Review: Economics, write the authors, "doesn't talk down to you or attempt to psychoanalyze. It doesn't care who won the last fight or whose turn it is to control the remote. Instead, it offers dispassionate, logical solutions to what can often seem like thorny, illogical, and highly emotional domestic disputes."
To be clear, this is principally a book of relationship advice, not a text from which to learn the finer points of Pareto efficiency. Each chapter applies an economic concept to marriage, and explores it through a few real–life case studies.
One chapter deals with the division of labour within a partnership. The first case study presents a couple that has taken an egalitarian approach to dividing up the household chores, only to find themselves miserable.
Elsewhere, Szuchman and Anderson apply the concept of supply and demand to people's sex lives, and frame the bad habits and apathy into which relationships can slide in terms of moral hazard. The same way that a bank deemed too big to fail might take greater risks — having the knowledge that its most severe mistakes will be underwritten by somebody else — so, too, can signing your name on a marriage licence offer a sort of insurance policy that changes your behaviour. "If I'm not married, I will make damn sure I work out every day so I can attract an equally fit husband," the authors write. "If I'm married, I might be tempted to stop going to the gym and grow a new ass. What's my husband going to do? Divorce me?"
In the aftermath of the 2010 election, George Megalogenis considers what has happened to politics in Australia. Have we entered a new phase with minority government and the rise of the Greens and independents?
The Hawke, Keating and Howard years were ones of bold reform; recently we have seen an era of power without purpose. But why? Is it down to powerful lobbies, or the media, or a failure of leadership, or all of the above? And whatever the case, how will hard decisions be taken for the future?
In a brilliant analysis, Megalogenis dissects the cycle of polls, focus groups and presidential politics and explores what it has done to the prospect of serious, difficult reform and the style of our leaders. He argues that politics-as-usual has become a self-defeating game and mounts a persuasive case for a different model of leadership.
This is also an essay that looks at the fate of progressive politics after the three years of opportunities lost. In distilling the meaning of election 2010, it offers a thought-provoking guide to the challenges to come. Now that the political landscape has changed, where to next?
Just as Bob Ellis's last book One Hundred Days of Summer, about Tony Abbott's ascension to the Liberal leadership, was ready to hit the shelves, the nation was stunned to witness Labor suddenly call time on Kevin Rudd's Prime MInistership and replace him with Julia Gillard. Such political turbulence couldn't remain unexamined by this restless observer of our times.
Ellis watches in horror as his beloved Labor lurches from miscalculated announcement to egregious strategic error in the ensuing federal election campaign, threatening to lose government after one calamitous term to the hard-right charmer Abbott. When the rural independents swung their support behind Gillard, Ellis was there, chatting to them between the closed-door meetings that decided the government.
Suddenly, Last Winter is a diary of an extraordinary period in Australian political history.
"I want to persuade you that economics gets an unfairly bad press. Even though economists are widely criticized for either failing to predict the financial crash, or for causing it, or sometimes both, economics is nevertheless entering a new golden age. This book is about the frontiers of economic research and empirical discovery during the past fifteen or twenty years. Yet these accomplishments are not widely known."
Diane Coyle is a writer and Harvard economics PhD. A member of the BBC Trust and the UK Competition Commission, and a visiting professor at the University of Manchester, she also runs an economic consulting firm, Enlightenment Economic
A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank: “In my book, they are insolvent.”
This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.
Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.
How this happened – and why – is the subject of William D. Cohan’s superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system.
Cohan’s minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt.
How do ordinary people come to know or believe what they do? We need an account of this process to help explain why people act as they do. You might think I am acting irrationally--against my interest or my purpose--until you realize that what you know and what I know differ significantly. My actions, given my knowledge, might make eminently good sense. Of course, this pushes our problem back one stage to assess why someone knows or believes what they do. That is the focus of this book. Russell Hardin supposes that people are not usually going to act knowingly against their interests or other purposes. To try to understand how they have come to their knowledge or beliefs is therefore to be charitable in assessing their rationality. Hardin insists on such a charitable stance in the effort to understand others and their sometimes objectively perverse actions.
Russell Hardin is professor of politics at New York University and the author of many books, including David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist, Indeterminacy and Society (Princeton), Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy, and One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict (Princeton).
