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James Laurence Laughlin (1850-1933) was the founder of the Economics Department at the University of Chicago. He gathered together a faculty whose views were often at variance with his and with one another. Laughlin recruited, and often argued with, leading economists such as Thorstein Veblen and Wesley Clair Mitchell. These early faculty members helped shape the independent and iconoclastic spirit of the University of Chicago?s Economics Department. While head professor of political economy at the University of Chicago, he proposed the concept of a school devoted to commerce and industry. He and his colleagues designed a curriculum that emphasized "close, sustained, and logical reasoning" a...
A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women. Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider. In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in ...
The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 created the infrastructure for the modern American payments system. Probing the origins of this benchmark legislation, J. Lawrence Broz finds that international factors were crucial to its conception and passage. Until its passage, the United States had suffered under one of the most inefficient payment systems in the world. Serious banking panics erupted frequently, and nominal interest rates fluctuated wildly. Structural and regulatory flaws contributed not only to financial instability at home but also to the virtual absence of the dollar in world trade and payments.Key institutional features of the Federal Reserve Act addressed both these shortcomings but ...
Oscar Skelton (1878-1941) was a prominent early-twentieth century scholar who became a civil servant and political advisor to prime ministers Mackenzie King and R.B. Bennett. He wrote a number of important books and one, Socialism: A Critical Analysis, was highly praised by Vladimir Lenin. His wife, Isabel Skelton (1877-1956), wrote extensively about literature and history; she was the first historian to treat women from the country's past individually in their own right rather than as a generalized category. Both husband and wife promoted the idea that Canada was an independent nation that no longer needed Britain's tutelage. Terry Crowley has written a unique double biography that examines...
The University of Chicago has been and continues to be one of the most important global centres for economics. With six chapters on themes in Chicago economics and 33 chapters on the lives and work of Chicago economists, this volume shows how economics became established at the University, how it produced some of the world’s best-known economists, including Frank Knight, Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas, and how it remains a global force for the very best in teaching and research in economics. With original contributions from a stellar cast, this volume provides economists – especially those interested in macroeconomics and the history of economic thought – with an in-depth analysis of Chicago economics.
DIVThis enduring economics text provided the theoretical basis of the entrepreneurial American economy during the post-industrial era. A revolutionary work, it taught the world how to systematically distinguish between risk and uncertainty. /div
The economic theories that dominated the field during the 20th century have failed us and empowered government to believe they can manipulate the business cycle. Every economic theory presented post-Marxism has assumed that the complexity of the business cycle can be reduced to a single cause and effect. To date, no attempt to manipulate the cycle has prevented a recession or financial crisis. We now face a truly monumental crisis. Central banks around the world are trapped. Their attempt to stimulate the economy through Quantitative Easing and rate manipulation has disastrously failed. The central banks have primarily purchased government debt, effectively keeping governments on life suppor...