Economics & Business

This book seeks to explain the persistence of capitalism despite all the trouble it has created. For several years now, every crisis—even crises not directly caused by capitalism, such as...

The Angel in the Marketplace is a biography of Jean Wade Rindlaub, a mid-century adwoman widely recognized on Madison Avenue for her success in marketing household products to American housewives,...

Is economics the key to everything or do we need to look for completely new ways of explaining what is going on in the world? By “economics” I mean the discipline...

It has been strongly asserted by some regulators, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, that the Dodd-Frank Act now permits the safe resolution of any systemically important financial institution that...

The book includes a 16-page color section that is a kind of visual overture of the project. This section uses a series of drawings and diagrams to address the main...

People and dogs share thousands of years of co-evolution. The nature of their relationship has also evolved, moving largely from dogs as workmates to dogs as pets. Especially in contemporary...

This book deals with a basic question: What’s the best way to get people to behave themselves? Modern legal, policy, and management experts often assume human beings are selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards, and who can’t be trusted to do a good job or refrain from lying, cheating and stealing—unless given the right “incentives.”

C. Wright Mills argued that sociological research often springs from the intersection of personal biography and history. My book is no exception. I come from a family that bought organic foods...

While Crack is, as books go, on the slim side, it covers a lot of ground. While I hope the chapters on the history of cocaine, the lure of crack,...

Histories of the long, prosperous liberal consensus in the middle of the twentieth century looked back to the specific experience of the industrial North. The people and institutions of the...

When the Endangered Species Act was passed, in 1973, traditional economics, which looked to self-interest and endless growth as the predominant drivers of the economy, was pretty much the only...

My first book, No Man’s Land, showed how and when geography and the technologies that we generally associate with globalization—cheap and fast transportation, containing shipping, the Internet, mobile phones, and...

Raiford Guins on King PONG, his history of Atari's launch product as a masterclass in market creation. Three engineers with no business background reinvented coin-op amusement, then pivoted into consumer electronics via Sears — becoming the engine behind ubiquitous gaming today.

“The Racial Return,” chapter 2 in the book, reveals, through the lens of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, how strategic partnerships between organizations in the nonprofit...

I would urge the reader to start with the Introduction, called Obsession, which provides a bird’s eye view of how silver has seduced investors and politicians throughout the ages, and...

Money Games chronicles how sports and entertainment have continued to converge throughout history. The pace at which this convergence has been happening is covered in the book’s nine chapters. My...

I’ve identified four reasons why our economic system doesn’t support the natural world. All four of these problems can be fixed by straightforward institutional or policy reforms. In fact, there are...

Copycats and Contrarians explores our instincts to follow others from a uniquely multidisciplinary perspective. It draws on insights and evidence from economics, finance, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and behavioral ecology....

While Europe is considered the “old world,” it is the United States that is actually far older. The European Union in its current configuration of 27 member states and 500...

My book reconsiders the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949 from a novel perspective: the spread of consumerism in a self-proclaimed communist country. The book title, Unending...

The global capitalist=consumerist economy has an entire faith system, which has its own hierarchy, its own institutions, its own marble palaces. It has its own mythology, doctrine of the creation,...

Chapter 5 opens with an anecdote, a true story. A few years back I was giving a talk in Taiwan about the state of the biotech sector there. The government had...

It is always a good idea to start at the end. The epilogue of my book takes its cue from the famous question in the Monty Python movie The Life...

Foreclosed describes the evolution of U.S. mortgage markets from the early twentieth century through to the subprime crisis of the late 2000s. The book details the highly mixed-economy nature of...

I came to write Veblen out of years of skepticism about the “outsider thesis.” Added to this was my frustration, at once theoretical and methodological, with the tendency of intellectual...

Discussions about migration in the media and elsewhere are limited by a lack of perspective of international migration’s historical role, contemporary impacts, and future prospects. Exceptional People addresses these gaps....

The book’s story line carries, I hope, some dramatic interest. And it demands relatively little background knowledge. A reader whose curiosity is piqued will hopefully go further and cover the...

Higher Learning, Greater Good is the first book to systematically identify and develop the evidence necessary to measure comprehensively the benefits of higher education and to estimate their economic value. The...

