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Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and unknowns in the dazzling world of derivatives
Satyajit Das

“I had been in derivatives for over 25 years. Many traders hadn't been born when I stumbled accidentally into the arcane world of derivatives trading. The Indonesians were at the fag end of that career. How did I get there? I had followed the money. I had ridden the tide and currents of financial markets. I had not known very much then. Even now I only knew the many unknowns. How did I get here? It was a very long story. Send Traders, Guns and Money is that story…..”...

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Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and unknowns in the dazzling world of derivatives
Satyajit Das

“I had been in derivatives for over 25 years. Many traders hadn't been born when I stumbled accidentally into the arcane world of derivatives trading. The Indonesians were at the fag end of that career. How did I get there? I had followed the money. I had ridden the tide and currents of financial markets. I had not known very much then. Even now I only knew the many unknowns. How did I get here? It was a very long story. Send Traders, Guns and Money is that story…..”

Warren Buffet once labelled derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction”. Unlike the military kind, financial WMD are not hard to find. Many great companies use them. These businesses use derivatives to make money or protect them from risk. It’s a simple case of greed or fear. Or is it?

In derivatives, whoever you are, there are things that you don’t know that you don’t know. These are the real risks of derivatives. They’re generally left to the client to discover. So, if you’re entering the dazzling world of derivatives, ask yourself this: What do I know? What do I need to know? What don’t I know? What am I doing?

You can find the answers in Traders, Guns & Money, a sensational and controversial first-person account of the business of derivatives trading and the financial products industry in the spirit of Liar’s Poker. It is a true insider’s view of the business of trading and marketing derivatives for a living. It details the nature of the business, the players, how money is made and lost, and the deceptions that underlie the entire process.

Funny and poignant, and written in a wry and wickedly comic style, the book provides the ordinary reader with an insight into the seeming madness that underlies financial markets and the out-of-control process that is trading in complex financial products that few understand.

Traders, Guns & Money throws light on the culture, games, and pure deceptions played out every day in trading rooms around the world, and played out with other people’s money. It describes the processes by which a small group of gifted, if avaricious, individuals parlay their knowledge of the arcane world of financial products into wealth, leaving shareholders, clients, regulators, and the tax paying ordinary public to bear most of the risk.

This is the story of how one set of clients discovered the perils of unknowns in a derivatives deal. This tale will leave you amazed, and this book will make it all clear.In the sometimes dazzling world of derivatives, Traders Guns & Money shows you how we got here and tells it how it is. Go on, follow the money.

An accessible companion and a wise counsel, Traders, Guns & Money weaves together three core themes:

Known unkowns: if you’re entering the dazzling world of derivatives, ask yourself this: What do I know? What do I need to know? What don’t I know? What am I doing? This book will make it all clear.

Follow the money: an insider’s, expert witness account of the rise and rules of the world of derivatives. This book will show you how we got here and tell it how it is

Send traders guns & money: the story of how one set of clients discovered the perils of unknowns in a derivatives deal . This tale will leave you amazed, but wiser.

"Ever since Warren Buffett memorably described derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction" there has been a thriller waiting to be written about them. Derivatives have frightened otherwise right-thinking people for some time. In part this reflects a natural tendency to fear what we do not understand." Financial Times

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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Michael Lewis

A brilliant account—character-rich and darkly humorous—of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff. Truth really is stranger than fiction. Who better than the author of the signature bestseller Liar’s Poker to explain how the event we were told was impossible—the free fall of the American economy—finally occurred; how the things that we wanted, like ridiculously easy money and greatly expanded home ownership, were vehicles for that crash; and how sha...

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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Michael Lewis

A brilliant account—character-rich and darkly humorous—of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff. Truth really is stranger than fiction. Who better than the author of the signature bestseller Liar’s Poker to explain how the event we were told was impossible—the free fall of the American economy—finally occurred; how the things that we wanted, like ridiculously easy money and greatly expanded home ownership, were vehicles for that crash; and how shareholder demand for profit forced investment executives to eat the forbidden fruit of toxic derivatives.

Michael Lewis’s splendid cast of characters includes villains, a few heroes, and a lot of people who look very, very foolish: high government officials, including the watchdogs; heads of major investment banks (some overlap here with previous category); perhaps even the face in your mirror. In this trenchant, raucous, irresistible narrative, Lewis writes of the goats and of the few who saw what the emperor was wearing, and gives them, most memorably, what they deserve. He proves yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times. .

