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Book SynopsisHarry Mount is the author of Amo, Amas, Amat and All That, his best-selling book on Latin, and A Lust for Window Sills - A Guide to British Buildings. A journalist for many newspapers and magazines, he has been a New York correspondent and a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph. He studied classics and history at Oxford, and architectural history at the Courtauld Institute. He lives in north London.Trade ReviewA lovely book, very engaging and easy to read. There are chapters on weather and soil and stone, on the history of hedges or the making of suburbia, all of them infectious did-you-knows. Mount is a natural and enthusiastic sharer of knowledge * Evening Standard *Charming and nerdily fact-stuffed * Guardian *Lively, a delight. Mount's paragraphs explode with information . . . I love all this, want more, and am given it. The sort of book, in its temperament and in its detail, that has helped to make England English * Spectator *Mount is as perceptive as he is obsessive, and time and again he skewers with unfailing accuracy some aspect of our national character * Mail on Sunday *'Fascinating. Mount's an intelligent, funny and always interesting companion * Daily Mail *

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Book SynopsisSensational books like Freakonomics have shown how human behaviour follows predictable patterns. But how do you take these radical ideas and apply them to your business? How do you make money from them?Secrets of the Moneylab sets out what business can learn from the findings of the new economics and social psychology. It shows how you can shape desires, use incentives and reduce risks to consistently improve the bottom line.In his experimental lab at Hewlett-Packard, chief economist Kay-Yut Chen is running groundbreaking research into human behaviour. He packs Secrets of the Moneylab with insights into the invisible forces controlling the world of business.These findings, which defy conventional wisdom and traditional economic theory, will help you engineer your business for success.Trade ReviewWhat can playing games in a lab tell us about risk management or compensation plans? A lot, as it turns out * Daniel Pink, author of DRIVE and A WHOLE NEW MIND *Economics at its best * George A Akerlof, Nobel Prize-winning economist *A brilliant book...a must-read * Teck-Hua Ho, Haas School of Business, Berkeley *Any smart business needs a 'moneylab' of its own * Ori Brafman, author of Sway and Click *Of the many books on behavioral economics, none are as effective as Secrets of the Moneylab in applying science to the practical world of business. Read it and be prepared to change your approach * Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic and columnist for Scientific American *An inexpensive tool for avoiding costly mistakes * Charles R. Plott, California Institute of Technology *

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Book Synopsis''It seemed to me that the bees were working on the very same kinds of problems we are trying to solve. How can large, diverse groups work together harmoniously and productively? Perhaps we could take what the bees do so well and apply it to our institutions.''When Michael O''Malley first took up beekeeping he thought it would be a nice hobby to share with his son. But he noticed that bees not only work together to achieve a common goal but, in the process, create a remarkably productive organization, like a miniature but incredibly successful business.O''Malley also realized that bees can teach managers a lot, identifying 25 powerful insights such as: * Distribute authority: the queen bee delegates relentlessly and worker bees make daily decisions * Keep it simple: bees exchange only relevant information* Protect the future: when a lucrative vein of nectar is discovered, the entire colony doesn''t rush off to mine itBlending practical advice Trade ReviewMind-opening, insightful, and compelling * John Pepper, former CEO and chairman, Procter & Gamble *Read this remarkable book * W. Warner Burke, chair, Department of Organization and Leadership, Columbia University *An excellent operating guide for good management. * Phil Johnson, CEO, PJA Advertising + Marketing *After you read this book, I assure you that you will never think about your organization in quite the same way. * Roxanne Quimby, co-founder of Burt's Bees *

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Book SynopsisNow in paperback - Start It Up by Luke Johnson, 2012''s most inspiring guide to running your own business.Running your own business is nowhere near as tough as you might think. So what are you waiting for?Luke Johnson is Britain''s busiest tycoon, with a personal fortune estimated at 120 million. From Pizza Express and Channel 4 to his incisive Financial Times column, Johnson has spent two decades on the business frontline.In Start It Up, Johnson sets out to inspire - and guide - every budding entrepreneur. He tackles the issues that really matter: finding the right idea, sourcing funds, and getting the best from the people you meet on the way - chiefly yourself.''A must-read for inspiring entrepreneurs, probably the best book available on the subject'' John McLaren, Management Today''Part rant, part outpouring of useful knowledge gleaned from 20 very successful years in business. There is a great deal here that is Trade ReviewJust buy this book. A must-read for inspiring entrepreneurs, probably the best book available on the subject. -- John McLaren * Management Today *A rare achievement: a business book that is both well-written and useful * Economist *Part rant, part outpouring of useful knowledge gleaned from 20 very successful years in business. There is a great deal here that is good. -- Richard Reed, co-founder of Innocent * Financial Times *Nine out of ten How-To books are a bore. This is the one out of ten. It's easy to read, with original ideas and useful advice for wannabe tycoons -- Jeff Randall, Sky News presenter and Daily Telegraph columnistBrilliant. It's all here: the triumphs and disasters, the iron law of the business cycle and the timeless wisdom of those who've gone before him -- Brent Hoberman, founder of lastminute.comIndependent, unorthodox, even bloody-minded - Johnson can be all of these and it's what makes him worth reading -- Peter Bazalgette, Chairman, Endemol UKLuke Johnson knows a lot about an amazing range of business subjects and has thoughtful views about the controversial ones * Investors Chronicle *A really refreshing guide by somebody who has made a fair amount of money following his own advice. An excellent book... Highly recommended * Irish Independent *Very few people have had more impact than Luke Johnson -- Peter Harden, founder, Harden’s Restaurant GuidesAn engaging and useful read * Financial News *Provocative and worth reading -- Michael Spencer, founder and Chief Executive, ICAP

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Book SynopsisKate Kelly, acclaimed journalist and author of Street Fighters, investigates the world of commodities tradersWhen most of us think of the drama of global finance, we think of stocks and bonds. But commodities? Crude oil and soya beans? Copper and wheat? What could be more boring?That''s exactly what the elite commodity traders want us to think. They don''t seek the spotlight. They don''t want to be as famous as Warren Buffett. Their astonishing wealth was created in obscurity, because they dwell in private companies or deep within large banks and corporations.But if the individuals in the commodities boom have gone unnoticed, their impact has not. Prices of raw materials have exploded. Are the big traders jacking up the cost of petrol, food, and essentials bought by people around the world? How did such immense power end up in the hands of a few?In this riveting book, Kate Kelly takes us inside the inner circle that affects so many thingTrade ReviewGripping ... even more shocking than you think ... Kelly is a master of storytelling * Independent on Sunday *Engaging * Financial Times *Outsiders know surprisingly little about this world, and Kate Kelly ... has done a good job of shedding light on some of the personalities who dominate it * The Economist *

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Book SynopsisIn The Icarus Deception, Seth Godin''s most inspiring book, he challenges readers to find the courage to treat their work as a form of artEveryone knows that Icarus''s father made him wings and told him not to fly too close to the sun; he ignored the warning and plunged to his doom. The lesson: Play it safe. Listen to the experts. It was the perfect propaganda for the industrial economy. What boss wouldn''t want employees to believe that obedience and conformity are the keys to success?But we tend to forget that Icarus was also warned not to fly too low, because seawater would ruin the lift in his wings. Flying too low is even more dangerous than flying too high, because it feels deceptively safe.The safety zone has moved. Conformity no longer leads to comfort. But the good news is that creativity is scarce and more valuable than ever. So is choosing to do something unpredictable and brave: Make art. Being an artist isn''t a genetic disposition Trade ReviewIf Seth Godin didn't exist, we'd need to invent him * Fast Company *Seth Godin is a demigod on the web, a bestselling author, highly sought-after lecturer, successful entrepreneur, respected pundit and high-profile blogger * Forbes *A wonderful manifesto in the author's characteristic style - pathological honesty, ruthless scepticism and generous intellect. The Icarus Deception turns society upside-down in order to awaken the reader's rebellious spirit and encourage him to create * Management Today *

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Book SynopsisAn intimate look at the legendary British designer behind Apple''s most iconic products - including the Apple WatchWith the death of Steve Jobs in 2011, JONY IVE has become the most important person at Apple. Some would argue he always was.Steve Jobs discovered Ive in 1997, when he found the scruffy British designer toiling away in a studio surrounded by hundreds of sketches and prototypes. Jobs instantly realised he had found a talent who could reverse Apple''s decline, and become his ''spiritual partner''.Their collaboration produced iconic products including the iMac, iPod, iPad and iPhone. Designs that overturned entire industries and created the world''s most powerful brand.Little has been known about this shy, softly-spoken designer. Until now. Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple''s Greatest Products tells the riveting story of a creative genius, from his early interest in industrial design to his meteoric rise, as well as the princiTrade ReviewSheds new light on technology's most-watched design team. Rare glimpses into working practices at Apple * The Observer *Kahney does an excellent job. A real pleasure * GQ *A look at the design philosophy that has made addicts of millions of us. One for the design geek/Apple freak in your life * Harper's Bazaar *

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Book SynopsisBo Burlingham, the bestselling author of Small Giants, returns with Finish Big, an original guide to exiting your company successfully and gracefully.Finish Big is for all those founder/leaders who want to do more than take...it is for the ones who want to leave something behind. Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why and Leaders Eat LastPractical and profound, fast-moving and thought-provoking, masterful in its clear prose and compelling stories- Bo Burlingham has once again done a tremendous service in deploying his craft. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and co-author of Built to Last and Great by ChoiceNo two exit experiences are exactly alike. Some people wind up happy with the process and satisfied with the way it turned out, while others look back on it as a nightmare. The question I hope to answer in this book is why. What did the people with ''good'' exits do differently froTrade ReviewFinish Big is for all those founder/leaders who want to do more than take...it is for the ones who want to leave something behind. -- Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why and Leaders Eat LastI love Burlingham's quest to understand why some entrepreneurs create a meaningful life after exiting their businesses, while others suffer and wander without purpose. Practical and profound, fast-moving and thought-provoking, masterful in its clear prose and compelling stories - Bo Burlingham has once again done a tremendous service in deploying his craft. -- Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and co-author of Built to Last and Great by ChoiceGiven the plethora of management books, the idea of something truly new is nutty. But Finish Big sprouts from untilled soil, offering invaluable tales of business owners wrestling with life's thorniest issues. Remarkable research, remarkable prose, remarkable book. -- Tom Peters, coauthor of In Search of ExcellenceThis book is a gift, a must read for anyone who has even an inkling that it might be helpful. It will reward you with both peace of mind and a significant ROI. -- Seth Godin, entrepreneur and author

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Book SynopsisWhat the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast is a powerful book about high productivity from bestselling author Laura Vanderkam.We''re all busy. But we all waste time. What are the secrets of using every hour productively? How do the most successful people spend their time? In this brilliant accessible book, Laura Vanderkam inspires you to rethink your morning routine and jump-start your day. If you use your mornings wisely, you can build habits that will lead to a happier, more productive life. She also helps you to rethink your weekends. She explains why doing nothing can be more exhausting than doing something, how to balance work and play, and why Sunday nights are crucial. Finally she challenges you to make the most of your time at the office. Focusing on matching your to-do list to your natural body clock, she shows you how to maximize your productivity so you can accomplish more in less time. By blending stories of fascina

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Book Synopsis''Part of a veritable golden age for smart books on the current state of the global economy'' Politico''A fast-paced and apocalyptic look at the financial future'' Financial TimesFinancial expert, investment advisor and New York Times bestselling author James Rickards explores how the international monetary system has collapsed three times in the past and warns that another collapse is rapidly approaching and why, this time, nothing less than the institution of money itself is at risk.------------------------------------------------------------------------The US dollar has been the global reserve currency since the end of the Second World War. If the dollar fails the entire international monetary system will fail with it. But Washington is gridlocked, and America''s biggest competitors - China, Russia, and the Middle East - are doing everything possible to end US monetary hegemony.In The Death Of Money James Rickards oTrade ReviewA fast-paced and apocalyptic look at the financial future, taking in financiers' greed, central banks' incompetence and impending Armageddon for the dollar ... Rickards may be right that 'the system is going wobbly' * Financial Times *The Death of Money is making it a veritable golden age for smart books on the current state of the global economy * Politico *The Death of Money makes a valuable contribution to our economic discourse * Forbes *A terrifically interesting and useful book...fascinating -- Kenneth W. Dam, former deputy secretary of the Treasury and adviser to three presidentsThe Death of Money contains very big, provocative ideas clearly explained and delivered...Rickards's insight enables him to connect the dots in a way that few others can -- John Hathaway, portfolio manager, Tocqueville Gold FundThe Death of Money is an important new book for those who worry about the future of our country -- R. Christopher Whalen, noted bank analyst; author of InflatedThe Death of Money is an engrossing account of the massive stresses accumulating in the global financial system. Any serious student of financial crises and their root causes needs to read this book -- John H. Makin, Ph.D., resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute; former chief economist, Caxton AssociatesA great book makes you think differently about the world - and this one does just that -- Don Young, twenty-five-time Institutional Investor All-Star Analyst

