Winner of the 2011 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year Award
Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world's poor. But much of their work is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, harmful misperceptions at worst.
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.
This important book illuminates how the poor live, and offers all of us an opportunity to think of a world beyond poverty.
Learn more at www.pooreconomics.com

❤没有人天生是父母，当孩子降临，婴儿床、学区房、升级考、兴趣班……却无师自通
❤童年宽松的父母，为什么纷纷开始“推娃”？是爱，是对未来的恐惧，还是不甘落后之心？
❤孩子，变得越来越“昂贵”；教育，投入多少才算够？
❤耶鲁经济学者重新理解育儿这场国家战争背后的逻辑
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诺奖得 主赫克曼 | 《国家为什么会失败》作者阿西莫格鲁
《纽约时报》德鲁克曼 | 香港中文大学宋铮 | 复旦大学王永钦
联袂推荐
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当富裕家庭的孩子被父母推着一步步向前时，贫穷家庭孩子的机会却在减少？
“别傻了，是经济决定了美国人如何抚养孩子！”
——帕特里克·A.科尔曼，“好爸爸”网站
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在不平等的时代抚育子女
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从美国到中国，无论富裕抑或贫穷，不管男孩还是女孩，世界各地的父母都希望孩子能快乐成长，有所成就。然而，他们实现这一目标的方式却千差万别。美国和中国的父母越来越权威、专断，“育儿战争”日益激烈；而北欧的父母相比之下更为宽容。这种转变背后的原因是什么？
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从中世纪到现代社会，从美国、英国、北欧到中国和日本，本书跨越了时间与空间，研究了经济激励和约束如何影响了不同国家的育儿习俗，以及什么才是好的教养方式。
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在竞争日益激烈的时代，实现机会平等和教育公平，帮助孩子立足未来是所有人的共同愿望。

From the authors of the best-selling The Second Machine Age, a leader’s guide to success in a rapidly changing economy.
We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs.
In The Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson predicted some of the far-reaching effects of digital technologies on our lives and businesses. Now they’ve written a guide to help readers make the most of our collective future. Machine, Platform, Crowd outlines the opportunities and challenges inherent in the science fiction-worthy technologies that have come to life in recent years, like self-driving cars and 3D printers, online platforms for renting outfits and scheduling workouts, or crowd-sourced medical research and financial instruments.

The second edition of the highly acclaimed American Accent Training, now on 5 audio CDs, is for foreign-born students and business people working, traveling or studying in the United States and Canada. Through extensive intonation and pronunciation exercises, students learn how to speak with a standard American Accent. At the same time, listening comprehension improves dramatically. Supplementary materials included detailed nationality guides for eight languages (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Spanish, French, German, Russian and Korean), access to a comprehensive website, and referral to a qualified telephone analyst for an individual diagnostic speech analysis. Also included are colored markers for written exercises, and a mirror to practice accurate pronunciation.

It may be hard to believe in an era of Walmart, Citizens United, and the Koch brothers, but corporations are on the decline. The number of American companies listed on the stock market dropped by half between 1996 and 2012. In recent years we've seen some of the most storied corporations go bankrupt (General Motors, Chrysler, Eastman Kodak) or disappear entirely (Bethlehem Steel, Lehman Brothers, Borders).
Gerald Davis argues this is a root cause of the income inequality and social instability we face today. Corporations were once an integral part of building the middle class. He points out that in their heyday they offered millions of people lifetime employment, a stable career path, health insurance, and retirement pensions. They were like small private welfare states.
The businesses that are replacing them will not fill the same role. For one thing, they employ far fewer people the combined global workforces of Facebook, Yelp, Zynga, LinkedIn, Zillow, Tableau, Zulily, and Box are smaller than the number of people who lost their jobs when Circuit City was liquidated in 2009. And in the sharing economy, companies have no obligation to most of the people who work for them at the end of 2014 Uber had over 160,000 driver-partners in the United States but recognized only about 2,000 people as actual employees.
Davis tracks the rise of the large American corporation and the economic, social, and technological developments that have led to its decline. The future could see either increasing economic polarization, as careers turn into jobs and jobs turn into tasks, or a more democratic economy built from the grass roots. It's up to us.

Five hundred feet underground, Jeanne Marie Laskas asked a coal miner named Smitty, “Do you think it’s weird that people know so little about you?” He replied, “I don’t think people know too much about the way the whole damn country works.”
Hidden America intends to fix that. Like John McPhee and Susan Orlean, Laskas dives deep into her subjects and emerges with character-driven narratives that are gripping, funny, and revelatory. In Hidden America, the stories are about the people who make our lives run every day—and yet we barely think of them.
Laskas spent weeks in an Ohio coal mine and on an Alaskan oil rig; in a Maine migrant labor camp, a Texas beef ranch, the air traffic control tower at New York’s LaGuardia Airport,
a California landfill, an Arizona gun shop, the cab of a long-haul truck in Iowa, and the stadium of the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders. Cheerleaders? Yes. They, too, are hidden America, and you will be amazed by what Laskas tells you about them: hidden no longer.

