Whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically, Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling to show how people respond to incentives.

"We are only just beginning to reckon with our post-pandemic future. As political extremism intensifies, the great resignation affects businesses everywhere, and supply chain issues crush bottom lines, we're faced with daunting questions - is our democracy under threat? How will Big Tech change our lives? What does job security look like for me? America is on the brink of massive change - change that will disrupt the workings of our economy and drastically...

From two stars in financial journalism comes this brilliant, fresh synthesis of economic theory and relationship advice. "Spousonomics" takes bedrock economic principles and applies them to the domestic front.

Follow Umberto D., an elderly pensioner, as he struggles to make ends meet during Italy's postwar economic boom. Alone, except for his dog, Flike, Umberto strives to maintain his dignity while trying to survive in a city where traditional human kindness seems to have lost out to the forces of modernization.

A scathing indictment of our current global financial system, The Value of Everything rigorously scrutinizes the way in which economic value has been accounted and reveals how economic theory has failed to clearly delineate the difference between value creation and value extraction. Mariana Mazzucato argues that the increasingly blurry distinction between the two categories has allowed certain actors in the economy to portray themselves as value creators,...

"How do you get your dinner? That is the basic question of economics. It might seem easy, but it is actually very complicated. When Adam Smith proclaimed that all our actions were motivated by self-interest and the world turned because of financial gain he laid the foundations for 'economic man'. Selfish and cynical, 'economic man' has dominated our thinking ever since, the ugly rational heart of modern day capitalism. But every night Adam Smith's...

Outlines a deconstruction of the framework for understanding the world of classroom economics, clarifying assumptions and misleading teachings while sharing historical insights into how economism became a prevalent influence in the U.S. "For generations, we've been told that there's a simple framework that can explain the mysteries of how the economy can create optimal outcomes for us all. What James Kwak shows us is that this set of ideas--what...

Walter Mosley is one of America's bestselling novelists, known for his critically acclaimed series of mysteries featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins. His writing is hard-hitting, often limned with a political subtext-aimed at a broad audience. When Mosley was working on a doctorate in political theory, he envisioned himself writing very different kinds of books from the ones he writes now. But once you've been tagged as a novelist, and in...

To predict our future, we must look to the extremes. So argues the economist Richard Davies, who takes readers to the margins of the modern economy and beyond. These extreme economies illustrate the forces that test human resilience, drive societies to failure, and promise to shape our collective future. Reviving a foundational idea from the medical sciences, Extreme Economies turns the logic of modern economics on its head by arguing that these outlier...