Previously published as Create Your Own Economy "Will change the way you think about thinking."—Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind Renowned behavioral economist and commentator Tyler Cowen shows that our supernetworked world is changing the way we think—and empowering us to thrive in any economic climate. Whether it is micro-blogging on Twitter or buying single songs at iTunes, we can now customize our lives to shape our own specific needs. In other words, we can create our own economy—and live smarter, happier, fuller lives. At a time when apocalyptic thinking has become all too common, Cowen offers a much-needed Information Age manifesto that will resonate with readers of Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, and everyone hungry to understand our potential to withstand, and even thrive, in any economic climate.

Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

Renowned economist and author of Big Business Tyler Cowen brings a groundbreaking analysis of capitalism, the job market, and the growing gap between the one percent and minimum wage workers in this follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Great Stagnation. The United States continues to mint more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever. Yet, since the great recession, three quarters of the jobs created here pay only marginally more than minimum wage. Why is there growth only at the top and the bottom? Economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen explains that high earners are taking ever more advantage of machine intelligence and achieving ever-better results. Meanwhile, nearly every business sector relies less and less on manual labor, and that means a steady, secure life somewhere in the middle—average—is over. In Average is Over, Cowen lays out how the new economy works and identifies what workers and entrepreneurs young and old must do to thrive in this radically new economic landscape.

One of America’s most respected economists presents a quirky, incisive romp through everyday life that reveals how you can turn economic reasoning to your advantage—often when you least expect it to be relevant. Like no other economist, Tyler Cowen shows how economic notions—such as incentives, signals, and markets—apply far more widely than merely to the decisions of social planners, governments, and big business. What does economic theory say about ordering from a menu? Or attracting the right mate? Or controlling people who talk too much in meetings? Or dealing with your dentist? With a wryly amusing voice, in chapters such as “How to Control the World, The Basics” and “How to Control the World, Knowing When to Stop” Cowen reveals the hidden economic patterns behind everyday situations so you can get more of what you really want. Readers will also gain less selfish insights into how to be a good partner, neighbor and even citizen of the world. For instance, what is the best way to give to charity? The chapter title “How to Save the World—More Christmas Presents Won’t Help” makes a point that is every bit as personal as it is global. Incentives are at the core of an economic approach to the world, but they don’t just come in cash. In fact, money can be a disincentive. Cowen shows why, for example, it doesn’t work to pay your kids to do the dishes. Other kinds of incentives—like making sure family members know they will be admired if they respect you—can work. Another non-monetary incentive? Try having everyone stand up in your next meeting if you don’t want anyone to drone on. Deeply felt incentives like pride in one’s work or a passing smile from a loved one, can be the most powerful of all, even while they operate alongside more mundane rewards such as money and free food. Discover Your Inner Economist is an introduction to the science of economics that shows it to be built on notions that are already within all of us. While the implications of those ideas lead to Cowen’s often counterintuitive advice, their wisdom is presented in ordinary examples taken from home life, work life, and even vacation life… How do you get a good guide in a Moroccan bazaar?

Visionary activist and author Jeremy Rifkin exposes the real stakes of the new economy, delivering "the clearest summation yet of how the Internet is really changing our lives" (The Seattle Times). Imagine waking up one day to find that virtually every activity you engage in outside your immediate family has become a "paid-for" experience. It's all part of a fundamental change taking place in the nature of business, contends Jeremy Rifkin. After several hundred years as the dominant organizing paradigm of civilization, the traditional market system is beginning to deconstruct. On the horizon looms the Age of Access, an era radically different from any we have known.

The art and science of talent search: how to spot, assess, woo, and retain highly talented people. How do you find talent with a creative spark? To what extent can you predict human creativity, or is human creativity something irreducible before our eyes, perhaps to be spotted or glimpsed by intuition, but unique each time it appears? Obsessed with these questions, renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better. Cowen and Gross guide the reader through the major scientific research areas relevant for talent search, including how to conduct an interview, how much to weight intelligence, how to judge personality and match personality traits to jobs, how to evaluate talent in online interactions such as Zoom calls, why talented women are still undervalued and how to spot them, how to understand the special talents in people who have disabilities or supposed disabilities, and how to use delegated scouts to find talent. Talent appreciation is an art, but it is an art you can improve through study and experience. Identifying underrated, brilliant individuals is one of the simplest ways to give yourself an organizational edge, and this is the book that will show you how to do that. Talent is both for people searching for talent and for those who wish to be searched for, found, and discovered.

