This “elegant portrait of Edinburgh in the age of Enlightenment” reveals a thriving city of artists, architects, scientists, and other pioneers (Times Literary Supplement). In the early eighteenth century, Edinburgh, Scotland, was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by century’s end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the arts, and economics—all of which continues to echo loudly today. Adam Smith penned The Wealth of Nations. James Boswell produced The Life of Samuel Johnson. Alongside them, pioneers such as David Hume, Robert Burns, James Hutton, and Sir Walter Scott transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of existence. In Capital of the Mind, James Buchan beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of a historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and those whose vision brought it into being. “As Buchan says in this marvelous book, ‘there is no city like Edinburgh in all the world’.” —Sunday Times

Praise for Mind Over Matter Why Intellectual capital is tHe Chief Source of Wealth "Ron Baker has written another great book on the thoughts and theories on intellectual capital.As usual, he has an awesome depth of content, knowledge, and thought. A great read." --Reed Holden, founder, Holden Advisors Corp., www.holdenadvisors.com, and coauthor, The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing and Pricing with Confidence: 10 Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table "At a time when the virtues that made America great--individualism, hard work, and free trade--are openly debated by well-meaning politicians, Ron Baker gives us Mind Over Matter. It is a story detailing the triumph of human spirit, imagination, and creativity. Ron tells us what the 'knowledge economy' really means. He gives a prescription for transforming human and intellectual capital into the foundation for sustainable prosperity. Mind Over Matter is a provocative book deserving of a thoughtful read. It is a timeless message to be treasured for generations." --Robert G. Cross, Chairman and CEO, Revenue Analytics, Inc., www.revenueanalytics.com "Ron Baker is an absolute master at challenging the 'physical fallacy,' e.g., the basis on which we assign value to businesses by focusing on tangible rather than intangible assets. This book builds on his previous books and helps the reader understand how critical intellectual capital is to the key to success in the twenty-first century. Ron pulls from the greatest business thinkers and economists,?from Drucker to Karl Sveiby as well as current company success stories to fund his rich gold mine of proof. The biggest benefit of the book is to change the paradigm of those who are the passive keepers of the 'books.' This is a must-read for anybody who wants to flourish in the age of intellectual capital." --Sheila Kessler, PhD, President, Competitive Edge, www.CompetitiveEdge.com "This book helps us understand some of the origins and sources that have led Ron Baker to the many contributions he has made to our understanding of good practice in running professional businesses." --David Maister, author and leading consultant to professional firmswww.davidmaister.com "Reading Ron Baker's book was the only delightful incident that robbed my sleep on the flight to Frankfurt today. It was sheer pleasure--I must have entertained or annoyed fellow passengers with repeated nodding and several exclamations. Baker has a terrific style that captures my mind while he entertains and educates by showing lines of connection between authors, incidents, and theories that I have never seen before. He hardly uses the 'You have to do this and that' approach, which I despise in most business books. I sum it up in two words: outstanding stuff!" --Friedrich Blase, Kerma Partners, www.kermapartners.com "This is a wonderful read for anyone who wants to explore the power of constructive thinking. In Mind Over Matter, Ron examines the power of creative thought over the conventional wisdom that you must make a tangible product for wealth to be created. The opening chapter sets a wonderful stage for the book, which develops the power of the new business equation and the underlying theory of the various types of intellectual capital. This is a must-read book for every business leader." --Peter Byers, Chartered Accountant, Byers & Co. Ltd, New Zealand "Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge worker a half century ago. We are all still only beginning to fully comprehend the implications. In Mind Over Matter, Ron Baker has switched on a beacon for us to follow. If we have the courage to embrace the concepts Ron posits, perhaps it will be less than another half century before we begin to reap the rewards as individuals and as

'Gunter Fatlin, himself a very successful entrepreneur, has written an inspiring book which can act as a guide to all those seeking to make the most of their talents — enabling them to establish their own company.'Muhammad Yunus2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Entrepreneurship is not a calling only for the selected few. Creative work and economic self-realization are goals that anyone can pursue. Learn how to create your own 'idea-masterpiece' as a collage or puzzle made from existing pieces, and construct your own company from pre-existing components that are freely available to everyone. Brains versus Capital: Entrepreneurship for Everyone opens up many channels of opportunity for many people who never thought that they would start their own company. This book emphasizes knowledge-based start-ups, which offers a crucial difference to classic self-employment and the new technology based start-ups. Günter Faltin has been teaching this approach for decades, and he has applied his theoretical concept with great success to 'The Tea Campaign' (Teekampagne), the largest mail-order tea company in Germany. A growing number of companies uses Professor Faltin's principles successfully. Featuring practical examples of successful companies, Günter Faltin shows how anyone can refine an idea to create a new company. By combining components that already exist, a small start-up founder could even challenge the big companies.

