Much of my academic work has been focused on American domestic public policy. Previously, I wrote a ground-breaking book called The Laws that Shaped America, which focused on 15 key laws in American history. My latest book, American Public Policy: Federal Domestic Policy Achievements and Failures, 1901 to 2022, focuses on what we have accomplished, but even more importantly on what we have failed to do. And, boy, do we have work to do: inequality, climate change, immigration, racial injustice, gun violence, drug addiction, and more. I’m passionate about what good government can accomplish, and, like so many, sadden by what we have failed to accomplish.
This Nobel Prize-winning economist gets right to the heart of America’s problems: the growing divide between the rich and the rest of society.
We can see the toll declines in the standard of living have taken: malnutrition, drug abuse, shortened life expectancy, lack of access to much-needed health care, desperation and increased economic insecurity among the poor and a shrinking middle class in America.
Stiglitz convincingly shows how Federal Reserve policies, budgetary policies of Congress, and globalization have increased the widening gap, but also offers hope for a more economically just future.
The top 1 percent of Americans control some 40 percent of the nation's wealth. But as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains in this best-selling critique of the economic status quo, this level of inequality is not inevitable. Rather, in recent years well-heeled interests have compounded their wealth by stifling true, dynamic capitalism and making America no longer the land of opportunity that it once was. They have made America the most unequal advanced industrial country while crippling growth, distorting key policy debates, and fomenting a divided society. Stiglitz not only shows how and why America's inequality is bad for our economy…
The events/developments that unsettle international politics of the Gulf are two kinds: internal and external to the region. Yet, no matter whether it is internal or external, its consequences concern us all, no matter where we live in. What happens in the Gulf does not stay in the Gulf. It unleashes ripple effects that reach directly or indirectly into our pockets and hence our lives. I am one of them and a non-resident scholar in the Middle East Institute, broadly speaking, writing on Turkey, the Persian/Arab Gulf, and the Middle East.
Security is the prime issue in the international politics of the Gulf. Not just in the narrow military sense. In the broadest sense too. This book takes a comprehensive and in-depth look at the multitude of risks the Arab Gulf states faces, not only military kind (read Iran), but also food and water, environment and climate, sustaining standards of living in the face of a multitude of economic challenges and potential regional state failures. This book is unquestionably a must-read to have a deeper understanding of the complexity of problems the Arab Gulf states have to resolve, some of which are unique to the Gulf, some are not. It will be epic to survive them.
Increasingly long-term, nonmilitary challenges have remade security concerns in the Persian Gulf. The protection of food, water, and energy, the management and mitigation of environmental degradation and climate change, demographic pressures and the youth boom, the reformulation of structural deficiencies, and the fallout from progressive state failure in Yemen all require a broad, global, and multidimensional approach to achieving security in the Gulf. While traditional threats from Iraq and Iran, nuclear proliferation, and transnational terrorism remain robust, new challenges could potentially destabilize the redistributive mechanisms of state and society in the Arab oil monarchies. Insecure Gulf explores this new reality,…
As an entrepreneur and a professional business valuation specialist, I have a passion for understanding entrepreneurship and its often-transformational impact on society/civilization. Having worked with many business owners and inventors over the years, I've noticed that money is not always the primary motivating factor for entrepreneurs. In many instances, the benefits their products and services are intended to provide—and, in some instances, the wider social implications of those benefits—are what animates these business adventurers the most. So, these days when the work of NewSpace entrepreneurs like Musk, Bezos, and Branson are likely leading humankind to a multiplanetary future, it's an opportune time to explore the impact of entrepreneurship on society.
The impact of entrepreneurship on society is clearly of great interest to the author, an economist at Indiana University. Often contrasting Europe, where Dr. Audretsch has spent a considerable amount of time, with his native United States, the author explores the socioeconomic implications of America’s transition from a job-for-life society toThe Entrepreneurial Society.
For example, he explains that the entrepreneurial thrust in American business and academia in the late 20th century/early 21st century have generated an impressive job-creating engine, especially in contrast to the relatively stagnant job growth in most of Europe. The Entrepreneurial Society stands as an important discussion about the impact of entrepreneurship on 21st-century society and the book’s transatlantic scope makes it particularly interesting.
