For more than a century, Coca-Cola has helped define America's image at home and abroad. Now Pendergrast tells the full story of why Coke--more than 99% sweetened water--is the quintessential American product, and how it changed the course of American capitalism.

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.

Like an Indecent Exposure of the defense industry, Running Critical is an expose of the General Dynamics scandal told by the only reporter who had exclusive access to the secret documents of both General Dynamics and the U.S. Navy. 16-page photo insert.

This history of the White Castle chain tells a "truly American success story (of) luck and hard work working behind one man to create an industry so pervasive that today it's an integral part of American pop culture" ("Publishers Weekly"). 23 illustrations.

For decades now, scholars and politicians alike have argued that the concentration of poverty in city housing projects would produce distrust, alienation, apathy, and social isolation—the disappearance of what sociologists call social capital. But relatively few have examined precisely how such poverty affects social capital or have considered for what reasons living in a poor neighborhood results in such undesirable effects. This book examines a neglected Puerto Rican enclave in Boston to consider the pros and cons of social scientific thinking about the true nature of ghettos in America. Mario Luis Small dismantles the theory that poor urban neighborhoods are inevitably deprived of social capital. He shows that the conditions specified in this theory are vaguely defined and variable among poor communities. According to Small, structural conditions such as unemployment or a failed system of familial relations must be acknowledged as affecting the urban poor, but individual motivations and the importance of timing must be considered as well. Brimming with fresh theoretical insights, Villa Victoria is an elegant work of sociology that will be essential to students of urban poverty.

Reveals how the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker engineered changes in America's economy.

High-rise public housing was a signature of the post–World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive homes for all Americans, the “projects“ soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, isolation and overcrowding, drugs, gang violence, and neglect. Here, Venkatesh seeks to salvage public housing’s troubled legacy.

From 1863 to the present--the company and the men who made it successful, the details of all models of rifles and the many other Marlin products.

Elihu Thomson was a late-nineteenth-century American inventor who helped create the first electric lighting and power systems. One of the most prolific inventors in American history, Thomson was granted nearly 700 patents in a career spanning the 1880s to 1930s.

Turn on a switch and from the nearest bulb out pours light from... somewhere; turn on a faucet and water appears. Wires, pipes, and roads support the lives we lead, but the average person doesn't know where they go or even how they work. In On the Grid, Scott Huler takes the time to understand the systems that sustain our way of life, starting from his own quarter of an acre in North Carolina and traveling as far as ancient Rome. Each chapter follows one element of infrastructure back to its source. Huler visits power plants, watches new asphalt pavement being laid, and traces a drop of water backward from the faucet to the Gulf of Mexico. He reaches out to guides along the way, both the workers who operate these systems and the people who plan them. On the Grid brings infrastructure to life and details the ins and outs of our civilization with fascinating, back-to-basics information about the systems we all depend on.