By one of the preeminent theorists of the Austrian school of economics, "The Theory of Money and Credit" represents a major contribution to the science of economics. Von Mises examines the value of money, how it can be measured, and the effects of credit and monetary policy at the nation-state level. Von Mises is well known for advocating a return to the gold standard as a way to eliminate the growth and recession cycles. Given the current economic crises, many people who want a better understanding of economic theory are turning back to this classic work in order to become informed on the role of monetary and credit policy.

These essays deal with various aspects of a new, rising field, socio economics. The field is seeking to combine the variables studied by neoclassical economists with those typically studied by other social sciences. The combination is expected to provide a better understanding of economic behavior and the economy as well as society; make more reliable predictions; and be more in line with normative values we seek to uphold. The new field, though, may be less elegant mathematically and possibly less parsimonious than neoclassical economics. Some of my ideas on this subject are included in a previously published book, The Moral Dimension: TowardA New Economics (New York: The Free Press, 1988). They also led to a formation of an international society of several thousand scholars who are interested in the field, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. The essays at hand are in effect grouped. The first two, previously published respectively in the Journal of Economic Psychology and Business Ethics Quarterly, reflect my most recent thinking. They both have a utopian streak that may stand out especially in these days when unfeathered capitalism is the rage. The first points to people, who far from making consuming ever more their life's project, seek a less affiuent way oflife. It examines the psychological foundations and the social consequences of such an approach.

With a new introduction by the author, this is an enduring analysis of British politics, stressing the lessons to be learnt from history. By the winner of the 1993 Wolfson History Prize awarded as 'tribute to a lifetime's contribution to the study of history.'

Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline. No one has played a greater role in this development than Viviana Zelizer, one of the world's leading sociologists. Economic Lives synthesizes and extends her most important work to date, demonstrating the full breadth and range of her field-defining contributions in a single volume for the first time. Economic Lives shows how shared cultural understandings and interpersonal relations shape everyday economic activities. Far from being simple responses to narrow individual incentives and preferences, economic actions emerge, persist, and are transformed by our relations to others. Distilling three decades of research, the book offers a distinctive vision of economic activity that brings out the hidden meanings and social actions behind the supposedly impersonal worlds of production, consumption, and asset transfer. Economic Lives ranges broadly from life insurance marketing, corporate ethics, household budgets, and migrant remittances to caring labor, workplace romance, baby markets, and payments for sex. These examples demonstrate an alternative approach to explaining how we manage economic activity--as well as a different way of understanding why conventional economic theory has proved incapable of predicting or responding to recent economic crises. Providing an important perspective on the recent past and possible futures of a growing field, Economic Lives promises to be widely read and discussed.

For more than a decade the leaders of the United States, Japan, Western Europe and Canada have met annually to discuss international economic and political issues. Hanging Together analyses the history of these seven-power summits and the relations between the Western allies during these turbulent years. New chapters in this edition relate the story of Western economic diplomacy until the Reagan Years. They give lucid accounts of the revamped international economic strategy after 1984 and how the Europeans and Japanese reacted to it. A new introduction and conclusion place the summits in a theoretical framework.

"The Master of Seventh Avenue is the definitive biography of David Dubinsky (1892-1982), one of the most controversial and influential labor leaders in 20th-century America. A 'character' in the truest sense of the word, Dubinsky was both revered and reviled, but never dull, conformist, or bound by convention. A Jewish labor radical, Dubinsky fled czarist Poland in 1910 and began his career as a garment worker and union agitator in New York City. He quickly rose through the ranks of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) and became its president in 1932. Dubinsky led the ILGWU for thirty-four years, where he championed 'social unionism, ' which offered workers benefits ranging from health care to housing. Moving beyond the realm of the ILGWU, Dubinsky also played a leading role in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), particularly during World War II. A staunch anti-communist, Dubinsky worked tirelessly to rid the American labor movement of communists and fellow-travelers. Robert D. Parmet also chronicles Dubinsky's influential role in local, national, and international politics. An extraordinary personality whose life and times present a fascinating lens into the American labor movement, Dubinsky leaps off the pages of this meticulously researched and vividly detailed biography"--Publisher description

All evidence points to the superiority of the libertarian ideal—private property, capitalism, international trade, laissez-faire—but something is keeping the world from embracing it. That something is wrong-headed ideology, some philosophical error grown into a massive system of thought, an agenda that if unleashed would mutilate and crush civilization as we know it.Murray Rothbard had a nose for such error. And when he smelled it, he wrote it up, exposed its underside, refuted its logic, and obliterated its intellectual foundation. That's why he was so hated—and so loved. He is so relentless that it makes the reader squirm. But he also teaches and inspires.So it goes through this wonderful book called "Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays." It might just be the wildest Rothbard romp ever. Fully armed, he slices and dices crazies of all sorts, from those who would level all incomes to those who would free all people's of the world through bombings and nuclear war. This is Rothbard providing the reader a strong does of sanity against the hordes of ideological fanatics who care not a knit for reality or reason.But Rothbard is not one of those thinkers who, like Russell Kirk, conclude that ideology is itself a bad thing. On the contrary, Rothbard believes that ideology is critical for the defense of liberty: we must organize our ideas to make sense of the world and to have an agenda for the future.Thus does this book also include outstanding pieces of positive theory, including "Justice and Property Rights," "War, Peace, and the State," and "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty." It concludes with his rallying cry: "Why Be Libertarian?"With all the political books out there, each with a partisan spin, it's wonderful to read a thinker who doesn't fear exposing the errors of left and right, measuring anyone and everyone against the great benchmark of the idea of liberty.