Normalization of the right is the term that I develop to capture the twin phenomena of the electoral surge of the European right and the mainstreaming of nationalist ideas and...

I’d like my fresh reader to read the introduction carefully because it lays out my argument and makes the assertions that the text must back up. Many believe that capitalism...

So much of the public discussion about China today concerns the question of where the nation is headed. What are China’s intentions in the world? Part of this debate draws...

Socrates in the Boardroom argues that it is experts, not managers that make the better leaders. This is a message that, recently, has been almost unfashionable. I go a step...

Vice and addiction have always been with us. The Age of Addiction shows how entrepreneurs melded vices and addictions into a global economic system of limbic capitalism, outmaneuvering reformers determined...

Each chapter deals with similar questions. What were the main forces that shaped business and its role in the economy? What new businesses emerged? How did they operate? What was...

Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves presents a holistic analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of neighborhood change and offers strategies for making a more socially desirable palette of...

How Economics Shapes Science focuses on how costs and incentives—core concepts in economics—shape the practice of science, especially the practice of science at universities. Costs matter: they play a role in...

I would urge the reader to look at the Reagan chapter first. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I suggest the Reagan era was a low point for NAM. During the 1980s,...

The world suddenly paid a lot of attention to Hong Kong during the uprising in 2019 and the subsequent crackdown in 2020 and after. My book offers a long historical...

What happens when you try to fix a problem without understanding its cause. Segregation, redlining, speculators, employers lured out to the suburbs by tax breaks, highways built for those suburbs while urban transit was cut — the damage was specific and quantifiable. What followed was not a remedy for any of it, but a machine for routing public money to outside lenders and businesses, most spectacularly through federal loan insurance that paid out in full when residents defaulted.

Swiftynomics is about understanding women as economic agents of change. Taylor Swift is its muse. The book highlights the often-ignored economic activities that women contribute to their families, communities, and the economy through economic growth. I delve into themes of reinvention and masterminding to explain how we grow, advance, and continue...

I am an economist who spent the last 35 years in a medical school training a wide range of post-doctoral fellows and undertaking applied research in an interdisciplinary setting. My...

For most of the twentieth century advertising portrayed women in narrow roles — as dim-witted sex objects, as perky young things in search of a man, or as one-dimensional homemakers...

The Great Delusion is about the unrealistic expectations we all have about what this tired and picked-over planet can provide us. It is about economic growth, the belief that a...

The Culture Transplant is about the fact that on average, immigrants never fully assimilate. Europeans who violently migrated to North America usually didn’t assimilate to Native American culture and levels...

My previous research was about the French movie industry. In 2014, Netflix was just arriving in France, opening up an office in Paris. I got funding for studying this company...

How much competition exists on the business side of live entertainment has always determined the quality and price of what reaches the stage, and how the artists and crew get treated. Vaudeville, a century of commercial theater, and today's arena tours — why vaudeville died, why a theatrical syndicate should have been prosecuted as the cartel it was, and why a monopoly had to be broken up in the 1950s.

What started as a contest for spices between Portugal and Spain had many consequences. It hugely expanded European understanding of the world and allowed people, through the resulting medium of...

We are fond of dogs. Although it would be a bit of a stretch to say that we are also fond of economics, we certainly appreciate its usefulness in understanding social interaction and...

This book is about adopting a longer-term perspective to understand the world we live in. In the 1800s a handful of countries, initially in western Europe and lands settled by Europeans,...

While chapter four, dealing with the debates surrounding the use of the death penalty for counterfeiting crimes, offers some revealing examples of how contemporaries understood money politically, I would steer...

The Romantics understood what scientists often forget: that, as Wordsworth put it, we ‘half-create’ the world we see. Any particular observation is the joint product of sense data our minds...

I develop the concept of ‘culturally adapted strategy’ to explain how they creatively engage with political narratives, draw moral legitimacy, and harness cultural resources to carve out a unique identity, one that affords them an..

America's biggest startups are raising trillions in private markets while sidestepping the disclosure rules that once protected investors and the public. This conversation traces how four decades of deregulation shrank the public markets, let companies stay private for decades, and handed founders nearly unchecked power. It asks what that shift means for ordinary people locked out of an insular, network-driven financing system.