Your father most likely enjoyed the security of life-time employment with a major corporation. No more. While the previous generation had an average of four employers over the course of their lifetimes, the current generation will hold four different jobs by the time they reach 30. One of their employers will be either someone they know or themselves. If you're not an agent of change by contributing to innovation and doing something different and better today than yesterday, don't expect your job to be around for much longer. Over two-thirds of college students will be their own boss at some…
Today's reporter inhabits an environment ranging from hostile to apathetic. Somewhere beyond the blistering criticism and rabid mistrust is the writer's haunting suspicion that today's revelatory art will line the reader's birdcage before his or her lunchtime McChicken. I get it. My entire professional career has been spent filing Right-to-Know and other public information requests, working the phones, chasing the perfect photo, and hammering at the keyboard in the hopes of something legible. On occasion I've mined something of both meaning and impact. That's what the writers I've featured have done as well as anyone I've ever read. May you find their journalism as inspiring as I do.
Believe it or not, this irreverently titled gem was recommended to me by a pastor.
Charlie LeDuff is no saint, but his sermons on racial unrest, politician-class hypocrisy, and the poisoned water of Flint, Michigan should evoke some Old Testament outrage in any red-blooded American.
LeDuff shrugs off the tired tropes and narratives for a God's-honest odyssey of the U.S. to document corrosions within our culture and society. I dig his style and, more critically, his clear-eyed examination of the problems average people are facing across the country.
Sh*tshow! is a fun and refreshing read, sure to help recharge the batteries of even our most cynical.
A daring, firsthand, and utterly-unscripted account of crisis in America, from Ferguson to Flint to Cliven Bundy's ranch to Donald Trump's unstoppable campaign for President--at every turn, Pulitzer-prize winner and bestselling author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, Charlie LeDuff was there
In the Fall of 2013, long before any sane person had seriously considered the possibility of a Trump presidency, Charlie LeDuff sat in the office of then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, and made a simple but prophetic claim: The whole country is bankrupt and on high boil. It’s a shitshow out there. No one in the bubbles of Washington,…
I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the arts and artists, because it can do for you what it did for me. It explains why we get the art we get. Deresiewicz’s central question is how to keep body and soul alive while making a living following your creative muse.
Today’s artists are obliged to engage in a seemingly permanent fight for eyes and ears. The available weapons – self-branding, self-promotion, self-marketing, building an audience by being intimate with strangers (by selling your story, your life, and yourself) are not particularly appealing. All are time-consuming, and, believe me, I’ve tried them all.
In this adapt-or-die scenario, every musician is her own record company, every artist her own gallery, every writer her own publishing house. There is no institution to protect her from the market.
This excellent book is a powerful call to arms. Creators can barely survive, and…
Over the last twenty years, art has become more accessible than ever before. A painter can post their latest creation on Instagram and wait as the likes pile up; a budding filmmaker can shoot a clip on their iPhone, then upload it to YouTube for thousands to view. The digital landscape has fundamentally altered what it means to be creative, as well as how consumers interact with artistic production both economically and curatorially.
William Deresiewicz, a leading critic of contemporary culture in America, argues that we are in the midst of an epochal transformation within art. Whereas the nineteenth century…
I’ve lived in San Francisco since I was 20 in 1978. I helped launch Processed World in 1981, Critical Mass in 1992, and Shaping San Francisco in 1998. I’ve been co-directing and co-curating the archive at foundsf.org since 2009, and have been fully immersed for years in gathering and presenting local history online, on bike and walking tours, during Public Talks, and most recently on Bay Cruises. I have published three books of my own and edited or co-edited seven additional volumes, much of which covers local history. The more I’ve learned the more I’ve realized how little I know!
Debunking the Horatio Alger promotional blather of self-flattering tech moguls, the real Bay Area comes into view, based on nurses and teachers, drivers and clerks, homeless and the desperate. Real estate bubbles have given way to tech bubbles which have given way to housing bubbles and now have given way to a chimerical prosperity that is as fragile as any of the prior ones. Dick Walker pierces the veils of capitalist self-promotion to reveal the bleak consequences of the “technology booms” that have repeatedly crashed over the San Francisco Bay Area. Whether unpacking the real causes of our ongoing housing crisis or detailing the extensive ecological havoc inflicted on our area, this is a recent, definitive, fact-based analysis of it all.
The San Francisco Bay Area is currently the jewel in the crown of capitalism—the tech capital of the world and a gusher of wealth from the Silicon Gold Rush. It has been generating jobs, spawning new innovation, and spreading ideas that are changing lives everywhere. It boasts of being the Left Coast, the Greenest City, and the best place for workers in the USA. So what could be wrong? It may seem that the Bay Area has the best of it in Trump’s America, but there is a dark side of success: overheated bubbles and spectacular crashes; exploding inequality and…
Microeconomics is a turnoff to most readers. Not without reason. Many books in this field are dull rewrites of other books and opaque. In particular, it is not clear how the behavior of individual consumers and producers adds to the performance—good or bad—of an economy. The books listed here helped me to sharpen my own mind and to make my writing lucid.
