United States Economics

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.

From the beet fields of North Dakota to the wilderness campgrounds of California to an Amazon warehouse in Texas, people who once might have kicked back to enjoy their sunset years are hard at work. Underwater on mortgages or finding that Social Security comes up short, they're hitting the road in astonishing numbers, forming a new community of nomads: RV and van-dwelling migrant laborers, or "workampers".

From Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, to Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, to the top economic thought leaders of today, The Economics Book is the essential audio reference for students and anyone else with an interest in how economies work. An easy-to-follow style, succinct quotations, and...

A bold, revisionist study of modern warfare, showing that military victory is rooted not in large armies and decisive battles, but in the full spectrum of economic, political, and social power—"vital reading for anyone grappling with America’s uncertain place in today’s global order”...

From one of the world’s leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward...

The first and definitive history of the use of food in United States law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops now in the ground and...

In this New York Times bestseller, a young and successful entrepreneur makes the case that politics has no place in business, and sets out a new vision for the future of American capitalism. There’s a new invisible force at work in our economic and cultural lives. It affects every...

Is economic—or broader—conflict, well beyond the trade and technology war that has already erupted, inevitable between the world’s two superpowers? Will their clash produce a new economic leadership vacuum akin to the 1930s, when Great Britain was unable to play its traditional leadership role and a rising United States was unwilling to step in to save the global order?

A group of children go on a field trip for a guided tour of the United States Mint in Philadelphia, where they learn how coins are made.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography and leading geopolitics expert comes an “insightful, hopeful, and endlessly fascinating” (Daily Express) book on today’s space race—including the increasingly tense power struggle between the US, China, and Russia and...

Chris Hedges examines the failure of the liberal class to confront the rise of the corporate state and the consequences of a liberalism that has become profoundly bankrupted. Hedges argues that there are five pillars of the liberal establishment and that each of these institutions has sold out the constituents it represented. In doing so, the liberal class has become irrelevant to society at large and ultimately the corporate power elite they once served.

In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream.

This is the story of silver's transformation from soft money during the 19th century to hard asset today, and how manipulations of the white metal by American president Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s and by the richest man in the world, Texas oil baron Nelson Bunker Hunt, during the 1970s altered the course of American and world history. FDR pumped up the price of silver to help jump start the US economy during the Great Depression, but this move weakened China, which was then on the silver standard, and facilitated Japan's rise to power before World War II.

In the 1980s, Phil Bellfy pondered the question: Why does Sault, Ontario, appear to be so prosperous, while the "Sault" on the American side has fallen into such a deplorable state? Could the answer be that the "American side" was little more than a "resource colony"--or to use the academic jargon of "Conflict and Change" Sociology--an "Internal Colony."

Here is the epic history of the "iron men in wooden boats" who built an industrial empire through the pursuit of whales. This absorbing history demonstrates that few things can capture the sheer danger and desperation of men on the deep sea as dramatically as whaling. This sweeping social and economic history provides rich and often fantastic accounts of the men themselves, who mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, scrimshawed, and recorded their experiences in journals and memoirs.

The second edition of the fun and fascinating guide to the main ideas of the Austrian School of economics, written in sparkling prose, especially for the non-economist. Gene Callahan shows that good economics isn't about government planning or statistical models - it's about human beings and the choices they make in the real world. This may be the most important book of its kind since Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Though written for the beginner, it has been justly praised by scholars too, including Israel Kirzner, Walter Block, and Peter Boettke.

When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day, no matter how distant from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics, far from being a "dismal science," is a positive force for the common good.

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.

This engrossing piece of undercover reportage has been a fixture on the New York Times best seller list since its publication. With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America's working-class poor.