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Book SynopsisIn 2001 an international panel of climate scientists declared that the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last two millennia. How scientists reached that conclusion is the story Weart tells in The Discovery of Global Warming. The award-winning book is now revised and expanded to reflect the latest science.Trade ReviewCharting the evolution and confirmation of the theory [of global warming], Weart dissects the interwoven threads of research and reveals the political and societal subtexts that colored scientists’ views and the public reception their work received. -- Andrew C. Revkin * New York Times Book Review *Table of Contents* Preface * How Could Climate Change? * Discovering a Possibility * A Delicate System * A Visible Threat * Public Warnings * The Erratic Beast * Breaking into Politics * Speaking Science to Power * The Work Completed...and Begun * Reflections * Milestones * Notes * Index

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Book SynopsisArgues that state policies that created conditions conducive to financialization allowed the state to avoid a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas that confronted policymakers as postwar prosperity stalled beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. This book also focuses on deregulation of financial markets during the 1970s and 1980s.Trade ReviewWith Capitalizing on Crisis, we finally have a persuasive account of the roots of the 2007-2008 financial disaster. While most studies focus on the proximate causes, Krippner makes sense of the dramatic expansion over decades of the financial sector of the U.S. economy. She explains brilliantly how and why government officials encouraged financialization as a way to solve the most vexing problems of our political economy. -- Fred Block, University of California at DavisIn this wonderfully researched and tightly argued book, Greta Krippner shows how the expansion of the financial sector in the United States not only helped delay the 'day of reckoning' for spendthrift American households, corporations and government, but also conveniently depoliticized the distributional conflicts that had plagued the nation since the 1960s. Nobody expected these providential outcomes, not even the policymakers who had opened up this space for finance in a rather ad hoc fashion, through repeated efforts to fend off crisis. By the end of the process however, the markets were in charge, and government officials were only too happy --and relieved-- to follow their lead. Capitalizing on Crisis is an absolute must read for anyone who cares to understand the origins of our current financial quagmire and the distributional dilemmas that policymakers inevitably and uncomfortably face. -- Marion Fourcade, University of California, BerkeleyAmidst the tsunami of books coming out in the wake of the recent financial crisis, Krippner's work stands out for its unusual approach. Rather than addressing the venality and incompetence of those with responsibility for regulating the economy, Krippner tells the history of the growth of financialization from the perspective of the regulators...In her account, the regulators were searching for ad hoc responses to what were deeper, perhaps even intractable problems. The high point of the book is her magnificent analysis of the erosion of Regulation Q, in which regulators cracked open the door to financial deregulation, unleashing the massive deregulation that came later. -- M. Perelman * Choice *

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Book SynopsisAt a time when science is seen as an engine of economic growth, Paula Stephan brings a keen understanding of the cost–benefit calculations made by individuals and institutions as they compete for resources and reputation in scientific fields. She highlights especially the growing gap between the biomedical sciences and physics/engineering.Trade ReviewHow Economics Shapes Science should be required reading for all scientists and students of science, who are increasingly called upon to adopt the language and logic of economics and engage in policy discussions. Paula Stephan (an economist at Georgia State University) makes her case in simple, easy-to-follow language, using timely examples… The book starts by summarizing the case that private industry alone will not invest in the socially optimal level of research, which will ultimately decrease the rate of innovation and lower economic growth. The logic is worth repeating at a time when there are calls for limiting government support for research and researchers face pressures to engage in lower-risk projects. Stephan convincingly argues that monetary incentives increasingly determine the behavior of researchers at the expense of scientists’ desire to participate in the joy of solving problems, receive recognition, and obtain a good reputation. -- Maryann Feldman * Science *[An] original and engaging book… Informed, authoritative and thoughtful, Stephan’s book will be an invaluable resource for scientists, policymakers and all those working to improve the ‘science of science and innovation policy’ in the U.S., Europe and further afield. -- James Wilsdon * Times Higher Education *A big biomedical lab spends 18 cents a day to keep one lab mouse, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars for animals each year. Economist Paula Stephan takes an exhaustive look at how publicly funded science pays such bills, and how this affects research, researchers and the economy. She argues that expanding universities and stagnant budgets have made funders and scientists more risk-averse, and stunted the development of young investigators. * Nature *[A] rich, data-driven, and nuanced discussion of science and economics… [A] excellent book. Stephan addresses how R&D spending is often driven by politics—either geo-politics (the Cold War) or personal politics (biomedical research), and how jobs in the sciences respond accordingly (and how competitive options for smart people have affected job uptake). She also talks about how difficult science and research spending is to measure from an economic efficiency perspective—essentially, because payback on investments can be quite indirect and take decades, choosing between investment options is fraught with the chance for mistakes. And the emerging trend showing that higher-impact science comes from funding entities that evaluate people instead of projects and provides longer-term funding is also covered… This book will have a special place on my shelf, as one of a handful of books that demand to be revisited, referenced, and re-read because there is so much clear and important information to be had, and some definite criticisms of the current system policy-makers need to consider. -- Kent Anderson * Scholarly Kitchen *Illuminating and accessible… Using the ‘tool bag’ economics provides for ‘analyzing the relationships between incentives and costs,’ [Stephan] penetrates the financial structure of university-based science, explaining the motivation and behavior of everyone from august university presidents and professors to powerless and impecunious graduate students and postdocs. It’s a remarkably revealing approach… The short space at my disposal allows me to present just a hint of the penetrating discoveries waiting in this book… [A] rigorous and clear-eyed examination of the money trail. She conveys her findings in clear, comprehensible prose. If you want to understand what is really happening in American academic science today, here’s my advice: Read this enlightening book. -- Beryl Lieff Benderly * Science Careers *This volume provides a useful summary of how economics shapes science that is accessible to students and researchers in a variety of disciplines and to policy makers. -- R. B. Emmett * Choice *Paula Stephan is the undisputed authority on the economics of science and her book is a delight. Laced with dozens of revealing anecdotes about everything from transgenic mice to the competition for high h-indexes and the Nobel Prize, How Economics Shapes Science reveals the economic logic behind the workings of modern science and makes a compelling case for using incentives to rationalize our use of scarce resources. -- Charles Clotfelter, Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics and Law, Duke UniversityPaula Stephan is one of the world’s leading scholars of the economics of science. Her comprehensive analysis—as readable as it is timely—is a must read for anyone worrying about the future of science policy or the economics of universities. -- Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics, Cornell UniversityThis is a marvelous book—lucid, cogent, and lively, full of fascinating anecdotes and news about what university science costs, who pays for it, and who benefits. Paula Stephan saw science as an economic enterprise long before other economists did, and she’s written what will be the definitive book for years to come. -- Richard Freeman, Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics, Harvard UniversityThis fascinating book makes senior scientists like me keenly aware of the travails that await our students and post-docs as they pursue the many years of scientific training that lead to a very uncertain career. As Paula Stephan shows, from the point of view of income and stability, our students might be better off getting MBAs. All senior scientists should read this book. It gives a sobering dose of reality to our love of science. -- Kathleen Giacomini, Professor of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California, San FranciscoHow do economic considerations shape what scientists do? How do scientific developments affect economic progress? In a world facing challenges like global warming and threats of economic stagnation, these are critical questions. Paula Stephan’s treatment is masterful—and readable outside the ranks of economists, too. -- Richard R. Nelson, George Blumenthal Professor Emeritus of International and Public Affairs, Business, and Law, Columbia UniversityScientific research and professional training are now inextricably linked. At the same time the perceived costs and benefits of science have skyrocketed, with governments and universities setting economic incentives in the race for productivity and prestige. Stephan’s groundbreaking economic analysis shows the complex results of these policies. -- Mara Prentiss, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, Harvard UniversityWe in Europe often invoke the U.S. science system as the frontier for us, but most of us don’t know in detail how it actually operates. With its wealth of facts and stories, and its rich multidisciplinary perspective, Paula Stephan’s book can teach us. It will help scientists understand their environment and help policy makers see what levers they have (or do not have) to direct science. No one other than Paula Stephan could write with such insight and depth. -- Reinhilde Veugelers, Professor of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation, Katholieke Universiteit LeuvenAn excellent introductory coverage of the nature of the scientific process as constructed through an economist’s framework…There is a rich smorgasbord of well-structured interrogation of each major issue that bedevils or stimulates the life of researchers in the sciences…Quite pertinent to current debate. -- Glenn Withers * Economic Record *

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Book SynopsisWhat exactly is neoliberalism, and where did it come from? This volume attempts to answer these questions by exploring neoliberalism’s origins and growth as a political and economic movement. Now with a new preface.Trade ReviewThe volume’s contributors make heavy use of original archival materials and make good on the editors’ promise to expose the complexity, nuance and plurality of neoliberal thought—a belief system that has constructed and re-constructed itself and the world… The Road from Mont Pèlerin is indispensable for anyone wishing to gain an understanding of neoliberalism, whether as an end in itself or as a means for constructing alternative, non-neoliberal futures. -- Daniel Kinderman * Critical Policy Studies *The Road from Mont Pèlerin reminds us that social movements succeed by drawing in many others who undertake the work that actually drives the movement forward. The book is full of stories of those individuals and related organizations that formed strategies, carried out the logistics and legwork, and brought legislators and others into contact with [Mont Pèlerin Society] ideas. In other words, if you work on post-war history of economics, there is almost no reason not to read this book. -- Ross B. Emmett * Journal of the History of Economic Thought *The Road from Mont Pèlerin uncovers and lays bare the origins of one of the most important political phenomena of our time—the development of the neoliberal discourse coalition that has come to shape the modern political economy. -- Frank Fischer, Rutgers UniversityThis excellent book contributes significantly to our understanding of the origins of neoliberalism and its transformation into political discourse and policy. -- Steven Lukes, New York UniversityA fascinating and important book, one that speaks in radical, perceptive, and provocative ways to contemporary debates around neoliberalism. -- Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia

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Book SynopsisIn Consumption Behavior and the Effects of Government Fiscal Policies, Randall Mariger explores how people make decisions about how much to consume and save over their lifetimes. An understanding of these issues illuminates not only individual behavior but important properties of the macro economy as well. The most popular framework for analyzing consumption has been the life-cycle theory. Mariger tests two fundamental, and controversial, assumptions underlying the theorythat there are no planned bequests and that human capital is marketable. To do this, he fits a structural consumption model that incorporates endogenous liquidity constraints (non-marketability of human capital), but no planned bequests, to data on a cross-section of U. S. families. This estimated model, in conjunction with estimates of alternative models, enables him to make inferences about the respective effects of liquidity constraints and social security wealth on consumption. This latter effect yields indirect evidence concerning planned bequests. Mariger also presents direct evidence concerning bequest behavior. Among his findings are that the model fits the data very well in spite of its tight theoretical structure; that liquidity constraints are prevalent and have important effects on consumption behavior; that planned bequests appear not to be common among families in the lower 99.1% of the wealth distribution; and that families in the upper 0.9% of the wealth distribution appear to plan substantial bequests. Mariger devotes the latter part of his book to studying the implications of his estimated consumption model for the effects of government fiscal policies. More specifically, he simulates the model to infer the effects of government tax/debt policy, as well as those of the social security system, on aggregate savings.Trade ReviewAn excellent book. While there have been other empirical studies of liquidity constraints, Mariger’s approach is unique. I particularly like the way he traces out the macroeconomic implications of his micro findings. -- Laurence J. Kotlikoff

