373 products in Books

Economics is a science. It primarily examines how decisions are made, which alternatives provide greatest benefits to various stakeholders. Contrary to popular belief, economics is not about money. It has and continues to be about the study of allocation of scarce resources (behaviours). We enforce them through incentives and disincentives (punishments).You don’t need to be an economist or technologist to understand the book. We keep things high-level to digest the information, yet coming from fundamental academic research.The difference between economics (soft science) and physics (hard science) is that economics is continuously evolves because it is a study of human behaviours. As we moved from Web 1 to Web 2 and now Web 3, the economics 101 that we initially understood has changed.While is important to be coding the tech infrastructure of Web 3.0 and having ideas of what Web 3.0 is like, an important aspect is the economics and incentive alignment of Web 3.0 users. It is easy to create a token or currency out of thin air. The token is only valuable when the economics make sense.The aim of this book is to dive into the core foundational principles of economics in Web 3.0. We explore the evolution to economics, the change in principles we learnt in Econs 101, and the new environment that economics will exist in.Then, we explore ways to apply these foundational principles in Web 3.0, with or without a token. We also tap into the general mathematics that defines the economic mechanisms.

"With its gentle affirmations, inspirational quotes, fill-in-the-blank lists and tasks — write yourself a thank-you letter, describe yourself at 80, for example — The Artist’s Way proposes an egalitarian view of creativity: Everyone’s got it."—The New York Times    "Morning Pages have become a household name, a shorthand for unlocking your creative potential"—Vogue Over four million copies sold! Since its first publication, The Artist's Way phenomena has inspired the genius of Elizabeth Gilbert and millions of readers to embark on a creative journey and find a deeper connection to process and purpose. Julia Cameron's novel approach guides readers in uncovering problems areas and pressure points that may be restricting their creative flow and offers techniques to free up any areas where they might be stuck, opening up opportunities for self-growth and self-discovery.   The program begins with Cameron’s most vital tools for creative recovery – The Morning Pages, a daily writing ritual of three pages of stream-of-conscious, and The Artist Date, a dedicated block of time to nurture your inner artist. From there, she shares hundreds of exercises, activities, and prompts to help readers thoroughly explore each chapter. She also offers guidance on starting a “Creative Cluster” of fellow artists who will support you in your creative endeavors. A revolutionary program for personal renewal, The Artist's Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions, and take the steps you need to change your life.

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. This book proves that premise wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned. Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts--as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises. While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur. This Time Is Different exposes centuries of financial missteps.

A Comprehensive Overview of the Past, Present, and Future of Money Broken Money explores the history of money through the lens of technology. Politics can affect things temporarily and locally, but technology is what drives things forward globally and permanently. The book's goal is for the reader to walk away with a deep understanding of money and monetary history, both in terms of theoretical foundations and in terms of practical implications. From shells to gold, from papyrus bills of exchange to central banks, and from the invention of the telegraph to the creation of Bitcoin, Lyn Alden walks the reader through the emergence of new technologies that have shaped what we use as money over the ages. And beyond that, Alden explores the concept of what money is at its very foundation to give the reader a framework to analyze and compare different types of monetary technologies and monetary theories. The book also takes a distinctively human look at how money impacts the lives of real people, and how new monetary technologies shape the power structures within society. In the modern era, energy abundance and technological enhancements have broadly improved human well-being, but the global monetary system has been slow to keep up. There are over 160 active currencies in the world, each with a local monopoly over its own country, and with little or no acceptance elsewhere. Many of them are rapidly diluted, which continually devalues the savings and the wages of the billions of people who live and work within those jurisdictions. Being born in the "wrong" country makes saving money far harder than it needs to be. Nigeria has a population of over 200 million people and has averaged 13% annualized inflation over the past decade. Egypt cut its currency in half relative to the dollar twice over the past decade, which instantly devalued the savings and wages of its 100 million citizens. Dozens of countries have experienced at least triple-digit year-over-year inflation within the past four decades, including Brazil that outright hyperinflated in the 1990s while it was the fifth most populous country in the world. Europe and Japan had $18 trillion worth of negative-yielding bonds in 2019, right before a wave of inflation wiped their purchasing power away. In 2021, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve dismissed the idea that the sharp rise in the money supply from the pandemic stimulus would lead to price inflation. By 2022, as major inflation emerged, the chairman rapidly changed his outlook and tightened monetary policy so quickly that it led to the failure of some of the largest banks in the country. How did we get to this point? Why isn't our money better than this in the 21st century? Broken Money answers these questions by examining the current mix of technology that has led to these limitations, and then explores emerging technologies that may be able to provide us with a monetary system that is fit for the modern era.

One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now: What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers—right from the belly of the beast. In A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald’s Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts “gateway to nowhere” housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world’s toughest trading floors.   We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor addiction to growth finally demolished the nation’ s oldest investment bank. The Wall Street we encounter here is a ruthless place, where brilliance, arrogance, ambition, greed, capacity for relentless toil, and other human traits combine in a potent mix that sometimes fuels prosperity but occasionally destroys it.   The full significance of the dissolution of Lehman Brothers remains to be measured. But this much is certain: it was a devastating blow to America’s—and the world’s—financial system. And it need not have happened. This is the story of why it did.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down. In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it. Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online―a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.

