A history of accounting, showing how financial and political accountability has shaped the rise and fall of nations and empires. Whether building a road or fighting a war, leaders from ancient Mesopotamia to the present have relied on financial accounting to track their state's assets and guide its policies. Basic accounting tools such as auditing and double-entry bookkeeping form the basis of modern capitalism and the nation-state. Yet our appreciation...

The author provides a concise and comprehensive history of capitalism within a global perspective from its medieval origins to the 2008 financial crisis and beyond. The author offers an account of capitalism that weighs its great achievements against its great costs, crises, and failures. The book puts the rise of capitalist economies in social, political, and cultural context, and shows how their current problems and foreseeable future are connected...

The epic story of the making of modern economics, and of how economics rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands rather than in fate. Nasar's account begins with Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew observing the condition of the poor majority in mid-nineteenth-century London, the richest place in the world. She describes the often heroic efforts of Marx and others to put those insights into action, with...

Author of the extremely popular "Dear Economist" column in Financial Times, Tim Harford reveals the economics behind everyday phenomena in this highly entertaining and informative book. Can a book about economics be fun to read? It can when Harford takes the reins, using his trademark wit to explain why it costs an arm and a leg to buy a cappuccino and why it's nearly impossible to purchase a decent used car. Supermarkets, coffee houses, airlines,...

"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...

In her ground-breaking reporting Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment", losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story...

The importance of money in our lives is readily apparent to everyone--rich, poor, and in between. However grudgingly, most of us accept the expression "Money makes the world go round" as a universal truth. We are all aware of the power of money--how it influences our moods, compels us to take risks, and serves as the yardstick of success in societies around the world. Yet because we take the daily reality of money so completely for granted, we seldom...

En este ensayo se presenta una estimación del valor de la producción agregada de la actual República de Colombia, basada en algunas series de estadísticas durante el siglo XIX. El comportamiento económico que expresa la serie es bastante pobre. El PIB per cápita decrece hasta mediados de siglo, comparado con el crecimiento económico de la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII. El ingreso per cápita se recupera hasta 1885, luego decrece hasta principios...

Siguiendo a Santo Tomás de Aquino, Francisco de Vitoria comenta la cuestión 66 de la Secunda secundae de la Suma de Teología en un contexto doctrinal específico: el relativo a la virtud de la justicia. El hurto y la rapiña, que atentan contra ella, presuponen la legítima propiedad de algo por parte de alguien que es su dueño o dominum. Vitoria procede a revitalizar la importante cuestión del dominio con motivo de los indios recenter inventis,...

“James M. Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy: A Rational Reconstruction” examines the contemporary meaning and significance of James M. Buchanan's body of work. The book uses Buchanan's past contributions to explore the present and future relevance of his scholarly contributions and insights. It seeks mainly to explain what insight for their work contemporary scholars might acquire by becoming familiar with some of Buchanan's formulations....