The various economic arguments of the Bolshevik leaders in the 1920s, Bukharin, the post-war debates, the reform economists of the 1960s and modern reassessments are surveyed. The central theme of the book is how state control impaired the economy and the development of a free society.

In the pages of this intriguing volume, a cure to stagflation seems to be at hand. Martin L. Weitzman, one of America’s leading economic theorists, has hit upon a central feature of our economic life as the cause of this chronic malady: the standard practice of paying workers a fixed wage, regardless of whether a company is doing well or poorly. Weitzman shows in a clear straightforward way that an alternative labor payment system, in which a significant number of firms share profits or revenues with their employees (like the Japanese bonus system), provides immunity against stagflation; an economy of such firms automatically soaks up unemployed labor and resists inflation. Under the Weitzman system, firms always have an incentive to take on more workers because the additional worker is paid only a fraction or share of the revenue he brings into the firm. General Motors and Eastern Airlines have already taken steps to implement profit and revenue sharing. Here, for the first time, is a lucid explanation and justification of share systems. Eschewing theoretically unsound schemes such as supply-side tax cuts and industrial policy on the one hand and macroeconomic sledgehammer “cures” on the other, The Share Economy provides a powerful and hopeful account of what may become the most important economic innovation of our time.

A thorough analysis of the challenges Mikhail Gorbachev faces in reforming the Soviet economy in the face of modern high technology.

The metaphor that frames this collection of recent studies reflects a broad perspective and understanding of the complexities of transition: every highway and byway leads eventually to capitalism, Kornai observes, but to what kind, how fast, and at what cost? Who wins and who loses? Hungarian economist János Kornai first used the metaphor of a single path to postsocialist transition in his earlier book, The Road to a Free Economy . The new metaphor that frames this collection of recent studies reflects a broader perspective and understanding of the complexities of transition: every highway and byway leads eventually to capitalism, Kornai observes, but to what kind, how fast, and at what cost? Who wins and who loses? Kornai draws from his experiences of Hungarian reform as well as from countries of the former Soviet Union to make several major points. The first three studies describe what went wrong in countries that tried to mix elements of planned and market economies. Efforts made by communist countries to introduce market socialism (the "middle road") contained an inherent contradiction between the logic of socialism and the logic of a free enterprise system, and were doomed to failure. In the studies that follow, Kornai analyzes the ongoing dilemmas. The transition from communism to free enterprise is filled with daunting hurdles; it requires no less than redefining ownership, changing values concerning the distribution of wealth, transferring the control of political power, creating financial institutions and enforcing financial discipline, and making deep economic sacrifice. Kornai closes with an overall survey of postsocialist transition, describing the stages that countries tend to go through, that will be particuarly useful to scholars of comparative economic systems.

One of the more troubling aspects of the ferment in macroeconomics that followed the demise of the Keynesian dominance in the late 1960s has been the inability of many of the new ideas to account for unemployment remains unexplained because equilibrium in most economic models occurs with supply equal to demand: if this equality holds in the labor market, there is no involuntary unemployment. Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market explores the reasons why there are labor market equilibria with employers preferring to pay wages in excess of the market-clearing wage and thereby explains involuntary unemployment. This volume brings together a number of the important articles on efficiency wage theory. The collection is preceded by a strong, integrative introduction, written by the editors, in which the hypothesis is set out and the variations, as described in subsequent chapters, are discussed.

This book examines the much-debated question of whether John Maynard Keynes' greatest work— The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money —was an instance of Mertonian simultaneous scientific discovery. In part I of this study, Don Patinkin argues for Keynes' originality, rejecting the claims of the Stockholm school and the Polish economist Michal Kalecki. Patinkin shows that the theoretical problems to which the Stockholm school and Kalecki devoted their attention largely differed from those of the General Theory and that, even when the problem addressed was similar, the treatment they accorded it was not part of their central messages. In the remaining parts of the book Patinkin presents a critique of Keynes' theory of effective demand and discusses Keynes' monetary theory and policy thinking, as well as the relationship between the respective developments of Keynesian theory and national income accounting in the 1930s.

Nothing but praise can be accorded to the editors of this monumental undertaking. As near perfection as anything human can be.

Book by Domb, Cyril

From the dust "This book proposes a scientifically grounded method by which we can understand-and perhaps control-human conflict in all its forms. Dr. Rapaport discerns three levels; he analyzes fights...games...and debates."

Reaching back centuries, this study makes a convincing case for very deep roots of current Eastern European backwardness. Its conclusions are suggestive for comparativists studying other parts of the world, and useful to those who want to understand contemporary Eastern Europe's past. Like the rest of the world except for that unique part of the West which has given us a false model of what was "normal," Eastern Europe developed slowly. The weight of established class relations, geography, lack of technological innovation, and wars kept the area from growing richer. In the nineteenth century the West exerted a powerful influence, but it was political more than economic. Nationalism and the creation of newly independent aspiring nation-states then began to shape national economies, often in unfavorable ways. One of this book's most important lessons is that while economics may limit the freedom of action of political players, it does not determine political outcomes. The authors offer no simple explanations but rather a theoretically complex synthesis that demonstrates the interaction of politics and economics.