The size of government is arguably the most controversial discussion in United States politics, and this issue won't fade from prominence any time soon. There must surely be a tipping point beyond which more government taxing and spending harms the economy, but where is that point? In this accessible book, best-selling authors Jeff Madrick, Jon Bakija, Lane Kenworthy, and Peter Lindert try to answer whether our government can grow any larger and examine how we can optimize growth and fair ...

"A clarion call to address this most unjust blight upon the American landscape. Madrick has provided a valuable service in presenting a highly readable and cogent argument for change."--Mark R. Rank, The Washington PostBy official count, more than one out of every six American children live beneath the poverty line. But statistics alone tell little of the story. In Invisible Americans, Jeff Madrick brings to light the often invisible reality and i...

A bold indictment of some of our most accepted mainstream economic theories—why they’re wrong, and how they’ve been harming America and the world.Budget deficits are bad. A strong dollar is good. Controlling inflation is paramount. Pay reflects greater worker skills. A deregulated free market is fair and effective. Theories like these have become mantras among American economists both liberal and conservative over recent decades. Validated originally by patron saints like Milton Fr...

The world has become increasingly separated into the haves and have-nots. In The Culture of Contentment, renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith shows how a contented class—not the privileged few but the socially and economically advantaged majority—defend their comfortable status at a cost. Middle-class voting against regulation and increased taxation that would remedy pressing social ills has created a culture of immediate gratification, leading to complacency and hampering lo...

**A vivid history of the recent economics of greed in the United States. This book explores how the pursuit of immense personal wealth has led to economic inequity and instability in the country.“A fascinating and deeply disturbing tale of hypocrisy, corruption, and insatiable greed. . . . A much-needed reminder of just how we got into the mess we’re in.”—The New York Review of Books**Age of Greed shows how the single-minded and selfish pursuit of immense ...

The author of the widely praised Age of Greed now gives us a bold indictment of some of our most accepted economic theories - why they're wrong, the harm they've done, and the theories that would vastly improve them. Jeff Madrick, a former columnist for The New York Times, is an economics columnist for Harper's, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and editor of Challenge Magazine. He is visiting professor of humanities at The Cooper Union, and director of the Bernard L. ...

Political conservatives have long believed that the best government is a small government. But if this were true, noted economist Jeff Madrick argues, the nation would not be experiencing stagnant wages, rising health care costs, increasing unemployment, and concentrations of wealth for a narrow elite. In this perceptive and eye-opening book, Madrick proves that an engaged government--a big government of high taxes and wise regulations--is necessary for the social and economic answers that...

"A clarion call to address this most unjust blight upon the American landscape. Madrick has provided a valuable service in presenting a highly readable and cogent argument for change."--Mark R. Rank, The Washington PostBy official count, more than one out of every six American children live beneath the poverty line. But statistics alone tell little of the story. In Invisible Americans, Jeff Madrick brings to light the often invisible reality and i...

Global warming’s physical impacts can be separated into three broad categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Funk travels to two dozen countries to profile entrepreneurial people who see a potential windfall in each of these forces.The melt is a boon for newly arable, mineral rich regions of the Arctic, such as Greenland—and for the man-made snow trade. Drought creates opportunities for private firefighters working for insurance companies as well as for fund managers backing south Su...

In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative.When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancie...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND KIRKUS REVIEWSA scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis**Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery:Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles.Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer...

The Great Recession that began in 2007 is now more than four years old—and counting. Some 24 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed, and at recent rates of job creation we won’t be back to normal levels of employment until late this decade. This is a tragedy. Do we have to accept it?“No!” is the resounding answer given by Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman in this call to arms. We have seen this situation before and we know how to fix it; all we lack is the polit...