eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
Looks at Paul Romer's 1980s solution of Adam Smith's new growth theory, tracing how the centuries-old puzzle was addressed throughout history and how it has helped leading corporations to address economic expansion and the value of intellectual property.
Chronicling the story of what has come to be called the new growth theory, this text helps to explain dominant first-mover firms like IBM or Microsoft, underscores the value of intellectual property, and provides essential advice to those concerned with the expansion of the economy.
For nearly ten years, readers of the Sunday Boston Globe and newspapers around America have delighted in David Warsh's column, "Economic Principals." This collection shows why. Taken as a whole, Warsh's writings amount to a vast and colorful group portrait of the personalities who dominate modem economics -- from the luminaries to unknown soldiers to eccentrics who add sparkle to the tapestry. Partly a history of controversies in economics, partly an essay on the evolution of the field, Economic Principals offers a glimpse of one of the most important stories of our time: the metamorphosis of a priestly class of moral philosophers into the mathematical mandarins of today, whose ideas are reshaping society even as they reveal its workings in ever more subtle detail. Warsh first recounts the rise of the economic paradigm, deftly treating the rediscovery of Adam Smith and the centrality of markets. He then turns to the generation of economists for whom the Nobel Prize was created in 1969, the men who forged the modern field in a few years during and after World War II. Some, like Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman, are well known to the public; others, like Trygvie Haavelmo and George Dantzig, are less quickly recognized. But all have interesting stories which Warsh brings to light. Tracing the high tech revolution to the current generation, he sketches younger scholars such as Jeffrey Sachs, Martin Feldstein, and others less popularly known, who rule the field today. Marking the most powerful applications of modern economics, Warsh explains how the ingenious "rocket scientists" of Wall Street are creating new markets and the business school wizards and leading corporate executives are reinventing the organization. Finally, in exploring the implications of modern economics, Warsh introduces us to scholars operating on the boundaries of the field, from Jane Jacobs to Noam Chomsky, and to the critics, like Donald McCloskey and Robert Reich, who have brought a bit of moral philosophy back into the economist's brave new world. At every step, Warsh maps the field with the journalist's eye for detail. Readers will see why he is considered one of the most consistently stimulating economic journalists in America today.
Tomas Sedlacek has shaken the study of economics as few ever have. Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about good and evil. In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a product of our civilization. It began within philosophy--Adam Smith himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking, broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity, from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club. Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we can do technically? Does it pay to be good? Placing the wisdom of philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way we calculate economic value.
The unlikely story of how Americans canonized Adam Smith as the patron saint of free markets Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America’s founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking about national wealth, statecraft, and moral virtue. Today, Smith is one of the most influential icons of economic thought in America. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith’s ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention. Drawing on a trove of illuminating archival materials, Liu tells the story of how an unassuming Scottish philosopher captured the American imagination and played a leading role in shaping American economic and political ideas. She shows how Smith became known as the father of political economy in the nineteenth century and was firmly associated with free trade, and how, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Chicago School of Economics transformed him into the preeminent theorist of self-interest and the miracle of free markets. Liu explores how a new generation of political theorists and public intellectuals has sought to recover Smith’s original intentions and restore his reputation as a moral philosopher. Charting the enduring fascination that this humble philosopher from Scotland has held for American readers over more than two centuries, Adam Smith’s America shows how Smith continues to be a vehicle for articulating perennial moral and political anxieties about modern capitalism.
Previous generations enjoyed the security of lifelong employment with a sole employer. Public policy and social institutions reinforced that security by producing a labor force content with mechanized repetition in manufacturing plants, and creating loyalty to one employer for life. This is no longer the case. Globalization and new technologies have triggered a shift away from capital and towards knowledge. In today's global economy, where jobs and factories can be moved quickly to low-cost locations, the competitive advantage has shifted to ideas, insights, and innovation. But it is not enough just to have new ideas. It takes entrepreneurs to actualize them by championing them to society. Entrepreneurship has emerged as the proactive response to globalization. In this book, award-winning economist David B. Audretsch identifies the positive, proactive response to globalization--the entrepreneurial society, where change is the cutting edge and routine work is inevitably outsourced. Under the managed economy of the cold war era, government policies around the world supported big business, while small business was deemed irrelevant and largely ignored. The author documents the fundamental policy revolution underway, shifting the focus to technology and knowledge-based entrepreneurship, where start-ups and small business have emerged as the driving force of innovation, jobs, competitiveness and growth. The role of the university has accordingly shifted from tangential to a highly valued seedbed for coveted new ideas with the potential to create not just breathtaking new ventures but also entire new industries. By understanding the shift from the managed economy and the emergence of the entrepreneurial society, individuals, businesses, and communities can learn how to proactively harness the opportunities afforded by globalization in this new entrepreneurial society.