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA meticulously comprehensive, frequently persuasive accounting of [universal basic income’s] superiority by measures economic, philosophical, and pragmatic. -- Nathan Heller * New Yorker *Basic Income provides a rigorous analysis of the many arguments for and against a universal basic income, offering a road map for future researchers who wish to examine policy alternatives. -- Marc Levinson * Wall Street Journal *Although their goal is utopian, Van Parijs and Vanderborght aim to infuse it with economic and political realism…What Van Parijs and Vanderborght bring to this topic is a deep understanding, an enduring passion, and a disarming optimism. -- Steven Pearlstein * Washington Post *Van Parijs and Vanderborght go deep, focusing exclusively on a universal guaranteed income and examining a range of philosophical, practical and political arguments for and against it. In considered, often enlightening, prose, they delve into John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Amartya Sen. They look at a number of alternative schemes; they discuss various objections to guaranteed income programs, including those over cost, free riding, and the possibility of diminished incentives. -- Akash Kapur * Financial Times *Van Parijs and Vanderborght have done the discussion of a universal basic income a great service. They have set forth, clearly and comprehensively, what is probably the best case to be made today for this form of economic and social policy. -- Benjamin M. Friedman * New York Review of Books *What matters—what will lift the heart of every reader of Basic Income—is that Van Parijs and Vanderborght have enlisted the rigor and scruple of first-rate social science in the service of a generous social vision that is at least as old as Saint Ambrose and as up-to-date as Pope Francis. Our sensible and humane descendants—they are bound to be sensible or humane, since humanity would otherwise have long since succumbed to nuclear or environmental catastrophe—will doubtless wonder, with the easy impatience of posterity, what we were waiting for. They may, in fairness to us, decide that we were waiting for books like this. -- George Scialabba * Commonweal *Provid[es] argument after argument as to why [basic income’s] introduction would be ‘economically clever’ and why it is the next logical step to take in a long history of social policies aimed at reducing poverty and inequality. Their proposals are not only clear but also extremely pragmatic…The value of this book is that, more comprehensively than any other study yet, it explains why an obligation-free income for all would be so beneficial, and it also charts how this could be incrementally attained. -- Danny Dorling * Times Higher Education *The book is likely to become a primer on core debates, such as the scheme’s overall feasibility, but its most striking aspect is how the authors make their argument. They justify a basic income not as a tool with which to address inequality, but rather as an ‘instrument of freedom.’ -- Aaron Reeves * Nature *Will be essential for the ongoing debate. -- Ben Collyer * New Scientist *The West is awash these days in populist movements that cloak repressive and inegalitarian agendas. In these troubled times, an unconditional basic income is a beacon: a workable proposal that furthers freedom and equality for all. In this book, two modern pioneers of the UBI make the moral and practical case for endowing everyone with the resources to shape a life of their own choosing. -- Anne Alstott, Yale UniversityThis is a major contribution to the effort to design a realistic program for achieving social justice in the twenty-first century. -- Bruce Ackerman, Yale UniversityThe idea of a universal basic income has been around for quite a while, but has the time for it finally arrived? This superb, closely argued book makes the case for the affirmative answer. While the authors do not hide their sympathies, they approach their subject with a philosopher’s care for ethical justification, a historian’s focus on the antecedents, an economist’s concern for incentives, an empiricist’s respect for evidence, and a practitioner’s attention to feasibility. -- Dani Rodrik, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard UniversityIn this important introduction to the ‘basic income’ initiative—an economic proposal that may radically transform the nature of the modern economy and society—two leading social scientists examine the ethics and economics of the proposed move. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the problems of deprivation and unfreedom that survive even in the richest countries in the world. The remedial reasoning presented by Van Parijs and Vanderborght is powerful as well as highly engaging—a brilliant book. -- Amartya Sen, Harvard UniversityThe concrete proposal for reducing economic inequality makes it a good complement to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. This work, while certainly controversial to some readers, is a sober and well-argued study of the basic income concept. -- Lawrence Maxted * Library Journal *Van Parijs and Vanderborght…make a sturdy ethical and philosophical argument for the provision of universal basic income… This thorough, thoughtful study will undoubtedly become a much-cited landmark work on its subject. * Publishers Weekly *At once an intellectual paean to the ideal of a universal basic income, an attempt to win over those who might be skeptical or undecided, and a plea for pragmatism to its supporters. -- David Hearne * Economic Record *

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThe book serves as a fantastic introduction to Piketty’s main argument in Capital [in the Twenty-First Century], and to some of the main criticisms, including doubt that his key equation—r > g, showing that returns on capital grow faster than the economy—will hold true in the long run. It also contains thoughtful interventions in debates about the political economy of inequality. -- Aaron Reeves * Nature *[Boushey, DeLong, and Steinbaum] have curated an impressive set of essays responding to Piketty’s work…Among them are deep dives into the assumptions underlying Piketty’s predictions, historical accounts of the role of slavery and gender in capitalist systems, and considerations of the relationship between concentrated wealth and political power. The essays put Piketty’s arguments into a broad historical and intellectual context and highlight some noteworthy omissions that call into question his book’s most dire predictions. At the end of the volume, Piketty himself weighs in. The result is an intellectual excursion of a kind rarely offered by modern economics. -- Melissa S. Kearney * Foreign Affairs *The essays in After Piketty are impressively diverse, not only in their subject matter but also in the way they relate to Piketty’s original text. Several launch straightforward critiques of his work—both of what he has done and what he has failed to do—while others present complementary ideas that aim to enrich his arguments. -- Matt Mazewski * Commonweal *The topics discussed in the book affect all citizens. High inequality should concern everyone because it is a moral, social and political issue. -- Asad Abbasi * LSE Review of Books *The book, edited by economists Heather Boushey, J. Bradford Delong and Marshall Steinbaum, is more interesting than the original. It benefits from having 21 essays on different inequality-­related topics. As Piketty says in his gracious response, included at the end of this 660-­page volume, the many authors bring a welcome breadth of expertise…Piketty’s commentators raise more questions than they answer, but they are important questions about a significant social challenge. -- Edward Hadas * Breakingviews *Unusually for such a large and varied collection, almost all the papers are worth reading. They repeat themselves rarely; they examine multiple different perspectives; and most of them are well and conservatively argued…[Piketty’s concluding essay] is written with great attention to criticism and humility about his conclusions. In it, Piketty insists that [Capital in the Twenty-First Century’s] purpose was to start a conversation. By the evidence of his concluding essay, and the book in general, that conversation is well underway. -- Mihir S. Sharma * Business Standard *Piketty’s work did what decades of rising disparities couldn’t do: it reminded macroeconomists that inequality matters. More starkly, it laid bare just how ill-equipped our existing frameworks are for understanding, predicting, and changing inequality. This extraordinary collection shows that our most nimble social scientists are responding to the challenge, collecting ideas about capital, technology, power, gender, race, and privilege that might help inform a broader understanding. -- Justin Wolfers, University of MichiganThomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century forcibly entered the public imagination in 2014, but the book’s impact on academic thinking and research is only just starting to be felt. The essays in After Piketty offer new findings and admirably lay out an agenda that will influence future research on inequality, opportunity, and measurement for years to come. -- Miles Corak, University of OttawaHeather Boushey, Brad DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum have convened and shaped an ambitious and refreshingly frank conversation about Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. This extraordinary gathering of two dozen authors—working across disciplinary boundaries—interrogates Piketty’s core claims about the causes, correlates, characteristics, and consequences of high and rising levels of income and wealth inequality in the West. The gathered authors celebrate and hone Capital’s far-reaching contributions; they also tackle substantial weaknesses and assess omissions. Readers unfamiliar with Capital will find an accessible synthesis, graduates of the original book will emerge with a more nuanced understanding, and inequality scholars—newcomers and veterans—will revise their research agendas. -- Janet C. Gornick, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, City University of New York

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewNo one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights than Samuel Moyn…In Not Enough, Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse…This book, like the author’s last, is the rare academic study that is sure to provoke a wider discussion about important political and economic questions. -- Adam Kirsch * Wall Street Journal *[Moyn] effectively provincializes an ineffectual and obsolete Western model of human rights…Moyn’s book is part of a renewed attention to the political and intellectual ferment of decolonialisation, and joins a sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana…[The book’s] critical—and self-critical—energy is consistently bracing, and is surely a condition of restoring the pursuit of equality and justice as an indispensable modern tradition. -- Pankaj Mishra * London Review of Books *No one has done more than Samuel Moyn to unsettle the story of human rights as a triumphal march of upgrades from Magna Carta to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…Not Enough asks us to rethink what human rights might accomplish if they were deployed not simply to set limits on state power, but to harness that power for the purpose of fostering economic equality. -- Benjamin Nathans * New York Review of Books *[S]peaks to the urgency of our contemporary politics… In Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice—above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights—need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal… Best read as a companion history to Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Not Enough explains how—across the fields of development, moral advocacy, philosophy, and governmental policy—the ideal of sufficiency gradually supplanted what was once an ideal of equality for all… The apparent paradox exposed in Not Enough is what makes the book another tour de force: what are we to make of the fact that our age of human rights was coterminous with the age of neoliberalism? …Moyn implores us to consider: what is the value content of justice in our age of human rights, and how do we try to rectify inequality, if the social and economic rights enumerated in international human rights law put no ceiling on wealth creation? -- Patrick William Kelly * Los Angeles Review of Books *Why do the grimmest obscenities of economic inequality barely register on the human rights agenda? What is the historical explanation for this? Moyn’s book offers fresh and nuanced insight into these questions, surveying a dizzying array of protagonists, from eighteenth-century Jacobin revolutionaries to late twentieth-century Princeton postgrads. -- Adam Etinson * Times Literary Supplement *Not Enough makes it impossible to conceive of the current status of human rights in the same way again…[It] leads the critical and ethical heart to beat much faster. -- Mark Goodale * Boston Review *An engaging and illuminating intellectual history of the rivalry between those focused on rights and those who have insisted on a more substantively egalitarian approach to emancipation…Intended to help everyone, from policymakers to political theorists, avoid the mistakes of the past in order to shape the future more fairly. * Commonweal *Samuel Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness. If we don’t address the growing global phenomenon of economic inequality, the human rights movement as we know it cannot survive or flourish. -- George SorosPromises to cement [Moyn’s] reputation as one of the most trenchant critics of ‘liberal humanitarian’ foreign policy. -- Jon Baskin * Chronicle of Higher Education *[A] marvelous book. -- Nils Gilman * Los Angeles Review of Books *Human rights do not seem to be enough in our era of unshared affluence. Samuel Moyn’s fascinating and highly timely book explores how we ended up here despite the higher hopes for humanity pursued by multiple political and philosophical movements over the last two hundred years. This is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the present age with its overwhelming challenges and breathtaking possibilities. -- Mathias Risse, author of On Global JusticeA brilliantly conceived and much-needed book on human rights and inequality. Moyn has a genius for writing history that is intelligent, surprising, and disciplined by fine judgment. -- Jedediah Purdy, author of After Nature: A Politics for the AnthropoceneMoyn provides important insights into how international and domestic inequalities have increased in recent decades…[His] trenchant critique of classical liberal economic and political thought questions many long-standing human rights assumptions. An important addition to the literature. -- C. E. Welch * Choice *

