Recommendations based on "Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. II The Wheels of Commerce"

An outrageous, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world - from someone who survived the trading game and then blew it all wide open 'If you were gonna rob a bank, and you saw the vault door there, left open, what would you do? Would you wait around? Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken footballs on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf's skyscrapers, Gary wanted something better. Something a whole lot bigger. Then he won a competition run by a bank: 'The Trading Game'. The prize: a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader in the whole city. A place where you could make more money than you'd ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public schoolboys and borderline psychopaths, yet they start to feel like family. Where soon you're the bank's most profitable trader, dealing in nearly a trillion dollars. A day. Where you dream of numbers in your sleep - and then stop sleeping at all. But what happens when winning starts to feel like losing? When the easiest way to make money is to bet on millions becoming poorer and poorer - and, as the economy starts slipping off a precipice, your own sanity starts slipping with it? You want to stop, but you can't. Because nobody ever leaves. Would you stick, or quit? Even if it meant risking everything?

• New York Times bestseller •The 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world“At this point in time, the Drawdown book is exactly what is needed; a credible, conservative solution-by-solution narrative that we can do it. Reading it is an effective inoculation against the widespread perception of doom that humanity cannot and will not solve the climate crisis. Reported by-effects include increased determination and a sense of grounded hope.” —Per Espen Stoknes, Author, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming“There’s been no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. There remains no single, comprehensive, reliable compendium of carbon-reduction solutions across sectors. At least until now. . . . The public is hungry for this kind of practical wisdom.” —David Roberts, Vox“This is the ideal environmental sciences textbook—only it is too interesting and inspiring to be called a textbook.” —Peter Kareiva, Director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLAIn the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here—some are well known; some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in lower-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable, and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth’s warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being—giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world.

'One of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time. When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive' Arundhati Roy From one of the world's most prominent thinkers comes an urgent warning of the threat that US power poses to humanity's future The land of the free. The home of the brave. But what has America achieved in the aim of 'spreading democracy' -- except wreak havoc across the globe and establish a reckless foreign policy that serves the interest of few and has endangered all too many? In this timely book, Noam Chomsky writing with Nathan J. Robinson, vividly traces America's pursuit of global domination, offering an incisive critique of the self-serving myths that dominant elites in the United States continue to push. Offering penetrating accounts of Washington's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they examine how interventions such as these have been justified with noble stories about humanitarian missions and benevolent intentions but are now driving us closer to wars with Russia and China. At once thorough and devastating, urgent and provocative, The Myth of American Idealism offers a highly readable entry to the conclusions Noam Chomsky has come to after a lifetime of thought and activism. 'The west's most prominent critic of US imperialism . . . the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar' Guardian

New York Times Book Review Editor’s ChoiceSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 FINANCIAL TIMES AND MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEARA New York Times technology and business reporter charts the dramatic rise of Bitcoin and the fascinating personalities who are striving to create a new global money for the Internet age.Digital Gold is New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper’s brilliant and engrossing history of Bitcoin, the landmark digital money and financial technology that has spawned a global social movement.The notion of a new currency, maintained by the computers of users around the world, has been the butt of many jokes, but that has not stopped it from growing into a technology worth billions of dollars, supported by the hordes of followers who have come to view it as the most important new idea since the creation of the Internet. Believers from Beijing to Buenos Aires see the potential for a financial system free from banks and governments. More than just a tech industry fad, Bitcoin has threatened to decentralize some of society’s most basic institutions.An unusual tale of group invention, Digital Gold charts the rise of the Bitcoin technology through the eyes of the movement’s colorful central characters, including an Argentinian millionaire, a Chinese entrepreneur, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and Bitcoin’s elusive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Already, Bitcoin has led to untold riches for some, and prison terms for others.

