Hundreds of years before a sixteenth-century crisis in European agriculture led to the origins of capital, investment, and finance, the silver mining industry exhibited many of the features of modern capitalism. Silver mines were large-scale business...

Throughout the twentieth century, "free enterprise" has been a contested keyword in American politics, and the cornerstone of a conservative philosophy that seeks to limit government involvement into economic matters. Lawrence B. Glickman shows how t...

Game theory assumes that people are self-interested and works from this premise to explain competitive behavior. People don't just compete, however; they also cooperate. John Roemer argues that attempts by orthodox game theorists to account for coope...

This insightful study explores how the economic system Vladimir Putin has developed in Russia works to consolidate control over the country. By appointing his close associates as heads of state enterprises and by giving control of the FSB and the jud...

Making accurate predictions about the economy has always been difficult, as F. A. Hayek noted when accepting his Nobel Prize in economics, but today forecasters have to contend with increasing complexity and unpredictable feedback loops. In this acce...

In the 1930s, battered and humbled by the Great Depression, the U.S. financial sector struck a grand bargain with the federal government. Bankers gained a safety net in exchange for certain curbs on their freedom: transparency rules, record-keeping a...

In his classic "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", Max Weber famously showed how Christian beliefs and practices could shape persons in line with capitalism. In this significant reimagining of Weber's work, Kathryn Tanner provocative...

One of the country's leading scholars on economics and social policy, Isabel Sawhill addresses the enormous divisions in American society – economic, cultural, and political – and what might be done to bridge them. Widening inequality and the loss of...

Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? This hard-hitting book argues that Central Asia is...

Are corporations people? The U.S. Supreme Court launched a heated debate when it ruled in "Citizens United" that corporations can claim the same free speech rights as humans. Should corporations be able to claim rights of free speech, religious consc...