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Book SynopsisA fascinating book about how platform internet companies (Amazon, Facebook, and so on) are changing the norms of economic competition.Fast CompanyShoppers with a bargain-hunting impulse and internet access can find a universe of products at their fingertips. But is there a dark side to internet commerce? This thought-provoking exposé invites us to explore how sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching are changing the nature of market competition, and not always for the better. Introducing into the policy lexicon terms such as algorithmic collusion, behavioral discrimination, and super-platforms, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke explore the resulting impact on competition, our democratic ideals, our wallets, and our well-being. We owe the authors our deep gratitude for anticipating and explaining the consequences of living in a world in which black boxes collude and leave no trails behind. They make it clear that in a world of big data and algorithmic pricing, consumers are outgunned and antitrust laws are outdated, especially in the United States.ScienceA convincing argument that there can be a darker side to the growth of digital commerce. The replacement of the invisible hand of competition by the digitized hand of internet commerce can give rise to anticompetitive behavior that the competition authorities are ill equipped to deal with.Burton G. Malkiel, Wall Street JournalA convincing case for the need to rethink competition law to cope with algorithmic capitalism's potential for malfeasance.John Naughton, The ObserverTrade Review[Ezrachi and Stucke] make a convincing argument that there can be a darker side to the growth of digital commerce. The replacement of the invisible hand of competition by the digitized hand of internet commerce can give rise to anticompetitive behavior that the competition authorities are ill equipped to deal with…Virtual Competition displays a deep understanding of the internet world and is outstandingly researched. -- Burton G. Malkiel * Wall Street Journal *Traditional competition law is about firms and their activities. The great insight underpinning Ezrachi’s and Stucke’s book is that, in a digital world, competition law will be mostly about algorithms and big data because these are the forces that now determine what happens in online marketplaces. The book focuses on three particular areas in which anticompetitive and manipulative behavior is possible and, in some cases, already evident… Ezrachi and Stucke dig deep into the ways in which algorithmic and big-data analytics combine to produce behaviors and outcomes that are—or could be—troubling for society. They then go on to discuss the extent to which existing competition law and legal precedents may—or may not—be able to address abuses… Ezrachi and Stucke have made a convincing case for the need to rethink competition law to cope with algorithmic capitalism’s potential for malfeasance. -- John Naughton * The Observer *We owe the authors our deep gratitude for anticipating and explaining the consequences of living in a world in which black boxes collude and leave no trails behind. They make it clear that in a world of big data and algorithmic pricing, consumers are outgunned and antitrust laws are outdated, especially in the United States…We can hope the ideas discussed in Virtual Competition get on the political agenda. -- Barry Nalebuff * Science *A fascinating book about how platform internet companies (Amazon, Facebook, and so on) are changing the norms of economic competition. Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy argues that these companies, with their immense data advantage, are effectively making their own rules in the marketplace, beating back new market entrants, and disadvantaging customers. -- Ben Schiller * Fast Company *From price-comparison algorithms to phone operating systems, technology has altered competitive commerce. Lawyers Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke question the democratic consequences of this dual-edged power. * Nature *This highly readable and authoritative account sets out the ways that platforms have replaced the invisible hand with a digitized one—a hand that is human-engineered, subject to corporate control and manipulation, and prone to charges of unlawfulness…It is becoming increasingly apparent that widespread deployment of algorithmic tools can intensify, rather than reduce, the chasm between the wealthy and the vulnerable. This is the issue Ezrachi and Stucke address as behavioral discrimination…Overall, they argue, this is corrosive to social welfare, because the more vulnerable among us end up paying more. The authors’ assessment of where this is heading is of the most sober kind: absent legal intervention, perfect discrimination will likely become the new norm. -- Julia Powles * Times Higher Education *This is a groundbreaking, critical work—a major contribution to the field of competition law. -- Frank Pasquale, author of The Black Box SocietyEzrachi and Stucke provide a compelling analysis challenging the orthodoxy that modern technology empowers consumers. Their findings will send a shiver down the spine of consumers, businesses, public policy makers and anyone working in the competition field. Virtual Competition is a fast-paced, mind-boggling thriller that you can’t put down; a thriller in which we are all set to be the victim. -- Alan Giles, Saïd Business School, University of OxfordVirtual Competition provides an intriguing and provocative look at the potential dark side of big data and big analytics. The debate over digital competition is just beginning, and Ezrachi and Stucke have laid down a marker that is likely to capture wide attention. -- Jonathan Levin, Stanford Graduate School of BusinessEzrachi and Stucke’s insights into data-driven opportunities, collusion scenarios, discrimination, and ‘frenemies’ will help authorities distinguish between true efficiencies and anti-competitive problems, and ensure that most enforcement at least keeps up with technological developments. Forward-thinking competition authorities can use these insights proactively to help craft government policies that ensure that innovation and competition are real, while problems are addressed quickly and thus—hopefully—remain virtual. -- Philip Marsden, Inquiry Chair, Competition and Markets AuthorityA thought-provoking, clearly written examination of the coming effects on markets and competition of computer algorithms, big data, big analytics, and ‘super-platforms,’ drawing on real-life examples, on neoclassical and behavioral economics, and on the authors’ deep understanding of U.S. and EU competition law. -- Harry First, New York University School of LawEqual measures computer science, law, economics, and behavioral science, this book will appeal to all four groups and introduce the concepts in a very enjoyable way. Whether people shop online, on their phones, or in stores, companies track them. What they buy, where they shop, when they shop, and how they shop can all be analyzed by retailers, who can then offer different products, coupons, and discounts. Retailers not only collect and analyze this data but also sell the data and analysis to other companies, sometimes including their competitors. This book delves into the privacy and regulatory complications of this data and analysis. Though readers may be taken aback by just how much information is collected about their shopping habits, this book describes in detail how retailers and marketers use ambivalence to privacy to market products and services at prices consumers are willing to pay. -- J. M. Keller-Aschenbach * Choice *

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Book SynopsisAn incisive history of the venture-capital industry.New YorkerAn excellent and original economic history of venture capital.Tyler Cowen, Marginal RevolutionA detailed, fact-filled account of America's most celebrated moneymen.New RepublicExtremely interesting, readable, and informativeTom Nicholas tells you most everything you ever wanted to know about the history of venture capital, from the financing of the whaling industry to the present multibillion-dollar venture funds.Arthur RockIn principle, venture capital is where the ordinarily conservative, cynical domain of big money touches dreamy, long-shot enterprise. In practice, it has become the distinguishing big-business engine of our time[A] first-rate history.New YorkerVC tells the riveting story of how the venture capital industry arose from America's longstanding identification with entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Whether the venture is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford or the latest Silicon Valley startup, VC is a state of mind as much as a way of doing business, exemplified by an appetite for seeking extreme financial rewards, a tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a faith in the promise of innovation to generate new wealth. Tom Nicholas's authoritative history takes us on a roller coaster of entrepreneurial successes and setbacks. It describes how iconic firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invested in Genentech and Apple even as it tells the larger story of VC's birth and evolution, revealing along the way why venture capital is such a quintessentially American institutionone that has proven difficult to recreate elsewhere.Trade Review[An] incisive history of the venture-capital industry. * New Yorker *A detailed, fact-filled account of America’s most celebrated moneymen…It provides a valuable look into their world…Nicholas is at his best when he is charting just how reliant venture capital has been on the government—and just how far the industry has gone to try and shape government policy in its favor. -- Avi Asher-Schapiro * New Republic *An excellent and original economic history of venture capital. -- Tyler Cowen * Marginal Revolution *Though it’s no secret that Pentagon money helped Silicon Valley to develop into a technology hub, Nicholas’s history sheds light on the less explored role of venture capital firms in bringing these new technologies to civilian markets. -- Jamie Martin * Bookforum *Whatever your view of venture capitalists, it’s worth studying where they came from. I had a vague familiarity with the role of U.S. postwar policy in the creation of the species, but I learned a lot more from Nicholas. And I’d never thought about their precursors in the old whaling industry! -- Stephen L. Carter * Bloomberg Opinion *Not only an insightful study of an asset class but a fascinating history which touches on fundamental questions of political economy. VC is distinctive mainly because it offers such a long view of venture capital’s evolution…[It] offers many lessons for attentive readers, explaining not only the present features of the venture landscape but also how we might address some of the widely recognized problems facing the U.S. economy today. -- Julius Krein * American Conservative *A penetrating history of the industry…I enthusiastically recommend it. -- Laurence B. Siegel * Advisor Perspectives *In his extremely interesting, readable, and informative VC, Tom Nicholas tells you most everything you ever wanted to know about the history of venture capital, from the financing of the whaling industry to the present multibillion-dollar venture funds. -- Arthur Rock, Arthur Rock & Co.VC is a captivating book that casts a historical light on the contemporary landscape of venture capital. Nicholas brilliantly explains the surprising origins of the financial practices and organizational structures of the VC industry we know today. -- Toby E. Stuart, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and venture partner, Avid Park VenturesRalph Waldo Emerson once called America ‘the country of tomorrow,’ and Nicholas’s book does a great job of showing how venture capital, a rocket fuel for entrepreneurial risk, played a fundamental and unique role in proving Emerson right. -- Mike Maples, Jr., partner, Floodgate

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Book SynopsisSetting wages isn’t an exact science, but we like to think that our workplace performance provides an objective basis for pay. You’re Paid What You’re Worth offers a bold theory to the contrary, arguing that pay is decided in contests over interests and ideals—that social conflicts, not economic metrics, determine who gets how much.Trade ReviewThis is the book to throw at your human resources director—not literally, of course—when any attempt is being made to bamboozle you about how decisions on pay have been made. It is all here: the economics, psychology, sociology and (crucially) mythology that underpin wages and how they are set. It is a closely argued, thoroughly researched treatise on how we got here and how pay could be both fairer and more effective as a reward. -- Stefan Stern * Financial World *Rosenfeld makes an important contribution to the literature on the determinants of workers’ pay in the United States—and, in doing so, also contributes to debates over the causes of rising pay inequality over the last 50 years in the United States. -- Joe LaBriola * American Journal of Sociology *Suitable for all audiences. Undergraduates will appreciate the clarity of prose, absence of jargon, and liberal use of examples. More advanced scholars of work…[will] appreciate Rosenfeld’s extraordinary ability to bring together multiple threads from the literature into a coherent, sweeping argument about the sources of pay inequality and inequity in contemporary labor markets. -- Kim Weeden * Social Forces *A stimulating reading for social scientists. -- Antonio Abatemarco * Journal of Economics *Rosenfeld outlines many of the injustices that underpin the American economy…Offers a series of sensible reforms that would help tweak the balance in favor of employees. -- Andrew Leigh * Inside Story *Rosenfeld debunks contemporary myths about work and wages in this illuminating account. * Publishers Weekly *You’re Paid What You’re Worth is a lively and rigorous study that will change debates over labor markets. Rosenfeld’s original research serves as a very important rejoinder to old ideas in economics and to conventional wisdom in the mass public. -- Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia UniversityRosenfeld’s book provides a rich sociological theory of the labor market, showing why and how wages are largely set by norms, organizational practices, and institutions. -- Suresh Naidu, Columbia UniversityA flat-out revelation of a book by one of the nation’s top scholars of the labor market, You’re Paid What You’re Worth is required reading for anyone who cares about the future of work in America. With concise prose informed by history and cutting-edge research, Rosenfeld dispels one myth after another about how the modern economy works and champions thoughtful solutions for how American prosperity can once more lead to broad social uplift. -- Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by AmericaThe growth in earnings inequality requires us to understand what determines pay in the economy. Jake Rosenfeld’s book provides nuanced and bold insight into the question of ‘who gets what and why?’ He challenges widely held assumptions and approaches in this area by probing the impact of fairness norms, organizational inertia and mimicry, and most importantly power in determining pay. In so doing, he provides novel and provocative perspectives on policies to address this pressing problem. -- David Weil, Dean, The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis UniversityJake Rosenfeld pulls back the curtain on the multifaceted cultural, institutional, and market forces at play in wage-setting. This timely book illuminates the power dynamics and often arbitrary forces that have contributed to the egregious inequality in the US labor market—and then lays out a clear blueprint for progressive change. -- Thea Lee, President of the Economic Policy Institute

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Book SynopsisThe redistribution of income has been a key element in Peruvian governmental policy. Both the Belaunde and Velasco regimes professed a deep concern with economic injustice, and they have been regarded as models of peaceful progress toward social justice. Despite its good intentions, Richard Webb shows, the government has had little impact on the rigid imbalance of wealth in Peru. The rich have continued to get richer faster than the poor have got less poor. Inequality has grown, and those most in need of improvement have benefited least. The tax structure has actually become more regressive. with taxes raised most on middle-income groups and least on the very rich. Overall, the Peruvian government's economic policy has been mildly progressive, but not progressive enough to have an appreciable effect on the widespread poverty. What is needed, Webb argues, are movements of capital from the modern sector of the economy to the traditional sector to create new jobs for the poor. Finally,

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Book SynopsisUnder free-market shock therapy, many economies of former socialist countries of Eastern Europe have declined. Why has there been so much stagnation, inflation, and de-industrialization, and what can be done to produce a turnaround? This book addresses these questions in revealing detail.Trade ReviewA highly readable and extremely convincing account of why the strategies adopted by east European governments have failed. [The authors] argue that these governments adopted a free-market, neo-classical model of capitalist development, totally inappropriate to their condition and history, and one which did not reflect the way advanced capitalist countries had themselves developed. -- Peter Lawrence * Financial Times *Table of ContentsPreface From Pseudo-Socialism to Pseudo-Capitalism Transition Macroeconomics The Black Box of State-Owned Enterprises Overloading the Market Mechanism Pseudo-Privatization and the World Bank Enterprise and the State Challenges Facing the State Reconstructing the State Economy, Society, and the State Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisWhat is it about free-market ideas that gives them staying power in the face of such failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and financial crises? The Power of Market Fundamentalism extends economist Karl Polanyi's work to explain why these dangerous utopian ideas have become the dominant economic ideology of our time.Trade ReviewIn seeking to understand the dynamics of our own time, we can do no better than to revisit Polanyi… Block and Somers provide a thorough reprise of Polanyi for readers new to him and careful analysis for specialists. The best part of their book is its introductory chapter, a well-integrated and brisk summary of the man and his ideas. Other chapters provide useful discussions of what Polanyi’s social history gets right and slightly wrong, as well as astute comparisons of Polanyi with Keynes and Marx… As more of us are having second thoughts about the second coming of the primal market, it is as if Polanyi is somewhere in the ether. Rereading Polanyi at a time when events vindicate his vision, one has to be struck with the eerie contemporary ring. Polanyi is startlingly 21st-century in addressing how the private rule of global finance puts public policy in a straitjacket. -- Robert Kuttner * American Prospect *Two of the smartest and most erudite sociologists at work today, Block and Somers deftly trace the biographical origins of Polanyi’s ideas and elucidate the philosophical, historical, and economic literatures he alludes to. The result is a lucid, engaging, and often brilliant guidebook to The Great Transformation that shows just how much we need Polanyi today… Everyone should be reading The Great Transformation these days. But first they should probably read The Power of Market Fundamentalism. -- Frank Dobbin * American Journal of Sociology *A timely book. More and more people are reading and quoting Polanyi, but they don’t always understand him. The Power of Market Fundamentalism undertakes to situate Polanyi’s thinking in our time and relate it to the events that have taken place since the publication of The Great Transformation in 1944. It also draws on biographical material in a way that only the two authors are able to. It does an excellent job of exploring how the world changed in a neoliberal direction when at the end of World War II everyone believed that capitalism would forever be under control. -- Wolfgang Streeck, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, CologneKarl Polanyi’s analysis should be an invaluable resource for social scientists, policy makers, and intelligent citizens who are grappling to find better ways of interpreting the economic and social distress that grips so many formerly comfortable societies of the industrialized North. Block and Somers, who are the premier analysts of Polanyi’s work, do a wonderful job of bringing this invaluable resource to bear on today’s debates. -- Peter Evans, University of California, Berkeley