Written by an expert in media, popular culture, gender, and sexuality, this book surveys the common archetypes of Internet users—from geeks, nerds, and gamers to hackers, scammers, and predators—and assesses what these stereotypes reveal about our culture's attitudes regarding gender, technology, intimacy, and identity. The Internet has enabled an exponentially larger number of people—individuals who are members of numerous and vastly different subgroups—to be exposed to one other. As a result, instead of the simple "jocks versus geeks" paradigm of previous eras, our society now has more detailed stereotypes of the undesirable, the under-the-radar, and the ostracized: cyberpervs, neckbeards, goths, tech nerds, and anyone with a non-heterosexual identity. Each chapter of this book explores a different stereotype of the Internet user, with key themes—such as gender, technophobia, and sexuality—explored with regard to that specific characterization of online users. Author Lauren Rosewarne, PhD, supplies a highly interdisciplinary perspective that draws on research and theories from a range of fields—psychology, sociology, and communications studies as well as feminist theory, film theory, political science, and philosophy—to analyze what these stereotypes mean in the context of broader social and cultural issues. From cyberbullies to chronically masturbating porn addicts to desperate online-daters, readers will see the paradox in popular culture's message: that while Internet use is universal, actual Internet users are somehow subpar—less desirable, less cool, less friendly—than everybody else.

Discover the evolution of the artisanal movement from the fringes of the 1970s to the spike of domesticity—home-cooking, gardening, and DIY crafting—caused by COVID-19 and what it means for the future of work and American culture. In the 1950s, America was a world of immaculate grocery stores, brightly packaged consumer goods, relentless big brand advertising, homes that were much too clean, and diets so rich in salt, sugar, fat, and preservatives you nearly have a heart attack just thinking of them. And while this approach made a great fortune for large consumer packaged goods companies it has been detrimental to American’s overall health and wellbeing. Then, towards the end of the 20th century, Alice Waters and other pioneers figured out how to market natural, handmade, small-batch products to the American consumer again—and the rest is history. Now, we are in the third wave of a revolution. Thanks to COVID-19, millions of Americans went from being consumers of artisanal goods to being producers. People in the mainstream are baking bread, keeping bees, growing vegetables, and even raising chickens. Gardens are flourishing, workshops are growing, and sewing machines are whirring. Thousands have left the cities for the countryside, and if their companies don’t require it, they might never return. Return of the Artisan is a collection of stories and interviews with artisanal businesses across America including family farms and collectives. This book explores their business models, their motivations, and explores how you can join them by turning your own hobby or passion into your work. Whether you want to make this a profession or simply enjoy providing artisanal goods to your family and friends, this book is a must-have for navigating the ups and downs of the latest artisanal revolution.

From a bestselling author and economist, a contemporary moral case for economic growth—and a dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities. Growth is good. Through history, economic growth, in particular, has alleviated human misery, improved human happiness and opportunity, and lengthened human lives. Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. If we want to continue on our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us. So, how do we proceed? Tyler Cowen, in a culmination of 20 years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. In this new book, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, Cowen argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society. Stubborn Attachments, at its heart, makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth and delivers a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities. As a means of practicing the altruism that Stubborn Attachments argues for, Tyler Cowen is donating all earnings from this book to a man he met in Ethiopia earlier this year with aspirations to open his own travel business.

Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, a new Cold War is being waged in our societies. During the Cold War a theoretical model of man was developed by economists and the military, an egotistical being interested only in his own benefit and in duping his opponents to achieve his ends: a modern homo oeconomicus. After his career in the Cold War ended, he was not scrapped but adapted to the needs of the twenty-first century. He became the ringmaster of a new era of information capitalism. He sought to read, control and influence thoughts; to predict, price and eliminate risks. Today stock-market trading is guided by him. He uses computer algorithms and Big Data to build up detailed pictures of our preferences and then suggest and sell goods to us. The model has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are no longer the masters of our own fate. The Game of Life runs without us. Schirrmacher traces the progress of this extreme rationalization of social life from the Cold War games of the 1950s Rand Corporation to the stock-market trading techniques that brought about the financial crash of 2008, showing how these developments were interwoven with the rise of game theory, rational choice theory and neoliberal economics. The state and politics increasingly submitted themselves to the logic of computerized game theory and an economistic view of the world, evading real decision-making in the process. In this brave new world individuals, alone in front of their computers, may think they are constructing a reality of their own choosing, but in fact they are being manipulated all along by others who are setting the rules of the game. This international bestseller by one of Germanys most distinguished journalists is a powerful indictment of a way of thinking that has become pervasive and threatens to undermine not only parliaments and constitutions but also the sovereignty of the individual to be the person he or she wants to be.