Speculation is about a dilemma that has troubled the legal system for a long time. For centuries, there has been a consensus that investment is necessary and ought to be...

They both indicate that the current economic recovery from the global recession is inherently unsustainable. In 2008, the world was confronted with multiple crises—fuel, food and financial—and by December the result...

This morning, October 1, 2009, I picked up the New York Times to notice a full-page ad on the back of the news section. It was prepared and paid for...

At its broadest level, Prosperity for All is about the changing meaning of consumer society over the past half century. I argue that whereas access to the benefits of consumer...

The financial crisis opened the door to massive public interventions in the Western economies. In many nations, governments responded to the threats of illiquidity and insolvency by making huge investments...

The business of contemporary art has changed immeasurably over the last half century. What was essentially a small, insider trade clustered in a few key avant-garde capitals has expanded into...

The Code Economy is a book about the past and likely future of human progress. My aim in writing it was to combine history with economics to explain how human...

While the paradigm frequently offered for understanding our society is freedom of the market, the reality of most people’s experience of economic life is one of constraint. Why is this? It...

Of the four host countries I studied—the US, Britain, Switzerland, and Australia—the last one seems like the odd one out. Aside from the fact that I am from there, Australia...

Let me share my personal perspective on my research journey. My interest began with the fascinating question of Japan's industrialization. How did Japan, a small island nation viewed by the...

Ten years ago, I began writing a book on the phenomenon of globalization, in part in order to try to understand the bitter debate which pitted globalization protesters against international...

The book ranges from describing the horrors of famine in some detail to musing, with tempered hope, about the prospects of eliminating famine, at least in peacetime. I would hope...

I came to this subject through an earlier project concerning business complicity under National Socialism. Companies such as Siemens (electronics), Krupp (steel), and the automotive firms BMW, Volkswagen, and Daimler Benz,...

Corruption has existed since the earliest civilizations but documenting and writing its history has not been easy. In the case of Peru, tackling through detailed research the challenges to writing...

The book’s introduction is titled “Thinking about Jews and Capitalism.”Capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. Of course, one...

Global California discusses what Californians can do to identify and promote their own interests in a rapidly changing world. It takes up such thorny issues as globalization, trade, infrastructure, immigration,...

My book begins with a largely forgotten California strike that took place at Safeway supermarkets in 2003-04. At first glance, the basic arc of that story is a familiar confrontation...

Measuring Tomorrow is essentially a guide to the well-being and sustainability transition and as such aims to make four contributions. First, while we have several insightful historical accounts of GDP’s...

Obviously, this isn’t the first book about Starbucks. But Everything but the Coffee is first to examine the company’s rise and fall and look ahead to its uncertain future in...

This book tells the story of how a small, often morally dubious, craft industry in the nineteenth century grew to be the $330 billion global powerhouse. There are many books written...

At each exhibit, you’ll learn about a different seemingly insane ritual used to organize human life and learn a different lesson about how to use economic logic to find its...

Clash of Extremes presents a new interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. If the prevailing explanation can be summarized in one word, “slavery,” the argument in my book...

One of the most notable developments in international trade after the end of the Cold War has been the explosion of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). In 1990, there were about...

In Enduring Success I address a key question in business today: How can companies succeed over time? I argue that companies are able to adapt to a constantly changing environment by...

As the title suggests, this book is about the personal and social relationships that govern the global economy. I wanted to tell a story of global finance that focuses not...

My book offers a fresh way of understanding insurgency and terrorism. I outline a constructive approach to confronting localized insurgencies like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the international terrorism...

This book is about how American politics affects the multilateral development banks—or “the banks,” for short. The best known of these is the World Bank, but several regional banks that...

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 triggered a huge demand for history, an unprecedented urge to place the event in a historical perspective. Two questions came up time and time again. How...

At the center of everything is building best teams, because that’s what successful people do. They really build a team, and they bring different things together, and they make it a team, not just a collection of people. And of course, ensuring alignment. That is, getting people to move in the same direction, even though they each have different things to do, they’re aligned with the vision of where we’re trying to go. That’s a bit about what competencies are, and I think you can see that they’re different from skills.