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIt seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade. -- Paul Krugman * New York Times *The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat. * The Economist *Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years. -- Steven Pearlstein * Washington Post *Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book…In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy. -- Martin Wolf * Financial Times *A sweeping account of rising inequality…Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore. -- John Cassidy * New Yorker *Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years. -- Timothy Shenk * The Nation *At a time when the concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few has resurfaced as a central political issue, Piketty doesn’t just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame…Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to. -- Paul Krugman * New York Review of Books *The most remarkable work of economics in recent years, if not decades…The discipline of economics, Piketty argues, remains trapped in a juvenile passion for mathematics, divorced from history and its sister social sciences. His work aims to change that. -- Nick Pearce * New Statesman *Magnificent…Even though it is a work more concerned with the past 200 years, it’s no coincidence that the full title of Piketty’s book is Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Its ambition is to shape debates about the next two centuries, not the past two. And in that it may succeed. -- Christopher Croke * The Australian *Piketty’s ground-breaking work on the historical evolution of income distribution is impressive…One of the best economic books in decades. -- Paul Sweeney * Irish Times *[Piketty] is just about to emerge as the most important thinker of his generation…He demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that capitalism can ever solve the problem of inequality, which he insists is getting worse rather than better. From the banking crisis of 2008 to the Occupy movement of 2011, this much has been intuited by ordinary people. The singular significance of his book is that it proves ‘scientifically’ that this intuition is correct. This is why his book has crossed over into the mainstream—it says what many people have already been thinking. -- Andrew Hussey * The Observer *The strength of Piketty’s book is his close attention to the different sources of inequality, the massive documentation underpinning his history and conclusions, and his impressive culls from sociology and literature, which exhibit the richness of ‘political economy’ compared to its thin mathematical successor that has attained such prominence…A timely intervention in the current debate about inequality and its causes. -- Robert Skidelsky * Prospect *A monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vast empirical material Piketty and his colleagues collected. -- Branko Milanovic * American Prospect *This book has all the makings of a classic. It has already changed the way economists think about inequality. One hopes that these ideas will percolate into the chambers of policy-makers in governments and lending institutions and bring about changes in their policies to reduce inequality. -- K. Subramanian * The Hindu *Piketty’s book is revolutionary…[His] multi-century portrait of wealth and income obliterates economists’ complacent narratives…We are still seeking an economy that is both vibrant and humane, where mutual advantage is real and mutual aid possible. The one we have isn’t it. -- Jedediah Purdy * Los Angeles Review of Books *Piketty demonstrates in terrifying detail, with painstaking statistical research, that free-market capitalism, in the absence of major state redistribution, produces profound economic inequalities. -- Michael Robbins * Chicago Tribune *An extraordinary sweep of history backed by remarkably detailed data and analysis…Piketty’s economic analysis and historical proofs are breathtaking. -- Robert B. Reich * The Guardian *Piketty’s treatment of inequality is perfectly matched to its moment. Like [Paul] Kennedy a generation ago, Piketty has emerged as a rock star of the policy-intellectual world…But make no mistake, his work richly deserves all the attention it is receiving…By focusing attention on what has happened to a fortunate few among us, and by opening up for debate issues around the long-run functioning of our market system, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a profoundly important contribution. -- Lawrence H. Summers * Democracy *What makes Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century such a triumph is that it seems to have been written specifically to demolish the great economic shibboleths of our time…Piketty’s magnum opus. -- Thomas Frank * Salon *Capital reflects decades of work in collecting national income data across centuries, countries, and class, done in partnership with academics across the globe. But beyond its remarkably rich and instructive history, the book’s deep and novel understanding of inequality in the economy has drawn well-deserved attention…The book is an attempt to ground the debate over inequality in strong empirical data, put the question of distribution back into economics, and open the debate not just to the entirety of the social sciences but to people themselves. -- Mike Konczal * Boston Review *[A] 700-page punch in the plutocracy’s pampered gut…It’s been half a century since a book of economic history broke out of its academic silo with such fireworks. -- Giles Whittell * The Times *Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics has done the definitive comparative historical research on income inequality in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century. -- Paul Starr * New York Review of Books *Bracing…Piketty provides a fresh and sweeping analysis of the world’s economic history that puts into question many of our core beliefs about the organization of market economies. His most startling news is that the belief that inequality will eventually stabilize and subside on its own, a long-held tenet of free market capitalism, is wrong. Rather, the economic forces concentrating more and more wealth into the hands of the fortunate few are almost sure to prevail for a very long time. -- Eduardo Porter * New York Times *About as close to a blockbuster as there is in the world of economic literature—easily the most discussed book of its genre in years…Piketty challenges one of the underpinnings of modern democracies—namely, that growth and productivity make each generation better off than the previous one. -- Barrie McKenna * Globe and Mail *Piketty has unearthed the history of income distribution for at least the past hundred years in every major capitalist nation. It makes for fascinating, grim and alarming reading…Piketty gives us the most important work of economics since John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. -- Harold Meyerson * Washington Post *The strength of [Piketty's] thesis is that it is founded on evidence rather than ideology…What Piketty has done is provide a strong factual understanding for how modern capitalist economies diverge from the image of risk-taking and productive commercial activity. At the very least, the book effectively debunks the notion that there is an economic imperative for low tax rates and a smaller state. -- Oliver Kamm * The Times *Defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism…Without what [Piketty] acknowledges is a politically unrealistic global wealth tax, he sees the United States and the developed world on a path toward a degree of inequality that will reach levels likely to cause severe social disruption. -- Thomas B. Edsall * New York Times *Piketty's magnum opus…A lucid tale of why inequality in the world is increasing, and what we should be doing about it. The right leaning crowd may be dismayed with his prescriptions of stiff global wealth taxes, but neither leftists nor rightists can dispute the data that he presents. -- Ajit Ranade * Business Today *Anyone remotely interested in economics needs to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. -- Matthew Yglesias * Slate *[A] timely, important book. -- Joseph E. Stiglitz * New York Times *Piketty’s genius lies in proving that inequality is growing and potentially threatens widespread political instability…Piketty has written a trenchant critique of our current economic system. -- Michael Washburn * Boston Globe *Piketty has looked at centuries of tax archives to formulate a theory of capitalism that is evidence-based and rigorously researched, but also attempts to answer the most basic questions in economic theory…Capital in the Twenty-First Century is already being hailed as a seminal work of economic thought, and with very good reason. -- Thomas Flynn * Daily Beast *Piketty solidifies and gives an intellectual edge to the view that something is wrong here, and something new and bold and radical has got to be done…People like me, and others, are certainly excited by the prospect of where Piketty might take us. -- Len McCluskey * The Guardian *The book is a terrific achievement. -- Alan Ryan * Literary Review *One of the strengths of Piketty’s book is the depth and rigor of his historical analysis. Yet it is changes taking place now that make his concerns especially urgent. -- Andrew Neather * London Evening Standard *There are books that you read and there are books that hit the nail on the head so hard that you want to get your teeth into them. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century…clearly belongs to the second category. -- Perry Lam * South China Morning Post *[Piketty] has demolished the Western myth that all who work hard can expect success. -- Mary Riddell * The Telegraph *It’s going to be remembered as the economic tome of our era. Basically, Piketty has finally put to death, with data, the fallacies of trickle down economics…We can only hope that the politicians crafting today’s economic programs will take this book to heart. -- Rana Foroohar * Time *Magisterial…This book is economics at its best. -- Philip Roscoe * Times Higher Education *[A] seminal work on capitalism. -- Madan Sabnavis * Financial Express *Piketty has shown that we are living in a Second Gilded Age…Nestled under the book’s mass of data, elegant mathematical formulae, and literary references is an insistence that the turmoil of capitalism is a human turmoil, within the control of human beings. Piketty’s book is a call to citizenship, not as a series of fatalistic poses, but as a political responsibility. That spirit of engagement is more radical, at this moment in history, than any other proposal. -- Stephen Marche * Los Angeles Review of Books *Piketty hits bullseye after bullseye about the exacerbating inequalities that disfigure society—especially American society…For [those] who suffer from the relentless blather about why the minimum wage cannot be raised; why ‘job creators’ cannot be taxed; and why American society remains the most open in the world, Piketty is what the doctor ordered. -- Russell Jacoby * New Republic *Riveting…[Piketty] embodies a model of engaged and sophisticated public debate, the sort of which politicians can only dream…Capital inequality has dispossessed us of our ‘democratic sovereignty,’ and that’s something we should all really worry about…His book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality. -- Duncan Kelly * Times Literary Supplement *Very readable and often slyly witty…Piketty does economics in a new way; or more accurately, he returns to an older way…He argues that the degree of inequality is not just the product of economic forces; it is also the product of politics. -- George Fallis * Literary Review of Canada *Capital in the Twenty-First Century delivered a well placed kick up the backside to complacent mainstream economics. -- Paul Mason * The Observer *This book is the key to understanding how the automatic accumulation and concentration of wealth poses a threat to the peaceful economies in which entrepreneurs prosper. -- Geoffrey James * Inc. *Monumental…Translated beautifully by Arthur Goldhammer, [Capital in the Twenty-First Century]…smashed into the intellectual world with incredible force…One also has to admire the way Piketty marshals the data to create a sweeping historical narrative, in a style reminiscent of the great thinkers of the 19th century. -- Ben Chu * The Independent *Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows how privateers use privatization, debt creation and capital inflation as a mechanism for rent extraction, with catastrophic consequences for public services. -- Allyson Pollock * Times Higher Education *Piketty’s great achievement, and one possible reason for the enthusiastic reception of his book, is his effective empirical demonstration of a fact long denied by neoclassical economics and its champions throughout the world: markets, when left to their own devices, do not provide individuals with rewards that are proportional to their efforts…[This book] effectively demolishes mainstream myths about the ability of markets to combat inequality. -- Hassan Javid * Dawn *Monumental…[Piketty] documents a sharp increase in such inequality over the last 25 years, not only in the United States, but also in Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa, with people with the highest incomes far outstripping the rest of society. The book is impressive in its wealth of information. -- Robert J. Shiller * New York Times *[Piketty’s] chief intellectual accomplishment is to show how the basic forces of capitalism tend inevitably toward an ever-greater accumulation of wealth at the tip of the pyramid…Piketty shows that the economics of the postwar era—when the West enjoyed strong, widely-shared growth—was a historical exception. For our Western democracies, it was also a political necessity. Capitalism is facing an existential challenge; smart plutocrats will be part of the solution. -- Chrystia Freeland * Politico *Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade…Capital in the Twenty-First Century essentially takes the existing debate on income inequality and supercharges it. It does so by asserting that in the long run the economic inequality that matters won’t be the gap between people who earn high salaries and those who earn low ones, it will be the gap between people who inherit large sums of money and those who don’t. -- Matthew Yglesias * Vox *Monumental…One of the most thorough and illuminating studies of capitalist economics since Karl Marx published the original Capital 150 years earlier. -- Gary Gerstle * Washington Post *Groundbreaking…The usefulness of economics is determined by the quality of data at our disposal. Piketty’s new volume offers a fresh perspective and a wealth of newly compiled data that will go a long way in helping us understand how capitalism actually works. -- Christopher Matthews * Fortune *Piketty draws on a vast store of historical data to argue that the broad dissemination of wealth that occurred during the decades following World War I was not, as economists then mistakenly believed, a natural state of capitalist equilibrium, but rather a halcyon interval between Belle Époque inequality and the rising inequality of our own era…[His] most provocative argument is that the discrepancy between the high returns to capital and much more modest overall economic growth—briefly annulled during the mid-century—ensures that the gulf between the rich (who profit from capital investments) and the middle class (who depend chiefly on income from labor) will only continue to grow. -- James Traub * Foreign Policy *Piketty’s main point, and his new and powerful contribution to an old topic: as long as the rate of return exceeds the rate of growth, the income and wealth of the rich will grow faster than the typical income from work…If the ownership of wealth in fact becomes even more concentrated during the rest of the twenty-first century, the outlook is pretty bleak unless you have a taste for oligarchy…Wouldn’t it be interesting if the United States were to become the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the last refuge of increasing inequality at the top (and perhaps also at the bottom)? Would that work for you? -- Robert Solow * New Republic *Argues that the great equalizing decades following World War II, which brought on the rise of the middle class in the United States, were but a historical anomaly. Armed with centuries of data, Piketty says the rich are going to continue to gobble up a greater share of income, and our current system will do nothing to reverse that trend. -- Shaila Dewan * New York Times Magazine *Though an heir to Tocqueville’s tradition of analytic history, Thomas Piketty has a message that could not be more different: Unless we act, inequality will grow much worse, eventually making a mockery of our democratic institutions. With wealth more and more concentrated, countries racing to cut taxes on capital, and inheritance coming to rival entrepreneurship as a source of riches, a new patrimonial elite may prove as inevitable as Tocqueville once believed democratic equality was…Perhaps with this magisterial book, the troubling realities Piketty unearths will become more visible and the rationalizations of the privileged that sustain them less dominant. Like Tocqueville, Piketty has given us a new image of ourselves. This time, it’s one we should resist, not welcome. -- Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson * American Prospect *A landmark book…which brings a ton of data to bear in reaching the commonsensical conclusion that inequality has to do with more than just blind market forces at work. -- George Packer * New Yorker *[Piketty] is now the most talked-about economist on the planet…The book analyzes hundreds of years of tax records from France, the U.K., the U.S., Germany and Japan to prove a simple idea: The rich really are getting richer. And their wealth doesn’t trickle down. It trickles up…The stark historical consequences of unchecked inequality are at the heart of Capital. -- Rana Foroohar * Time *Magisterial…Piketty provides a sweeping, data-driven narrative about inequality trends in the United States and other Western economies over the past century or more, identifies a worrisome increase in income and wealth concentration in a small percentage of the population since 1980, and warns that this trend won’t likely correct itself. -- Chad Stone * U.S. News & World Report *Piketty’s new book is an important contribution to understanding what we need to do to produce more growth, wider economic opportunity and greater social stability. -- David Cay Johnston * Al Jazeera America *The book has made everyone with a stake in capitalism sit up and take notice…[Piketty’s] analysis should challenge Americans to rethink our notions of wealth and poverty and whether any semblance of ‘equal opportunity’ actually exists. * America *Capital in the Twenty-First Century is written in the tradition of great economic texts…This book is significant for its findings, as well as for how Piketty arrives at them. It’s easy—and fun—to argue about ideas. It is much more difficult to argue about facts. Facts are what Piketty gives us, while pressing the reader to engage in the journey of sorting through their implications. -- Heather Boushey * American Prospect *How does a rigorous, seven-hundred page economic history become a lionized hit? Through the canny voice of professor Thomas Piketty, and his demystification of inherited wealth, Karl Marx’s true legacy, and what we mean when we talk about monetary ‘growth’ and ‘inequality.’ * Barnes and Noble Review *When it comes to economics…you need to get yourself a hold of Capital in the Twenty-First Century…Piketty’s study will have readers plotting capital’s downfall because what it shows is that the growing inequalities we are seeing between the haves and have nots are endemic to the system…We are entering a new age of capital, he argues; a time, similar to the early 19th century, when many will live off their money. Without the need for work. Meanwhile, those without capital will always struggle to keep ahead of debts. -- Thomas Quinn * Big Issue *Intellectually hefty…Piketty has already engendered vigorous argument. Capital is an arduous climb, but the subject is equally weighty, and it demands our best analyses, proposals and dialogues. Capital is an essential volume in the conversation. -- Earl Pike * Cleveland Plain Dealer *An important book…which paints a compelling, and scary, picture of the deep forces driving toward ever greater inequality in the modern world. Piketty’s historical focus adds power to his analysis of the trend toward greater financial inequality today. -- Charles R. Morris * Commonweal *This important and fascinating book surely ranks among the most influential economic analysis of recent decades. -- Andrew Berg * Finance & Development *Piketty has made his name central to serious discussions of inequality…[He] expands upon his empirical work of the last 10 years, while also setting forth a political theory of inequality. This last element of the book gives special attention to tax policy and makes some provocative suggestions—new and higher taxes on the very rich. -- Joseph Thorndike * Forbes *The most eagerly anticipated book on economics in many years. -- Toby Sanger * Globe and Mail *Is Piketty the new Karl Marx? Anybody who has read the latter will know he is not…Piketty has, more accurately, placed an unexploded bomb within mainstream, classical economics…The power of Piketty’s work is that it also challenges the narrative of the center-left under globalization, which believed upskilling the workforce, combined with mild redistribution, would promote social justice. This, Piketty demonstrates, is mistaken. All that social democracy and liberalism can produce, with their current policies, is the oligarch’s yacht co-existing with the food bank forever. Piketty’s Capital, unlike Marx’s Capital, contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself. -- Paul Mason * The Guardian *The big questions that concerned Mill, Marx and Smith are now rearing their heads afresh…Thomas Piketty—who spent long years, during which the mainstream neglected inequality, mapping the distribution of income—is making waves with Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Nodding at Marx, that title helps explain the attention, but his decidedly classical emphasis on historical dynamics in determining who gets what resonates in a world where an increasing proportion of citizens are feeling fleeced by the elite. * The Guardian *A big book in every sense of the word, using empirical evidence from 30 countries to describe how capitalism has evolved over the past 300 years and is now reverting to what Piketty calls the Downton Abbey world of a century ago…It is rare for economics books to fly off the shelves. Once in every generation, usually when the world has started to recover after a serious recession, there is a search for answers. Will Hutton’s The State We’re In was the must-buy book two decades ago just as Piketty’s is today. * The Guardian *Piketty says he wants the book to be widely read and his ideas debated. He has succeeded. Questions of economic theory have now reached an uncommonly large audience. One could, of course, fill a book twice the size with the reviews and the commentary Capital has prompted. But there is a better way into the debate than consuming the Piketty media phenomenon: spend a little valuable capital and read the original yourself. -- Ben Chu * The Independent *The enthusiastic reception in the United States of Piketty’s rigorous Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which answers the empirical spirit of the age with a welcome rush of statistics, may be a promising sign of renewal in the otherwise sedate intellectual pastures of the continent. To have made the word ‘redistribution’ utterable again by mainstream economists is already a considerable achievement…An unignorable account of the history of inequality in capitalist democracies. -- Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk * The Nation *Not since John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 has a work of political theory been as rapturously received on the left as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century…In this supposedly superficial and anti-intellectual age, his 690-page treatise on inequality, rich in empirical research, has resonated because it speaks to one of the central anxieties of our time: that society is becoming ever more fragmented as the very rich pull away from the rest. * New Statesman *Piketty, a prominent economist, explains the tendency in mature societies for wealth to concentrate in a few hands. -- Amy Merrick * New Yorker *[Piketty] has written a 700 page book on inequality which has achieved something few would have thought possible. He has rocked the neo-liberal economic establishment to its foundations…Even some of the most ideologically blinkered of free market economists, having read this book, now openly admit that Professor Piketty has laid down a challenge which they dare not ignore and which could change the political environment. -- John Palmer * Red Pepper *Drawing on hundreds of years of economic data (some of which has only recently become available to researchers) Piketty reaches a simple but disturbing conclusion: In the long run, the return on capital tends to be greater than the growth rate of the economies in which that capital is located…Readers can already guess the dire conclusion that flows from combining Piketty’s theory with the plausible assumption that unregulated wealth leads to plutocracy: If the only way to avoid plutocracy would be to employ political processes that the plutocrats themselves will eventually buy lock, stock and barrel, then the only way to avoid being ruled by the Lords of Capital is to become one of them. -- Paul Campos * Salon *[Piketty] has been perhaps the most important thinker on inequality of the past decade or so…Capital will change the political conversation in a more subtle way as well, by focusing it on wealth, not income. -- Jordan Weissmann * Slate *There is a huge amount to admire and welcome in this book…Like the radicals of the 1790s, who toasted Edmund Burke in gratitude for the fundamental debate his writings on the French Revolution had provoked, even those who find Piketty’s remedies unpalatable and in some ways worse than the disease he is trying to cure should nevertheless applaud his industry, his acuity, and his humane commitment to the ideal of rational, temperate and informed public debate. -- David Womersley * Standpoint *Clearly written, ambitious in scope, rooted in economics but drawing on insights from related fields like history and sociology, Piketty’s Capital resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned work of political economy by the likes of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes…The book’s major strength lies in Piketty’s ability to see the big picture. His original and rigorously well-documented insights into the deep structures of capitalism show us how the dynamics of capital accumulation have played out historically over the past three centuries, and how they’re likely to develop in the century to come. -- Kathleen Geier * Washington Monthly *After receiving widespread attention in his native France, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has received even greater attention on this side of the Atlantic, and deservedly so. It offers a stark and depressing picture for those who believe that some combination of democratic politics and economic growth can protect us from rampant inequality. -- Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage * Washington Post *Painstakingly details the dynamics of wealth and income inequality throughout the last two centuries, and offers a somewhat grim picture of the future of economic inequality. Along the way, Piketty also offers his theory of the cause of exploding executive pay and how we can successfully combat this destructive trend. -- Matt Bruenig * The Week *It’s a brilliant, surprisingly readable work that synthesizes a staggering amount of careful research to make the case that income inequality is no accident…[Piketty] has starkly and convincingly outlined the stakes for future generations. Either we’ll have a new birth of reformed capitalism…or we’ll have wealth concentration on such a colossal scale that it will threaten the democratic order. -- Ryan Cooper * The Week *It is a great work, a fearsome beast of analysis stuffed with an awesome amount of empirical data, and will surely be a landmark study in economics. * The Week *Rarely does a book come along…that completely alters the paradigm through which we frame our worldview. Thomas Piketty’s magisterial study of the structure of capitalism since the 18th century, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is such a book…This book is more than a must read. It is a manual for action that provides a fresh framework for the new politics of the 21st century. -- Nathan Gardels * The WorldPost *[An] enormously important book. -- Doug Henwood * Bookforum *Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high—and is only bound to grow worse. * Kirkus Reviews *An explosive argument. * Liberation *A seminal book on the economic and social evolution of the planet… A masterpiece. -- Emmanuel Todd * Marianne *Outstanding… A political and theoretical bulldozer. * Mediapart *The book of the season. * Telerama *In this magisterial work, Thomas Piketty has performed a great service to the academy and to the public. He has written a pioneering book that is at once thoughtful, measured, and provocative. The force of his case rests not on a diatribe or a political agenda, but on carefully collected and analyzed data and reasoned thought. -- Rakesh Khurana, Harvard Business SchoolThis book is not only the definitive account of the historical evolution of inequality in advanced economies, it is also a magisterial treatise on capitalism’s inherent dynamics. Piketty ends his book with a ringing call for the global taxation of capital. Whether or not you agree with him on the solution, this book presents a stark challenge for those who would like to save capitalism from itself. -- Dani Rodrik, Institute for Advanced StudyThis is a truly path-breaking book offering a hard-hitting and well-founded critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century…Piketty shows himself to be not only a supereconomist but also a skilled politician. No wonder his thoughts have resonated even at the highest political levels. One can only hope that his work will actually influence adoption of his policy recommendations. -- Christel Lane * LSE Review of Books *As befits a book of such size, Capital is broad-ranging, both historically and geographically…Impressive. -- William Keegan * The Tablet *Piketty is offering something fresh in the discourse: an unimaginably massive data-set that traces the ebb and flow of wealth and productivity around the globe for three centuries…It’s a rare thing to see economists, especially pro-capitalist economists, praising taxation itself, but Piketty—careful, unemotional Piketty—dares…Besides, he says, the thing every red-blooded entrepreneur wants to see is people getting rich by their wits and deeds, not by the birthright of kings. -- Cory Doctorow * Boing Boing *A book of such magisterial sweep…Piketty deserves huge credit for kickstarting a debate about inequality and illuminating the distribution of income and wealth. -- Stephanie Flanders * The Guardian *Seven hundred pages on the evolution of inequality in economically advanced societies by the most fashionable new theorist to emerge for a long time. Many have been waiting for such a comprehensive critique of capitalism. -- David Sexton * Evening Standard *[A] most unlikely best seller, a crossover from the world of scholarship into general public discussion of a kind that seems rarer than it used to be. The book’s thesis—that economic inequality in the developed world is increasing, with potentially dire consequences for social justice and democratic governance—has struck a nerve in the American body politic. But its implications extend beyond the realm of political economy…The book invites the re-examination of deeply held assumptions about the world. -- A. O. Scott * New York Times *Using sophisticated computer modeling and analyses, the professor from the Paris School of Economics debunks a long-held assumption—that income from wages will tend to grow at roughly the same rate as wealth—and instead makes a compelling case that, over time, the apparatus of capitalism grows wealth faster than wages. Result: Inequality between the wealthy and everyone else will widen faster and faster; and, without progressive taxation, his data show we’ll return to levels of inequality not seen since America’s Gilded Age. -- Dean Paton * YES! *The depth and range of evidence Piketty marshals allows him to deliver a devastating blow to the confidence of many economists that capitalism is a tide that gradually lifts all boats. In the process, he mounts an effective critique of the tendency of economic writers on both left and right to rely on theories and formal systems…His book challenges both mainstream economists’ faith in untested mathematical models, as well as radicals’ resistance to subjecting Marx’s economic theory to rigorous testing. -- Michael W. Clune * Chronicle of Higher Education *In this monumental, vitally important work, [Piketty] forces us to reconsider what we think we know about the baseline functioning of capitalist economies over the long haul, and to grapple with the implications for ourselves and our times…Nearly every page of the book rewards a careful reading with new insights and intriguing questions. -- Matthew Carnes * America *We are in danger of entering into an era that, like the 19th century in France and England, is socially and politically dominated by those with vast amounts of inherited wealth…Piketty’s book is important because of the way he has clarified the magnitude of the problem and its dangers. And he has done so at a time of increasing soul-searching about the role technology plays in exacerbating inequality. -- David Rotman * Technology Review *This past July, I felt compelled to read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century after reading several reviews and hearing about it from friends. I’m glad I did. I encourage you to read it too…I agree with his most important conclusions, and I hope his work will draw more smart people into the study of wealth and income inequality. -- Bill Gates * Gates Notes *[Piketty’s] overarching theme—that increased income disparity as a threat to democratic capitalism—remains prominent…His concerns about social unrest cannot be ignored. -- James Halteman * Christian Century *[A] sweeping study of wealth in the modern world…Full of insights but free of dogma, this is a seminal examination of how entrenched wealth and intractable inequality continue to shape the economy. * Publishers Weekly *The best business book on economics of the year. -- Daniel Gross * strategy+business *Throws much light upon one of the most important questions in economics: what determines the distribution of income and wealth. With an abundance of data and some simple and powerful theories, Piketty has made an immensely important contribution to the public debate. -- Martin Wolf * Financial Times *The year’s most popular and controversial book. -- Roland White * Sunday Times *Marx believed that free markets produce inequality, social division and violence. Piketty appears to side with Marx, but this is deceptive. When Piketty talks about ‘capital,’ he means the kind of investments held by today’s leisured rentier class whose money is tied up in property and pensions. Piketty argues that a free market overloaded with this kind of capital may or may not lead to anger and alienation, but it will certainly act like lumpy blockages in the smooth running of the economy. Piketty only wants the economy to work better. -- Nicholas Blincoe * The Telegraph *Capital in the Twenty-First Century is arguably the most important popular economics book in recent memory. It will take its place among other classics in the field that have survived changing theoretical and political fashions, such as its namesake by Karl Marx (Das Kapital, 1867) or other ambitiously titled books such as John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion about the economic landscape will have to read Piketty. -- Kate Bahn * Women’s Review of Books *Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century laid bare the deep structural forces that have made our brave new neoliberal economic order so dangerously topheavy and unstable. -- Chris Lehmann * In These Times *The extraordinary resonance of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century suggests that inequality has become the most pressing economic issue of our time. -- Michael Rosen * Times Literary Supplement *[Piketty’s] magnum opus, which kicked off years of debate over the causes of and potential solutions for deep poverty in wealthy societies. -- Martin Wolk * Los Angeles Times *Piketty presents the problem of inequality afresh, using new forms of historical narration and explanation that cut across disciplines and theoretical frameworks. -- William Davies * London Review of Books *Capital in the Twenty-First Century looks back in order to look forward, plumbing economic patterns from the 18th century onward and homing in on the staggering inequities that dominate our age. -- Hamilton Cain * The Atlantic *

