Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Free Enterprise & Capitalism

Globalization, the dominant economic force of this era, is a phenomenon that invites misrepresentation and exaggeration. One of its results has been to introduce several false premises into this country's policy debates. So says William Watson, whose new book draws on economics and history to pose interesting challenges to modes of thinking that have become habitual in late twentieth-century Canadian life.

Watson begins by pointing out that globalization is not new: Canadians have some 400 years' experience of being dependent on economic events in other countries. He goes on to show...

The substantial prosperity that characterizes market economies at the beginning of the twenty-first century is relatively recent in human history. Prior to the Industrial Revolution economic progress was so slow that people would not have been able to recognize it in their lifetimes, whereas today, economic progress is so much a part of people s lives that they take it for granted.

In this new volume, Randall Holcombe argues that economic analysis, as it developed through the twentieth century, relies heavily on concepts of economic equilibrium, and is not descriptive of the dynamic...

With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Bela Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and...

With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Bela Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and...

J. A. Hobson s "Imperialism: A Study," first written in 1902, was undoubtedly his most prolific work. Yet Hobson wrote frequently about the topic of imperialism over the course of his career, and a number of his articles are included in this collection, first published in 1992. Exploring areas such as the presence of capitalism in South Africa following his visits to the country in the lead-up to the Boer War, free trade, and the ethical implications of empire, these articles and extracts reflect how Hobson s ideas changed over the decades in which they were written. This is a fascinating...

Ever since Adam Smith, the central teaching of economics has been that free markets provide us with material well-being, as if by an invisible hand. In Phishing for Phools, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller deliver a fundamental challenge to this insight, arguing that markets harm as well as help us. As long as there is profit to be made, sellers will systematically exploit our psychological weaknesses and our ignorance through manipulation and deception. Rather than being essentially benign and always creating the greater good, markets are inherently...