"From the author of Blame, a new novel about the unexpected damage inflicted by romantic entanglements. It's the early 1980s: Reagan is in the White House and his trickle-down theory is gaining traction in the national psyche. Cressida Hartley, twenty-eight, a PhD candidate in economics, has moved to her parents' shabby A-frame in the Sierras, hoping to finish her dissertation about art in the marketplace. Though she came seeking solitude, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the life of the small mountain community, and she's seduced by a local lodge owner, Jakey Yates, a big, burly, immensely attractive man in his late forties. Rick Garsh, the local contractor, gives Cress a part time job. Through Rick she meets the Morrow brothers, two talented fine-finish carpenters. They are handsome, amusing, intriguing, and married. As Cress tells her best friend back home in Pasadena, being a single woman on the mountain amounts to a form of public service. Increasingly uninspired by her dissertation, Cress allows love, adultery, and obsession to commandeer her life, and soon she becomes the victim of her own perilous reasoning. Michelle Huneven is one of our most searching, elegant novelists--Richard Russo has called her "a writer of extraordinary and thrilling talent." In Off Course, she tells the cautionary tale of an intelligent young woman seeking her place in life only to discover that love is the great distraction, and impossible love the greatest distraction of all"--

Cartographics illustrate accurate, up-to-date data on the economics, weaponry, and politics of war, the producers of armaments and their clients, and the anti-war movement

What is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? What role is played by its members and partners? Does the largest military alliance ever to exist serve the cause of peace or the causes of weapons sales and war mongering? Published to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the alliance, this sharp, concise account examines NATO's origins, structure, and its goals at a time of mounting global tension. NATO has remade itself repeatedly, as its past purposes have disappeared. In the last 35 years it has been part of wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. It has played a major role in Ukraine, and supported warmaking by Israel. NATO is now expanding rapidly, both in geography and in scope, adding partners from Colombia to Mongolia to Australia, and claiming a role in policing, immigration, economics, public budgeting, scientific research, and environmental protection. With pointed investigations of how NATO's decisions are made, the widely misunderstood question of the way it is funded, its relationship to international law, and the available alternatives to it, NATO: What You Need to Know is an indispensable primer on an organization that not only confronts expanding military conflict but, the authors contend, plays an active part in its escalation.

"Growing out of Nussbaum's years of work with an international development agency connected with the United Nations, this collection charts a feminism that is deeply concerned with the urgent needs of women who live in hunger and illiteracy, or under unequal legal systems. Offering an internationalism informed by development economics and empirical detail, many essays take their start from the experiences of women in developing countries. Nussbaum argues for a universal account of human capacity and need, while emphasizing the essential role of knowledge of local circumstance. Further chapters take on the pursuit of social justice in the sexual sphere, exploring the issue of equal rights for lesbians and gay men."--Jacket

In a time of political turbulence, and as the Welfare State totters under the strain in a country that has changed dramatically since 1945, Archbishop Justin Welby sets out to identify the values that will enable us to reimagine, and to enact, a more hopeful future. The thesis is that the work of reimagining is as great as it was in 1945, and will happen either by accident – and thus badly – or deliberately. The author draws on Britain's history and Christian tradition to identify this country's foundational values, and the building blocks necessary to implement them in a post-Brexit, multicultural society. He explores the areas in which values are translated into action, including the traditional three of recent history: health (especially public, and mental), housing and education. To these he adds family; the environment; economics and finance; peacebuilding and overseas development; immigration; and integration. He looks particularly at the role of faith groups in enabling, and contributing to, a fairer future. When so many are immobilized by political turmoil, this book builds on our past to offer hope for the future, and practical ways of achieving a more equitable society.

Competition and Entrepreneurship defines Israel M. Kirzner's unique contribution to the economics profession. Pointing out the shortcomings of the traditional microeconomic model, Kirzner offers an alternative and complementary view, which illuminates and enriches the way economists think of the market process. Recognizing that economics cannot explain sheer novelty and ultimately social change by referring only to productive factors already in use, Kirzner develops a theory of the market process that focuses on the role of the pure entrepreneurial element in human action. This leads him to reconstruct the theory of price in order to understand, as he puts it, "how the decisions of individual participants in the market interact to generate the market forces which compel changes in prices, outputs, and methods of production and in the allocation of resources." In doing so, Kirzner offers a new appraisal of competition moving the entrepreneurial function back to center stage, thereby shedding new light on issues such as monopoly pricing, cartels, and pure profit. No other economist in recent times has been so closely identified with the Austrian School of economics as Kirzner. A leader of the generation of Austrian economists after Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, Kirzner has been recognized as one of the minds behind the revival of entrepreneurship and market process theory in the twentieth century.