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Book SynopsisEli Black was the immigrant rabbi-turned-CEO who transformed the notoriously corrupt United Fruit into a model of ethical business. Then he died by suicide. How did it all go wrong? Matt Garcia traces Black’s own descent into corruption and despair—the unraveling, and the deliberate forgetting, of one of America’s most enigmatic business leaders.Trade ReviewAn engaging chronicle of an idealistic but flawed businessman as well as a dissection of the postwar merger craze with no small relevance to today. -- Roger Lowenstein * Wall Street Journal *Eli and the Octopus focuses on one individual to tell a story that is emblematic of an era. In this story, readers learn about Eli Black, but we learn more about migration, divisions within American Judaism, meatpacking, lettuce transportation, unions, sunglasses production, and mergers and conglomerates. -- Courtney J. Campbell * History Today *Garcia’s portrayal of Black is sympathetic and somewhat rueful, finding pathos in the disconnect between Garcia’s ‘good intentions’ and the inevitability that the ‘imperatives of turning a profit and serving investors’ would outweigh ‘any virtuous impulse.’ The result is a plaintive study of the challenges of trying to change a system from within. * Publishers Weekly *Eli and the Octopus is a deeply informed study of one of the most enigmatic figures to arise in the Mad Men era of merger mania and conglomerate-building. Beyond its inherent tragedy, this story adds richly to our understanding of how corporate America became what it is today. -- Diana B. Henriques, author of The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of TrustPiecing together the Shakespearean saga of rabbi-turned-business tycoon Eli Black, Matt Garcia offers a compelling, cautionary tale on the limits of corporate social responsibility. The unvarnished—but not unsympathetic—portrait is a history with great current relevance. -- Miriam Pawel, author of The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A BiographyA gripping story worth telling. In this deeply researched book, Garcia weaves together American Jewish history, American business history, and American labor history, all through the many lives of a remarkable and ultimately tragic individual. -- Hasia R. Diner, author of Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the WorldA marvelous book that embodies the inherent tension between our religious and ethical senses and the compromised and corrupt business of our daily lives. Eli Black's rise and fall is but an exaggerated illumination of the human condition. -- Nelson Lichtenstein, author of State of the Union: A Century of American LaborIn this riveting tale of United Fruit's Eli Black, Garcia walks right into the center of business history, adds union power into the mix, and shows the impossibility of pursuing both corporate profits and social responsibility. Black wanted to believe that his private machinations were for the public good, in keeping with his Jewish faith. But meatpacking workers in the Midwest, the United Farm Workers in California, and banana workers in Honduras—all of which Garcia links in a seamless narrative—paid the price for Black's market-driven policies. Eli and the Octopus is a powerful and cautionary tale of the true nature of corporate strategy, however well-meaning the outrageously wealthy who pursue it. -- Dana Frank, author of The Long Honduran NightA revelatory exploration of Eli Black and his struggle to remake modern business into a vehicle for positive social change. In a moment of growing inequality and corporate power, Eli and the Octopus could not be more timely or more important. -- Karl Jacoby, author of The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewCompelling, lucid, and filled with actionable insights, What Works draws from a deep well of research to explain how we can end gender inequality. -- Adam Grant, author of OriginalsPathbreaking work, and packed with insights on every page. Bohnet has produced, at once, the best book ever written on behavioral science and discrimination, and a major contribution to behaviorally informed policymaking as a whole. Her book promises to change both private and public institutions—and to improve individual lives. -- Cass Sunstein, coauthor of NudgeImpressive…What Works is stuffed with good ideas...The glory of this book is that Bohnet not only offers dozens of practical examples of how behavioral findings can be put to use but also demonstrates that moving toward equity need not be a zero-sum game in which as women gain, men lose…She makes trying out the new steps seem like an exhilarating project rather than an impossible one. -- Carol Tavris * Wall Street Journal *Right up to board level, companies should find in What Works not only food for thought [about gender bias], but a guide for effective practical action as well. -- Sarah Gordon * Financial Times *In a field overflowing with opinions and ‘gut feelings,’ What Works is a shining ray of truth and insight. Bohnet lays out the science behind what really drives—and prevents—gender inequality, and translates it into clear, easy-to-implement steps for achieving equality. A much needed book with precise, effective prescriptions for any environment. -- Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google and author of Work Rules!Even when women do make it to the bargaining table, they often fare poorly… Bohnet examines data from a group of Swedish job seekers, among whom women ended up with lower salaries than their equally qualified male peers…When women act more like men, she suggests, they are often punished for it. Lean in, and you might get pushed even further back. Bohnet recommends that organizations explicitly invite women to negotiate, and train managers to counteract their biases. -- Lauren Collins * New Yorker *A refreshingly clear, meticulously researched manual for eliminating gender inequality in the workplace. * The Guardian *Have you checked your boardroom and hallways lately? What do you see on the walls? Among the many interventions Iris Bohnet…proposes in order to achieve gender equality, one that you could implement pretty quickly is reviewing the photos hanging around your company. If after a quick inspection, you discover the portraits are mostly of past male CEOs, rethink your decor. It’s a simple idea that can work wonders. * Forbes *What Works delivers! I have long been inspired by Iris Bohnet’s impressive research on gender bias. In this book, she has distilled years of work into practical approaches that any organization—business, education or government—can adapt to start changing the environments in which we all live, learn, and work. This is a must-read for everyone who actually wants to do something to address the stubborn and costly issue of gender inequality. -- Beth A. Brooke-Marciniak, Global Vice Chair of Public Policy, Ernst & Young Global LimitedA game changer. In this brilliant and practical book, Bohnet explains how behavioral insights can collapse gender inequality in our lifetime. It’s terrific. -- Linda Babcock, James M. Walton Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University and coauthor of Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender DivideThoroughly evidence-based and intensely practical. This book will provide employers with ways to think about what changes they can and should be making to address unintentional discrimination in the workplace, and how such changes would benefit everyone. * Prospect *Provides a useful introduction to all the available evidence showing there is a business, as well as moral, case for diversity. What Works speaks to CEOs in a language they will understand, taking the emotion out of the argument and making a pragmatic case for reshaping workplace norms to make women feel less alienated. -- Helen Lewis * New Statesman *Drawing on a deep well of research and expertise, Iris Bohnet’s new book gives companies a practical and invaluable toolkit for designing a gender-equal culture. Her business case for action is so compelling that it should be required reading for every corporate leader. -- Frédéric Rozé, President and CEO, L’Oréal USAThis is a persuasive manual for anyone seeking to eliminate unconscious biases—in recruitment and management—that perpetuate imbalances between men and women. Bohnet offers invaluable, research-based guidance about how to design and run organizations that are not only fairer, but better. -- Andrew Hill * Financial Times *Despite so many improvements, gender equality in the workplace (let alone in other parts of life) often seems like a chimera: something that exists only in imagination and is not possible in reality…Bohnet presents the science; we no longer have to think that it is all in our imagination. Read the book. Act on it. Make gender equality a reality. -- Lori Chesser * Business Record *A handy manual about promoting gender in the workplace, which is up front about what works, and what doesn’t. -- Rebecca Smith * Management Today *What Works is a call to action. It demonstrates with real-life examples, such as the introduction of blind auditions into the world of symphony orchestras, how the seemingly intractable problem of gender inequality can be not only addressed but solved. This book is a gift. -- Deborah Borda, President and CEO, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Hollywood Bowl AssociationIf you really want equality, here is a guide to action. No more excuses; we know how to design. Bohnet is brilliant and practical, and she documents what works. Everyone who read Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge and cares about equality will want to consume this masterpiece. -- Max Bazerman, Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business SchoolIf you think you have no gender bias, you should read this book. It will surprise you. Bohnet uses hard evidence to show that complacency about gender equality is dangerous because bias in the workplace remains widespread, entrenched and destructive. Sometimes depressing, always compelling, this work makes it clear how much work has yet to be done. -- Sarah Green * Times Higher Education *Iris Bohnet has not only managed to successfully explain how gender bias exists in all of us, she then goes on to provide straightforward, practical suggestions to overcome the suboptimal status quo. A groundbreaking book with solutions that every institution and corporation should implement in their quest for high performance. -- Carol Schwartz, Founding Chair, Women’s Leadership Institute AustraliaIris Bohnet’s groundbreaking work will revolutionize the way governments and corporations approach gender equality in the workplace. Extraordinary. -- Mirjam Staub-Bisang, CEO, Independent Capital Group, and author of Sustainable Investing for Institutional InvestorsWhat Works is an out-of-the-box read. Full of facts, data and real-life evidence, it is a must read for those who want doable actions to ensure gender equality. -- Yoshika Sangal * Governance Now *Bohnet elegantly and expansively demonstrates how [subconscious] biases can be obstacles to gender equality. What sets her approach apart in an increasingly crowded field of gender-equality literature is her use of behavioral design to offer practical—and often intuitive—solutions…She leads through demonstration and design, leaving readers better equipped to find solutions that work, so we can each contribute to making a difference. -- Karen Ongley * Finance and Development *Professor Bohnet has written a pathbreaking book documenting how unconscious biases and stereotypes are pervasive barriers to gender equality. The book combines brilliant insights from behavioral research with practical recommendations about how to design policies and organizations to counter these biases and accelerate progress toward gender parity. The moral case for gender parity is indisputable; the business case is compelling. Now Professor Bohnet has written a how-to manual, based on rigorous research, about how to achieve this goal. -- Laura D. Tyson, Professor of Business Administration and Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of BusinessIf you want to solve gender inequality, read What Works. Then follow the compelling, insightful suggestions Iris Bohnet provides. This is a book you will return to again and again, for this is a book that changes everything. -- Urs Rohner, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Credit SuisseBohnet is the world’s leading expert at the intersection of behavioral science and gender equality. Her work moves effortlessly between laboratory studies and real world examples, and spells out the practical implications. Achieve equity; enhance profit; and beat your rivals—and be gripped along the way. -- David Halpern, author of Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big DifferenceWhat Works is a brilliant breakthrough guide to closing the gender gap. Iris Bohnet connects research-based insights from many nations that are tackling this vital issue to show how biased minds can be nudged to make unbiased choices, and how small changes can have big impact. Her book provides essential leadership lessons for designing a more equitable and more productive world. -- Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and best-selling author of Men and Women of the Corporation, Confidence, and MOVEWhat Works is one of those rare books that will cause me to act differently. Confronting me with common situations and arming me with practical recommendations, Iris Bohnet challenged my ingrained beliefs and behavior. Brava! -- Severin Schwan, CEO, Roche GroupTrue to its title, Iris Bohnet’s timely book marshals evidence from proven research to designing interventions that actually work. A must-read for anyone trying to move the needle on gender diversity. -- Herminia Ibarra, Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning, INSEADFresh, scholarly, and illuminating. Iris Bohnet brings a new lens to gender discussion that will spark much-needed debate. -- Tina BrownThis book is easy to follow with helpful summaries and an inspiring finish. I would highly recommend that anyone who manages people gives it a go. It is stuffed with experiments and data drawn from all over the world…This is a must-have guide for anyone in charge of a diversity budget. -- Julie Chappell * Management Today *What Works is a fascinating and absorbing book, presenting dozens of research projects, case studies, and theories that address a wide range of gender equality problems…It offers thought-provoking (and empirically-researched) challenges to many of the mainstream notions and ideas that turn out to be rooted in bias, stereotypes, and other ‘mind bugs that affect our judgment.’ -- Hans Rollmann * PopMatters *To blindly assume that sexism is a thing of the past is to fly in the face of the wealth of modern-day experimental evidence presented in this fascinating book… From the boardroom to the classroom, this book outlines a set of tools that we need to design organizations in a way that sets us free from unconscious gender bias… Bohnet’s book is a call to action—and it is one that organizations cannot afford to ignore. -- Victoria Bateman * Times Higher Education *What Works serves both as a clear indication of where we currently stand and a guide as to how, institution by institution, we can nudge ourselves towards greater gender equality. -- Nic Logan-Murray * LSE Review of Books *A practical guide for any employer seeking to offset the unconscious bias holding backwomen in organizations, from orchestras to internet companies. -- Andrew Hill * Financial Times *This in-depth exploration of gender bias offers practical examples of what you can do to ensure your business hires and retains the best talent. * HR Magazine *[Bohnet’s] straightforward tools for designing inclusive and diverse workplaces and institutions are a boon to anyone who hopes to study, work, and live in an atmosphere of openness and civility. -- Kavita Nandini Ramdas * Stanford Social Innovation Review *

