Since its publication in 1949, D.O. Hebb's, The Organization of Behavior has been one of the most influential books in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. However, the original edition has been unavailable since 1966, ensuring that Hebb's comment that a classic normally means "cited but not read" is true in his case. This new edition rectifies a long-standing problem for behavioral neuroscientists--the inability to obtain one of the most cited publications in the field.
The Organization of Behavior played a significant part in stimulating the investigation of the neural foundations of behavior and continues to be inspiring because it provides a general framework for relating behavior to synaptic organization through the dynamics of neural networks.
D.O. Hebb was also the first to examine the mechanisms by which environment and experience can influence brain structure and function, and his ideas formed the basis for work on enriched environments as stimulants for behavioral development.
References to Hebb, the Hebbian cell assembly, the Hebb synapse, and the Hebb rule increase each year. These forceful ideas of 1949 are now applied in engineering, robotics, and computer science, as well as neurophysiology, neuroscience, and psychology--a tribute to Hebb's foresight in developing a foundational neuropsychological theory of the organization of behavior.

By the publisher of the prestigious Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, an account of the deep economic slump of 1920–21 that proposes, with respect to federal intervention, “less is more.” This is a free-market rejoinder to the Keynesian stimulus applied by Bush and Obama to the 2007–09 recession, in whose aftereffects, Grant asserts, the nation still toils.
James Grant tells the story of America’s last governmentally-untreated depression; relatively brief and self-correcting, it gave way to the Roaring Twenties. His book appears in the fifth year of a lackluster recovery from the overmedicated downturn of 2007–2009.
In 1920–21, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding met a deep economic slump by seeming to ignore it, implementing policies that most twenty-first century economists would call backward. Confronted with plunging prices, wages, and employment, the government balanced the budget and, through the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates. No “stimulus” was administered, and a powerful, job-filled recovery was under way by late in 1921.
In 1929, the economy once again slumped—and kept right on slumping as the Hoover administration adopted the very policies that Wilson and Harding had declined to put in place. Grant argues that well-intended federal intervention, notably the White House-led campaign to prop up industrial wages, helped to turn a bad recession into America’s worst depression. He offers the experience of the earlier depression for lessons for today and the future. This is a powerful response to the prevailing notion of how to fight recession. The enterprise system is more resilient than even its friends give it credit for being, Grant demonstrates.

For over 50 years, James G. March has made a sustained and innovative contribution to the study of organizations. In his renowned course on leadership at Stanford University he explores the problems of leadership using works of great literature, such as War and Peace and Don Quixote. These essays are based on March's notes for his course lectures. The notes have been interpreted by Thierry Weil, and translated here from his original French interpretation.March uses literature to examine a set of dilemmas related to leadership - questions concerning the balance between private life and public duties, between ingenuity and innocence, between diversity and integration, and between the expression and the control of sexuality. He encourages us to explore ideas that are sometimes subversive and unpalatable, but may allow organizations to adapt in a rapidly changing world.

In The Ambiguities of Experience , James G. March asks a deceptively simple question: What is, or should be, the role of experience in creating intelligence, particularly in organizations? Folk wisdom both trumpets the significance of experience and warns of its inadequacies. On one hand, experience is described as the best teacher. On the other hand, experience is described as the teacher of fools, of those unable or unwilling to learn from accumulated knowledge or the teaching of experts. The disagreement between those folk aphorisms reflects profound questions about the human pursuit of intelligence through learning from experience that have long confronted philosophers and social scientists. This book considers the unexpected problems organizations (and the individuals in them) face when they rely on experience to adapt, improve, and survive.
While acknowledging the power of learning from experience and the extensive use of experience as a basis for adaptation and for constructing stories and models of history, this book examines the problems with such learning. March argues that although individuals and organizations are eager to derive intelligence from experience, the inferences stemming from that eagerness are often misguided. The problems lie partly in errors in how people think, but even more so in properties of experience that confound learning from it. 'Experience,' March concludes, 'may possibly be the best teacher, but it is not a particularly good teacher.'

Written rules in formal organizations are distinctive elements of organizational history; they shape organizational change and are in turn shaped by it. These rules are created, revised, and eliminated in ways that leave historical traces, and they have a visibility and durability that elude non-written rules. They thus provide rich data for an empirical probe into the dynamics of organizational history. This study uses qualitative and quantitative data from the history of a specific organization, Stanford University, to develop speculations about the ways in which written rules change. It contributes both to a theory of rules and to theories of organizational decision-making, change, and learning. Organizations respond to problems and react to internal or external pressures by focusing attention on existing and potential rules. The creation, modification, or elimination of a rule, then, is a response to events in the outside environment (such as new government regulations) or to events within the organization (such as alterations in internal government structures). The authors elaborate a simple set of ideas about written rules and their dynamics, emphasizing the interplay among periodic major shocks to the system from outside, experiences with individual rules as they age and are revised, and the spread of effects through an interconnected set of rules. It is a story in which changes introduced in one part of a rule system create adjustments in other parts, including the same rule later in time, as the consequences of the changes are experienced and as rule-making attention is mobilized, satiated, and redirected. These processes involve the full panoply of political negotiation, symbolic competition, discussion, and problem solving that are typical of organizational decision making.

Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize-wimming author of The Prize joins a leading expert on the global economy to present an incisive narrative of the risks and opportunities that are emerging as the balance of power shifts around the world between governments and markets -- and the battle over globalization comes front and center. The Commanding Heights is essential for understanding the struggle over the "new rules of the game" for the twenty-first century.
Amazon.com
The "commanding heights," according to Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Yergin and international business advisor Joseph Stanislaw, are those dominant enterprises and industries that form the high economic ground in nations around the globe. In their analysis of the new world economy, The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World, they examine "the individuals, the ideas, the conflicts, and the turning points" that are responsible. And by considering events such as the ongoing Asian monetary crisis, they suggest what the ultimate interconnection of financial markets might mean in the future.
The Wall Street Journal, Kenneth Minogue
Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw write clearly and have the journalist's talent for fixing personalities in our minds with biographical detail. No one could ask for a better account of the world's political and economic destiny since World War II.
The New York Times Book Review, Jeffrey E. Garten
It is an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking, combining the history of milestone events in countries as diverse as France and India, the biography of leaders as different as Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping and the evolution of ideas ranging from Keynesian economics ... to the Chicago school of free markets. But it is also a brilliantly successful project, a colorful and even suspenseful story of how the world has been transformed over the last half-century.
From Booklist
Yergin and Stanislaw's global tour d'horizon doesn't extrapolate from the discrediting of various shades of socialism that free markets are here to stay. The situation varies from country to country. The authors report on the post^-World War II performance of significant national economies and, moreover, on the politicians who, starting with Margaret Thatcher, advocated the disengagement of the state from the economy. This work complements Robert Skidelsky's Road from Serfdom (1996), a readable analysis of how the predictions of free-market economist F. A. Hayek came true. The authors supplement their research with interviews of influential economists and politicians over the past two decades, such as those who implemented "shock therapies" in ex-communist countries. The authors' judgments are reasoned and seasoned, far from podium-pounding homilies on the free market; rather, they explain why the welfare state was so appealing after the war, then how it gradually sputtered into 1970s stagflation. Renders wide-ranging acquaintance with the basic ideas of contemporary economics.
Gilbert Taylor
Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Robert Heilbroner
...a book that must be read by anyone who responds to its powerful subtitle.... It has been a long time since I have read a book in which intelligence and readability were so felicitously mixed.
Commentary, Gary Rosen
Yergin and Stanislaw trace the course of our century's enchantment with central planning from its first hopeful postwar expressions to its dissolution in recent decades under the relentless pressure of the marketplace and its partisans. It is a grand tale, and they relate it with admirable ambition and energy, even if in the end they fail to do it full justice.

They rightly consider Hayek the leading thinker in the revolt against statism. The problem with Yergin and Stanislaw's presentation of his views is that it scants their essential aspect, which is political and legal. As they would have it, the confrontation between market and state basically concerns information, that is, which side knows more. For Hayek himself, however, the overriding reason state control of economies is "the road to serfdom" is that it vastly expands the opportunities for the governing class to serve its own narrow interests.
Such messily political matters are not fundamental to Yergin and Stanislaw's account. This no doubt explains their strange insistence that the state may soon come roaring back to reclaim its place atop the commanding heights. Whatever misfortunes may befall the newly liberalized economies of the world, however, far too many people have learned that political power, even when exercised in the name of public-spirited economic ends, corrupts in direct proportion to the ambition of its reach.
Book Dimension :
length: (cm)23.4 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)15.5

The classic introduction to economic thought, now updated in time for the publication of New Ideas from Dead CEOs
This entertaining and accessible introduction to the great economic thinkers throughout history— Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and more—shows how their ideas still apply to our modern world. In this revised edition, renowned economist Todd Buchholz offers an insightful and informed perspective on key economic issues in the new millennium: increasing demand for energy, the rise of China, international trade, aging populations, health care, and the effects of global warming. New Ideas from Dead Economists is a fascinating guide to understanding both the evolution of economic theory and our complex contemporary economy.