In Bad Boy , renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating, often searing exploration of his coming of age as an artist, and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as Bad Boy and Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved. In an extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Fischl discusses the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art—his mother, an imaginative and tragic woman, was an alcoholic who ultimately took her own life. Following his years as a student at Cal Arts and teaching in Nova Scotia, he describes his early years in New York with the artist April Gornik, just as Wall Street money begins to encroach on the old gallery system and change the economics of the art world. Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives. Still in his thirties, Eric became the subject of a major Vanity Fair interview, his canvases sold for as much as a million dollars, and The Whitney Museum mounted a major retrospective of his paintings. Bad Boy follows Fischl’s maturation both as an artist and sculptor, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings, Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before.

In a work of lucid prose and striking originality, Bell offers the first comprehensive survey of patriotism and national sentiment in early modern France, and shows how the dialectical relationship between nationalism and religion left a complex legacy that still resonates in debates over French national identity today. Table of Contents: Preface Introduction: Constructing the Nation 1. The National and the Sacred 2. The Politics of Patriotism and National Sentiment 3. English Barbarians, French Martyrs 4. National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 5. National Character and the Republican Imagination 6. National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible Conclusion: Toward the Present Day and the End of Nationalism Notes Note on Internet Appendices and Bibliography Index Reviews of this book: Bell delineates the history of nationalism in France, tracing its origins to the 17th century. He shows how in 18th-century France, political and intellectual leaders made perfect national unity a priority, allowing the construction of the nation to take precedence over other political tasks. The goal was to provide all French people with the same language, laws, customs, and values. Bell argues that while the French leaders hoped that patriotism and national sentiment would replace religion as the binding force, it was actually religion that was a major (but not exclusive) factor in helping the French see the world around them. This period of history was the beginning of the first large-scale nationalist program. Bell also shows how the relationship between nationalism and religion contributes to the French national identity debate today. Bell's comprehensive and well-documented book is written in an accessible style...Recommended for French and European history collections. --Mary Salony, Library Journal Reviews of this book: At the center of Bell's subtle and intricate argument is religion. Religion, he suggests, was changing in the 18th century. And with men less likely to see God as an interventionist presence in their daily lives and more likely to stress God's distant, inscrutable quality, space was opened up for an autonomous realm of human action, described by a series of interconnected words: society, public opinion, civilization, fatherland and nation. --Richard Vinen, New York Times Book Review Reviews of this book: David Bell has interesting things to say about the French kindred and about an important aspect of their life together. The Cult of the Nation in France is about the way a particular kind of togetherness and a novel kind of identity were implanted, grew (and may have begun to wither) in France's fertile soil. The nation, he argues, is no spontaneous growth but a political artifact: not organic like a tree but constructed like a city. --Eugen Weber, Los Angeles Times Reviews of this book: Bell argues in his excellent analysis of the 18th-century conceptual birth of French nationalism that nationalism emerged at a point when French intellectuals increasingly came to see God as distant from human affairs and sough to separate religious passions from political life...A masterful, thought-provoking [study]. --P. G. Wallace, Choice Reviews of this book: This excellent book is at once a valuable account of the development of the concept of the nation in France and an important example of the use that can be made of the culture of print...Bell argues that right-wing nationalism has belonged consistently to a minority and that there has been a basic continuity in French republican nationalism over the past two centuries, views that not all will share, but arguments that testify to the importance of this well-crafted work. --Jeremy Black, History A notable addition to the expanding literature on nationalism in general and of French nationalism in particular, The Cult of the Nation in France explores how national affiliation became part of individual identity. It demonstrates the connections between nationalism and religion, without falling into the simple trap of treating nationalism as another religion. Against the present-day challenges faced by French republican nationalism, Bell insightfully examines the paradoxical process whereby the French came to posit themselves as a union of politically and spiritually like-minded citizens. --Joan B. Landes, Pennsylvania State University A formidably intelligent and beautifully written analysis of how the French came to perceive their nation as a political construction. Its breadth, together with its highly original discussion of the role of religion, makes The Cult of the Nation in France essential reading both for students of nationalism and for anyone wanting to understand current French debates on culture, ethnicity, and identity. --Linda Colley, London School of Economics and Political Science David Bell is one of the most talented young historians working in any field. This fascinating, brilliantly argued, and beautifully written study demonstrates the multi-stranded origins of the concept of the nation in France. Bell's major contribution is to place the timing of this crucial evolution well before the Revolution of 1789. He never loses sight of the linguistic and cultural complexity of France, bringing to a conclusion the story of French nationalism in our era. --John Merriman, Yale University

