Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?

Author: Katrine Marcal
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681771853
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
How do you get your dinner? That is the basic question of economics. When economist and philosopher Adam Smith proclaimed that all our actions were motivated by self-interest, he used the example of the baker and the butcher as he laid the foundations for 'economic man,' arguing that the baker and butcher didn't give bread and meat out of the goodness of their hearts. It's an ironic point of view coming from a bachelor who lived with his mother for most of his life—a woman who cooked his dinner every night.The economic man has dominated our understanding of modern-day capitalism, with a focus on self-interest and the exclusion of all other motivations. Such a view point disregards the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning and cooking. It insists that if women are paid less, then that's because their labor is worth less.A kind of femininst Freakonomics, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? charts the myth of economic man—from its origins at Adam Smith's dinner table, its adaptation by the Chicago School, and its disastrous role in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis—in a witty and courageous dismantling of one of the biggest myths of our time.

Mother of Invention

Author: Katrine Marçal
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1647004799
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
An illuminating and maddening examination of how gender bias has skewed innovation, technology, and history—now in paperback It all starts with a rolling suitcase. Though the wheel was invented some 5,000 years ago, and the suitcase in the 19th century, it wasn’t until the 1970s that someone successfully married the two. What was the holdup? For writer and journalist Katrine Marçal, the answer is both shocking and simple: because “real men” carried their bags, no matter how heavy. Mother of Invention is a fascinating and eye-opening examination of business, technology, and innovation through a feminist lens. Because it wasn’t just the suitcase. Drawing on examples from electric cars to tech billionaires, Marçal shows how gender bias stifles the economy and holds us back, delaying innovations, sometimes by hundreds of years, and distorting our understanding of our history. While we talk about the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, we might as well talk about the Ceramic Age or the Flax Age, since these technologies were just as important. But inventions associated with women are not considered to be technology in the same way as those associated with men. Mother of Invention is a sweeping tour of the global economy with a powerful message: If we upend our biases, we can unleash our full potential.

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life

Author: Russ Roberts
Publisher: Portfolio
ISBN: 1591847958
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
"How the insights of an 18th century economist can help us live better in the 21st century. Adam Smith became famous for The Wealth of Nations, but the Scottish economist also cared deeply about our moral choices and behavior--the subjects of his other brilliant book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Now, economist Russ Roberts shows why Smith's neglected work might be the greatest self-help book you've never read. Roberts explores Smith's unique and fascinating approach to fundamental questions such as: - What is the deepest source of human satisfaction? - Why do we sometimes swing between selfishness and altruism? - What's the connection between morality and happiness? Drawing on current events, literature, history, and pop culture, Roberts offers an accessible and thought-provoking view of human behavior through the lenses of behavioral economics and philosophy"--

Women and the Economy

Author: Saul D. Hoffman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1352012014
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
An analysis of the enormous changes in women's economic lives around the world, from the family to the labour market. Hoffman and Averett examine topics such as the effect of rising women's wages and improved labour market opportunities on marriage, the ways in which more reliable contraception has shaped women's adult lives and careers, and the forces behind the phenomenal rise in women's labour force activity. This fourth edition includes brand new chapters on gender in economics and race and gender in the USA. It incorporates the latest research findings throughout, many of which are featured in helpful call-out boxes, and illustrated with new graphs and figures. This is invaluable reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of economics, development and women's studies. The level of economic analysis is suitable for students with basic economics knowledge. New to this Edition: - New chapters on gender in economics and race and gender in economics - Fully updated with new data, policy examples and a new companion website with lecturer resources - Increased pedagogy, with over 30 new boxes

The Book of Eating

Author: Adam Platt
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062293567
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
A wildly hilarious and irreverent memoir of a globe-trotting life lived meal-to-meal by one of our most influential and respected food critics As the son of a diplomat growing up in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, Adam Platt didn’t have the chance to become a picky eater. Living, traveling, and eating in some of the most far-flung locations around the world, he developed an eclectic palate and a nuanced understanding of cultures and cuisines that led to some revelations which would prove important in his future career as a food critic. In Tokyo, for instance—“a kind of paradise for nose-to-tail cooking”—he learned that “if you’re interested in telling a story, a hair-raisingly bad meal is much better than a good one." From dim sum in Hong Kong to giant platters of Peking duck in Beijing, fresh-baked croissants in Paris and pierogi on the snowy streets of Moscow, Platt takes us around the world, re-tracing the steps of a unique, and lifelong, culinary education. Providing a glimpse into a life that has intertwined food and travel in exciting and unexpected ways, The Book of Eating is a delightful and sumptuous trip that is also the culinary coming-of-age of a voracious eater and his eventual ascension to become, as he puts it, “a professional glutton.”