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ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism
Yves Smith

Why are we in such a financial mess today? There are lots of proximate causes: over-leverage, global imbalances, bad financial technology that lead to widespread underestimation of risk.
But these are all symptoms. Until we isolate and tackle fundamental causes, we will fail to extirpate the disease. ECONned is the first book to examine the unquestioned role of economists as policy-makers, and how they helped create an unmitigated economic disaster.

Here, Yves Smith looks at ho...

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ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism
Yves Smith

Why are we in such a financial mess today? There are lots of proximate causes: over-leverage, global imbalances, bad financial technology that lead to widespread underestimation of risk.
But these are all symptoms. Until we isolate and tackle fundamental causes, we will fail to extirpate the disease. ECONned is the first book to examine the unquestioned role of economists as policy-makers, and how they helped create an unmitigated economic disaster.

Here, Yves Smith looks at how economists in key policy positions put doctrine before hard evidence, ignoring the deteriorating conditions and rising dangers that eventually led them, and us, off the cliff and into financial meltdown. Intelligently written for the layman, Smith takes us on a terrifying investigation of the financial realm over the last twenty-five years of misrepresentations, naive interpretations of economic conditions, rationalizations of bad outcomes, and rejection of clear signs of growing instability.

In eConned, author Yves Smith reveals:

--why the measures taken by the Obama Administration are mere palliatives and are unlikely to pave the way for a solid recovery

--how economists have come to play a profoundly anti-democratic role in policy

--how financial models and concepts that were discredited more than thirty years ago are still widely used by banks, regulators, and investors

--how management and employees of major financial firms looted them, enriching themselves and leaving the mess to taxpayers

--how financial regulation enabled predatory behavior by Wall Street towards investors

--how economics has no theory of financial systems, yet economists fearlessly prescribe how to manage them

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The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
Diane Ravitch

A passionate plea to preserve and renew public education, The Death and Life of the Great American School System is a radical change of heart from one of America’s best-known education experts.

Diane Ravitch—former assistant secretary of education and a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum—examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions that she once staunchly advocated. Drawing on over forty years of research and experience, Ravitch ...

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The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
Diane Ravitch

A passionate plea to preserve and renew public education, The Death and Life of the Great American School System is a radical change of heart from one of America’s best-known education experts.

Diane Ravitch—former assistant secretary of education and a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum—examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions that she once staunchly advocated. Drawing on over forty years of research and experience, Ravitch critiques today’s most popular ideas for restructuring schools, including privatization, standardized testing, punitive accountability, and the feckless multiplication of charter schools. She shows conclusively why the business model is not an appropriate way to improve schools. Using examples from major cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, and San Diego, Ravitch makes the case that public education today is in peril.

Ravitch includes clear prescriptions for improving America’s schools:

• leave decisions about schools to educators, not politicians or businessmen
• devise a truly national curriculum that sets out what children in every grade should be learning
• expect charter schools to educate the kids who need help the most, not to compete with public schools
• pay teachers a fair wage for their work, not “merit pay” based on deeply flawed and unreliable test scores
• encourage family involvement in education from an early age

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House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
William D. Cohan

A blistering narrative account of the negligence and greed that pushed all of Wall Street into chaos and the country into a financial crisis.
 
At the beginning of March 2008, the monetary fabric of Bear Stearns, one of the world’s oldest and largest investment banks, began unraveling. After ten days, the bank no longer existed, its assets sold under duress to rival JPMorgan Chase. The effects would be felt nationwide, as the country suddenly found itself in the grip of the wors...

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House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
William D. Cohan

A blistering narrative account of the negligence and greed that pushed all of Wall Street into chaos and the country into a financial crisis.
 
At the beginning of March 2008, the monetary fabric of Bear Stearns, one of the world’s oldest and largest investment banks, began unraveling. After ten days, the bank no longer existed, its assets sold under duress to rival JPMorgan Chase. The effects would be felt nationwide, as the country suddenly found itself in the grip of the worst financial mess since the Great Depression. William Cohan exposes the corporate arrogance, power struggles, and deadly combination of greed and inattention, which led to the collapse of not only Bear Stearns but the very foundations of Wall Street.