"An accessible and self-contained treatment of the current state of thinking about rationality in economics and other social sciences"--

This book aims to provide relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in Internet of Things (IoT) in Management Science and Operations Research. It starts with basic concept and present cases, applications, theory, and potential future. The contributed chapters to the book cover wide array of topics as space permits. Examples are from smart industry; city; transportation; home and smart devices. They present future applications, trends, and potential future of this new discipline. Specifically, this book provides an interface between the main disciplines of engineering/technology and the organizational, administrative, and planning capabilities of managing IoT. This book deals with the implementation of latest IoT research findings in practice at the global economy level, at networks and organizations, at teams and work groups and, finally, IoT at the level of players in the networked environments. This book is intended for professionals in the field of engineering, information science, mathematics, economics, and researchers who wish to develop new skills in IoT, or who employ the IoT discipline as part of their work. It will improve their understanding of the strategic role of IoT at various levels of the information and knowledge organization. The book is complemented by a second volume of the same editors with practical cases

Jensen provides a comprehensive treatment of one of the major constructs of behavioral science―general mental ability―labeled the g factor by its discoverer, Charles Spearman. The g factor is about individual differences in mental abilities. In factor analyses of any and every large and diverse collection of measures of mental abilities, however varied the content of knowledge and skills they call upon, g emerges as the largest, most general source of differences between individuals and between certain subpopulations. Jensen fully and clearly explains the psychometric, statistical, genetic, and physiological basis of g, as well as the major theoretical challenges to the concept. For decades a key construct in differential psychology, the g factor's significance for scholars and researchers in the brain sciences as well as education, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, economics, and public policy is clearly evident in this, the most comprehensive treatment of g ever published.

Inalienable Possessions tests anthropology's traditional assumptions about kinship, economics, power, and gender in an exciting challenge to accepted theories of reciprocity and marriage exchange. Focusing on Oceania societies from Polynesia to Papua New Guinea and including Australian Aborigine groups, Annette Weiner investigates the category of possessions that must not be given or, if they are circulated, must return finally to the giver. Reciprocity, she says, is only the superficial aspect of exchange, which overlays much more politically powerful strategies of "keeping-while-giving." The idea of keeping-while-giving places women at the heart of the political process, however much that process may vary in different societies, for women possess a wealth of their own that gives them power. Power is intimately involved in cultural reproduction, and Weiner describes the location of power in each society, showing how the degree of control over the production and distribution of cloth wealth coincides with women's rank and the development of hierarchy in the community. Other inalienable possessions, whether material objects, landed property, ancestral myths, or sacred knowledge, bestow social identity and rank as well. Calling attention to their presence in Western history, Weiner points out that her formulations are not limited to Oceania. The paradox of keeping-while-giving is a concept certain to influence future developments in ethnography and the theoretical study of gender and exchange.

Game-Theoretic Models of Bargaining provides a comprehensive picture of the new developments in bargaining theory. It especially shows the way the use of axiomatic models has been complemented by the new results derived from strategic models. The papers in this volume are edited versions of those given at a conference on Game Theoretic Models of Bargaining held at the University of Pittsburgh. There are two distinct reasons why the study of bargaining is of fundamental importance in economics. The first is that many aspects of economic activity are directly influenced by bargaining between and among individuals, firms, and nations. The second is that bargaining occupies an important place in economic theory, since the 'pure bargaining problem' is at the opposite pole of economic phenomena from the case of 'perfect competition'. This volume is an outgrowth of the renewed interest in the strategic approach to the theory of bargaining and to the general theory of non-cooperative games.

Game-Theoretic Models of Bargaining provides a comprehensive picture of the new developments in bargaining theory. It especially shows the way the use of axiomatic models has been complemented by the new results derived from strategic models. The papers in this volume are edited versions of those given at a conference on Game Theoretic Models of Bargaining held at the University of Pittsburgh. There are two distinct reasons why the study of bargaining is of fundamental importance in economics. The first is that many aspects of economic activity are directly influenced by bargaining between and among individuals, firms, and nations. The second is that bargaining occupies an important place in economic theory, since the 'pure bargaining problem' is at the opposite pole of economic phenomena from the case of 'perfect competition'. This volume is an outgrowth of the renewed interest in the strategic approach to the theory of bargaining and to the general theory of non-cooperative games.

