Economics versus reality

how to be effective in the real Wwrld in spite of economic theory

John M. Legge shows the many ways in which the real world diverges from economics textbooks. He argues that mainstream economic theory took a disastrous turn 140 years ago, when it attempted to use calculus to explain human behavior. A real economy involves people who ...

The Jacobins

an essay in the New History

The Jacobins were the most famous of the political clubs that fomented the French Revolution. Initially moderate, they are remembered mainly for instituting the Reign of Terror. Crane Brinton’s The Jacobins was written in the 1930s, itself a decade of the violent centralization of ...

Weimar

a cultural history

The challenge of abolishing nuclear weapons

In the more than sixty years since the advent of nuclear weapons, there has been little meaningful progress toward nuclear disarmament. Some countries have nuclear weapons, while other states are forbidden to acquire them, a status quo that lacks rational basis and cannot be sustained ...

When small countries crash

The public is fascinated with financial crashes. Historians portray the roar of an angry mob toppling presidents or prime ministers and destroying the property of those who are regarded as malefactors. And certainly, financial crisis is often a factor in political change. It is often ...

The struggle for Madrid

the central epic of the spanish conflict 1936-1937

The Struggle for Madrid is a study of the battles that were waged between the armies of the Spanish Republic and the armies of General Francisco Franco for the city of Madrid. It was this struggle, beginning with the collapse of Republican arms at Toledo ...

Anarchism as political philosophy

Ed. Robert Hoffman. Reports of people rejecting political authority, assaulting it with words and often violent acts, are actions that are part of modern life. Anarchism has been considered a dead movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it assumed a renewed and ...

Men at war

politics, technology and innovation in the twentieth century

Eds. Timothy Travers, Christon Archer. The growing number of books on military history and the lively interest in military history courses at colleges and universities shows that the study of war is enjoying considerable popularity. The reasons for this are arguable, but of immediate interest ...

The presidency in the constitutional order

an historical examination

Eds. Joseph M. Bessette, Jeffrey Tulis. With Richard Nixon having so recently high-tailed it out of town one step ahead of the posse, most studies of the US presidency during the late 1970s were conducted by law scholars. Here political scientists take their turn, emphasizing ...

The Great Depression

With a new introduction by Murray Weidenbaum. This book examines the nature and the causes of the 1929 depression, tracing its background and the broad conditions from which the depression emerged. As an influence on economic activity, Robbins sees World War I, and the political ...

The north korean economy

between crisis and catastrophe

Viewed from afar, North Korea may appear bizarre, or positively irrational. But as Nicholas Eberstadt demonstrates in this meticulously researched volume, there is a grim coherence to North Korea's political economy, and a ruthless logic undergirding it - one that unreservedly subordinates economic welfare to ...

Separating fools from their money

a history of american financial scandals

What do Michael Milken and Martha Stewart have in common? (Answer: Both became public scapegoats for an outrageous era of greed and excess). What was the most outrageous party thrown by a financial baron of the twentieth century? (Answer: Tough call, but either Michael Milken ...

Conversations on the neture of political economy

Jane Marcet is not writing for the working classes, but for women and men of the educated classes of the nineteenth century. She draws her principles and materials from the writings of the great masters who have written about political economy, particularly Adam Smith, Thomas ...

Bismarck and the creation of the second reich

With a new introduction by Eda Sagarra. Chancellor Otto Bismarck's "greatness" lay in what he created, the German Reich of 1871. This Reich was the product of his genius, and in it his genius took complete shape. In less than a decade German chaos ...

The optimum quantity of money

This classic set of essays by Nobel Laureate and leading monetary theorist Milton Friedman presents a coherent view of the role of money, focusing on specific topics related to the empirical analysis of monetary phenomena and policy. The early chapters cover factors determining the real ...

Nuclear war and nuclear peace

This book began as a personal effort to comprehend the effect of nuclear weapons on the current era and its international system. Nuclear weapons have not merely revolutionized the military sphere but have also left their stamp on the world order. Knowledge of the basic ...

The economics of slavery and other studies in econometric history

How are economists and historians to explain what happened in history? What statistical inferences can be drawn from historical data? The authors believe that explanation in history can be identified with the problems of prediction in a probabilistic universe. Using this approach, the historian can ...

Public finance

Shoup (political economy, Columbia U.) takes a comprehensive and global approach to the issue of how people pay for their governments' services, while also considering the goals, effects, and criteria of the public finance methods they use. Graced with a new introduction by Steven Medema.

Adventures of a bystander

Peter Drucker's lively and thoughtful memoirs are now available in paperback with a new introduction by the author. He writes with wit and spirit about people he has encountered in a long and varied life, inluding Sigmung Freud, Henry Luce, Alfred Sloan, John L ...

Combating piracy

intellectual property theft and fraud

Fraud and piracy of products and ideas have become common in the early twenty-first century, as opportunities to commit them expand, and technology makes fraud and piracy easy to carry out. In "Combating Piracy: Intellectual Property Theft and Fraud", Jay S. Albanese and his contributors ...

The illusion of economic stability

In one of the foremost critiques of the widespread view that in market-based economics the fluctuations of the marketplace are essentially self-regulating, Eli Ginzberg argues the reverse. He asserts that government regulation or intervention to provide stability in the capitalist marketplace is a necessity. In ...

European integration and health policy

the artful dance of economics and history