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Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
Gillian Tett

From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her newsbreaking warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, Fool's Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown.

Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the "Morgan Mafia," as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Se...

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Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
Gillian Tett

From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her newsbreaking warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, Fool's Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown.

Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the "Morgan Mafia," as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team's bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control.

The deeply reported and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the "shadow banking" world. The story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk.

But when the Morgan team's derivatives dream collided with the housing boom, and was perverted -- through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed -- by titans of banking that included Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch -- even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling -- catastrophe followed. Tett's access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story of how they engineered their bank's escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown.

A tale of blistering brilliance and willfully blind ambition, Fool's Gold is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was perpetrated.

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Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management
Jeffrey Pfeffer

The best organizations have the best talent. . . Financial incentives drive company performance. . . Firms must change or die. Popular axioms like these drive business decisions every day. Yet too much common management "wisdom" isn’t wise at all—but, instead, flawed knowledge based on "best practices" that are actually poor, incomplete, or outright obsolete. Worse, legions of managers use this dubious knowledge to make decisions that are hazardous to organizational health.

Jeffrey Pf...

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Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management
Jeffrey Pfeffer

The best organizations have the best talent. . . Financial incentives drive company performance. . . Firms must change or die. Popular axioms like these drive business decisions every day. Yet too much common management "wisdom" isn’t wise at all—but, instead, flawed knowledge based on "best practices" that are actually poor, incomplete, or outright obsolete. Worse, legions of managers use this dubious knowledge to make decisions that are hazardous to organizational health.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton show how companies can bolster performance and trump the competition through evidence-based management, an approach to decision-making and action that is driven by hard facts rather than half-truths or hype. This book guides managers in using this approach to dismantle six widely held—but ultimately flawed—management beliefs in core areas including leadership, strategy, change, talent, financial incentives, and work-life balance. The authors show managers how to find and apply the best practices for their companies, rather than blindly copy what seems to have worked elsewhere.

This practical and candid book challenges leaders to commit to evidence-based management as a way of organizational life – and shows how to finally turn this common sense into common practice.

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On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System
Henry M. Paulson

Fast-paced and dramatic re-telling of the financial crisis that nearly bought the developed world to its knees. Hank Paulson was without doubt at the absolute epicentre of the recent economic storm, and his account of how he dealt with the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression will make for absolutely fascinating reading. The book contains all the decisive moments in the economic crisis, including the pivotal meetings with mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as ...

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On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System
Henry M. Paulson

Fast-paced and dramatic re-telling of the financial crisis that nearly bought the developed world to its knees. Hank Paulson was without doubt at the absolute epicentre of the recent economic storm, and his account of how he dealt with the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression will make for absolutely fascinating reading. The book contains all the decisive moments in the economic crisis, including the pivotal meetings with mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as Paulson's personal recollections of and conversations with President Bush, President Obama, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. As well as detailing the major decisions taken during the height of the crisis, Paulson will also put forth the policies he believes need to be implemented to take us securely into the future.

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The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (New Edition)
Bryan Caplan

The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.

Boldly calling in...

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The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (New Edition)
Bryan Caplan

The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.

Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.

The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.

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Plundering the Public Sector
David Craig

In their crusade to modernise public services, New Labour are giving vast amounts of taxpayers' money to management and IT systems consultants. They are everywhere - the Inland Revenue, MoD, Education Department, NHS and Downing Street. But are these management wizards giving us schools and hospitals that will be the envy of the world, or are they just siphoning off billions that should have been spent on the frontline services? And the biggest and most expensive consulting catastrophe of the...

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Plundering the Public Sector
David Craig

In their crusade to modernise public services, New Labour are giving vast amounts of taxpayers' money to management and IT systems consultants. They are everywhere - the Inland Revenue, MoD, Education Department, NHS and Downing Street. But are these management wizards giving us schools and hospitals that will be the envy of the world, or are they just siphoning off billions that should have been spent on the frontline services? And the biggest and most expensive consulting catastrophe of them all may still be yet to come - up to GBP 30 billion taken out of patient care to pay for the new NHS computer system. Isn't it time to ask how our money is really being spent?

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Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy
John Rawls

This last book by the late John Rawls, derived from written lectures and notes for his long-running course on modern political philosophy, offers readers an account of the liberal political tradition from a scholar viewed by many as the greatest contemporary exponent of the philosophy behind that tradition.

