INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A powerful and persuasive discussion about economics, freedom, and the relationship between the two, from today's brightest economist. In this classic discussion, Milton and Rose Friedman explain how our freedom has been eroded and our affluence undermined through the explosion of laws, regulations, agencies, and spending in Washington. This important analysis reveals what has gone wrong in America in the past and what is necessary for our economic health to flourish.

Thomas Sowell “both surprises and overturns received wisdom” in this indispensable examination of widespread economic fallacies (The Economist) Economic Facts and Fallacies exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues-and does so in a lively manner and without requiring any prior knowledge of economics by the reader. These include many beliefs widely disseminated in the media and by politicians, such as mistaken ideas about urban problems, income differences, male-female economic differences, as well as economics fallacies about academia, about race, and about Third World countries. One of the themes of Economic Facts and Fallacies is that fallacies are not simply crazy ideas but in fact have a certain plausibility that gives them their staying power-and makes careful examination of their flaws both necessary and important, as well as sometimes humorous. Written in the easy-to-follow style of the author's Basic Economics, this latest book is able to go into greater depth, with real world examples, on specific issues.

Gary Gerstle provides a sweeping re-interpretation of the entire era - from the revival of market liberalism in the 1970s to the ruin generated by the 2008 global financial crisis - that places America at the center.--

For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner.

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year "A must-read, with key lessons for the future."—Thomas Piketty A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they’ve had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal? In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below. Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies “succeeded,” relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity—and of modern economics—at the levers of contemporary political power.

Capitalism now dominates the globe, both in economics and ideology, shapes every aspect of our world and influences everything from laws, wars and government to interpersonal relationships. Introducing Capitalism tells the story of its remarkable and often ruthless rise, evolving through strife and struggle as much as innovation and enterprise. Dan Cryan and Sharron Shatil, with Piero's brilliant graphics, cover the major economic, social and political developments that shaped the world we live in, such as the rise of banking, the founding of America and the Opium Wars.The book explores the leading views for and against, including thinkers like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno and Milton Friedman, the connections between them and their historical context. Few ideas have had as much impact on our everyday lives as capitalism. Introducing Capitalism is the essential companion.

The story of Steve Schwarzman, Blackstone, and a financial revolution, King of Capital is the greatest untold success story on Wall Street. In King of Capital, David Carey and John Morris show how Blackstone (and other private equity firms) transformed themselves from gamblers, hostile-takeover artists, and ‘barbarians at the gate’ into disciplined, risk-conscious investors while the financial establishment—banks and investment bankers such as Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley—were recklessly assuming risks, leveraging up to astronomical levels and driving the economy to the brink of disaster. Now, not only have Blackstone and a small coterie of competitors wrested control of corporations around the globe, but they have emerged as a major force on Wall Street, challenging the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for dominance. Insightful and hard-hitting, filled with never-before-revealed details about the workings of a heretofore secretive company that was the personal fiefdom of Schwarzman and Peter Peterson, King of Capital shows how Blackstone and private equity will drive the economy and provide a model for how financing will work in the years to come.

This is an analysis of the increasingly differentiated regions of the South, the former Eastern bloc countries and Western Europe. The author integrates his economic arguments about the nature of the crisis with political arguments based on his vision of human history as the product of social response to material realities. The book analyzes the rise of ethnicity and fundametalism, and deconstructs the Bretton Woods institutions - notably the IMF and the World Bank - as managerial mechanisms proptecting the profitability of capital.

A Financial Times Book of the Year A ProMarket Book of the Year “Superbly argued and important...Donald Trump is in so many ways a product of the defective capitalism described in The Great Reversal. What the U.S. needs, instead, is another Teddy Roosevelt and his energetic trust-busting. Is that still imaginable? All believers in the virtues of competitive capitalism must hope so.” —Martin Wolf, Financial Times “In one industry after another...a few companies have grown so large that they have the power to keep prices high and wages low. It’s great for those corporations—and bad for almost everyone else.” —David Leonhardt, New York Times “Argues that the United States has much to gain by reforming how domestic markets work but also much to regain—a vitality that has been lost since the Reagan years...His analysis points to one way of making America great again: restoring our free-market competitiveness.” —Arthur Herman, Wall Street Journal Why are cell-phone plans so much more expensive in the United States than in Europe? It seems a simple question, but the search for an answer took one of the world’s leading economists on an unexpected journey through some of the most hotly debated issues in his field. He reached a surprising conclusion: American markets, once a model for the world, are giving up on healthy competition. In the age of Silicon Valley start-ups and millennial millionaires, he hardly expected this. But the data from his cutting-edge research proved undeniable. In this compelling tale of economic detective work, we follow Thomas Philippon as he works out the facts and consequences of industry concentration, shows how lobbying and campaign contributions have defanged antitrust regulators, and considers what all this means. Philippon argues that many key problems of the American economy are due not to the flaws of capitalism or globalization but to the concentration of corporate power. By lobbying against competition, the biggest firms drive profits higher while depressing wages and limiting opportunities for investment, innovation, and growth. For the sake of ordinary Americans, he concludes, government needs to get back to what it once did best: keeping the playing field level for competition. It’s time to make American markets great—and free—again.

This title marks a milestone in the comprehension of the accomplishments of our free-market economic system - a new understanding that promises to benefit many countries that lack the advantages of this immense innovation machine.