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Book SynopsisDealing with economic sociology, this title introduces the theory and practical tools needed to analyze markets for singularities. It shows that because of the uncertainty and the subjective valuation of singularities, the markets related to movies, music, and fine wine are equipped with the 'judgment devices' such as brands, critics and rankings.Trade Review"[T]his is an admirable book. It is theoretically rich, illustrated with many, many fascinating examples of real markets, and a wonderful read for all interested in how markets really work."--John L. Campbell, Administrative Science Quarterly "Given the relative scarcity of theoretical models in economic anthropology in the last decade, anthropologists should not simply discard this very ambitious, empirically grounded model of markets of singular products. Taking into account the abundant anthropological literature on the production, circulation and consumption of singularities, it is puzzling and a bit troubling for economic anthropologists that the first theoretical synthesis on the topic comes from a sociologist. But working toward such synthesis is in itself already a great achievement of the book, one anthropologists would do well to emulate."--Marian Viorel Anastasoaie, Social Anthropology "The reader will read this book for its precise and descriptive analysis of markets for which quality is multidimensional, incommensurable, and uncertain."--John Baffes, European Review of Agricultural Economics "In demonstrating the role devices play in cases where markets are constructed against the odds--the book is an important contribution to economic sociology. In the best traditions of defamiliarisation, the book is also a beautiful book."--Monika Krause, European Economic Sociology NewsletterTable of ContentsList of Illustrations and Tables ix Preface xi Part One: An Overlooked Reality Chapter One: The Problem 3 Chapter Two: Singularities 10 What Are Singularities? 10 A Preliminary Journey 13 The Market of Psychoanalysis 15 Two Models of Singularity 16 Chapter Three: Do We Need Another Market Theory? 21 What Mainstream Economics Could Only Ignore 21 What the "New Economics" Chose to Ignore 23 Part Two: Tools for Analysis Chapter Four: Judgment 35 Can Economic Analysis Ignore Information? 35 Decision and Judgment 36 What Is Judgment? 39 Chapter Five: Judgment Devices 44 Devices Are Representatives 46 Devices Are Cognitive Supports 49 Devices Are Active Forces 51 Chapter Six: Trust Devices 55 Formal Analysis 57 Substantive Analysis 58 Chapter Seven: Homo singularis 67 Value and Instrumentality 68 Shopping 73 The Red Michelin Guide: A Paper Engine 77 How Many Ninth Symphonies Did Beethoven Compose? 80 Chapter Eight: The Metamorphosis of Singularities 87 The Weight of Words 88 Can Sameness Engender Incommensurability? 89 Chapter Nine: The Regimes of Economic Coordination 96 A Classification of the Economic Coordination Regimes 97 Consumer Commitments and Coordination Regimes 103 Interlude 106 Part Three: Economic Coordination RegimesImpersonal Devices Regimes 131 Chapter Ten: The Authenticity Regime 133 The Market of Fine Wines 135 The Hachette and the Parker Guides to Wine 138 The Intelligentsia, Connoisseurs, and the Layman 141 Vulnerability of the French Fine- Wines Market? 144 Chapter Eleven: The Mega Regime 148 Megafilms 148 The Luxury Megafirm 157 The Megabrand 163 Chapter Twelve: The Expert- Opinion Regime 167 Literary Prizes 167 Trendsetters and Gatekeepers 170 Public Quality- Rating Devices 171 Chapter Thirteen: The Common- Opinion Regime 174 Songs 175 Adjustment by the Charts 177 Personal Devices Regimes 181 Chapter Fourteen: The Network- Market 183 The Personal Network 183 The Trade Network 185 The Practitioner Network 186 Chapter Fifteen: The Reticular Coordination Regime 188 Coordination by Shared Convictions 188 Coordination by Belief in Miracle Workers 191 Chapter Sixteen: The Professional Coordination Regime 195 Professional Regime Variants 196 Legal- Services Coordination Regime Variants 203 Chapter Seventeen: Prices 209 Concordance 211 Disproportion 219 Part Four: Finale Chapter Eighteen: The Historicity of Singularities 229 The Rule of Product Renewal 232 Desingularization of Personalized Services 236 Desingularization of Pop Music 242 Chapter Nineteen: Conclusion: Economics of Singularities and Individualism 255 On Individualism 256 Singularities and Individualism 261 Index 265