Principles of Economics is a university-level textbook offering a comprehensive, engaging, and easy-to-read overview of the field of economics that is valuable to the university student, the general reader, and the professional economist. Saifedean Ammous’ first book, The Bitcoin Standard, is an international best-seller that has been translated into 36 languages. The book garnered praise from respected scholars, successful entrepreneurs, professional athletes, and countless readers worldwide for its engaging and enlightening presentation of sophisticated economic and technical concepts, delivered in a style accessible to the general reader. With its sequel, The Fiat Standard, Ammous established himself as one of the world’s most effective communicators of economic ideas, whose writing resonates with a growing global readership. In Principles of Economics, his most ambitious and elaborate work to date, Ammous offers readers a potent antidote to the modern economics textbook. After two decades of learning and teaching economics at university level, Ammous became aware that most economic textbooks confuse more than they illuminate and most university students tasked with reading them learn very little that is useful and actionable. The culmination of four years' work, this book uses the underappreciated approach of the Austrian school of economics to introduce the principles, methods, and concepts of economics in a readable, engaging, and informative manner. Rather than relying on mathematical analysis of aggregates and arcane theoretical models, the book uses the clear written word to effectively illustrate key economic concepts. The book first presents the Austrian school method and the foundational concepts of value and time. With these foundations laid, the second part of the book explores how humans act individually to achieve their ends under scarcity—in other words, how humans economize. A chapter is dedicated to detailed overviews of labor, property, capital, technology, and energy, and each topic is accompanied by vivid examples explaining its relevance to the reader. The third part of the book examines economizing in the social context, with chapters examining trade, money, the market order, and capitalism—important concepts that are often shrouded by misconceptions in most modern treatments. The fourth part of the book presents the Austrian perspective on monetary economics, laying the groundwork through a detailed discussion of time preference, followed by a discussion of banking and credit, and the business cycle and its monetary origins. The final section of the book explains why respect for property rights in an extended market order is the basis for human civilization, how the market order protects against aggression, and the failures of monopoly provision of defense.

Real-world advice on how to be invisible online from "the FBI's most wanted hacker" (Wired). Be online without leaving a trace. Your every step online is being tracked and stored, and your identity literally stolen. Big companies and big governments want to know and exploit what you do, and privacy is a luxury few can afford or understand. In this explosive yet practical book, Kevin Mitnick uses true-life stories to show exactly what is happening without your knowledge, teaching you "the art of invisibility" -- online and real-world tactics to protect you and your family, using easy step-by-step instructions. Reading this book, you will learn everything from password protection and smart Wi-Fi usage to advanced techniques designed to maximize your anonymity. Kevin Mitnick knows exactly how vulnerabilities can be exploited and just what to do to prevent that from happening. The world's most famous -- and formerly the US government's most wanted -- computer hacker, he has hacked into some of the country's most powerful and seemingly impenetrable agencies and companies, and at one point was on a three-year run from the FBI. Now Mitnick is reformed and widely regarded as the expert on the subject of computer security. Invisibility isn't just for superheroes; privacy is a power you deserve and need in the age of Big Brother and Big Data. "Who better than Mitnick -- internationally wanted hacker turned Fortune 500 security consultant -- to teach you how to keep your data safe?" --Esquire arsene_lupin

George Orwell, born in 1903 in India was an English novelist, essayist and critic. He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism. Orwell was the author of six novels as well as numerous essays and non-fiction works. His famous works include Animal Farm' and 'Burmese days'.

When this gem first appeared in 1963, it took the form of a small paperback designed for mass distribution. We've conjured up that spirit again with this special edition of Rothbard's primer on money and government.Innumerable economists, investors, commentators, and authors have learned from this book through the decades. After fifty years, it remains the best book in print on the topic, a real manifesto of sound money.Rothbard boils down the Austrian theory to its essentials. The book also made huge theoretical advances. Rothbard was the first to prove that the government, and only the government, can destroy money on a mass scale, and he showed exactly how they go about this dirty deed. But just as importantly, it is beautifully written. He tells a thrilling story because he loves the subject so much.The passion that Murray feels for the topic comes through in the prose and transfers to the reader. Readers become excited about the subject, and tell others. Students tell professors. Some, like the great Ron Paul of Texas, have even run for political office after having read it.Rothbard shows precisely how banks create money out of thin air and how the central bank, backed by government power, allows them to get away with it. He shows how exchange rates and interest rates would work in a true free market. When it comes to describing the end of the gold standard, he is not content to describe the big trends. He names names and ferrets out all the interest groups involved.Since Rothbard's death, scholars have worked to assess his legacy, and many of them agree that this little book is one of his most important. Though it has sometimes been inauspiciously packaged and is surprisingly short, its argument took huge strides toward explaining that it is impossible to understand public affairs in our time without understanding money and its destruction.

What Has Government Done to Our Money? details the history of money, from early barter systems, to the gold standard, to present-day systems of paper money. Rothbard explains how money was originally developed, and why gold was chosen as the preferred commodity to use as money. The author also explains how the gold standard makes money a commodity, and how market forces create a stable economy. Rothbard shows that many European governments went bankrupt due to World War I and left the gold standard in order to try to solve their financial issues, which was not the right solution. He also argues that this strategy was partially responsible for World War II and led to economic problems throughout the world.

For fans of Freakonomics and Thinking, Fast and Slow, here is a book by Hans Rosling, the scientist called "a true inspiration" by Bill Gates, that teaches us how to see the world as it truly is. Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends-what percentage of the world's population live in poverty; why the world's population is increasing; how many girls finish school-we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective-from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don't know what we don't know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn't mean there aren't real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future.