The Austrian-American novelist Vicki Baum once wrote that what people have done to rubber is fascinating, but what is more fascinating yet is what rubber has done to people. That,...

I came to the subject as an outsider to the field of management: as an historian with a broad interest in the social sciences and in public policy. I was...

While Coffee Nation is about the history of one of the world’s most popular commodities, I use it to consider how North America fit into a world governed by empires...

Other historians, especially in the last ten years, have written about this suspected conspiracy. Indeed, as an undergraduate student, I myself abridged the one extant judge’s account of the trials....

Most people associate the word mocha with coffee. For some it may be a type of coffee bean with a rich deep taste, usually from Yemen or the Horn of...

My critics have “granted me” the point that developed free market cities have the ability and the capacity to cope with many aspects of climate change. But they have countered...

The narcissistic present forever seeks itself in the past. Though the living try to winnow meaning from the chaos of history, they often discover only themselves among the dead generations....

The nature of this book is that it is full of close-ups. It is made of the details of people’s lives, and the ways that they shaped and were shaped...

Trucking Country shows how the social history of long-haul truckers was enmeshed with the political history of America’s transition from the New Deal era to the conservative counter-revolution of the...

Matt is an advocate of investing in companies for the long term, not trading stocks. He has studied companies that have multiplied in value 100 times. They're called hundred baggers and the process usually takes 30 years.

Andean Cocaine is cocaine’s first full-length biography. The book is, I hope, a more “serious” than usual history of the infamous drug, covering more than a century from cocaine’s birth...

The reality is that sustainable (also called "socially responsible") investing mostly supports the status quo. Corporations are happy to receive sustainable investments, but they don’t let it change their course. They have one objective: produce value for shareholders.

I argue that a single-minded concentration on positive leadership alone is one-sided, skewed, and unable to address the psychology of high-level leaders and extremely complex organizational systems. A failure in...

The opioid crisis is almost always told as a uniquely American tale of corporate greed. But what if it was really the wreckage of a global system, built over more than a century to supply the world with morphine, codeine, and pain pills? This is the hidden history of legal opium—the crop that moved from hand-scored poppy fields through treaties and monopolies into the medicine cabinets of the West.

This book seeks to explain the persistence of capitalism despite all the trouble it has created. For several years now, every crisis—even crises not directly caused by capitalism, such as...

The Angel in the Marketplace is a biography of Jean Wade Rindlaub, a mid-century adwoman widely recognized on Madison Avenue for her success in marketing household products to American housewives,...

Is economics the key to everything or do we need to look for completely new ways of explaining what is going on in the world? By “economics” I mean the discipline...

It has been strongly asserted by some regulators, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, that the Dodd-Frank Act now permits the safe resolution of any systemically important financial institution that...

The book includes a 16-page color section that is a kind of visual overture of the project. This section uses a series of drawings and diagrams to address the main...

People and dogs share thousands of years of co-evolution. The nature of their relationship has also evolved, moving largely from dogs as workmates to dogs as pets. Especially in contemporary...

This book deals with a basic question: What’s the best way to get people to behave themselves? Modern legal, policy, and management experts often assume human beings are selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards, and who can’t be trusted to do a good job or refrain from lying, cheating and stealing—unless given the right “incentives.”

C. Wright Mills argued that sociological research often springs from the intersection of personal biography and history. My book is no exception. I come from a family that bought organic foods...

While Crack is, as books go, on the slim side, it covers a lot of ground. While I hope the chapters on the history of cocaine, the lure of crack,...

Histories of the long, prosperous liberal consensus in the middle of the twentieth century looked back to the specific experience of the industrial North. The people and institutions of the...

When the Endangered Species Act was passed, in 1973, traditional economics, which looked to self-interest and endless growth as the predominant drivers of the economy, was pretty much the only...

My first book, No Man’s Land, showed how and when geography and the technologies that we generally associate with globalization—cheap and fast transportation, containing shipping, the Internet, mobile phones, and...

Raiford Guins on King PONG, his history of Atari's launch product as a masterclass in market creation. Three engineers with no business background reinvented coin-op amusement, then pivoted into consumer electronics via Sears — becoming the engine behind ubiquitous gaming today.

“The Racial Return,” chapter 2 in the book, reveals, through the lens of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, how strategic partnerships between organizations in the nonprofit...