Education Matters presents in one volume many of Alan B. Krueger's contributions to the economics of education. This invaluable collection of papers, based on his groundbreaking research from the 1990s, has been published in a wide range of professional outlets and has influenced public policy and research in the US and throughout the world. The book opens with an introductory essay explaining the importance of the study of the economics of education as well as providing an overview of the book. The author then goes on to discuss and analyse the important topics in the economics of education, including the economic pay off from attending school for longer, the return to investments in school resources, causes of the increased pay off to education, the contribution of education to economic growth, and racial differences in school quality and their consequences. The final chapter provides a framework for evaluating schools. This fascinating collection of work, from a writer at the forefront of economics and educational research, will be warmly welcomed by academics in the areas of human capital, economics and public policy, as well as by educational policymakers.

It is widely acknowledged among economists today that their discipline is in a state of some disarray. Behind the controversies particular to the times lies a fundamental crisis of thought, rooted in the increasingly apparent inadequacy of the neoclassical approach that has been dominant for some fifty years. The failure to impose such a formalistic framework has fostered the return from the wilderness of the subjectivist Austrian School of economics and renewed debate on the nature of markets and the predictability of economic phenomena. Until recently subjectivist economics has been largely ignored by mainstream economists. But as the dominant neoclassical, Keynesian, and monetarist approaches have each been championed in turn only to be found wanting at the end of the day, the Austrian approach has come to seem increasingly promising. In this book, first published in 1986 and now reprinted with a new foreword from Solomon M. Stein and Virgil Henry Storr, Ludwig M. Lachmann presents his case for viewing economic events as elements within an ongoing process dependent on human actions in a world where the future, though not unimaginable, is unknowable. In stark contrast to the mechanistic world view of mainstream orthodoxy, his perspective takes due account of the complex workings of the human mind. His insistence on the variety of ways in which markets may function warns against elevating any "process" theory to the levels of abstraction characteristic of neoclassical equilibrium theory. Drawing easily on the classics as well as the most recent theoretical developments, Lachmann sheds new light on each of the areas he discusses. Ludwig M. Lachmann (1906-1990) witnessed and participated in numerous controversies for over fifty years as a leading member of the Austrian School, while remaining receptive to ideas from a diversity of disciplines and schools of thought. He studied under F. A. Hayek at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, and was a distinguished member of the Austrian School of economics and has played an active part in its revival over the past ten years. His previous publications include Capital and its Structure (1956), The Legacy of Max Weber (1970), and Capital Expectations and the Market Process (1977).

In this book, Robert Leeson and Charles Palm have assembled an amazing collection of Milton Friedman's best works on freedom. Even more amazing is that the selection represents only 1 percent of the 1,500 works by Friedman that Leeson and Palm have put online in a user-friendly format--and an even smaller percentage if you include their archive of Friedman's audio and television recordings, correspondence, and other writings. This book and the larger online collection are sorely needed and very welcome. Milton Friedman deserves to be read in the original by generation after generation.

The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets and states aren’t straightforwardly opposing forces. In this groundbreaking work, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin demonstrate the intimate relationship between modern capitalism and the American state, including its role as an “informal empire” promoting free trade and capital movements. Through a powerful historical survey, they show how the US has superintended the restructuring of other states in favor of competitive markets and coordinated the management of increasingly frequent financial crises. The Making of Global Capitalism , through its highly original analysis of the first great economic crisis of the twenty-first century, identifies the centrality of the social conflicts that occur within states rather than between them. These emerging fault lines hold out the possibility of new political movements transforming nation states and transcending global markets.

Famine Crimes is a factually rich, powerfully intelligent, morally important analysis of the persistence of famine in Africa. Using comparative studies from other parts of the world and a detailed knowledge of specific cases in Africa, de Waal lays the blame for Africa's problems with starvation on the political failings of African governments, western donors, and international relief agencies. The message of this important book is that no one need starve in Africa.

The climate is changing more rapidly than scientists predicted even a few years ago, with extreme weather already touching our everyday lives. At the same time, the clean energy revolution is forging ahead faster than nearly anyone anticipated. As Tom Steyer sees it, these two trends together create a moment like the one America faced during World War II: on the one hand, an existential threat calling for collective action; on the other, an opportunity to lead the world, protect the planet, and set the stage for a new generation of shared economic prosperity. In 2012, Steyer walked away from the highly successful investment fund he founded to devote himself full time to climate issues, and he's been on the front lines of the fight ever since: funding cleantech research and businesses, spearheading clean-energy ballot measures and voter registration drives, and running for president on a climate platform. Today, he leads a climate investment firm focused on accelerating climate solutions. In this accessible book, Steyer shares his own story and showcases the inspiring and innovative work of other climate leaders in the clean-energy transition. He shows us how capitalism can be used to scale climate progress, debunks many of the arguments made by fossil fuel companies, and calls on all of us to make stabilizing our planet part of our life's work. As green technology is fast becoming cleaner and cheaper, reshaping our planet's future--and our own--has never been more crucial or within our reach.