Allegations of Russian conspiracies meddling in the affairs of Western countries have been a persistent feature of Western politics since the Cold War – allegations of Russian interference in the US presidential election are only the most recent in a long series of conspiracy allegations that mark the history of the twentieth century. But Russian politics is rife with conspiracies about the West too. Everything bad that happens in Russia is traced back by some to an anti-Russian plot that is hatched in the West. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union – this crucial turning point in world politics that left the USA as the only remaining superpower – was, according to some Russian conspiracy theorists, planned and executed by Russia’s enemies in the West.
This book is the first-ever study of Russian conspiracy theories in the post-Soviet period. It examines why these conspiracy theories have emerged and gained currency in Russia and what role intellectuals have played in this process. The book shows how, in the new millennium, the image of the ‘dangerous, conspiring West’ provides national unity and has helped legitimize Russia’s rapid turn to authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin.

'The US vs China offers vital insight into the underlying currents reshaping the world as it shifts from its transatlantic axis to Asia-centred order, making it a must-read for anyone with an interest in twenty-first-century international affairs. An essential counter to arguments about the "China threat" and the "inevitability of US-China conflict", the work should find a place on any balanced academic reading list, both undergraduate and graduate.' Jenny Clegg, China and Asia Pacific specialist, author of China's Global Strategy: towards a multipolar world, Pluto Press 'China has burst onto the global political scene, tearing up the established contours of post-1945 international relations. This is a change that affects us all in the most profound ways and is shaping the twenty first century, throwing up fundamental questions: Can US hegemony prevail? Will China be the next global superpower? Does China's rise present a threat to world peace? In this accessible yet rigorous book, Jude Woodward challenges conventional preconceptions about the implications of China's rise and suggests that with the US on the decline, China offers hope for the future.' --Kate Hudson, General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)

In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least 5 million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than 3 million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them.
Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic’s borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil.

As Europe plunged into World War II, Hitler ordered the development of a hi-tech secret weapon capable of taking the war across the Atlantic--the Messerschmitt Me 264. Chosen from designs for an "Amerika Bomber" tendered by Messerschmitt, Junkers, and Focke-Wulf, this ultra-long-range aircraft would be capable of attacking cities in the United States. Just one month before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the American entry into World War II, Hitler was promising, privately, to wage a "new war" against the USA after his victories in Europe. Dazzling digital artwork and 50 rare archival photographs perfectly complement the detailed analysis offered by Robert Forsyth as he examines the development, intended role, and influence of the aircraft that Hitler planned to use to bomb New York City.

Blue jeans are globally beloved and quintessentially American. They symbolize everything from the Old West to the hippie counter-culture; everyone from car mechanics to high-fashion models wears jeans. And no name is more associated with blue jeans than Levi Strauss & Co., the creator of this classic American garment.
As a young man Levi Strauss left his home in Germany and immigrated to America. He made his way to San Francisco and by 1853 had started his company. Soon he was a leading businessman in a growing commercial city that was beginning to influence the rest of the nation. Family-centered and deeply rooted in his Jewish faith, Strauss was the hub of a wheel whose spokes reached into nearly every aspect of American culture: business, philanthropy, politics, immigration, transportation, education, and fashion.
But despite creating an American icon, Levi Strauss is a mystery. Little is known about the man, and the widely circulated "facts" about his life are steeped in mythology. In this first full-length biography, Lynn Downey sets the record straight about this brilliant businessman. Strauss's life was the classic American success story, filled with lessons about craft and integrity, leadership and innovation.

A gripping and tragic tale that sheds rare light on the unique burden of genius  In 2006, an eccentric Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved the Poincare Conjecture, an extremely complex topological problem that had eluded the best minds for over a century. A prize of one million dollars was offered to anyone who could unravel it, but Perelman declined the winnings, and in doing so inspired journalist Masha Gessen to tell his story. Drawing on interviews with Perelmanâ s teachers, classmates, coaches, teammates, and colleagues in Russia and the United Statesâ and informed by her own background as a math whiz raised in Russiaâ Gessen uncovered a mind of unrivaled computational power, one that enabled Perelman to pursue mathematical concepts to their logical (sometimes distant) end. But she also discovered that this very strength turned out to be Perelman's undoing and the reason for his withdrawal, first from the world of mathematics and then, increasingly, from the world in general.