I would urge the reader to start with the Introduction, called Obsession, which provides a bird’s eye view of how silver has seduced investors and politicians throughout the ages, and...

Money Games chronicles how sports and entertainment have continued to converge throughout history. The pace at which this convergence has been happening is covered in the book’s nine chapters. My...

I’ve identified four reasons why our economic system doesn’t support the natural world. All four of these problems can be fixed by straightforward institutional or policy reforms. In fact, there are...

Copycats and Contrarians explores our instincts to follow others from a uniquely multidisciplinary perspective. It draws on insights and evidence from economics, finance, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and behavioral ecology....

While Europe is considered the “old world,” it is the United States that is actually far older. The European Union in its current configuration of 27 member states and 500...

My book reconsiders the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949 from a novel perspective: the spread of consumerism in a self-proclaimed communist country. The book title, Unending...

The global capitalist=consumerist economy has an entire faith system, which has its own hierarchy, its own institutions, its own marble palaces. It has its own mythology, doctrine of the creation,...

Chapter 5 opens with an anecdote, a true story. A few years back I was giving a talk in Taiwan about the state of the biotech sector there. The government had...

It is always a good idea to start at the end. The epilogue of my book takes its cue from the famous question in the Monty Python movie The Life...

Foreclosed describes the evolution of U.S. mortgage markets from the early twentieth century through to the subprime crisis of the late 2000s. The book details the highly mixed-economy nature of...

I came to write Veblen out of years of skepticism about the “outsider thesis.” Added to this was my frustration, at once theoretical and methodological, with the tendency of intellectual...

Discussions about migration in the media and elsewhere are limited by a lack of perspective of international migration’s historical role, contemporary impacts, and future prospects. Exceptional People addresses these gaps....

The book’s story line carries, I hope, some dramatic interest. And it demands relatively little background knowledge. A reader whose curiosity is piqued will hopefully go further and cover the...

Higher Learning, Greater Good is the first book to systematically identify and develop the evidence necessary to measure comprehensively the benefits of higher education and to estimate their economic value. The...

Normalization of the right is the term that I develop to capture the twin phenomena of the electoral surge of the European right and the mainstreaming of nationalist ideas and...

I’d like my fresh reader to read the introduction carefully because it lays out my argument and makes the assertions that the text must back up. Many believe that capitalism...

So much of the public discussion about China today concerns the question of where the nation is headed. What are China’s intentions in the world? Part of this debate draws...

Socrates in the Boardroom argues that it is experts, not managers that make the better leaders. This is a message that, recently, has been almost unfashionable. I go a step...

Vice and addiction have always been with us. The Age of Addiction shows how entrepreneurs melded vices and addictions into a global economic system of limbic capitalism, outmaneuvering reformers determined...

Each chapter deals with similar questions. What were the main forces that shaped business and its role in the economy? What new businesses emerged? How did they operate? What was...

Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves presents a holistic analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of neighborhood change and offers strategies for making a more socially desirable palette of...

How Economics Shapes Science focuses on how costs and incentives—core concepts in economics—shape the practice of science, especially the practice of science at universities. Costs matter: they play a role in...

I would urge the reader to look at the Reagan chapter first. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I suggest the Reagan era was a low point for NAM. During the 1980s,...

The world suddenly paid a lot of attention to Hong Kong during the uprising in 2019 and the subsequent crackdown in 2020 and after. My book offers a long historical...

What happens when you try to fix a problem without understanding its cause. Segregation, redlining, speculators, employers lured out to the suburbs by tax breaks, highways built for those suburbs while urban transit was cut — the damage was specific and quantifiable. What followed was not a remedy for any of it, but a machine for routing public money to outside lenders and businesses, most spectacularly through federal loan insurance that paid out in full when residents defaulted.

Swiftynomics is about understanding women as economic agents of change. Taylor Swift is its muse. The book highlights the often-ignored economic activities that women contribute to their families, communities, and the economy through economic growth. I delve into themes of reinvention and masterminding to explain how we grow, advance, and continue...

I am an economist who spent the last 35 years in a medical school training a wide range of post-doctoral fellows and undertaking applied research in an interdisciplinary setting. My...