Bruce Guthrie survived tuberculosis, Melbourne's gritty northern suburbs and a boss who twice tried to sack him in his first six months in newspapers, to become a foreign correspondent and then one of Australia's feistiest and most controversial editors. His CV boasts editorships of The Age, The Sunday Age and the Herald Sun, magazines Who Weekly and The Weekend Australian, even a high level stint at America's celeb-news bible, People. Then, just as he claimed one of the industry's most glittering prizes, he fell foul of Rupert Murdoch and his henchmen, who promptly dispensed with his services. What would any self-respecting Broadmeadows boy do in such circumstances? Sue them, of course.
This is Guthrie's explosive account of almost forty years in the news business, his brutal dismissal from Australia's biggest selling paper and the celebrated court case that exposed the inner workings of the world's biggest media company – and the treachery of its most senior executives.
What do Eastern Europe’s booming sex trade, America’s subprime mortgage lending scandal, China’s fake goods industry, and celebrity philanthropy in Africa have in common? With biopirates trolling the blood industry, fish-farming bandits ravaging the high seas, pornography developing virtually in Second Life, and games like World of Warcraft spawning online sweatshops, how are rogue industries transmuting into global empires? And will the entire system be transformed by the advent of sharia economics?
Economist and best-selling author Loretta Napoleoni examines how dark economic forces are creating victims out of millions of ordinary people whose lives have become trapped inside a world they don’t understand.
Few Australian writers can match Trevor Sykes' understanding of the murkier waters of Australian business, as readers of his Pierpont column and his magisterial works The Bold Riders and Two Centuries of Panic have shown.
He has now turned his eagle eye on what has become known as the GFC, and the waves of panic that began with the subprime crisis in America and flowed with tsunami-like force across Europe, Asia and Australia. This was a crisis which was borne from an excess of greed, and immorality, and Sykes singles the Wall Street banks out for particular blame.
He explains how the subprime phenomenon came about, and how the fall of Lehman brothers marked the beginning of the slide. Inevitably the crisis reached Australia, with Centro and MFS the first dominoes in the chain. With the same blowtorch he earlier applied to the likes of Alan Bond he dissects the questionable dealings which caused the fall of high flyers like Allco, Babcock and Brown, ABC and many more, and summarises the pain and harm caused by the myriad small companies and individuals feeding from the frenzy.
In this forensic examination of how we live, Andrew Leigh, one of our most exciting young thinkers, rips though Australian life and asks whether we are tightly-knit and looking out for each other, or are we all disconnected? Organisational membership records and surveys show that our society is shifting rapidly. These days, chances are you never quite get around to talking to your neighbours, or you’re always too busy to give blood. In Disconnected Andrew Leigh guides us through the reasons that our social fabric has begun to fray, and outlines steps to creating a better civic and personal life.
1001 SONGS YOU MUST HERE BEFORE YOU DIE is an absorbing introduction to some of the greatest songs ever recorded. Written by a widely experienced team of music journalists and critics, and illustrated throughout with full-color photographs, this superb guide features nearly a century of timeless songwriting and legendary performers!
1001 SONGS YOU MUST HEAR BEFORE YOU DIE picks through nearly a century of music to bring you an inspiring selection of some of the greatest recordings ever made. Each entry in this wonderfully browsable book tells the story of a great song. Find out what inspired the songwriter, what makes the track so enduring, which songs it influenced in turn, and which cover version to listen out for. You’ll also pick up a wealth of fascinating trivia along the way. What links Lead Belly, Lonnie Donegan, and Black Betty? Whose gravestone inspired Phil Spector’s first hit? And when did Christina Aguilera join forces with The Moon People? Read on and find out.
In 1981, academic Patrick Weller teamed up with renowned political commentator and journalist Michelle Grattan to publish Can Ministers Cope?, a study of the challenges facing Australia’s federal government ministers.
With the federal Labor government just twenty months into its first term in office, it was time to revisit the question ‘Can ministers cope?’ and to broaden the focus to ask how they cope, especially as relatively young and sometimes inexperienced players, in the transition to government after a long period in opposition.
Anne Tiernan and Patrick Weller draw on extensive interviews with current and former ministers, ministerial staffers and senior officials, to discover how a new ministry learns to juggle their simultaneous roles of member of Parliament and Cabinet, local constituency representative, and media spokesperson, not to mention their lives outside work.
Learning to Be a Minister is an in-depth examination of the day-to-day life of Australia’s federal ministers at work.
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