The political and economic history of Latin America has been marked by great hopes and even greater disappointments. Despite abundant resources—and a history of productivity and wealth—in recent decades the region has fallen further and further behind developed nations, surpassed even by other developing economies in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. In Left Behind, Sebastian Edwards explains why the nations of Latin America have failed to share in the fruits of globalization and forcefully highlights the dangers of the recent turn to economic populism in the region. He begins by detailing the many ways Latin American governments have stifled economic development over the years through excessive regulation, currency manipulation, and thoroughgoing corruption. He then turns to the neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s, which called for the elimination of deficits, lowering of trade barriers, and privatization of inefficient public enterprises—and which, Edwards argues, held the promise of freeing Latin America from the burdens of the past. Flawed implementation, however, meant the promised gains of globalization were never felt by the mass of citizens, and growing frustration with stalled progress has led to a resurgence of populism throughout the region, exemplified by the economic policies of Venezuela’sHugo Chávez. But such measures, Edwards warns, are a recipe for disaster; instead, he argues, the way forward for Latin America lies in further market reforms, more honestly pursued and fairly implemented. As an example of the promise of that approach, Edwards points to Latin America's giant, Brazil, which under the successful administration of President Luis Inácio da Silva (Lula) has finally begun to show signs of reaching its true economic potential. As the global financial crisis has reminded us, the risks posed by failing economies extend far beyond their national borders. Putting Latin America back on a path toward sustained growth is crucial not just for the region but for the world, and Left Behind offers a clear, concise blueprint for the way forward.
“Superb . . . the best one-volume economic history of the United States in a long time and, perhaps, ever.” —Newsweek In this illuminating history, John Steele Gordon tells the extraordinary story of the world’s first economic superpower. He shows how the American economy became not only the world’s largest, but also its most dynamic and innovative. Combining its English political inheritance with its diverse, ambitious population, the nation was able to develop more wealth for more and more people as it grew. Far from a guaranteed success, America’s economy suffered near constant adversity. It survived a profound recession after the Revolution, an unwise decision by Andrew Jackson that left the country without a central bank for nearly eighty years, and the disastrous Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet, having weathered those trials, the economy became vital enough to Americanize the world in recent decades. Virtually every major development in technology in the twentieth century originated in the United States, and as the products of those technologies traveled around the globe, the result was a subtle, peaceful, and pervasive spread of American culture and perspective.
In this updated edition of a groundbreaking text, concepts such as energy return on investment (EROI) provide powerful insights into the real balance sheets that drive our “petroleum economy.” Hall and Klitgaard explore the relation between energy and the wealth explosion of the 20th century, and the interaction of internal limits to growth found in the investment process and rising inequality with the biophysical limits posed by finite energy resources. The authors focus attention on the failure of markets to recognize or efficiently allocate diminishing resources, the economic consequences of peak oil, the high cost and relatively low EROI of finding and exploiting new oil fields, including the much ballyhooed shale plays and oil sands, and whether alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar power can meet the minimum EROI requirements needed to run society as we know it. For the past 150 years, economics has been treated as a social science in which economies are modeled as a circular flow of income between producers and consumers. In this “perpetual motion” of interactions between firms that produce and households that consume, little or no accounting is given of the flow of energy and materials from the environment and back again. In the standard economic model, energy and matter are completely recycled in these transactions, and economic activity is seemingly exempt from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As we enter the second half of the age of oil, when energy supplies and the environmental impacts of energy production and consumption are likely to constrain economic growth, this exemption should be considered illusory at best. This book is an essential read for all scientists and economists who have recognized the urgent need for a more scientific, empirical, and unified approach to economics in an energy-constrained world, and serves as an ideal teaching text for the growing number of courses, such as the authors’ own, on the role of energy in society.
