94 Books Like Interest And Prices

Grappling with the meaning of money and unraveling its impact on prices or on the creation of wealth is enduringly controversial.

Fascination with money - to eyes or pockets - is universal. Fisher understood this!

He defined money simply as what is acceptable in exchange for goods: bills, coins, cheques - legal tender - or other forms of debt.

Since inflation, for Fisher, is a monetary phenomenon, and as in classical physics, where one matter is equalised to another, in his economics, money-on-the-move is always balancing products-for-a-price; in the long run, too much money or too little does not affect wealth creation but only the level of price.

Fisher is a ‘must read’ because this, his ultimate conclusion, deprived of his many subtleties, is the basis of present macroeconomics.

Take Hayek’s market economy as a Bohemian accordion orchestra.

As its instruments produce music, each elongates, pulls in air (analogous to money), and compresses, expresses air (money). Air-in (savings) is equal to air-out (investment). Fluctuating elongations and compressions are an essential feature of the orchestra (the economy).

For Hayek, interference with harmonious accordion (economic) activity infusing or restricting air (money) would spoil the music.

Economic fluctuations stem from preferences, spending for present enjoyment, or saving for future gains. Relative demands for end products or capital impact relative prices, costs, and returns, affecting savings/investment. Investment money, as IOUs, flies where returns are highest.

Hayek engages readers to prove that bank interventions’ tinkering with money is as capable of producing compassionate social outcomes as free individuals using their earnings as they wish.

Hicks envisaged an economy in which individuals choose to offer labour for income to purchase products of their effort or to spend time in uncompensated leisure.

His is a theorical economy: individuals and firms interact to determine current and future supplies and demands. It establishes the laws governing the price system regulating exchange and production.

In this world of transparent, free movement of goods and resources without government, regulations, banks, and unions, there is no room for monopolies or capital accumulation. 

Money as intermediary is simply a unit of account. Growth is the outcome of needs, efforts, and mutual cooperation.

Value and Capital, a jewel, is the core of current microeconomics, but Hicks’ economy, in which inflation and income disparities are non-issues, is not a capitalist but a market one; ironically present microeconomists conflate the two.

Most economists associate volume of money with price-level (inflation/deflation), not Keynes.

For him, a macro price-level does not reveal the unsynchronized dynamics affecting the prices of its components: commodities, labor, capital, raw materials, profits; it must be decomposed.

When FunCorp invests in a rollercoaster, its decision is based on present costs and future returns (ticket sales, performance, stock options, etc.).

Windfall profits will lead to more expansion; losses, to curtailed activity. Both expansion, contingent on easy credit, or recession, on the tightening of credit, depend on bankers’ use of individuals’ savings and their creation of more deposits.

For Keynes, an institutionalised banking system is essential for a modern economy but he advocated, in the public interest, for strict rules on bankers’ abuse of credit, to mitigate the inflation/deflation rollercoaster. 

A classic, this book was one of the first to challenge prevailing white attitudes about the assimilation and acculturation of Africans and African Americans to life under slavery. Mullin describes how greater levels of assimilation translated into more effective means of protest.

While many celebrated the ethnic revival of the 1960s and the social justice causes that grew from them, Steinberg offers a powerful and challenging thesis that argues the limits of ethnicity. A sense of ethnic re-birth, he argues, can only occur once ethnicity is gone. Rather than empowering a new generation of social justice youth, ethnicity proves a myth.

One area of social justice that is often overlooked is intergenerational justice. As we deplete the planet’s resources, we pass problems along to future generations. Rather than leaving the Earth a better place for those who follow, we are leaving them with an environment at the tipping point. There are a number of science fiction and fantasy books that address this, and it’s possible that Wanderers (2019) springs to mind in part because it’s fairly recent. On the other hand, most of the books I’ve listed are decades old, and this is one of the best works of speculative fiction I’ve read in the past few years. Wendig’s epic novel provides prescient commentary on the political divisions that currently plague our nation and our world, as we split into seemingly disparate tribes, as well as the mounting environmental dangers that coming generations will face if we do not take substantive… show more.

I contacted Gilbert Moore in 2014 to share how valuable his book Rage was to my perspective as an author writing about the ground-breaking defense in the 1968 “trial of the century”, People v. Newton. Moore covered that headliner for LIFE magazine as its first black reporter. He agreed to be interviewed for our documentary project American Justice on Trial. Tragically, he died before the interview occurred. Watching that extraordinary trial caused Moore to engage in soul-searching, quit his plum job, and write his critically acclaimed book about the epiphany he experienced. Rage is considered a classic in African-American literature – an unparalleled window into the impact of that unprecedented Movement trial on pioneering black professionals in a white supremacist environment – through the eyes and pen of a firsthand observer.   

Trees are being cleared at a faster rate than any time in history! How can we possibly reverse this? How can poetry raise awareness of the value of our forests, worth more standing? This anthology, in its breadth and scope, offers readers hope, and prompts us to action on behalf of our trees. The anthology features an important introduction by Diana Beresford-Kroeger, author of The Global Forest and renowned expert on trees.

This anthology continues my theme of activism through poetry to raise awareness about our threatened environment. With over 100 poems and contributions from poets all over the country, Heartwood is a tribute to and celebration of the timeless impact of nature on Canadian poetry. “We must turn to the poets to expand dreams. This is because trees are the parents to the child deep within us. Forests bear silent witness to the tides of time upon which we… show more.

This anthology attempts to answer ongoing questions about struggle in poems that engaged, challenged, and comforted me. What might survival sound or look like to us in our daily lives? Is it loud, refusing silence, demanding action? Or quiet, interior? What does surviving feel like in the body, this long into the pandemic? What techniques have helped us exist, continue to bear witness, learn to live with illness, grief, and pain? Is survival the continual interrogation of inequity and oppressive structures? What happens when we get tired of fighting?

Survival may very well be a composite of things; both a tending to one’s inner life and to the processing of life events, as well as the will to act, retrieve momentum. It is also a plurality/multiplicity of practices that serve to keep us well—as persons and with respect to our communities, the ongoing project of social justice/civil rights, which involves… show more.