“A dark comedy of manners packed with urgency” (H. W. Vail, Vanity Fair), The Capital is an instant classic of world literature. A highly inventive novel of ideas written in the rich European tradition, The Capital transports readers to the cobblestoned streets of twenty-first-century Brussels. Chosen as the European Union’s symbolic capital in 1958, this elusive setting has never been examined so intricately in literature. Translated with "zest, pace and wit" (Spectator) by Jamie Bulloch, Robert Menasse's The Capital plays out the effects of a fiercely nationalistic “union.” Recalling the Balzacian conceit of assembling a vast parade of characters whose lives conspire to form a driving central plot, Menasse adapts this technique with modern sensibility to reveal the hastily assembled capital in all of its eccentricities. We meet, among others, Fenia Xenopoulou, a Greek Cypriot recently “promoted” to the Directorate-General for Culture. When tasked with revamping the boring image of the European Commission with the Big Jubilee Project, she endorses her Austrian assistant Martin Sussman’s idea to proclaim Auschwitz as its birthplace—of course, to the horror of the other nation states. Meanwhile, Inspector Émile Brunfaut attempts to solve a gritty murder being suppressed at the highest level; Matek, a Polish hitman who regrets having never become a priest, scrambles after taking out the wrong man; and outraged pig farmers protest trade restrictions as a brave escapee squeals through the streets. These narratives and more are masterfully woven, revealing the absurdities—and real dangers—of a fracturing Europe. A tour de force from one of Austria’s most esteemed novelists, The Capital is a mordantly funny and piercingly urgent saga of the European Union, and an aerial feat of sublime world literature.

The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.

From 1944 to 1946, as the world pivoted from the Second World War to an unsteady peace, Americans in more than two hundred cities and towns mobilized to chase an implausible dream. The newly-created United Nations needed a meeting place, a central place for global diplomacy—a Capital of the World. But what would it look like, and where would it be? Without invitation, civic boosters in every region of the United States leapt at the prospect of transforming their hometowns into the Capital of the World. The idea stirred in big cities—Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, New Orleans, Denver, and more. It fired imaginations in the Black Hills of South Dakota and in small towns from coast to coast. Meanwhile, within the United Nations the search for a headquarters site became a debacle that threatened to undermine the organization in its earliest days. At times it seemed the world’s diplomats could agree on only one thing: under no circumstances did they want the United Nations to be based in New York. And for its part, New York worked mightily just to stay in the race it would eventually win. With a sweeping view of the United States’ place in the world at the end of World War II, Capital of the World tells the dramatic, surprising, and at times comic story of hometown promoters in pursuit of an extraordinary prize and the diplomats who struggled with the balance of power at a pivotal moment in history.

Early in the twenty-first century, a quiet revolution occurred. For the first time, the major developed economies began to invest more in intangible assets, like design, branding, and software, than in tangible assets, like machinery, buildings, and computers. For all sorts of businesses, the ability to deploy assets that one can neither see nor touch is increasingly the main source of long-term success. But this is not just a familiar story of the so-called new economy. Capitalism without Capital shows that the growing importance of intangible assets has also played a role in some of the larger economic changes of the past decade, including the growth in economic inequality and the stagnation of productivity. Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake explore the unusual economic characteristics of intangible investment and discuss how an economy rich in intangibles is fundamentally different from one based on tangibles. Capitalism without Capital concludes by outlining how managers, investors, and policymakers can exploit the characteristics of an intangible age to grow their businesses, portfolios, and economies.

It's not capitalism, it's not neoliberalism - what if it's something worse? In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems. While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.

An exploration of our understanding of the purpose of capital and the cultural, historic and environmental aspects of how we have come to understand the relation between economic, social and environmental components of capital. Offers a vision of capital as a fuel to promote individual freedom in the context of community and Earth.

Joseph Schumpeter’s conceptions of entrepreneurship, innovation, and creative destruction have been hugely influential. He pioneered the study of economic development and of technological paradigm shifts and was a forerunner of the emerging field of evolutionary economics. He is not thought of as a theorist of credit-supercharged high-speed growth, but this is what he became in postwar Japan. As Mark Metzler shows in Capital as Will and Imagination, economists and planners in postwar Japan seized upon Schumpeter’s ideas and put them directly to work. The inflationary creation of credit, as theorized by Schumpeter, was a vital but mostly unrecognized aspect of the successful stabilization of Japanese capitalism after World War II and was integral to Japan’s postwar success. It also helps to explain Japan’s bubble, and the global bubbles that have followed it. The heterodox analysis presented in Capital as Will and Imagination goes beyond the economic history of postwar Japan; it opens up a new view of the core circuits of modern capital in general.