The #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Required reading. . . . Shows how our economic crisis was a failure, not of the free market, but of government.” —Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO, Koch Industries, Inc. Did Wall Street cause the mess we are in? Should Washington place stronger regulations on the entire financial industry? Can we lower unemployment rates by controlling the free market? The answer is NO. Not only is free market capitalism good for the economy, says industry expert John Allison, it is our only hope for recovery. As the nation’s longest-serving CEO of a top-25 financial institution, Allison has had a unique inside view of the events leading up to the financial crisis. He has seen the direct effect of government incentives on the real estate market. He has seen how government regulations only make matters worse. And now, in this controversial wake-up call of a book, he has given us a solution. The national bestselling The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure reveals: Why regulation is bad for the market—and for the world What we can do to promote a healthy free market How we can help end unemployment in America The truth about TARP and the bailouts How Washington can help Wall Street build a better future for everyone With shrewd insight, alarming insider details, and practical advice for today’s leaders, this electrifying analysis is nothing less than a call to arms for a nation on the brink. You’ll learn how government incentives helped blow up the real estate bubble to unsustainable proportions, how financial tools such as derivatives have been wrongly blamed for the crash, and how Congress fails to understand it should not try to control the market—and then completely mismanages it when it tries. In the end, you’ll understand why it’s so important to put “free” back in free market. It’s time for America to accept the truth: the government can’t fix the economy because the government wrecked the economy. This book gives us the tools, the inspiration—and the cure.

Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

Since the Financial Crisis of 2008, there has been and continues to be a debate about the proper role of the free market in the United States and beyond. On one side there are those who defend the free market as a method to provide both wealth and democratic legitimacy; while on the other side are thinkers who reject the orthodoxy of the free market and call for a greater role of government in society to correct its failures. But what is needed in this debate is a return to the vantage point of the human condition to better understand both the free market and our role in it. The Free Market and the Human Condition explores what the human condition can reveal to us about the free market—its strengths, its limits, and its weaknesses—and, in turn, what the free market can illuminate about the essence of the human condition. Because the human condition is multifaceted, this book has adopted an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon the disciplines of philosophy, theology, archeology, literature, sociology, political science, criminal justice, and education. Since it is impossible for one to know all aspects of the human condition, the book consists of contributors who approach the topic from their respective disciplines, thereby providing an accumulated picture of the free market and the human condition. Although it does not claim to provide a comprehensive account of the human condition as situated in the free market, The Free Market and the Human Condition transcends the current climate of debate about the free market and provides a way forward in our understanding about the role that free market plays in our society.

Much of what has been heard, read, or taught about the 2008 financial crisis is incorrect. It was not caused by free market capitalism run amok. The crisis was not created by deregulatory zeal. It wasn’t primarily due to greed on Wall Street. The crisis was not simply created by people’s “irrational exuberance” or “animal spirits.” Perhaps most importantly, it did not require bailouts and thousands of pages of new regulations to fix. Instead, it came about because of significant market distortions created by government subsidies, misregulation, and perverse incentives. The conventional wisdom blames unbridled markets for mortgage fraud, imprudent risks, and extreme leverage in financial institutions. Policy makers told us that the failure of Lehman Brothers, and the near failure of American International Group and many large banks, would have resulted in catastrophic decline and perhaps another Great Depression. After the crisis, thousands of pages of new regulations were written to limit the types of risk banks can take and the kinds of investments they can make so that a financial crisis of this magnitude can’t happen again. But what if this conventional wisdom was wrong? If the problem wasn’t unregulated, unrestrained markets leading to fraud and excessive risk-taking, if instead it was perverted incentives and distorted market signals due to numerous regulations and mandates in the first place, then the thousands of new pages of regulations haven’t solved the fundamental problem. In fact, they have made it worse. This book shows that it is time to reassess the conventional wisdom. Perhaps there is still time to reverse the faulty solutions based upon it before another financial crisis breaks out.