Americans have always loved guns. This special bond was forged during the American Revolution and sanctified by the Second Amendment. It is because of this exceptional relationship that American civilians are more heavily armed than the citizens of any other nation.
Or so we’re told.
In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag overturns this conventional wisdom. American gun culture, she argues, developed not because the gun was exceptional, but precisely because it was not: guns proliferated in America because throughout most of the nation’s history, they were perceived as an unexceptional commodity, no different than buttons or typewriters.
Focusing on the history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, one of the most iconic arms manufacturers in America, Haag challenges many basic assumptions of how and when America became a gun culture. Under the leadership of Oliver Winchester and his heirs, the company used aggressive, sometimes ingenious sales and marketing techniques to create new markets for their product. Guns have never “sold themselves”; rather, through advertising and innovative distribution campaigns, the gun industry did. Through the meticulous examination of gun industry archives, Haag challenges the myth of a primal bond between Americans and their firearms.
Over the course of its 150 year history, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company sold over 8 million guns. But Oliver Winchester-a shirtmaker in his previous career-had no apparent qualms about a life spent arming America. His daughter-in-law Sarah Winchester was a different story. Legend holds that Sarah was haunted by what she considered a vast blood fortune, and became convinced that the ghosts of rifle victims were haunting her. She channeled much of her inheritance, and her conflicted conscience, into a monstrous estate now known as the Winchester Mystery House, where she sought refuge from this ever-expanding army of phantoms.
In this provocative and deeply-researched work of narrative history, Haag fundamentally revises the history of arms in America, and in so doing explodes the clichés that have created and sustained our lethal gun culture.

How skirting the law once defined America’s relation to the world.
In the frigid winter of 1875, Charles L. Lawrence made international headlines when he was arrested for smuggling silk worth $60 million into the United States. An intimate of Boss Tweed, gloriously dubbed “The Prince of Smugglers,” and the head of a network spanning four continents and lasting half a decade, Lawrence scandalized a nation whose founders themselves had once dabbled in contraband.
Since the Revolution itself, smuggling had tested the patriotism of the American people. Distrusting foreign goods, Congress instituted high tariffs on most imports. Protecting the nation was the custom house, which waged a “war on smuggling,” inspecting every traveler for illicitly imported silk, opium, tobacco, sugar, diamonds, and art. The Civil War’s blockade of the Confederacy heightened the obsession with contraband, but smuggling entered its prime during the Gilded Age, when characters like assassin Louis Bieral, economist “The Parsee Merchant,” Congressman Ben Butler, and actress Rose Eytinge tempted consumers with illicit foreign luxuries. Only as the United States became a global power with World War I did smuggling lose its scurvy romance.
Meticulously researched, Contraband explores the history of smuggling to illuminate the broader history of the United States, its power, its politics, and its culture.

Area 51's most important military aviation developments are profiled in an illustrated format. When most of us think of Area 51, we think of aliens, UFOs, and controversial government cover-ups. It's easy to forget that, since the mid-1950s, the United States' famed extension of Edwards Air Force Base has served as a top-secret CIA testing ground for many of the most groundbreaking advancements in American military aviation technology. In Area 51 - Black Jets, author and military historian Bill Yenne offers the first fully illustrated chronology of Area 51's most famous aircraft projects, including Lockheed's U-2 "Dragon Lady" and SR-71 "Blackbird" reconnaissance planes, drones ranging from the early Lockheed D-21 to the modern-day General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, and the famous F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter produced by the Have Blue program during the 1970s. Each project is given its own fascinating chapter illuminating the aircraft's development at this famed location. But beyond the aircraft themselves, Area 51 - Black Jets also covers a handful of the many classified experimental programs carried out at Area 51 over the years, such as Have Doughnut, Have Ferry, and Have Drill - secret undertakings that successfully reverse-engineered such enemy aircraft as the Russian MiG during the Cold War. Presented in beautiful hardcover format and illustrated with historic color and black-and-white photographs, diagrams, and maps, this book reveals Area 51 for what it truly is: a clandestine area for the United States' most cutting-edge technological innovators in military aviation.

For many years now China's economy has seemed unstoppable. A slow appreciation of the renminbi in 2007 brought wave upon wave of liquidity into China and allowed its companies and banks to raise hundreds of billions in dollars via stock market listings. State banks that had started the new century as bankrupt relics of a communist past became the darlings of international investors.
Even the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the ensuing global financial crisis seemed to have little impact on China as the government quickly responded with a huge stimulus package. But the Lehman collapse was a dramatic wake up call to the Chinese leadership. This model of bank and capital market reform had been studiously emulated for more than a decade and had brought great benefits to China. But now, although they believed it to be bankrupt, the Chinese government were bereft of new ideas. In the face of the global financial crisis the government returned to what it knows best, massive state intervention via the banking system. Ten years of banking and capital market reforms were dead.
In Red Capitalism, Carl Walter and Fraser Howie detail how the Chinese government reformed and modeled its financial system in the 30 years since it began its policy of engagement with the west. Instead of a stable series of policies producing steady growth, China's financial sector has boomed and gone bust with regularity in each decade. The latest decade is little different. Chinese banks have become objects of political struggle while they totter under balance sheets bloated by the excessive state-directed lending and bond issuance of 2009.
Looking forward, the government's response to the global financial crisis has created a banking system the stability of which can be maintained only behind the walls of a non-convertible currency, a myriad of off-balance sheet arrangements with non-public state entities and the strong support of its best borrowers--the politically potent National Champions--who are the greatest beneficiaries of the financial status quo.
China's financial system is not a model for the west and, indeed, is not a sustainable arrangement for China itself as it seeks increasingly to assert its influence internationally. This is not a story of impending collapse, but of frustrated reforms that suggests that any full opening and meaningful reform of the financial sector is not, indeed cannot be, on the government's agenda anytime soon.