Rawls's goal in the lectures was, he wrote, "to identify the more central features of liberalism as expressing a political conception of justice when liberalism is viewed f...

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Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy
John Rawls

This last book by the late John Rawls, derived from written lectures and notes for his long-running course on modern political philosophy, offers readers an account of the liberal political tradition from a scholar viewed by many as the greatest contemporary exponent of the philosophy behind that tradition.

Rawls's goal in the lectures was, he wrote, "to identify the more central features of liberalism as expressing a political conception of justice when liberalism is viewed from within the tradition of democratic constitutionalism." He does this by looking at several strands that make up the liberal and democratic constitutional traditions, and at the historical figures who best represent these strands--among them the contractarians Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; the utilitarians Hume, Sidgwick, and J. S. Mill; and Marx regarded as a critic of liberalism. Rawls's lectures on Bishop Joseph Butler also are included in an appendix. Constantly revised and refined over three decades, Rawls's lectures on these figures reflect his developing and changing views on the history of liberalism and democracy--as well as how he saw his own work in relation to those traditions.

With its clear and careful analyses of the doctrine of the social contract, utilitarianism, and socialism--and of their most influential proponents--this volume has a critical place in the traditions it expounds. Marked by Rawls's characteristic patience and curiosity, and scrupulously edited by his student and teaching assistant, Samuel Freeman, these lectures are a fitting final addition to his oeuvre, and to the history of political philosophy as well.

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History of Economic Analysis by Schumpeter, Joseph
Joseph Schumpeter

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History of Economic Analysis by Schumpeter, Joseph
Joseph Schumpeter

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Law and Revolution, The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition
Harold J. Berman

The roots of modern Western legal institutions and concepts go back nine centuries to the Papal Revolution, when the Western church established its political and legal unity and its independence from emperors, kings, and feudal lords. Out of this upheaval came the Western idea of integrated legal systems consciously developed over generations and centuries.

Harold J. Berman describes the main features of these systems of law, including the canon law of the church, the royal law...

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Law and Revolution, The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition
Harold J. Berman

The roots of modern Western legal institutions and concepts go back nine centuries to the Papal Revolution, when the Western church established its political and legal unity and its independence from emperors, kings, and feudal lords. Out of this upheaval came the Western idea of integrated legal systems consciously developed over generations and centuries.

Harold J. Berman describes the main features of these systems of law, including the canon law of the church, the royal law of the major kingdoms, the urban law of the newly emerging cities, feudal law, manorial law, and mercantile law. In the coexistence and competition of these systems he finds an important source of the Western belief in the supremacy of law.

Written simply and dramatically, carrying a wealth of detail for the scholar but also a fascinating story for the layman, the book grapples with wideranging questions of our heritage and our future. One of its main themes is the interaction between the Western belief in legal evolution and the periodic outbreak of apocalyptic revolutionary upheavals.

Berman challenges conventional nationalist approaches to legal history, which have neglected the common foundations of all Western legal systems. He also questions conventional social theory, which has paid insufficient attention to the origin of modem Western legal systems and has therefore misjudged the nature of the crisis of the legal tradition in the twentieth century.

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Studs Terkel's Working: A Graphic Adaptation
Harvey Pekar

"Working has been a book, a radio drama, a Broadway musical, and now a gripping graphic novel. I can't speak for Studs, but I suspect he would have been tickled to see it adapted by a former government file clerk and wage slave, who knows all about working." --Roger Ebert

In the thirty-five years since Pulitzer Prize-winner Studs Terkel's Working was first published, it has captivated millions of readers with lyrical and heartbreaking accounts of how their fellow citizens...

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Studs Terkel's Working: A Graphic Adaptation
Harvey Pekar

"Working has been a book, a radio drama, a Broadway musical, and now a gripping graphic novel. I can't speak for Studs, but I suspect he would have been tickled to see it adapted by a former government file clerk and wage slave, who knows all about working." --Roger Ebert

In the thirty-five years since Pulitzer Prize-winner Studs Terkel's Working was first published, it has captivated millions of readers with lyrical and heartbreaking accounts of how their fellow citizens earn a living. Widely regarded as a masterpiece of words, it is now adapted into comic book form by comics legend Harvey Pekar, the blue-collar antihero of his American Book Award-winning comics series American Splendor.

