Is capitalism inherently predatory? Must there be winners and losers? Is public interest outdated and free-riding rational? Is consumer choice the same as self-determination? Must bargainers abandon the no-harm principle? Prisoners of Reason recalls that classical liberal capitalism exalted the no-harm principle. Although imperfect and exclusionary, modern liberalism recognized individual human dignity alongside individuals' responsibility to respect others. Neoliberalism, by contrast, views life as ceaseless struggle. Agents vie for scarce resources in antagonistic competition in which every individual seeks dominance. This political theory is codified in non-cooperative game theory; the neoliberal citizen and consumer is the strategic rational actor. Rational choice justifies ends irrespective of means. Money becomes the medium of all value. Solidarity and good will are invalidated. Relationships are conducted on a quid pro quo basis. However, agents can freely opt out of this cynical race to the bottom by embracing a more expansive range of coherent action.

It was a time when anything seemed possible–instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury–and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors’ money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the “rob Peter to pay Paul” scam to an art form. At the peak of his success, Ponzi was raking in more than $2 million a week at his office in downtown Boston. Then his house of cards came crashing down–thanks in large part to the relentless investigative reporting of Richard Grozier’s Boston Post. A classic American tale of immigrant life and the dream of success, Ponzi’s Scheme is the amazing story of the magnetic scoundrel who launched the most successful scheme of financial alchemy in modern history.

The growth of technological and scientific knowledge in the past two centuries has been the overriding dynamic element in the economic and social history of the world. Its result is now often called the knowledge economy. But what are the historical origins of this revolution and what have been its mechanisms? In "The Gifts of Athena", Joel Mokyr constructs an original framework to analyze the concept of "useful" knowledge. He argues that the growth explosion in the modern West in the past two centuries was driven not just by the appearance of new technological ideas but also by the improved access to these ideas in society at large - as made possible by social networks comprising universities, publishers, professional sciences, and kindred institutions.Through a wealth of historical evidence set in clear and lively prose, he shows that changes in the intellectual and social environment and the institutional background in which knowledge was generated and disseminated brought about the Industrial Revolution, followed by sustained economic growth and continuing technological change. Mokyr draws a link between intellectual forces such as the European enlightenment and subsequent economic changes of the nineteenth century, and follows their development into the twentieth century. He further explores some of the key implications of the knowledge revolution. Among these is the rise and fall of the "factory system" as an organizing principle of modern economic organization. He analyzes the impact of this revolution on information technology and communications as well as on the public's state of health and the structure of households. By examining the social and political roots of resistance to new knowledge, Mokyr also links growth in knowledge to political economy and connects the economic history of technology to the New Institutional Economics. "The Gifts of Athena" provides crucial insights into a matter of fundamental concern to a range of disciplines including economics, economic history, political economy, the history of technology, and the history of science.

你可以出售自己的选票吗？
你可以出售自己的肾脏吗？
同性恋可以花钱雇代孕为他们生孩子吗？
伴侣可以花钱雇另一半看孩子、洗碗、或做饭吗？
应该允许富人利用基因工程设计美丽、有天赋的孩子吗？
……
世上的一切都是可以出售的吗？
市场不该受到限制吗？
本书用严密的论证、鲜活的例子、生动的语言，逐一分析了对市场的各种质疑与误解，是近年来讨论市场伦理的优秀著作。

揭示中国非凡崛起与金融改革的真相！
阅读这本书，可以从一个独特的视角，对中国改革开放30年，特别是金融改革20年波澜壮阔的历史进程有一个全新的了解。作者通过对中国的银行及货币政策，股票及债券市场如何一步一步发展、壮大的历史总结，包括对中国金融高层决策的一些重要背景及金融交易内幕的研究分析，提出了很多独特而深刻的洞见。

Bodie, Kane, and Marcus' "Investments" sets the standard for graduate/MBA investments textbooks. It blends practical and theoretical coverage, while maintaining an appropriate rigor and a clear writing style. Its unifying theme is that security markets are nearly efficient, meaning that most securities are priced appropriately given their risk and return attributes. The text places greater emphasis on asset allocation and offers a much broader and deeper treatment of futures, options, and other derivative security markets than most investment texts. It is also the only graduate "Investments" text to offer an online homework management system, 'McGraw-Hill's Connect Finance'.

The crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the iron curtain, and the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions" all owe a tremendous debt to F. A. Hayek. Economist, social and political theorist, and intellectual historian, Hayek passionately championed individual liberty and condemned the dangers of state control. Now Hayek at last tells the story of his long and controversial career, during which his fortunes rose, fell, and finally rose again.
Through a complete collection of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches and a wide selection of interviews, Hayek on Hayek provides the first detailed chronology of Hayek's early life and education, his intellectual progress, and the academic and public reception of his ideas. His discussions range from economic methodology and the question of religious faith to the atmosphere of post-World War I Vienna and the British character.
Born in 1899 into a Viennese family of academics and civil servants, Hayek was educated at the University of Vienna, fought in the Great War, and later moved to London, where, as he watched liberty vanish under fascism and communism across Europe, he wrote The Road to Serfdom. Although this book attracted great public attention, Hayek was ignored by other economists for thirty years after World War II, when European social democracies boomed and Keynesianism became the dominant intellectual force. However, the award of the Nobel Prize in economics for 1974 signaled a reversal in Hayek's fortunes, and before his death in 1992 he saw his life's work vindicated in the collapse of the planned economies of Eastern Europe.
Hayek on Hayek is as close to an autobiography of Hayek as we will ever have. In his own eloquent words, Hayek reveals the remarkable life of a revolutionary thinker in revolutionary times.
"One of the great thinkers of our age who explored the promise and contours of liberty....[Hayek] revolutionized the world's intellectual and political life"--President George Bush, on awarding F. A. Hayek the Medal of Freedom
F. A. Hayek, recipient of the Medal of Freedom 1991 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and the principal proponent of the libertarian philosophy. Hayek is the author of numerous books in economics, as well as books in political philosophy and psychology.

Executive Summary:
Sweden did not become wealthy through social democracy, big government and a large welfare state. It developed economically by adopting free-market policies in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It also benefited from positive cultural norms, including a strong work ethic and high levels of trust.
As late as 1950, Swedish tax revenues were still only around 21 per cent of GDP. The policy shift towards a big state and higher taxes occurred mainly during the next thirty years, as taxes increased by almost one per cent of GDP annually
The rapid growth of the state in the late 1960s and 1970s led to a large decline in Sweden’s relative economic performance. In 1975, Sweden was the 4th richest industrialised country in terms of GDP per head. By 1993, it had fallen to 14th.
Big government had a devastating impact on entrepreneurship. After 1970, the establishment of new firms dropped significantly. Among the 100 firms with the highest revenues in Sweden in 2004, only two were entrepreneurial Swedish firms founded after 1970, compared with 21 founded before 1913.
High levels of equality and favourable social outcomes were evident before the creation of an extensive welfare state. Moreover, generous welfare policies have created numerous social problems, including high levels of dependency among certain groups.
Descendants of Swedes who migrated to the USA in the 19th century are characterised by favourable social outcomes, such as a low poverty rate and high employment, despite the less extensive welfare state in the USA. The average income of Americans with Swedish ancestry is over 50 per cent higher than Swedes in their native country.
Third World immigrants have been particularly badly affected by a combination of high welfare benefits and restrictive labour market regulations. In 2004, when the Swedish economy was performing strongly, the employment rate among immigrants from non- Western nations in Sweden was only 48 per cent.
Since the economic crisis of the early 1990s, Swedish governments have rolled back the state and introduced market reforms in sectors such as education, health and pensions. Economic freedom has increased in Sweden while it has declined in the UK and USA. Sweden’s relative economic performance has improved accordingly.

"Linear and Nonlinear Programming" is considered a classic textbook in Optimization. While it is a classic, it also reflects modern theoretical insights. These insights provide structure to what might otherwise be simply a collection of techniques and results, and this is valuable both as a means for learning existing material and for developing new results. One major insight of this type is the connection between the purely analytical character of an optimization problem, expressed perhaps by properties of the necessary conditions, and the behavior of algorithms used to solve a problem. This was a major theme of the first edition of this book and the second edition expands and further illustrates this relationship.</P>
"Linear and Nonlinear Programming" covers the central concepts of practical optimization techniques. It is designed for either self-study by professionals or classroom work at the undergraduate or graduate level for technical students. Like the field of optimization itself, which involves many classical disciplines, the book should be useful to system analysts, operations researchers, numerical analysts, management scientists, and other specialists from the host of disciplines from which practical optimization applications are drawn. </P>

