Recommendations based on "Our Dollar, Your Problem An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead"

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities.The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories.Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including:- China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West?- Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority?- What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions?Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.

Daniel Halliday examines the moral grounding of the right to bequeath or transfer wealth. He engages with contemporary concerns about wealth inequality, class hierarchy, and taxation, while also drawing on the history of the egalitarian, utilitarian, and liberal traditions in political philosophy. He presents an egalitarian case for restricting inherited wealth, arguing that unrestricted inheritance is unjust to the extent that it enables and enhances the intergenerational replication of inequality. Here, inequality is understood in a group-based sense: the unjust effects of inheritance are principally in its tendency to concentrate certain opportunities into certain groups. This results in what Halliday describes as 'economic segregation'. He defends a specific proposal about how to tax inherited wealth: roughly, inheritance should be taxed more heavily when it comes from old money. He rebuts some sceptical arguments against inheritance taxes, and makes suggestions about how tax schemes should be designed.

'If I were a voter in Britain, I would vote for [Jeremy Corbyn]' - Noam Chomsky, 2017Who Rules the World is the essential account of geopolitics right now - including an afterword on President Donald TrumpNoam Chomsky: philosopher, political writer, fearless activist. No one has done more to question the hidden actors who govern our lives, calling the powers that be to account. Here he presents Who Rules the World?, his definitive account of those powers, how they work, and why we should be questioning them.From the dark history of the US and Cuba to China's global rise, from torture memos to sanctions on Iran, this book investigates the defining issues of our times and exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of America's policies and actions. The world's political and financial elite are now operating almost totally unconstrained by the so-called democratic structure. With climate change and nuclear proliferation threatening our very survival, dissenting voices have never been more necessary.Fiercely outspoken and rigorously argued, Who Rules the World? is an indispensable guide to how things really are.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 BY THE NEW YORKER, THE GUARDIAN, and KIRKUS REVIEWSAn award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy—and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple question: what really happens to what we throw away?In Wasteland, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on a shocking journey inside the waste industry—the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy, quietly profiting from what we leave behind. In India, he meets the waste-pickers on the front line of the plastic crisis. In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste. In Ghana, he follows the after-life of our technology and explores the global export network that results in goodwill donations clogging African landfills. From an incinerator to an Oklahoma ghost-town, Franklin-Wallis travels in search of the people and companies that really handle waste—and on the way, meets the innovators and campaigners pushing for a cleaner and less wasteful future.With this mesmerizing, thought-provoking, and occasionally terrifying investigation, Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells a new story of humanity based on what we leave behind, and along the way, he shares a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world—before we’re all buried in trash.

The New York Times bestseller from CNN Political Commentator and 2020 former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, this thought-provoking and prescient call-to-action outlines the urgent steps America must take, including Universal Basic Income (UBI), to stabilize our economy amid rapid technological change and automation. The shift toward automation is about to create a tsunami of unemployment. Not in the distant future--now. One recent estimate predicts 45 million American workers will lose their jobs within the next twelve years--jobs that won't be replaced. In a future marked by restlessness and chronic unemployment, what will happen to American society? In The War on Normal People, Andrew Yang paints a dire portrait of the American economy. Rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and automation software are making millions of Americans' livelihoods irrelevant. The consequences of these trends are already being felt across our communities in the form of political unrest, drug use, and other social ills. The future looks dire-but is it unavoidable? In The War on Normal People, Yang imagines a different future--one in which having a job is distinct from the capacity to prosper and seek fulfillment. At this vision's core is Universal Basic Income, the concept of providing all citizens with a guaranteed income-and one that is rapidly gaining popularity among forward-thinking politicians and economists. Yang proposes that UBI is an essential step toward a new, more durable kind of economy, one he calls "human capitalism."

If you thought Wall Street was about alpha males standing in trading pits hollering at each other, think again. That world is dead. Now, the world's money is traded by computer code, inside black boxes in heavily guarded buildings. Even the experts entrusted with your cash don't know what's happening to it. And the very few who do aren't about to tell - because they're making a killing. This is a market that's rigged, out of control and out of sight; a market in which the chief need is for speed; and in which traders would sell their grandmothers for a microsecond. Blink, and you'll miss it. In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis tells the explosive story of how one group of ingenious oddballs and misfits set out to expose what was going on. It's the story of what it's like to declare war on some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. It's about taking on an entire system. And it's about the madness that has taken hold of the financial markets today. You won't believe it until you've read it.