For most of the twentieth century advertising portrayed women in narrow roles — as dim-witted sex objects, as perky young things in search of a man, or as one-dimensional homemakers...

The Great Delusion is about the unrealistic expectations we all have about what this tired and picked-over planet can provide us. It is about economic growth, the belief that a...

The Culture Transplant is about the fact that on average, immigrants never fully assimilate. Europeans who violently migrated to North America usually didn’t assimilate to Native American culture and levels...

My previous research was about the French movie industry. In 2014, Netflix was just arriving in France, opening up an office in Paris. I got funding for studying this company...

How much competition exists on the business side of live entertainment has always determined the quality and price of what reaches the stage, and how the artists and crew get treated. Vaudeville, a century of commercial theater, and today's arena tours — why vaudeville died, why a theatrical syndicate should have been prosecuted as the cartel it was, and why a monopoly had to be broken up in the 1950s.

What started as a contest for spices between Portugal and Spain had many consequences. It hugely expanded European understanding of the world and allowed people, through the resulting medium of...

We are fond of dogs. Although it would be a bit of a stretch to say that we are also fond of economics, we certainly appreciate its usefulness in understanding social interaction and...

This book is about adopting a longer-term perspective to understand the world we live in. In the 1800s a handful of countries, initially in western Europe and lands settled by Europeans,...

While chapter four, dealing with the debates surrounding the use of the death penalty for counterfeiting crimes, offers some revealing examples of how contemporaries understood money politically, I would steer...

The Romantics understood what scientists often forget: that, as Wordsworth put it, we ‘half-create’ the world we see. Any particular observation is the joint product of sense data our minds...

I develop the concept of ‘culturally adapted strategy’ to explain how they creatively engage with political narratives, draw moral legitimacy, and harness cultural resources to carve out a unique identity, one that affords them an..

America's biggest startups are raising trillions in private markets while sidestepping the disclosure rules that once protected investors and the public. This conversation traces how four decades of deregulation shrank the public markets, let companies stay private for decades, and handed founders nearly unchecked power. It asks what that shift means for ordinary people locked out of an insular, network-driven financing system.

Speculation is about a dilemma that has troubled the legal system for a long time. For centuries, there has been a consensus that investment is necessary and ought to be...

They both indicate that the current economic recovery from the global recession is inherently unsustainable. In 2008, the world was confronted with multiple crises—fuel, food and financial—and by December the result...

This morning, October 1, 2009, I picked up the New York Times to notice a full-page ad on the back of the news section. It was prepared and paid for...

At its broadest level, Prosperity for All is about the changing meaning of consumer society over the past half century. I argue that whereas access to the benefits of consumer...

The financial crisis opened the door to massive public interventions in the Western economies. In many nations, governments responded to the threats of illiquidity and insolvency by making huge investments...

The business of contemporary art has changed immeasurably over the last half century. What was essentially a small, insider trade clustered in a few key avant-garde capitals has expanded into...

The Code Economy is a book about the past and likely future of human progress. My aim in writing it was to combine history with economics to explain how human...

While the paradigm frequently offered for understanding our society is freedom of the market, the reality of most people’s experience of economic life is one of constraint. Why is this? It...

Of the four host countries I studied—the US, Britain, Switzerland, and Australia—the last one seems like the odd one out. Aside from the fact that I am from there, Australia...

Let me share my personal perspective on my research journey. My interest began with the fascinating question of Japan's industrialization. How did Japan, a small island nation viewed by the...

Ten years ago, I began writing a book on the phenomenon of globalization, in part in order to try to understand the bitter debate which pitted globalization protesters against international...

The book ranges from describing the horrors of famine in some detail to musing, with tempered hope, about the prospects of eliminating famine, at least in peacetime. I would hope...

I came to this subject through an earlier project concerning business complicity under National Socialism. Companies such as Siemens (electronics), Krupp (steel), and the automotive firms BMW, Volkswagen, and Daimler Benz,...

Corruption has existed since the earliest civilizations but documenting and writing its history has not been easy. In the case of Peru, tackling through detailed research the challenges to writing...

The book’s introduction is titled “Thinking about Jews and Capitalism.”Capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. Of course, one...

