I am Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Munich. I also taught as a visitor at Duke University, Harvard, University of North Carolina, as well as the University of Vienna, the Vienna School of Economics, and the University of St. Gallen. Since the financial crisis of 2008, I have been writing about current economic issues and the need for new paradigms in economics. I have been advocating a humanistic approach to economics in which people and their quality of life count more than the output of the economy. I have also formulated the need for capitalism with a human face. I have also blogged for PBS.
I wrote
Foundations of Real-World Economics: What Every Economics Student Needs to Know
I think that this book is an excellent introduction to the history of the past four decades as it shows why we ended up with a billionaire authoritarian as the leader of the nation.
It begins with Reaganomics and argues that twelve years of Republican Administration generated sufficient momentum for its pro-market ideology that Democrat Bill Clinton was reluctant to reverse course. He went all in on globalization and continued to deregulate the financial sector that ultimately steered the economy into the financial crisis of 2008. Obama failed to seize the opportunity to end the dominance of the financial oligarchy and maintained the power structure as he found it.
The election of 2016 showed the revolt of the “deplorables” keen on draining the swamp in Washington responsible for their fate.
Best Books of 2022: Financial Times Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022: De Tijd Shortlisted for Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year
The most sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left.
The epochal shift toward neoliberalism-a web of related policies that, broadly speaking, reduced the footprint of government in society and reassigned economic power to private market forces-that began in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1970s fundamentally changed the world.…
I found this book to be very insightful about the problems faced by our political system.
Sandel is spot on in explaining why democracy’s discontents have hardened into a country divided against itself. He outlines America’s civic struggles from the 1990s to the present and shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time.
A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today.
The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America's version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface.
So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy's Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would "shore up…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I found this book useful in understanding the anachronistic nature of the U.S. constitution and how the institutions of democracy came under pressure by the powerful forces of inequality caused by technological change, globalization, and bailout capitalism until the political system morphed into a plutocracy.
Plutocracy means that the general will of the population was not mirrored in the laws of the land because the super-rich influenced the legislators. It is not true that most Americans want to have easy access to military-style machine guns. It is not true that most Americans want the federal minimum wage to be at $7.25 per hour. It is not true that most Americans want to allow pharmaceuticals to charge monopoly prices for drugs. All this is not true, yet they remained the law.
An acclaimed examination of how the American political system favors the wealthy-now fully revised and expanded
The first edition of Unequal Democracy was an instant classic, shattering illusions about American democracy and spurring scholarly and popular interest in the political causes and consequences of escalating economic inequality. This revised, updated, and expanded second edition includes two new chapters on the political economy of the Obama era. One presents the Great Recession as a "stress test" of the American political system by analyzing the 2008 election and the impact of Barack Obama's "New New Deal" on the economic fortunes of the…
I think this is an impressive book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning and NYTimes bestselling author about the dangers posed by the first Trump administration destroying norms and damaging democratic institutions and thereby compromising our safety and the finances of the lower-middle class.
Johnston diagnoses the grave mistakes of the first Trump administration and makes us aware of what we can expect from the second.
From David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the bestselling The Making of Donald Trump, comes his New York Times bestseller about how the Trump Administration's policies will affect our jobs, savings, taxes, and safety-completed revised and updated.
New York Times bestselling author and longtime Trump observer David Cay Johnston shines a light on the political termites who have infested our government under the Trump administration, destroying it from within and compromising our jobs, safety, finances, and more.
In It's Even Worse Than You Think, Johnston exposes shocking details about the Mexican border wall, and how American…
Social Security for Future Generations
by
John A. Turner,
This book provides new options for reform of the Social Security (OASI) program. Some options are inspired by the U.S. pension system, while others are inspired by the literature on financial literacy or the social security systems in other countries.
An example of our proposals inspired by the U.S. pension…
If anyone has not yet realized the ephemeral nature of American democracy, this is the book to start.
The authors present extensive data to show that decades of dysfunctional government left many millions of low-skilled workers behind, exacerbating inequality, and supporting policies that enriched corporations while the wealthy became super-wealthy.
America faces daunting problems stagnant wages, high health care costs, neglected schools, deteriorating public services. Yet the government consistently ignores the needs of its citizens, paying attention instead to donors and organized interests. Real issues are held hostage to demagoguery, partisanship beats practicality, and trust in government withers along with the social safety net. How did we get here? Through decades of dysfunctional government. In Democracy in America? veteran political observers Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens marshal an unprecedented array of evidence to show that while other countries have responded to a rapidly changing economy by helping people who've…
The volume is a guide to understanding the way the real economy actually works and not how it is imagined in academic ivory towers. It exposes the major mistakes of economic policy of the last four decades based on neoliberal ideology that created an economy that works well for half the population but leaves behind scores of millions of less-skilled workers who were displaced from their employment, forcing them to accept a lower standard of living.
This book is for those who want to understand the new knowledge economy and why millions rebelled, dissatisfied with low and stagnating wages, increasing indebtedness, etc., and feeling hopeless while the wealthy lived high. It also shows the advantages of a humanistic approach to economics and advocates for capitalism with a human face.