The last decade has brought dramatic changes in the way that researchers analyze economic and financial time series. This book synthesizes these recent advances and makes them accessible to first-year graduate students. James Hamilton provides the first adequate text-book treatments of important innovations such as vector autoregressions, generalized method of moments, the economic and statistical consequences of unit roots, time-varying variances, and nonlinear time series models. In addition, he presents basic tools for analyzing dynamic systems (including linear representations, autocovariance generating functions, spectral analysis, and the Kalman filter) in a way that integrates economic theory with the practical difficulties of analyzing and interpreting real-world data. "Time Series Analysis" fills an important need for a textbook that integrates economic theory, econometrics, and new results. The book is intended to provide students and researchers with a self-contained survey of time series analysis. It starts from first principles and should be readily accessible to any beginning graduate student, while it is also intended to serve as a reference book for researchers.

The twenty-first century workplace compels Americans to be more flexible. To embrace change, work with unpredictable schedules, be available 24/7, and take charge of one's own career. What are the wider implications of these pressures for workers' lives? How do they conceive of good work and a good life amid such incessant change?
In The Disrupted Workplace, Benjamin Snyder examines how three groups of American workers—financial professionals, truck drivers, and unemployed job seekers—construct moral order in a capitalist system that demands flexibility. Based on seventy in-depth interviews and three years of participant observation, he argues that the flexible economy transforms how workers experience time. New scheduling techniques, employment strategies, and technologies disrupt the flow and trajectory of working life, which makes the workplace a site of perplexing moral dilemmas. Work can feel both liberating and terrorizing, engrossing in the short term but unsustainable in the long term.
Through a vivid portrait of real workers' struggles to adapt their lives to constant disruption, Benjamin Snyder mounts a compelling critique of the costs of the flexible economy.

Warren Buffet once memorably described derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”. Read this sensational and controversial account of the often dazzling business of derivatives trading, and see if you agree.
No money is ever really made in financial markets. Markets merely transfer wealth. As to how to make money? Well, it is basically theft, misrepresentation, lies, cheating, deception or force. It is impossible to make the staggering amounts made in derivatives in good years honestly.
Traders, Guns & Money is a wry and wickedly comic exposé of the culture, games, and pure deceptions played out every day in trading rooms around the world, usually with other people’s money. Whether you move in the financial world yourself, know people who do, or have money invested in stocks, shares or derivatives, this is a fascinating read guaranteed to make you think.

"A risk-management maven who's been on Wall Street for decades…Bookstaber's book shows us some complex strategies that very smart people followed to seemingly reduce risk—but that led to huge losses." (Newsweek)
"Mr. Bookstaber is one of Wall Street's 'rocket scientists'--mathematicians lured from academia to help create both complex financial instruments and new computer models for making investing decisions. In the book, he makes a simple point: The turmoil in the financial markets today comes less from changes in the economy--economic growth, for example, is half as volatile as it was 50 years ago--and more from some of the financial instruments (derivatives) that were designed to control risk." (The New York Times)
"Bright sparks like Mr Bookstaber ushered in a revolution that fuelled the boom in financial derivatives and Byzantine 'structured products.' The problem, he argues, is that this wizardry has made markets more crisis-prone, not less so. It has done this in two ways: by increasing complexity, and by forging tighter links between various markets and securities, making them dangerously interdependent." (The Economist)
"He understands the inner workings of financial markets...A liberal sparkling of juicy stories from the trading floor..." (The Economist)
"…smart book…Part memoir, part market forensics, the book gives an insider's view…" (Bloomberg News)
"Like many pessimistic observers, Richard Bookstaber thinks financial derivatives, Wall Street innovation and hedge funds will lead to a financial meltdown. What sets Mr. Bookstaber apart is that he has spent his career designing derivatives, working on Wall Street and running a hedge fund." (The Wall Street Journal)
"Every so often [a book] pops out of the pile with something original to say, or an original way of saying it. Richard Bookstaber, in A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation, accomplishes both of these rare feats." (Fortune)
"a must-read amidst the current market chaos" (BusinessWeek.com)
"Bookstaber is a former academic who went on to head risk management for Morgan Stanley and now runs a large hedge fund. He knows the subject and has written a lucid and readable book. To his aid he calls mathematics (from Bertrand Russell to Godel's theorem); physics (particularly Heisenberg's uncertainty principle); and even -- meteorology." (Financial Times)
"The book covers a lot about risk management that is relevant to capital markets conditions today and the liquidity crisis." (Financial Times, Saturday 25th August)
"...an insider's guide to markets, hedge funds and the perils of financial innovation. We saw plenty of those in 2007." (The Sunday Telegraph, Sunday 25th November 2007)
"I cannot recommend this book too highly. It is a clear exposition of what the combination of derivatives, leverage and hedge funds can do to the markets.
In short, A Demon of our Own Design is a guide to the dangerous financial markets we have created for ourselves by the clever innovations of structured finance, derivatives, credit default swaps and other newfangled products that are a mystery to the ordinary investor and even plenty of the sophisticates in the investment business. To understand the demonic risks we're taking, read this book."--Forbes.com