Global California discusses what Californians can do to identify and promote their own interests in a rapidly changing world. It takes up such thorny issues as globalization, trade, infrastructure, immigration,...

My book begins with a largely forgotten California strike that took place at Safeway supermarkets in 2003-04. At first glance, the basic arc of that story is a familiar confrontation...

Measuring Tomorrow is essentially a guide to the well-being and sustainability transition and as such aims to make four contributions. First, while we have several insightful historical accounts of GDP’s...

Obviously, this isn’t the first book about Starbucks. But Everything but the Coffee is first to examine the company’s rise and fall and look ahead to its uncertain future in...

This book tells the story of how a small, often morally dubious, craft industry in the nineteenth century grew to be the $330 billion global powerhouse. There are many books written...

At each exhibit, you’ll learn about a different seemingly insane ritual used to organize human life and learn a different lesson about how to use economic logic to find its...

Clash of Extremes presents a new interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. If the prevailing explanation can be summarized in one word, “slavery,” the argument in my book...

One of the most notable developments in international trade after the end of the Cold War has been the explosion of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). In 1990, there were about...

In Enduring Success I address a key question in business today: How can companies succeed over time? I argue that companies are able to adapt to a constantly changing environment by...

As the title suggests, this book is about the personal and social relationships that govern the global economy. I wanted to tell a story of global finance that focuses not...

My book offers a fresh way of understanding insurgency and terrorism. I outline a constructive approach to confronting localized insurgencies like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the international terrorism...

This book is about how American politics affects the multilateral development banks—or “the banks,” for short. The best known of these is the World Bank, but several regional banks that...

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 triggered a huge demand for history, an unprecedented urge to place the event in a historical perspective. Two questions came up time and time again. How...

At the center of everything is building best teams, because that’s what successful people do. They really build a team, and they bring different things together, and they make it a team, not just a collection of people. And of course, ensuring alignment. That is, getting people to move in the same direction, even though they each have different things to do, they’re aligned with the vision of where we’re trying to go. That’s a bit about what competencies are, and I think you can see that they’re different from skills.

The Austrian-American novelist Vicki Baum once wrote that what people have done to rubber is fascinating, but what is more fascinating yet is what rubber has done to people. That,...

I came to the subject as an outsider to the field of management: as an historian with a broad interest in the social sciences and in public policy. I was...

While Coffee Nation is about the history of one of the world’s most popular commodities, I use it to consider how North America fit into a world governed by empires...

Other historians, especially in the last ten years, have written about this suspected conspiracy. Indeed, as an undergraduate student, I myself abridged the one extant judge’s account of the trials....

Most people associate the word mocha with coffee. For some it may be a type of coffee bean with a rich deep taste, usually from Yemen or the Horn of...

My critics have “granted me” the point that developed free market cities have the ability and the capacity to cope with many aspects of climate change. But they have countered...

The narcissistic present forever seeks itself in the past. Though the living try to winnow meaning from the chaos of history, they often discover only themselves among the dead generations....

The nature of this book is that it is full of close-ups. It is made of the details of people’s lives, and the ways that they shaped and were shaped...

Trucking Country shows how the social history of long-haul truckers was enmeshed with the political history of America’s transition from the New Deal era to the conservative counter-revolution of the...

Matt is an advocate of investing in companies for the long term, not trading stocks. He has studied companies that have multiplied in value 100 times. They're called hundred baggers and the process usually takes 30 years.

Andean Cocaine is cocaine’s first full-length biography. The book is, I hope, a more “serious” than usual history of the infamous drug, covering more than a century from cocaine’s birth...

The reality is that sustainable (also called "socially responsible") investing mostly supports the status quo. Corporations are happy to receive sustainable investments, but they don’t let it change their course. They have one objective: produce value for shareholders.

I argue that a single-minded concentration on positive leadership alone is one-sided, skewed, and unable to address the psychology of high-level leaders and extremely complex organizational systems. A failure in...

The opioid crisis is almost always told as a uniquely American tale of corporate greed. But what if it was really the wreckage of a global system, built over more than a century to supply the world with morphine, codeine, and pain pills? This is the hidden history of legal opium—the crop that moved from hand-scored poppy fields through treaties and monopolies into the medicine cabinets of the West.