“This is a brilliant and hardheaded book. It will frighten those who prefer not to dwell on the unthinkable and infuriate those who have taken refuge in stereotypes and moral attitudinizing.”—Gordon A. Craig, New York Times Book Review“A grim but carefully reasoned and coldly analytical book. . . . One of the most frightening previews which this reviewer has ever seen of the roads that lie just ahead in warfare.”—Los Angeles TimesOriginally published in 1966, this landmark book explores the ways in which military capabilities—real or imagined—are used, skillfully or clumsily, as bargaining power. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new introduction to the work shows how Schelling’s framework—conceived of in a time of superpowers and mutually assured destruction—still applies to our multipolar world, where wars are fought as much online as on the ground.The Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series

Consuming less is our best strategy for saving the planet--but can we do it? In this thoughtful and surprisingly optimistic book, journalist J. B. MacKinnon investigates how we may achieve a world without shopping. We can't stop shopping. And yet we must. This is the consumer dilemma. The economy says we must always consume more: even the slightest drop in spending leads to widespread unemployment, bankruptcy, and home foreclosure. The planet says we consume too much: in America, we burn the earth's resources at a rate five times faster than it can regenerate. And despite efforts to "green" our consumption--by recycling, increasing energy efficiency, or using solar power--we have yet to see a decline in global carbon emissions. Addressing this paradox head-on, acclaimed journalist J. B. MacKinnon asks, What would really happen if we simply stopped shopping? Is there a way to reduce our consumption to earth-saving levels without triggering economic collapse? At first this question took him around the world, seeking answers from America's big-box stores to the hunter-gatherer cultures of Namibia to communities in Ecuador that consume at an exactly sustainable rate. Then the thought experiment came shockingly true: the coronavirus brought shopping to a halt, and MacKinnon's ideas were tested in real time. Drawing from experts in fields ranging from climate change to economics, MacKinnon investigates how living with less would change our planet, our society, and ourselves. Along the way, he reveals just how much we stand to gain: An investment in our physical and emotional wellness. The pleasure of caring for our possessions. Closer relationships with our natural world and one another. Imaginative and inspiring, The Day the World Stops Shopping will embolden you to envision another way.

'In this remarkable work, Robert Skidelsky unites his experience, knowledge and talents in a sweeping account of money and power' James K. GalbraithThe dominant view in economics is that money and government should play only a minor role in economic life. Money, it is claimed, is nothing more than a medium of exchange; and economic outcomes are best left to the 'invisible hand' of the market. The view taken in this important new book is that the omnipresence of uncertainty make money and government essential features of any market economy. One reason we need money is because we don't know what the future will bring. Government - good government - makes the future more predictable and therefore reduces this kind of demand for money.After Adam Smith orthodoxy persistently espoused non-intervention, but the Great Depression of 1929-32 stopped the artificers of orthodox economics in their tracks. A precarious balance of forces between government, employers, and trade unions enabled Keynesian economics to emerge as the new policy paradigm of the Western world. However, the stagflation of the 1970s led to the rejection of Keynesian policy and a return to small-state neoclassical orthodoxy. Thirty years later, the 2008 global financial crash was severe enough to have shaken the re-vamped classical orthodoxy, but, curiously, this did not happen. Once the crisis had been overcome - by Keynesian measures taken in desperation - the pre-crash orthodoxy was reinstated, undermined but unbowed. Since 2008, no new 'big idea' has emerged, and orthodoxy has maintained its sway, enacting punishing austerity agendas that leave us with a still-anaemic global economy.This book aims to familiarise the reader with essential elements of Keynes's 'big idea'. By showing that much of economic orthodoxy is far from being the hard science it claims to be, it aims to embolden the next generation of economists to break free from their conceptual prisons and afford money and government the starring roles in the economic drama that they deserve.

'The best case I've read for putting an upper limit on the accumulation of wealth' Richard Wilkinson 'One of the most talked-about books to the moment ... Limitarianism floats the heretical idea that fixing society isn't just about saving the poorest from destitution, but about putting a cap on how much the richest are able to own' Spectator No-one deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you. We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately. In this astonishing, eye-opening intervention, world-leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control. In moral, political, economic, social, environmental and psychological terms, she shows, extreme wealth is not only unjustifiable but harmful to us all - the rich included. In place of our current system, Robeyns offers a breathtakingly clear alternative: limitarianism. The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism - and the opportunity for a vastly better world - lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. Because nobody deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you. *Shortlisted for the Socrates Philosophy Prize*

A sweeping history of the American invention of modern money. Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems—coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention. Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed. Easy Money illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods—such as silver—to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. Weaving economics, law, and American history, Easy Money is a new touchstone in the story of monetary systems.