In this series of essays, Ayn Rand presents her stand on the persecution of big business, the causes of war, the default of conservatism, and the evils of altruism.
The foundations of capitalism are being battered by a flood of altruism, which is the cause of the modern world's collapse. This is the view of Ayn Rand, a view so radically opposed to prevailing attitudes that it constitutes a major philosophic revolution. Here is a challenging new look at modern society by one of the most provocative intellectuals on the American scene.
You have to appreciate the intrepid nature of those who ventured out to sea in the days before satellite-enabled navigation, modern weather forecasting, and Coast Guard rescue swimmers. The books I’ve listed span a time of great global exploration occurring simultaneously with the engines of novel economic development. Most of that development was based on the exploitation of human and natural resources. A thread of curiosity through all of these picks is how those individuals most directly involved in its physical pursuit and transport were rarely the same who benefitted from it. But instead lived lives of constant hardship and danger – profiting, if at all, only in the adventure itself.
Democratically elected captains overseeing multi-ethnic crews in floating meritocraciesconducting rogue assaults against an autocratic, kleptocratic, slaveholding world isactually a quite appealing concept.
Yet, this both simplifies and overlooks the oftensavage and sadistic nature of the violence contained within the so-called Golden Age ofPiracy (1650s to 1730s). Johnson deconstructs these complexities through a deep, diveinto Henry Every, the 17th Century’s most notorious pirate and his vicious attack on anIndian treasure ship.
His crew was rewarded in rape, murder, mayhem, and financialriches beyond their wildest dreams. I love that the book strips away all our preconceptionof piracy, both positive and negative, forcing us to consider not just the darker forces ofhuman nature – but also of the social and economic systems that prompted them andwhich continue to thrive today.
“Thoroughly engrossing . . . a spirited, suspenseful, economically told tale whose significance is manifest and whose pace never flags.” —The Wall Street Journal
From The New York Times–bestselling author of The Ghost Map and Extra Life, the story of a pirate who changed the world
Henry Every was the seventeenth century’s most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular—and wildly inaccurate—reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Every’s most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the global economy.…
I'm a historian of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade who was trained with a PhD in History and a PhD in Art History, and who's interested in how slavery is memorialized in the public space as well as in the visual and material culture of slavery. I was born and raised in Brazil, the country where the largest number of enslaved Africans were introduced in the era of the Atlantic slave trade and that still today is the country with the largest Black population after Nigeria, the most populous African country. I believe that studying the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery helps us to remedy the legacies of anti-Black racism today.
Mariana Candido’s book brings to light the importance of land ownership among West Central Africans, by contesting the work of historians who up to here have basically agreed with the claims of European conquerors and colonizers who stated that West Central African land was plentiful and empty, therefore available to be occupied by the newcomers.
Drawing on detailed archival research, the book also us how West Central African men and women acquired and owned land and movable property. Candido brings to light how West Central African communities were consumers of European and Asian goods, and therefore connected to other parts of the world.
The book shows how men and women in Angola accumulated wealth, and also how during the rise of colonialism they were deprived of this wealth.
Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical…
I accidentally fell in love with Latin America, a love that has lasted my lifetime. When I was young, I lived in a Dominican neighborhood in New York, learning Spanish from my neighbors. After I graduated from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism I got a job covering the Cuban community in New Jersey because I spoke Spanish. Eventually I ended up living in Colombia and then Managua as a foreign correspondent. Now I edit a magazine at Harvard about Latin America. It's not just the news that interests me; I love the cadence of the language, the smell and taste of its varied cuisine, the warmth of the people, the culture, and, yes, soccer.
Mexican-born, Bogotá-based New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto writes about Latin America in a vivid, compassionate way, using individual stories to tease out trends and shed a light on history. I've loved all of Guillermoprieto's books, including her wonderful chronicles about dancing in Cuba and Brazil, but this volume is a true classic. She captures the feeling of the spirit of Latin America and Latin Americans. Even when I've been to the places she describes, she makes me see them in a different way through her meticulous reporting and lush descriptions.
What I like best about Guillermoprieto is that she looks into ordinary lives, ranging from Mexican garbage pickers to the window-pane fixers who make a living in Bogotá after glass is shattered by bombs.
An extraordinarily vivid, unflinching series of portraits of South America today, written from the inside out, by the award-winning New Yorker journalist and widely admired author of Samba.