In Studs Terkel's Working, Pekar offers a brilliant visual adaptation of Terkel's verbatim interviews, collaborating with both established comics veterans and some of the comic underground's brightest new talent. Here are riveting accounts of the lives of ordinary Americans--farmers, miners, barbers, hookers, box boys, stockbrokers--depicted with unsurpassed dignity and frankness. A visual treat with a visceral impact, Studs Terkel's Working will delight Terkel fans everywhere, and introduce his most powerful work to a new generation.

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Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel records the voices of America. Men and women from every walk of life talk to him, telling him of their likes and dislikes, fears, problems, and happinesses on the job. Once again, Terkel has created a rich and unique document that is as simple as conversation, but as subtle and heartfelt as the meaning of our lives.... In the first trade paperback edition of his national bestseller, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel presents "the real American experience" (Chicago Daily ...

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Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel records the voices of America. Men and women from every walk of life talk to him, telling him of their likes and dislikes, fears, problems, and happinesses on the job. Once again, Terkel has created a rich and unique document that is as simple as conversation, but as subtle and heartfelt as the meaning of our lives.... In the first trade paperback edition of his national bestseller, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel presents "the real American experience" (Chicago Daily News)--"a magnificent book . . .. A work of art. To read it is to hear America talking." (Boston Globe).

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Presimetrics: How Democratic and Republican Administrations Measure Up on the Issues We Care About
Mike Kimel

The authors cut through party bias to present the quantifiable facts about how modern presidents have performed on critical national issues

Politicians and the media spend a lot of time telling Americans how the presidents and their administrations are performing, but this analysis always skews along party lines. In Presimetrics, Kimel and Kanell take a fresh look at modern politics by gathering data from numerous government sources in order to compare and rank preside...

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Presimetrics: How Democratic and Republican Administrations Measure Up on the Issues We Care About
Mike Kimel

The authors cut through party bias to present the quantifiable facts about how modern presidents have performed on critical national issues

Politicians and the media spend a lot of time telling Americans how the presidents and their administrations are performing, but this analysis always skews along party lines. In Presimetrics, Kimel and Kanell take a fresh look at modern politics by gathering data from numerous government sources in order to compare and rank presidential performance on critical issues, from employment and health care to taxes and family values. The results frequently defy expectations:

• Reagan, godfather of neoconservatives, increased the federal workforce more than any president since LBJ

• Clinton, a hero to Democrats, cut funding for the NEA by a larger percentage than any other president

• Nixon/Ford outperformed all administrations on Democratic issues like Federal spending on social programs

The lively text clearly explains how various policies of each administration affect the data, and fascinating information graphics lend even greater depth to the discussion, showing at a glance how multiple administrations stack up.

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Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System
Daniel Callahan

Technological innovation is deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and is no less a basic feature of American health care. Medical technology saves lives and relieves suffering, and is enormously popular with the public, profitable for doctors, and a source of great wealth for industry. Yet its costs are rising at a dangerously unsustainable rate. The control of technology costs poses a terrible ethical and policy dilemma. How can we deny people what they may need to live and fl...

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Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System
Daniel Callahan

Technological innovation is deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and is no less a basic feature of American health care. Medical technology saves lives and relieves suffering, and is enormously popular with the public, profitable for doctors, and a source of great wealth for industry. Yet its costs are rising at a dangerously unsustainable rate. The control of technology costs poses a terrible ethical and policy dilemma. How can we deny people what they may need to live and flourish? Yet is it not also harmful to let rising costs strangle our health care system, eventually harming everyone?

In Taming the Beloved Beast, esteemed medical ethicist Daniel Callahan confronts this dilemma head-on. He argues that we can't escape it by organizational changes alone. Nothing less than a fundamental transformation of our thinking about health care is needed to achieve lasting and economically sustainable reform. The technology bubble, he contends, is beginning to burst.

Callahan weighs the ethical arguments for and against limiting the use of medical technologies, and he argues that reining in health care costs requires us to change entrenched values about progress and technological innovation. Taming the Beloved Beast shows that the cost crisis is as great as that of the uninsured. Only a government-regulated universal health care system can offer the hope of managing technology and making it affordable for all.