'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*

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women and children are abducted, deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution, coerced to service hundreds if not thousands of men before being discarded. These trafficked sex slaves form the backbone of one of the world's most profitable illicit enterprises and generate huge profits for their exploiters, for unlike narcotics, which must be grown, harvested, refined, and packaged, sex slaves require no such "processing," and can be repeatedly "consumed." Kara first encountered the horrors of slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Subsequently, in the first journey of its kind, he traveled across four continents to investigate these crimes and take stock of their devastating human toll. Kara made several trips to India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Albania, Moldova, Mexico, and the United States. He witnessed firsthand the sale of human beings into slavery, interviewed over four hundred slaves, and confronted some of those who trafficked and exploited them. In this book, Kara provides a riveting account of his journey into this unconscionable industry, sharing the moving stories of its victims and revealing the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He draws on his background in finance, economics, and law to provide the first ever business analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focusing on its most profitable and barbaric form: sex trafficking. Kara describes the local factors and global economic forces that gave rise to this and other forms of modern slavery over the past two decades and quantifies, for the first time, the size, growth, and profitability of each industry. Finally, he identifies the sectors of the sex trafficking industry that would be hardest hit by specifically designed interventions and recommends the specific legal, tactical, and policy measures that would target these vulnerable sectors and help to abolish this form of slavery, once and for all. The author will donate a portion of the proceeds of this book to the anti-slavery organization, Free the Slaves.

Traditionally, Americans have viewed war as an alternative to diplomacy, and military strategy as the science of victory. Today, however, in our world of nuclear weapons, military power is not so much exercised as threatened. It is, Mr. Schelling says, bargaining power, and the exploitation of this power, for good or evil, to preserve peace or to threaten war, is diplomacy—the diplomacy of violence. The author concentrates in this book on the way in which military capabilities—real or imagined—are used, skillfully or clumsily, as bargaining power. He sees the steps taken by the U.S. during the Berlin and Cuban crises as not merely preparations for engagement, but as signals to an enemy, with reports from the adversary's own military intelligence as our most important diplomatic communications. Even the bombing of North Vietnam, Mr. Schelling points out, is as much coercive as tactical, aimed at decisions as much as bridges. He carries forward the analysis so brilliantly begun in his earlier The Strategy of Conflict (1960) and Strategy and Arms Control (with Morton Halperin, 1961), and makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on modern war and diplomacy. Stimson Lectures. Mr. Schelling is professor of economics at Harvard and acting director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs.

Bill de Blasio's campaign rhetoric focused on a tale of two cities: rich and poor New York. He promised to value the needs of poor and working-class New Yorkers, making city government work better for everyone-not just those who thrived during Bloomberg's tenure as mayor. But well into de Blasio's administration, many critics think that little has changed, especially in terms of land owners' and developers' profits. Despite the mayor's goal of creating more affordable housing, Brooklyn and Manhattan sit atop the list of the most unaffordable housing markets in the country. It seems that the old adage is becoming truer: New York is a place for only the very rich and the very poor.In <em>The Creative Destruction of New York City</em>, urban scholar Alessandro Busà travels to neighborhoods across the city, from Harlem to Coney Island, to tell the story of fifteen years of drastic rezoning and rebranding, updating the tale of two New Yorks. There is a gilded city of sky-high glass towers where Wall Street managers and foreign billionaires live-or merely store their cash. And there is another New York: a place where even the professional middle class is one rent hike away from displacement. Despite de Blasio's rhetoric, the trajectory since Bloomberg has been remarkably consistent. New York's urban development is changing to meet the consumption demands of the very rich, and real estate moguls' power has never been greater.Major players in real estate, banking, and finance have worked to ensure that, regardless of changes in leadership, their interests are safeguarded at City Hall. <em>The Creative Destruction of New York City</em> is an important chronicle of both the success of the city's elite and of efforts to counter the city's march toward a glossy and exclusionary urban landscape. It is essential reading for everyone who cares about affordable housing access and, indeed, the soul of New York City