the public wealth of nations

"When you look around the world it's almost as if Thatcher/Reagan economic revolution never happened. The largest pool of wealth in the world - a global total that is twice the world's total pension s

We have spent the last three decades engaged in a pointless and irrelevant debate about the relative merits of privatization or nationalization. We have been arguing about the wrong thing while sittin

In the ancient world it was guns, germs, and steel that determined the fates of people and nations; now, more than ever, it is electricity.Global demand for power is doubling every two decades, but el

The economics profession in twentieth-century America began as a humble quest to understand the "wealth of nations." It grew into a profession of immense public prestige--and now suffers a strangely w

To those who know Adam Smith principally by his classic treatise on economics, The Wealth of Nations, this earlier work may come as a revelation. Smith is often misrepresented in the public imaginatio

In recent years, 'nudge units' or 'behavioral insights teams' have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over the world, public officials are using the behavioral sciences to protect the environment, promote employment and economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase national security. In this book, Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge (2008), breaks new ground with a deep yet highly readable investigation into the ethical issues surrounding nudges, choice architecture, and mandates, addressing such issues as welfare, autonomy, self-government, dignity, manipulation, and the constraints and responsibilities of an ethical state. Complementing the ethical discussion, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science contains a wealth of new data on people's attitudes towards a broad range of nudges, choice architecture, and mandates.

How foreign lending weakens emerging nations In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war. This reliance on external public finance offered emerging nations endless opportunities to overcome barriers to growth, but it also enabled rulers to bypass critical stages in institution building and political development. Pawned States reveals how easy access to foreign lending at early stages of state building has led to chronic fiscal instability and weakened state capacity in the developing world. Drawing on a wealth of original data to document the rise of cheap overseas credit between 1816 and 1913, Didac Queralt shows how countries in the global periphery obtained these loans by agreeing to "extreme conditionality," which empowered international investors to take control of local revenue sources in cases of default, and how foreclosure eroded a country's tax

This analysis of collective security covers its institutional, operational and legal parameters along with the United Nations system, presenting it as a global public order institution for maintaining peace. The authors study its constitutional premises as they are shaped by the forces of law and politics. After an historical account of initiatives and projects for global peace, the authors explain the morphology of collective security as a global public order institution and outline its triggers, institutions, actors, components and tools. They go on to analyse its legal properties and the processes of political, legal and criminal accountability. The analysis and assessment are informed throughout by practice drawn from examples including Korea, Iraq and Libya, and by a wealth of cases from national and international jurisdictions.