Own It

Author: Sallie Krawcheck
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 1101906251
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
A Wall Street Journal and Washington Post Bestseller, Own It is a new kind of career playbook for a new era of feminism, offering women a new set of rules for professional success: one that plays to their strengths and builds on the power they already have. Weren’t women supposed to have “arrived”? Perhaps with the nation’s first female President, equal pay on the horizon, true diversity in the workplace to come thereafter? Or, at least the end of “fat-shaming” and “locker room talk”? Well, we aren’t quite there yet. But does that mean that progress for women in business has come to a screeching halt? It’s true that the old rules didn’t get us as far as we hoped. But we can go the distance, and we can close the gaps that still exist. We just need a new way. In fact, there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future, says former Wall Street powerhouse-turned-entrepreneur Sallie Krawcheck. That’s because the business world is changing fast –driven largely by technology - and it’s changing in ways that give us more power and opportunities than ever…and even more than we yet realize. Success for professional women will no longer be about trying to compete at the men’s version of the game, she says. And it will no longer be about contorting ourselves to men’s expectations of how powerful people behave. Instead, it’s about embracing and investing in our innate strengths as women - and bringing them proudly and unapologetically, to work. When we do, she says, we gain the power to advance in our careers in more natural ways. We gain the power to initiate courageous conversations in the workplace. We gain the power to forge non-traditional career paths; to leave companies that don’t respect our worth, and instead, go start our own. And we gain the power to invest our economic muscle in making our lives, and the world, better. Here Krawcheck draws on her experiences at the highest levels of business, both as one of the few women at the top rungs of the biggest boy’s club in the world, and as an entrepreneur, to show women how to seize this seismic shift in power to take their careers to the next level. This change is real, and it’s coming fast. It’s time to own it.

Adam Smith

Author: Christopher J. Berry
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198784457
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Book Description
In 1776 Adam Smith (1723-90) wrote The Wealth of Nations, a book so foundational that it has led to him being called the father of economics. Today he is associated with the promotion of self-interest, a defense of greed and a criticism of any governmental 'interference' in market transactions which, if left to the 'invisible hand', will produce prosperity and liberty. Yet if Smith is actually read these associations are more a caricature than a faithful portrait. In this Very Short Introduction, Christopher Berry offers a balanced and nuanced view of this seminal thinker, embedding his fierce defense of free trade, competition, and assault on special interests in contemporary European history, politics, and philosophy. As Berry explores, Smith was more than an economist. His book The Theory of Moral Sentiment, offered a complex account of ethics in the context of human social behavior. His scope as a professor at the University of Glasgow, a major center of the Scottish Enlightenment, was extensive. Beyond courses in philosophy and jurisprudence he also gave classes covering history, literature, and language. In addition to his two major works he also wrote a pioneering study of the history of astronomy as an illustration of the motivations that drive humans to seek answers to questions. He produced, again derived from his Glasgow classroom, an analysis of the development of grammar and language. As Christopher Berry shows, Adam Smith was no narrow thinker, but rather one who produced not only one of the greatest books in the history of social science, but also a wide-ranging body of work that remains significant today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Author: Adam Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description

23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism

Author: Ha-Joon Chang
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608193586
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER "For anyone who wants to understand capitalism not as economists or politicians have pictured it but as it actually operates, this book will be invaluable."-Observer (UK) If you've wondered how we did not see the economic collapse coming, Ha-Joon Chang knows the answer: We didn't ask what they didn't tell us about capitalism. This is a lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists-the apostles of the freemarket-have spun since the Age of Reagan. Chang, the author of the international bestseller Bad Samaritans, is one of the world's most respected economists, a voice of sanity-and wit-in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz. 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism equips readers with an understanding of how global capitalism works-and doesn't. In his final chapter, "How to Rebuild the World," Chang offers a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market.

The Sex Factor

Author: Victoria Bateman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509526803
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
Why did the West become so rich? Why is inequality rising? How ‘free’ should markets be? And what does sex have to do with it? In this passionate and skilfully argued book, leading feminist Victoria Bateman shows how we can only understand the burning economic issues of our time if we put sex and gender – ‘the sex factor’ – at the heart of the picture. Spanning the globe and drawing on thousands of years of history, Bateman tells a bold story about how the status and freedom of women are central to our prosperity. Genuine female empowerment requires us not only to recognize the liberating potential of markets and smart government policies but also to challenge the double-standard of many modern feminists when they celebrate the brain while denigrating the body. This iconoclastic book is a devastating exposé of what we have lost from ignoring ‘the sex factor’ and of how reversing this neglect can drive the smart economic policies we need today.