and continue to grow even as your competitors stumble. This audiobook will inspire you to get your company ready before a downturn strikes, learn the right lessons from previous recessions, minimize pain while cutting costs and managing risk, foster a healthy organizational culture during anxious times, and seize the opportunity to innovate and reinvent your business.

This reissue of Thomas Sowell’s classic study of decision making, which includes a preface by the author, updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making—a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency but our very freedom.

At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, and inequality are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company to Apple. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics.

Thomas Sowell has a different idea about how economics should be taught. With this groundbreaking introduction to economics, Sowell has thrown out the graphs, statistics, and jargon. Learning economics, he believes, should be relaxing - and even enjoyable. In this edition, Basic Economics has been revised and expanded to address the new concerns of the 21st century. It's focus has become more international, including the range of economic problems faced by foreign countries around the world.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes' acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultural mores and historical circumstance.

Embark on a captivating journey into the heart of the digital frontier with "Decoding Bitcoin." In this insightful book, we demystify the revolutionary world of cryptocurrency, focusing on the pioneering force that is Bitcoin. Discover the origins of this decentralized marvel, crafted by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, and delve into the transformative power that has reshaped the landscape of finance. Unravel the complexities of blockchain technology and explore how Bitcoin has emerged as a global phenomenon, challenging traditional notions of currency, banking, and economic systems.

Simply Electrifying: The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world: Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Elon Musk, and more. In the process, it reveals for the first time the complete, thrilling, and often dangerous story of electricity's historic discovery, development, and worldwide application.

It is abundantly clear that our world is divided into two very different economies. The real one, for the average worker, is based on productivity and results. It behaves according to traditional rules of money and economics. The other doesn’t. It is the product of years of loose money, poured by central banks into a system dominated by financial titans. It is powerful enough to send stock markets higher even in the face of a global pandemic and threats of nuclear war. Nomi Prins relentlessly exposes a world fractured by policies crafted by the largest financial institutions

Stephanie Kelton's brilliant exploration of modern monetary theory (MMT) dramatically changes our understanding of how we can best deal with crucial issues ranging from poverty and inequality to creating jobs, expanding health care coverage, climate change, and building resilient infrastructure. Any ambitious proposal, however, inevitably runs into the buzz saw of how to find the money to pay for it, rooted in myths about deficits that are hobbling us as a country.

Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets - whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up or that housing prices never fall. Whether true or false, stories like these - transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media - drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that.

Listen to the incredible national best seller that is changing people's lives - and increasing their net worth. Also available:
The Millionaire Mind.

Since the end of the Second World War, the US dollar has been the global reserve currency, which has ensured American dominance of the world economy. But no longer. More than a hundred countries are developing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), digital equivalents to cash that will utterly transform how we do business at home and abroad. Urgent, clear-eyed and groundbreaking, Smart Money shows us how CBDCs are going to impact all of our futures in ways that most of us have failed to even consider.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.

Beginning in the 1950s, America entered a period of unprecedented social reform. This remarkable book demonstrates how the social programs of the 1960s and ’70s had the unintended and perverse effect of slowing and even reversing earlier progress in reducing poverty, crime, ignorance, and discrimination. Using widely understood and accepted data, it conclusively demonstrates that the amalgam of reforms from 1965 to 1970 actually made matters worse.

The Thank You Economy is about something big, something greater than any single revolutionary platform. It isn't some abstract concept or wacky business strategy—it's real, and every one of us is doing business in it every day, whether we choose to recognize it or not. It's the way we communicate, the way we buy and sell, the way businesses and consumers interact online and offline.