The highly anticipated follow up to The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure—the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post bestseller The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure reveals the integrated principles he sees as critical to the success of any leader--all of which are modern day reflections of the American Founders' concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. John Allison believes many of the problems in our economy are the direct result of leaders who have lost a sense of purpose in themselves and in their organization. Basing his conclusions on libertarian and Objectivist philosophy, Allison describes the values today's leaders must follow, which should guide decision making at the individual, corporate, and public policy level. He shares his real-world experience growing BB&T into the tenth largest financial services holding company in the U.S. John Allison is the author of The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure, CEO of the Cato Institute, and retired Chairman and CEO of BB&T Corporation.

This nontechnical book provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary survey of political economy that can easily be understood by any reader with an introductory-level background in economics. As 21st-century political debate becomes polarized across ideological lines, students and citizens need to understand the underlying values on which contending arguments are based. The current political gridlock calls for a deeper appreciation of the competing perspectives in political economy. Now revamped for a third edition, Political Economy: A Comparative Approach supplies a truly interdisciplinary examination of the development and evolution of political economy from the Enlightenment onward, drawing material from the realms of political theory, sociology, philosophy, and history as well as from economics to present detailed comparisons of competing perspectives on a variety of current issues. The book begins with an introduction to political economy that provides readers with an overview of the historical development of the discipline, followed by in-depth analyses of four ideological perspectives in political economy—Classical Liberalism, Radicalism, Conservatism, and Modern Liberalism. The author then applies each of the four ideological perspectives to a range of contemporary issues, such as the role of government, economic instability, poverty, labor relations, discrimination, education, culture, the environment, and international trade. Readers will gain insight into the methods and practice of political economics as well as better understand the history of political/economic thought and the effects of historical processes—European industrialization, for example—on modern debates.

This fascinating volume offers a critique of recent institutional and cultural turns in heterodox economics and political economy. Using seven case studies as examples, the authors explore how research on sense- and meaning-making can deepen critical s

Bill Gates's Five Books for Summer Reading 2019 From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it. Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now. In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts—economic, social and cultural—with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession. Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself—and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century.

Life improves under the economic system often called "entrepreneurial capitalism" or "creative destruction," but more accurately called "innovative dynamism." Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism shows how innovation occurs through the efforts of inventors and innovative entrepreneurs, how workers on balance benefit, and how good policies can encourage innovation. The inventors and innovative entrepreneurs are often cognitively diverse outsiders with the courage and perseverance to see and pursue serendipitous discoveries or slow hunches. Arthur M. Diamond, Jr. shows how economies grow where innovative dynamism through leapfrog competition flourishes, as in the United States from roughly 1830-1930. Consumers vote with their feet for innovative new goods and for process innovations that reduce prices, benefiting ordinary citizens more than the privileged elites. Diamond highlights that because breakthrough inventions are costly and difficult, patents can be fair rewards for invention and can provide funding to enable future inventions. He argues that some fears about adverse effects on labor market are unjustified, since more and better new jobs are created than are destroyed, and that other fears can be mitigated by better policies. The steady growth in regulations, often defended on the basis of the precautionary principle, increases the costs to potential entrepreneurs and thus reduces innovation. The "Great Fact" of economic history is that after at least 40,000 years of mostly "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" humans in the last 250 years have started to live substantially longer and better lives. Diamond increases understanding of why.

Despite the reversal of America’s fortune from the triumphalism of the Roaring Nineties to the gloom of the lost decade and the Great Depression, theoretical conceptions of US capitalism have remained surprisingly unchanged. In fact, if the crisis questioned the sustainability of the US capitalist paradigm, it did not fundamentally challenge academic theorization of American political economy. This book departs from the American political economy literature to identify three common myths that have shaped our conceptualization of US capitalism: its reduction to a state-market dyad dis-embedded from societal factors; the illusion of a weak state and the synchronic conception of the US variety of capitalism. To remedy these pitfalls, the authors propose a civilizational approach to American political economy at the crossroads between cultural studies, history, sociology and political science. Drawing together contributions from a rich variety of fields (from geography to cultural studies, political science and sociology) this work sheds a new light on America’s "cultural political economy" combining theoretical reflection with empirical data and offering innovative perspectives on the crisis and renewal of American capitalism.