From cell phones to Web portals, advances in information and communications technology have thrust society into an information age that is far-reaching, fast-moving, increasingly complex, and yet essential to modern life. Now, renowned scholar and author David Luenberger has produced Information Science, a text that distills and explains the most important concepts and insights at the core of this ongoing revolution. The book represents the material used in a widely acclaimed course offered at Stanford University. Drawing concepts from each of the constituent subfields that collectively comprise information science, Luenberger builds his book around the five "E's" of information: Entropy, Economics, Encryption, Extraction, and Emission. Each area directly impacts modern information products, services, and technology--everything from word processors to digital cash, database systems to decision making, marketing strategy to spread spectrum communication. To study these principles is to learn how English text, music, and pictures can be compressed, how it is possible to construct a digital signature that cannot simply be copied, how beautiful photographs can be sent from distant planets with a tiny battery, how communication networks expand, and how producers of information products can make a profit under difficult market conditions. The book contains vivid examples, illustrations, exercises, and points of historic interest, all of which bring to life the analytic methods presented. It presents a unified approach to the field of information science. It emphasizes basic principles, and includes a wide range of examples and applications. It helps students develop important new skills, and suggests exercises with solutions in an instructor's manual.

经济学和法律有着什么关系？
假设立法者提议持枪抢劫犯必须判死刑，各方必然会有不同的反应。媒体和舆论会强烈支持对犯罪采取强硬手段；律师会提出异议，认为这种惩罚太残酷；法学家会思考这项议案的公平正义的问题。而经济学家则会发现，持枪抢劫的判罚跟谋杀的判罚一样，会鼓励抢劫犯杀掉被害人。经济学这种直达问题本质的能力，使得它不仅适用于解释法律，还有助于法律的制定。
作者简洁明快地厘清了法律与经济学的关系，而平易的行文风格适合专业人士乃至外行读者，同时无损其观点的深度。利用大量实际案例，加上渊博的芝加哥学派经济学知识，作者坚定地为法律的经济分析“辩护”，并没有颠覆传统法律学者的结论（对同一法律问题，比如是否废除死刑，它能被不同的立场所用），而是改变了双方辩论的本质。又比如在讨论房屋租赁法时，一般认为它要么偏袒房东或要么偏袒租客，但经济分析明确表示：长期来看，一个糟糕的法律会对双方都造成损害。
此外，跟传统法律理论不同，经济分析用相同的概念（如经济效率）和方法去理解和评估不同类别的法律，比如合同法、财产法、刑法、侵权法等——不管是当下的美国法律，还是其他历史时期或其他地方的法律。

Why are some countries better than others at science and technology (S&T)? Written in an approachable style, The Politics of Innovation provides readers from all backgrounds and levels of expertise a comprehensive introduction to the debates over national S&T competitiveness. It synthesizes over fifty years of theory and research on national innovation rates, bringing together the current political and economic wisdom, and latest findings, about how nations become S&T leaders. Many experts mistakenly believe that domestic institutions and policies determine national innovation rates. However, after decades of research, there is still no agreement on precisely how this happens, exactly which institutions matter, and little aggregate evidence has been produced to support any particular explanation. Yet, despite these problems, a core faith in a relationship between domestic institutions and national innovation rates remains widely held and little challenged. The Politics of Innovation confronts head-on this contradiction between theory, evidence, and the popularity of the institutions-innovation hypothesis. It presents extensive evidence to show that domestic institutions and policies do not determine innovation rates. Instead, it argues that social networks are as important as institutions in determining national innovation rates. The Politics of Innovation also introduces a new theory of "creative insecurity" which explains how institutions, policies, and networks are all subservient to politics. It argues that, ultimately, each country's balance of domestic rivalries vs. external threats, and the ensuing political fights, are what drive S&T competitiveness. In making its case, The Politics of Innovation draws upon statistical analysis and comparative case studies of the United States, Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Turkey, Israel, Russia and a dozen countries across Western Europe.

This is a reassessment of the international monetary crises of the post-World War I period, that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It also analyzes the responses of the world's economic powers to the Depression and how new monetary policies set the stage for the watershed post-World War II system established at Bretton Woods. It offers new theories of what effect the Great Depression had on the collapse of the world monetary system, and what effect the collapse had on deepening and prolonging the Depression, by exploring the link between global economic crises and the the gold standard (the framework for international monetary affairs until 1931).