Power Economics

The tumultuous life and radical science of a revolutionary thinker, and the history of an idea that changed the world In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for...

“A tale of rapacious colonialism, Cold War spy games, dazzling technical innovation, big business rivalry, big power geopolitics . . . Niarchos has produced an unflinching, landmark work on the nature of extractive capitalism.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times best-selling author of...

In their groundbreaking book, Women Don’t Ask, Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever uncovered a startling fact: even women who negotiate brilliantly on behalf of others often falter when it comes to asking for themselves. Now they’ve developed the action plan that women all over the country...

Leading for survival, leading for liberation—how to uplift women of color, transform cultures of complicity, and upend white supremacy culture at work Workplace leaders: white comfort comes at the safety of women of color—and it costs lives and livelihoods. Microaggressions, structural...

In a radical break with the past, information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into its stream. Individuals and companies can no longer rely on the stocks of knowledge that theyve carefully built up and stored away. Information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into the stream.

Is America fated to decline as a great power? Can it recover? With absorbing insight and fresh perspective, foreign policy expert Andrew Imbrie provides a road map for bolstering American leadership in an era of turbulence abroad and deepening polarization at home. This is a book about choices: the tough policy trade-offs that political leaders need to make to reinvigorate American money, might, and clout. In the conventional telling, the United States is either destined for continued dominance or doomed to irreversible decline.

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning-cost-benefit analysis-to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton reveals, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

The promise of green jobs and a clean energy future has roused the masses. But as Robert Bryce makes clear in this provocative book, that vision needs a major re-vision. We cannotand will notquit using carbon-based fuels at any time in the near future for a simple reason: they provide the horsepower that we crave. The hard reality is that oil, coal, and natural gas are here to stay.

No matter how President Obama spins his proposed government policies, it amounts to the same thing: a power grab. In his new book, best-selling author Christopher Horner reveals an out-of-control administration that wants to impose mandates, raise taxes, and even subjugate our authority to international organizations such as the United Nations.

The independence of the Federal Reserve is considered a cornerstone of its identity, crucial for keeping monetary policy decisions free of electoral politics. But do we really understand what is meant by "Federal Reserve independence"? Using scores of examples from the Fed's rich history, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve shows that much common wisdom about the nation's central bank is inaccurate.

The Federal Reserve is the most powerful central bank in the world. Without its central bank, America would be subject to devastating fluctuations in currency value and chronic economic instability. To stabilize the economy, the Fed adjusts interest rates and intervenes in the economy more directly when appropriate. According to most Fed observers, it as an impartial referee exercising its independence free from political interference in order to advance the best interests of America.

America’s struggling economy needs a better philosophy than the college student’s lament,“I can’t be out of money, I still have checks in my checkbook!” We've tried a government spending spree, and we've learned it doesn't work. Now is the time to rededicate our country to the pursuit of free-market capitalism, before we’re buried under a mound of debt and unfunded entitlements. But how do we navigate between government spending that’s too big to sustain and financial institutions that are "too big to fail?"

The intensified globalization that ensued after the end of the Cold War has resulted in an unprecedented level of interconnectedness between the economies of all rising and established powers. Economic interdependence makes today's world a much more complex place than when balance of power theory was initially developed. International relations literature has overlooked the fact that great powers have been using institutions to soft balance each other's power and aggressive behavior. Restraining Great Powers places the evolution of balancing behavior in historical perspective.

Is India ready for superpower status or too far behind China to ever catch up? In his career as one of India's leading journalists and entrepreneurs, Raghav Bahl has often faced this question, and many others, from bewildered visitors.

For all the attention globalization has received in recent years, little consensus has emerged concerning how best to understand it. For some, it is the happy product of free and rational choices; for others, it is the unfortunate outcome of impersonal forces beyond our control. It is, in turn, celebrated for the opportunities it affords and criticized for the inequalities in wealth and power it generates.

In a society marked by extreme inequality of income and opportunity, why should economists care about how people feel? The truth is that feelings of well-being are critical metrics that predict future life outcomes. In this timely and innovative account, economist Carol Graham argues for the importance of hope—little studied in economics at present—as an independent dimension of well-being.

In Breaking Through Power, Ralph Nader draws from a lifetime waging - and often winning - David vs. Goliath battles against big corporations and the US government.

As the 20th century began, oil in Texas was easy to find, but the quantities were too small to attract industrial capital and production. Then, on January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher blew in. Over the next 50 years, oil transformed Texas, creating a booming economy that built cities, attracted out-of-state workers and companies, funded schools and universities, and generated wealth that raised the overall standard of living - even for blue-collar workers. No other 20th-century development had a more profound effect upon the state.

Opportunities are free, abundant, and available to all-including you. Better yet, golden opportunities are like powerful magnets that attract all the resources you need to succeed. People who started with nothing-like Dhirubhai Ambani, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Sunil Mittal and Bill Gates-all...

How community-centered, peer-to-peer, youth knowledge exchanges are evolving into a strong economic and political foundation on which to build radical public education. Following in the rich traditions in African American cooperative economic and educational thought, teacher-organizer Jay Gillen...