● No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea
By James Livingston
Summary via publisher (University of North Carolina Press)
For centuries we’ve believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance–in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem–why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that “full employment” is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic.
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Category Archives: Book Bits
Book Bits |22 October 2016
● Quantitative Momentum: A Practitioner’s Guide to Building a Momentum-Based Stock Selection System
By Wesley R. Gray and Jack R. Vogel
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
Quantitative Momentum brings momentum investing out of Wall Street and into the hands of individual investors. In his last book, Quantitative Value, author Wes Gray brought systematic value strategy from the hedge funds to the masses; in this book, he does the same for momentum investing, the system that has been shown to beat the market and regularly enriches the coffers of Wall Street’s most sophisticated investors. First, you’ll learn what momentum investing is not: it’s not ‘growth’ investing, nor is it an esoteric academic concept. You may have seen it used for asset allocation, but this book details the ways in which momentum stands on its own as a stock selection strategy, and gives you the expert insight you need to make it work for you. You’ll dig into its behavioral psychology roots, and discover the key tactics that are bringing both institutional and individual investors flocking into the momentum fold.
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Book Bits |25 June 2016
● Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe
By James K. Galbraith
Summary via publisher (Yale University Press)
The economic crisis in Greece is a potential international disaster and one of the most extraordinary monetary and political dramas of our time. The financial woes of this relatively small European nation threaten the long-term viability of the Euro while exposing the flaws in the ideal of continental unity. “Solutions” proposed by Europe’s combined leadership have sparked a war of prideful words and stubborn one-upmanship, and they are certain to fail, according to renowned economist James K. Galbraith, because they are designed for failure. It is this hypocrisy that prompted former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, when Galbraith arrived in Athens as an adviser, to greet him with the words “Welcome to the poisoned chalice.”
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Book Bits | 21 May 2016
● The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
By Arun Sundararajan
Summary via publisher (MIT Press)
Sharing isn’t new. Giving someone a ride, having a guest in your spare room, running errands for someone, participating in a supper club—these are not revolutionary concepts. What is new, in the “sharing economy,” is that you are not helping a friend for free; you are providing these services to a stranger for money. In this book, Arun Sundararajan, an expert on the sharing economy, explains the transition to what he describes as “crowd-based capitalism”—a new way of organizing economic activity that may supplant the traditional corporate-centered model. As peer-to-peer commercial exchange blurs the lines between the personal and the professional, how will the economy, government regulation, what it means to have a job, and our social fabric be affected?
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Book Bits | 23 April 2016
● A Future Beyond Growth: Towards a steady state economy
Edited by Haydn Washington, Paul Twomey
Summary via publisher (Routledge)
A Future Beyond Growth explores the reason why the endless growth economy is fundamentally unsustainable and considers ways in which society can move beyond this to a steady state economy. The book brings together some of the deepest thinkers from around the world to consider how to advance beyond growth. The main themes consider the deep problems of the current system and key aspects of a steady state economy, such as population; throughput and consumerism; ethics and equity; and policy for change. The policy section and conclusion bring together these various themes and indicates how we can move past the growth economy to a truly sustainable future.
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Book Bits | 12 March 2016
● Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe
By Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage
Excerpt via publisher (Princeton University Press)
What a country decides about taxes on the rich has profound consequences for its future economic growth and the distribution of economic resources and opportunities. Given the stakes, it’s surprising how few comparative studies exist of taxation of the rich over the long run. Many people have asked this question only for recent decades, or for a single country. The last book to treat the question extensively was published more than a century ago, by Edwin Seligman.
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Book Bits For Saturday: 2.18.2012
● The Decline in Saving: A Threat to America’s Prosperity?
By Barry Bosworth
Summary via publisher, Brookings Institution Press
ongtime Brookings economist and former presidential adviser Barry Bosworth examines why saving rates in the United States have fallen so precipitously over the past quarter century, why the initial consequences were surprisingly benign, and how reduced saving will affect the future well-being of Americans. The saving of American households underwent an astonishing collapse in the years before the financial crisis as consumers engaged in a long-lived spending binge. More recently, however, that saving rate has risen as households attempt to rebuild their wealth in the aftermath of large stock market and housing losses. It was not only consumers who were guilty of overspending; budget deficits grew as the government borrowed huge sums from the rest of the world. Indeed, over the past three decades, the cumulative external deficit has exceeded $7 trillion, leaving the United States as the world’s largest debtor nation.