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Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care
Arnold Kling

In Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care, economist Arnold Kling argues that the way we finance health care matches neither the needs of patients nor the way medicine is practiced. The availability of premium medicine, combined with patients who are insulated from costs, means Americans are not getting maximum value per dollar spent. Using basic economic concepts, Kling demonstrates that a greater reliance on private saving and market innovation would eliminate waste, con...

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Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care
Arnold Kling

In Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care, economist Arnold Kling argues that the way we finance health care matches neither the needs of patients nor the way medicine is practiced. The availability of premium medicine, combined with patients who are insulated from costs, means Americans are not getting maximum value per dollar spent. Using basic economic concepts, Kling demonstrates that a greater reliance on private saving and market innovation would eliminate waste, contain health care costs and improve the quality of care. Kling proposes gradually shifting responsibility for health care for the elderly away from taxpayers and back to the individual. The idea of matching the health care funding system to needs is very simple, Kling writes. The very poor and the very sick need help paying for health care. The rest of us do not.

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Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
Peter Hessler

From the bestselling author of Oracle Bones and River Town comes the final book in his award-winning trilogy, on the human side of the economic revolution in China.

In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China. Hessler writes movingly of the average pe...

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Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
Peter Hessler

From the bestselling author of Oracle Bones and River Town comes the final book in his award-winning trilogy, on the human side of the economic revolution in China.

In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China. Hessler writes movingly of the average people—farmers, migrant workers, entrepreneurs—who have reshaped the nation during one of the most critical periods in its modern history.

Country Driving begins with Hessler's 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Great Wall, from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. He investigates a historically important rural region being abandoned, as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. Next Hessler spends six years in Sancha, a small farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, which changes dramatically after the local road is paved and the capital's auto boom brings new tourism. Finally, he turns his attention to urban China, researching development over a period of more than two years in Lishui, a small southeastern city where officials hope that a new government-built expressway will transform a farm region into a major industrial center.

Peter Hessler, whom The Wall Street Journal calls "one of the Western world's most thoughtful writers on modern China," deftly illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against foreigners, is now building roads and factory towns that look to the outside world.

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The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050
Joel Kotkin

Visionary social thinker Joel Kotkin looks ahead to America in 2050, revealing how the addition of one hundred million Americans by midcentury will transform how we all live, work, and prosper.

In stark contrast to the rest of the world's advanced nations, the United States is growing at a record rate and, according to census projections, will be home to four hundred million Americans by 2050. This projected rise in population is the strongest indicator of our long-term econ...

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The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050
Joel Kotkin

Visionary social thinker Joel Kotkin looks ahead to America in 2050, revealing how the addition of one hundred million Americans by midcentury will transform how we all live, work, and prosper.

In stark contrast to the rest of the world's advanced nations, the United States is growing at a record rate and, according to census projections, will be home to four hundred million Americans by 2050. This projected rise in population is the strongest indicator of our long-term economic strength, Joel Kotkin believes, and will make us more diverse and more competitive than any nation on earth.

Drawing on prodigious research, firsthand reportage, and historical analysis, The Next Hundred Million reveals how this unprecedented growth will take physical shape and change the face of America. The majority of the additional hundred million Americans will find their homes in suburbia, though the suburbs of tomorrow will not resemble the Levittowns of the 1950s or the sprawling exurbs of the late twentieth century. The suburbs of the twenty-first century will be less reliant on major cities for jobs and other amenities and, as a result, more energy efficient. Suburbs will also be the melting pots of the future as more and more immigrants opt for dispersed living over crowded inner cities and the majority in the United States becomes nonwhite by 2050.

In coming decades, urbanites will flock in far greater numbers to affordable, vast, and autoreliant metropolitan areas-such as Houston, Phoenix, and Las Vegas-than to glamorous but expensive industrial cities, such as New York and Chicago. Kotkin also foresees that the twenty-first century will be marked by a resurgence of the American heartland, far less isolated in the digital era and a crucial source of renewable fuels and real estate for a growing population. But in both big cities and small towns across the country, we will see what Kotkin calls "the new localism"-a greater emphasis on family ties and local community, enabled by online networks and the increasing numbers of Americans working from home.

The Next Hundred Million provides a vivid snapshot of America in 2050 by focusing not on power brokers, policy disputes, or abstract trends, but rather on the evolution of the more intimate units of American society-families, towns, neighborhoods, industries. It is upon the success or failure of these communities, Kotkin argues, that the American future rests.

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