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"The accomplished historian Jennifer Delton has written an extremely important book on one of the United States’ leading business organizations, the National Association of Manufacturers . . . . [A] meticulously researched study." * Business History Review *

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Book SynopsisHealth care costs make up nearly a fifth of U.S. gross domestic product, but health care is a peculiar thing to buy and sell. Both a scarce resource and a basic need, it involves physical and emotional vulnerability and at the same time it operates as big business. Patients have little choice but to trust those who provide them care, but even thoseTrade ReviewOne of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2015 "This book is an important resource for academic audiences and professionals in the health disciplines as well as those in the social sciences."--Choice "Kudos to Adam Reich for this well-researched book! Students of medical sociology, as well as health management and policy, will find Selling Our Souls useful."--Okori Uneke, Ph.D., International Social Science Review "Reich has written an excellent book."--Hengameh Hosseini, Political Science QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 PART ONE PubliCare Rebuffs the Market 19 Chapter 1 Health Care for All 26 Chapter 2 Privileged Servants 48 Chapter 3 Feels Like Home 59 PART TWO HolyCare Moralizes the Market 71 Chapter 4 Sacred Encounters 78 Chapter 5 Good Business 95 Chapter 6 The Martyred Heart 109 PART THREE GroupCare Tames the Market 123 Chapter 7 Flourishing 127 Chapter 8 Disciplined Doctors 147 Chapter 9 PARTnership 171 Conclusion 189 Acknowledgments 199 A Note on Methods 201 Notes 205 Bibliography 213 Index 221

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Book Synopsis"Originally ppublished in 2016 under the title aEconomie du bien commun A Presses Universitaires de France"--Title page verso.Trade Review"Jean Tirole, Winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics""Winner of the 2018 George S. Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing, Columbia Business School""Longlisted for the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award""One of the Microsoft Best Business Books of 2017""One of the Times Higher Education Books of the Year 2017, chosen by Sir Anton Muscatelli""One of Project Syndicate’s Best Reads in 2017 (chosen by J. Bradford DeLong)""One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Books of 2017: Economics""One of Bloomberg’s Best Books of 2017""Selected for Bloomberg View’s “Must-Reads of 2017: Monopolies, Sexism and Economics”""One of Choice Reviews' Outstanding Academic Titles of 2018""One of the LSE Marshall Institute's Books of 2019""Economics for the Common Good offers an ambitious yet accessible summary of his ideas on the proper role of economists and the value of their ideas in informing government, business and social life. . . . Mr. Tirole has a patient, explanatory style. But when riled, he lashes out."---Philip Delves Broughton, Wall Street Journal"Economics for the Common Good is an ambitious book. As the title suggests, it is a response to the crisis of the economics profession, whose credibility was badly damaged by the financial turmoil of 2008. Though not the first book to address this, more than any earlier attempt it manages to balance a constructive critique of economists with a strong defence of the subject they study."---Martin Sandbu, Financial Times"As I had the privilege of helping prepare the English edition, I've read it with careful attention, and most appreciated Tirole’s ability to crystallise complicated issues in a straightforward way, combining surgical analysis with very clear explanation. This is too rare a skill among economists." * The Enlightened Economist *"'Economists must . . . with humility and conviction, harness economics for the common good.' That is the last sentence of the new book by Jean Tirole, winner of the 2014 Nobel Memorial Prize for economics. Economics for the Common Good has a great deal of humility, a fair amount of conviction and a sincere commitment to improving the world."---Edward Hadas, Reuters Breaking Views"French economist Jean Tirole spells out the usefulness of rigorous economic thinking for society in deep, yet accessible, language in his book Economics for the Common Good. The strength of the book is in its breadth. It brings clarity and simplicity to many complex topics covering various fields in economics ranging from climate change, labor market laws, and the global financial crisis to the euro crisis and the gig economy. Many illustrative examples . . . make the book accessible, and each chapter can be read on its own. . . . Many readers will benefit from reading this great book, rich with insights into a broad spectrum of policy questions."---Markus Brunnermeier, Finance & Development"Tirole, a Nobel Prize-winning French economist, explains in straightforward language what academic economists do, how they think about society and human behavior, and what advice they tend to offer governments about some of the biggest challenges they face." * Foreign Affairs *"A tour de force from a Nobel-prize winning economist." * LSE The Marshall Institute *

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