Washoe County Library System

Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. But historian Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What's more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind...

Looks at the history of the growth of consumerism, exposing the international nature of its expansion through the last six hundred years, and the challenges it poses to the planet.

Traces how the works of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew reflected the poor majority in mid-nineteenth-century London, citing the achievements of such influential figures as John Maynard Keyes, Paul Samuelson, and Amartya Sen.

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government...

A group history of the Austrian School of Economics, from the coffeehouses of imperial Vienna to the modern-day Tea Party. The Austrian School of Economics-a movement that has had a vast impact on economics, politics, and society, especially among the American right-is poorly understood by supporters and detractors alike. Defining themselves in opposition to the mainstream, economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter...

"Why did the size of the U.S. economy increase by 3 percent on one day in mid-2013 -- or Ghana's balloon by 60 percent overnight in 2010? Why did the U.K. financial industry show its fastest expansion ever at the end of 2008 -- just as the world's financial system went into meltdown? And why was Greece's chief statistician charged with treason in 2013 for apparently doing nothing more than trying to accurately report the size of his country's economy?...

"Today's inequality discourse has a fascinating and illuminating 300-year history. Branko Milanovic describes the evolution of the idea of inequality through portraits of six key economists, from Quesnay to Kuznets. In their work and lives, we see the rise and consolidation of the theory of social class, followed by its twentieth-century eclipse"-- "A sweeping and original history of how economists across two centuries have thought about inequality,...