World Economics

The practice of charging interest on loans has been controversial since it was first mentioned in early recorded history. Lending is a powerful economic tool, vital to the development of society but it can also lead to disaster if left unregulated. Prohibitions against excessive interest, or usury, have been found in almost all societies since antiquity. Whether loans were made in kind or in cash, creditors often were accused of beggar-thy-neighbor exploitation when their lending terms put borrowers at risk of ruin.

In this 20th-anniversary edition, Korten shares insights from his personal experience as a participant in the growing movement for a new economy. A new introduction documents the further concentration of wealth and corporate power since 1995 and explores why our institutions resolutely resist even modest reform. A new conclusion chapter outlines high-leverage opportunities for breakthrough change.

The history and evolution of land ownership is a fascinating chronicle in the history of civilization, offering unexpected insights about how various forms of democracy and capitalism developed, as well as a revealing analysis of a future where the Earth must sustain nine billion lives. Seen through the eyes of remarkable individuals - Chinese emperors; German peasants; the 17th century English surveyor William Petty, who first saw the connection between private property and free-market capitalism.

Robert Conquest has been called by Paul Johnson "our greatest living modern historian". As a new century begins, Conquest offers an illuminating examination of our past failures and a guide to where we should go next. Graced with one of the most acute gifts for political prescience since Orwell, Conquest assigns responsibility for our century’s cataclysms not to impersonal economic or social forces but to the distorted ideologies of revolutionary Marxism and National Socialism.

Today the food and agricultural markets of India and China are in motion. The history of agricultural change is littered with hunger, poverty, and failure. Will that curse pass itself on to this Asian generation? Or is there a brighter future ahead of us? Now China is rapidly becoming the wealthiest country in the world. China's water shortages and its rice market are fault lines that finger their way beneath the surface of the world economy.

We all know how identities - notably, those of nationality, class, culture, race, and religion - are at the root of global conflict, but the more elusive truth is that these identities are created by conflict in the first place. In provocative, entertaining chapters, Kwame Anthony Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with engrossing historical tales and reveals the tangled contradictions within the stories that define us.

Natural resources empower the world's most coercive men. Autocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend oil money on weapons and repression. ISIS and Congo's militias spend resource money on atrocities and ammunition. For decades resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists have forced endless crises on the West - and the ultimate source of their resource money is us, paying at the gas station and the mall.

If the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female. If the business world had a sex, it would be male. And therein lies the pickle. Women are the engine of the global economy, driving nearly 80 percent of consumer household spending in the United States alone. They hold the purse strings, and when they've got a tight grip on them as they do now, companies must be shrewder than ever to win them over.

Pasta, guita, plata, parné, duros. Da igual cómo lo llamemos, pero lo cierto es que el dinero importa ahora más que nunca. En El triunfo del dinero Niall Ferguson demuestra que la historia de las finanzas es el trasfondo de toda la Historia. ¿Cuándo pasó el dinero de metal a papel? ¿Por qué los tipos de interés suben y bajan como un yoyó? ¿Por qué la gente nunca aprende que las burbujas bursátiles siempre acaban estallando? ¿Por qué los seguros ya no son la mejor manera de protegerse contra el riesgo?

For the past 50 years, the business world has been dominated by the Milton Friedman financial capitalism economic model, which preaches that it is the "sole social responsibility of business to maximize profit for distribution to shareholders". This one-dimensional focus represents a grossly incomplete view of reality - there are many other factors businesses need to pay attention to if they are to thrive and endure.

In April 2020, the United States will embark on what has been called "the largest peacetime mobilization in American history": the decennial population census. It is part of a tradition of counting people that goes back at least three millennia and now spans the globe. In The Sum of the People, data scientist Andrew Whitby traces the remarkable history of the census, from ancient China and the Roman Empire, through revolutionary America and Nazi-occupied Europe, to the steps of the Supreme Court.

In this groundbreaking book, education expert Tony Wagner provides a powerful rationale for developing an innovation-driven economy. He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators.

A Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke was originally published in Latin in 1689. It was Locke's response to the problem of religion and government; he proposed religious toleration as the answer. For Locke, the only way a Church gains genuine converts is through persuasion, not violence.

Branko Milanovic is best known as one of the world's leading experts on global inequality. But he is also an unusually wide-ranging and penetrating commentator on subjects across economics and beyond, in politics, history, and culture. This book brings together his most searching, provocative, and entertaining articles of recent years, providing an abundance of vital insights into the evolution and dynamics of the world under capitalism.

El dinero es mucho más que un simple instrumento de intercambio: es una fuerza que ha marcado el destino de las civilizaciones e influido en el curso de la historia de la humanidad. Este fascinante relato recorre su evolución, desde las primeras formas de intercambio utilizadas por las sociedades primitivas hasta los complejos sistemas monetarios que rigen nuestro mundo moderno.

Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships. Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China.

Greider explains the dynamics of the global economy in terms of human struggle. As he makes clear, the actions of multinational corporations and finance capitalists are no longer guided by the national interests of their home countries, but by the imperatives of the free market. As the global economy's contradictions multiply and its instabilities deepen, are we doomed to relive the world depression and the rise of violent fascism experienced in the early 20th century?

The industrial age made possible by fossil fuels will surely decline as these fuels run out. In The Ecotechnic Future John Michael Greer alerts the listener to possible changes future generations may face as these dwindling fuel supplies lead first to a deindustrial age, then to a society which salvages the remnants of our current plenty, and eventually to a time in which people may learn to live in balance with the environment: an ecotechnic society.

In explaining how economic thinking is indispensable to tackling these huge problems, this book is a sure-footed guide, spanning Aristotle’s ideas about restraining consumption, Adam Smith’s thinking about the importance of moral character for sustained economic development, and Esther Duflo’s ongoing work to help the world’s poorest communities lift themselves out of poverty.

In this fully updated fourth edition, Pinder and Usherwood cover the migrant crisis and the UK's decision to leave the Union, set in the context of a body that is now involved in most areas of public policy. Discussing how the EU continues to draw in new members, they conclude by considering the future of the Union and the choices and challenges that may lie ahead.