Technologies and tech companies are routinely accused of creating many societal problems. This book exposes these charges as mostly myths, falsehoods, and exaggerations.Technology Fears and Scapegoats debunks 40 widespread myths about Big Tech, Big Data, AI, privacy, trust, polarization, automation, and similar fears, while exposing the scapegoating behind these complaints. The result is a balanced and positive view of the societal impact of technology thu...

Why small business is not the basis of American prosperity, not the foundation of American democracy, and not the champion of job creation.In this provocative book, Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind argue that small business is not, as is widely claimed, the basis of American prosperity. Small business is not responsible for most of the country's job creation and innovation. American democracy does not depend on the existence of brave bands of self-employed citizens...

Supply-Side Follies is a progressive political and economic challenge to the current George W. Bush policies. It debunks commonly held assumptions of conservative economic policies centered on the obsession that tax cuts led to greater productivity and prosperity. These fundamentally flawed policies are setting the United States up for a major economic downturn in the near future.The 21st century knowledge economy requires a fundamentally different approach to boosting gro...

The digitally-enabled economy is unleashing a new wave of change, something we are only just beginning to feel and understand. The economic evidence shows that this innovation—the development and adoption of new products, services, processes and business models—is vital to support rising living standards. But making the political case for the progressive power of innovation, and the digital economy, can be more challenging. The forces of “creative destruction” threaten incumbent firms, job...

Technologies and tech companies are routinely accused of creating many societal problems. This book exposes these charges as mostly myths, falsehoods, and exaggerations. Technology Fears and Scapegoats debunks 40 widespread myths about Big Tech, Big Data, AI, privacy, trust, polarization, automation, and similar fears, while exposing the scapegoating behind these complaints. The result is a balanced and positive view of the societal impact of technology thus far. The book takes readers thr...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY“Succinct, humane, and politically astute . . . Sachs lays out a detailed path to reform, regulation, and recovery.”—The American ProspectIn this forceful and impassioned book, Jeffrey D. Sachs offers a searing and incisive diagnosis of our country’s economic ills, and an urgent call for Americans to r...

We all want to help. Over the past fifty years $1 trillion of aid has flowed from Western governments to Africa, with rock stars and actors campaigning for more. But this has not helped Africa. It has ruined it.Dambisa Moyo's excoriating and controversial book reveals why millions are actually poorer because of aid, unable to escape corruption and reduced, in the West's eyes, to a childlike state of beggary.Dead Aid shows us another way. Using hard...

In the universally acclaimed and award-winning The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier reveals that fifty failed states--home to the poorest one billion people on Earth--pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines much-needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living ...

"A damning denunciation of things as they are, and a platform for how we can do better."--Andrew Leonard, SalonFour years after he outlined the challenges our increasingly interdependent world was facing in Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz offered his agenda for reform. Now in paperback, Making Globalization Work offers inventive solutions to a host of problems, including the indebtedness of developing countries, international fiscal ...

AlterNet editor Joshua Holland demolishes the Right's biggest and most outrageous myths about the economyTaxes kill growth. Labor unions hurt their members. Government regulation destroys jobs. These are just a few of the biggest lies in the web of misinformation spun by conservatives and the Chamber of Commerce. Holland's book dissects each malicious fiction to show how the Right is just plain wrong on the economy—wrong on jobs, wrong on the deficit, wrong on taxe...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama in March 2010 is a landmark in U.S. social legislation, and the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the Act has ensured that it will remain the law of the land. The new law extends health insurance to nearly all Americans, fulfilling a century-long quest and bringing the United States to parity with other industrial nations. Affordable Care aims to control rapidly rising health care costs and promises to make th...

Picture South Africa ten years from now: Are the angry poor rising up and seizing land and businesses? Or has economic reform created jobs and growth? Is an increasingly desperate government clamping down on freedoms? Or do the middle classes still braai in suburban bliss? South Africa is at a tipping point, and small shifts in political and economic conditions can bring about dramatic changes. Unemployment, slow growth, threats to freedom of speech, and poor education can send the country...