Showing titles in Economics

We are living through a Long Emergency: a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars, and other climate-driven disasters. In Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care that spring up in response to these times might be brought together in a single, coherent way of life?

Brought to you by Penguin. The fascinating new history of the British Aristocracy since the Second World War There are fewer than 5000 people who can genuinely claim to be members of the British aristocracy, and yet they loom large in the popular consciousness. We're fascinated by their houses...

Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

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.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2025, as chosen by Martin Wolf 'Economica is an epic story . . . an important retelling of global economic history that puts women at the centre . . . Bateman is a great storyteller . . . a rare, long-term perspective on gender equality' - Financial Times 'This...

The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems.

Despite its manifest failures, the narrative of neoliberalism retains its grip on the public mind and the policies of governments all over the world. By this narrative, less regulation and more ‘animal spirits’ capitalism produces not only greater prosperity, but more freedom for individuals in society - and is therefore morally better. But, in The Road to Freedom Stiglitz asks, whose freedom are we – should we be – thinking about? What happens when one person’s freedom comes at the expense of another’s?

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes can make us poor and unhealthy. We often make bad decisions about education, personal finance, health care, family, and the environment.

Evil Geniuses is the secret history of how, over the last half century, from even before Ronald Reagan through Donald Trump, America has sharply swerved away from its dream of progress for the many to a system of unfettered profit and self-interest for the few. As the social liberation of the 1960s finally ended in the chaos of Vietnam and Watergate, a cabal of rich industrialists, business chiefs, wide-eyed libertarians and right-wing economic radicals were waiting, determined to claw back everything they saw as rightfully theirs. 

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano, read by Paul Michael. From the international bestselling author of Gomorrah, this searing exposé of dirty money and the drug trade reveals how they are at the heart of our lives, our economy...

To modern Western society, capitalism is the air we breathe, and most people rarely think to question it, for good or for ill. But knowing what makes capitalism work - and what makes it fail - is crucial to understanding its long-term health and the vast implications for the global economy that go along with it. 

Some ideas behave like slow weather. They gather quietly, almost invisibly, in the background of ordinary life. You hear them now, and then, you sense them in passing, and you notice them taking shape in conversations that do not yet sound like conclusions. Then, one day, the sky seems to change all at once. A phrase is suddenly everywhere. A new habit feels normal overnight. A once-unthinkable opinion becomes mainstream. A slight movement becomes a crowd.

In this unique exploration of the role of risk in our society, Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past. Against the Gods chronicles the remarkable intellectual adventure that liberated humanity from oracles and soothsayers by means of the powerful tools of risk management that are available to us today.

A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia: into the lives of Hells Angels convinced they are messiahs, professional killers with the souls of artists, bohemian theatre directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, supermodel sects, post-modern dictators and oligarch revolutionaries.

State and Revolution (1917) describes the role of the state in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution. It describes the inherent nature of the state as a tool for class oppression, a creation born of one social class' desire to control all other social classes. Whether a dictatorship or a democracy, the state remains in the control of the ruling class.

More than two thousand years ago, a group of philosophers known as the Stoics analyzed life's predicaments and came up with simple solutions. The principles they identified were so profound that they formed the basis of many major modern psychotherapies. They are easy to use and powerful, and they can be applied to modern life and its problems. Often we don't pay much attention to simple principles because we don't believe simple things can be effective, but when understood and consistently practiced, simple principles can have a profound effect on our lives.

For decades, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the decade leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, booming banks, rising house prices, and cheap consumer goods propped up living standards in the rich world. Thirty years of rocketing debt and financial wizardry had masked the deep underlying fragility of finance-led growth, and in 2008 we were forced to pay up.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO BUILDING AN APP-BASED BUSINESS 'A must read for anyone who wants to start a mobile app business' Riccardo Zacconi, founder and CEO King Digital (maker of Candy Crush Saga) 'A fascinating deep dive into the world of billion-dollar apps. Essential reading for anyone trying to...

Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? Author James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not - and cannot - be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge.

Wars are expensive, both in human terms and monetary ones. Since the 1640s, in the aftermath of the British Civil Wars, the phrase 'blood and treasure' has encapsulated these costs. Blood and Treasure examines why Genghis Khan should be regarded as the father of globalisation, how New World gold and silver kept Spain poor, why some economists think of witch trials as a form of 'non-price competition', how pirate captains were pioneers of effective HR techniques, how handing out medals hurt the Luftwaffe in the Second World War and why economic theories helped to create a tragedy in Vietnam.