"Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life...

The Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith. First published in 1776, the book offers one of the world's first collected descriptions of what builds nations' wealth, and is today a fundamental work in classical economics. By reflecting upon the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the book touches upon such broad topics as the division of labour, productivity, and free markets....

Superfreakonomics-the smash hit follow-up to the remarkable New York Times bestselling phenomenon Freakonomics-is back in a new full-color, fully illustrated and expanded edition. The brainchild of rogue economist Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner that once again brilliantly challenges our view of the way the world really works is presented with a new, visual, superfreaky dimension added, enhancing the already provocative thinking about street...

"Discusses the new economics of abundance and includes a survey of economic and social change since the book first appeared twenty-six years ago." --

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Many of the problems of globalization confronting us today-including finding the right balance between economic growth, technological advance, and international trade, and human welfare-also troubled earlier generations. David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation represents an important early attempt to illuminate the problem and to offer viable...

Could you identify a sausage gun if you had to? How about a plate warmer or a well-sweep? Any idea how the term log-rolling really originated? Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911), a prolific popular historian and the first American to chronicle everyday life and customs of the colonial era, describes what these and many other obscure utensils were and how they were used. She also conveys a vivid picture of home production of textiles, colonial dress, transportation,...

Perhaps one of the most infamous works of the modern world, Capital is the German treatise on political economy by Karl Marx that critically analyzes capitalism. First published in 1867 as the beginning of an ambitious but unfinished six-volume series, this work extensively attempts to expose and explain the capitalist mode of production and the class struggles embedded within it. Capital was written while Marx was exiled in England, and many of the...

To predict our future, we must look to the extremes. So argues the economist Richard Davies, who takes readers to the margins of the modern economy and beyond. These extreme economies illustrate the forces that test human resilience, drive societies to failure, and promise to shape our collective future. Reviving a foundational idea from the medical sciences, Extreme Economies turns the logic of modern economics on its head by arguing that these outlier...