Tyler Cowen

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology. and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterp...

A stunning, deeply reported investigation into the housing crisis Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. Today, however, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Nowhere is this more visible than in...

From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493--an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's world.I...

In this collection of writings, Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek discusses topics from moral philosophy and the methods of the social sciences to economic theory as different aspects of the same central issue: free markets versus socialist planned economies. First published in the 1930s and 40s, these essays continue to illuminate the problems fac...

An Economist Best History Book 2017  History as it should be written.Barry Cunliffe, Guardian  Scott hits the nail squarely on the head by exposing the staggering price our ancestors paid for civilization and political order.Walter Scheidel, Financial Times   Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livest...

In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming.Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age government, political parties, the media.The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgen...

Prosecutors can "indict a ham sandwich," we hear, and laugh at the absurdity. Yet the joke captures a truth: federal prosecutors wield enormous power over us all. And the federal criminal justice system is so stacked in favor of the government that shocking numbers of innocent people have been sent to prison.In Conviction Machine, two leading autho...

Whats the Most Important Fact About the Heathcare Crisis? That We Already Know the Cure!  Whole Foods Markets, the State of Indiana, and innovators around the world have used forgotten American ideas to slash healthcare costs by 75 percent while simultaneously delivering true universal access, coverage for preexisting conditions, and an ironclad sa...

THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO ALCOHOL AND YOUR HEALTH As the most harmful drug in the UK, alcohol has a profound and wide-reaching impact on our health and on society at large. Drink? is the first book of its kind, written by a scientist and rooted in 40 years of medical research and hands-on experience treating patients. Professor David Nutt cuts throu...

A groundbreaking comparative study that illuminates the connections between the Qur'ān and the Bible While the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are understood to be related texts, the sacred scripture of Islam, the third Abrahamic faith, has generally been considered separately. Noted religious scholar Gabriel Said Reynolds draws on centuries of ...

Most economists would agree that a thriving economy is synonymous with GDP growth. The more we produce and consume, the higher our living standard and the more resources available to the public. This means that our current era, in which growth has slowed substantially from its postwar highs, has raised alarm bells. But should it? Is growth actually...

A definitive new history of the Vikings The Viking Age -- between 750 and 1050 -- saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they reshaped the world between eastern North America and the Asian steppe. For a millennium, though, their history has largely been filtered through the writi...

Written with the verve of such works as The Big Short, The History of the Future, and The Spider Network, here is the fascinating, true story of the rise of Ethereum, the second-biggest digital asset in the world, the growth of cryptocurrency, and the future of the internet as we know it.Everyone has heard of Bitcoin, but few know about the second ...

Ballot box voting is often considered the essence of political freedom. But, it has two major shortcomings: individual voters have little chance of making a difference, and they also face strong incentives to remain ignorant about the issues at stake. "Voting with your feet," however, avoids both of these pitfalls and offers a wider range of choice...

An acclaimed biography of the Enlightenment's greatest mathematicianThis is the first full-scale biography of Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), one of the greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists of all time. In this comprehensive and authoritative account, Ronald Calinger connects the story of Euler's eventful life to the astonishing achieveme...

"The Idealist is a powerful book, gorgeously written and consistently insightful. Samuel Zipp uses the 1942 world tour of Wendell Willkie to examine American attitudes toward internationalism, decolonization, and race in the febrile atmosphere of the world's first truly global conflict."--Andrew Preston, author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Fai...

Marseille is a thoroughly ambiguous place. France's second city and its major sea-port, its impact on the national imagination is unparalleled. Yet it is also a frontier city, arguably capital of the Mediterranean, and with a traditionally suspect allegiance to the French nation. This apartness, and the city's long and rich history as home to migra...

What configuration of institutions and policies is most conducive to human flourishing? The historical and comparative evidence suggests that the answer is social democratic capitalism - a democratic political system, a capitalist economy, good elementary and secondary schooling, a big welfare state, pro-employment public services, and moderate reg...

A compelling history of the ancient schism that continues to divide the Islamic worldWhen Muhammad died in 632 without a male heir, Sunnis contended that the choice of a successor should fall to his closest companions, but Shi'a believed that God had inspired the Prophet to appoint his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, as leader. So began a schism that i...

This landmark synthesis of political science and historical institutionalism is a detailed study of antagonistic ethnic majoritarianism.Northern Ireland was coercively created through a contested partition in 1920. Subsequently Great Britain compelled Sinn Fein's leaders to rescind the declaration of an Irish Republic, remain within the British Emp...

From the author the classic The Wizards of Armageddon and Pulitzer Prize finalist comes the definitive history of American policy on nuclear warand Presidents actions in nuclear crisesfrom Truman to Trump.Fred Kaplan, hailed by The New York Times as a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter, takes us into the White House Si...

He has had unprecedented access to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg for three years. And now renowned tech writer Steven Levy delivers the definitive history of one of America's most powerful and controversial companies: Facebook.In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. The s...

From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our age in human history, so superficially turbulent, is actually defined by stagnation, repetition, deadlocks, and decayToday the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality-television politics, the deeper r...

A National Book Award FinalistA PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end. Twenty...

The first complete history of US industry's most influential and controversial lobbyistFounded in 1895, the National Association of Manufacturers--NAM--helped make manufacturing the basis of the US economy and a major source of jobs in the twentieth century. The Industrialists traces the history of the advocacy group from its origins to today, exam...

This brilliantly innovative synthesis of narrative and analysis illuminates how British colonialism shaped the formation and political cultures of what became Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume I provides a somber and compelling comparative audit of the scale of recent conflict in Northern Ireland and ...

After tracking the lives of thousands of people from birth to midlife, four of the world's preeminent psychologists reveal what they have learned about how humans develop.Does temperament in childhood predict adult personality? What role do parents play in shaping how a child matures? Is day care bad--or good--for children? Does adolescent delinque...

A sociologist and former fashion model takes readers inside the elite global party circuit of "models and bottles" to reveal how beautiful young women are used to boost the status of menMillion-dollar birthday parties, megayachts on the French Riviera, and $40,000 bottles of champagne. In today's New Gilded Age, the world's moneyed classes have tak...

A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misledand ready to put an adventurer in the White House.Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unfo...

A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the m...

"This is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences... Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year."--Tyler Cowen, Marginal RevolutionHow did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the...

The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us for the better. In his bestselling Here Comes Everybody, Internet guru Clay Shirky provided readers with a much-needed primer for the digital age. Now, with Cognitive Surplus, he reveals how new digital technology is unleashing a torrent of creative prod...

Populists on both sides of the political aisle routinely announce that the American Dream is dead. According to them, the game has been rigged by elites, workers cant get ahead, wages have been stagnant for decades, and the middle class is dying.  Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, disputes ...

The acclaimed bestseller that's teaching the world about the power of mass collaboration. Translated into more than twenty languages and named one of the best business books of the year by reviewers around the world, Wikinomics has become essential reading for business people everywhere. It explains how mass collaboration is happening not just at ...

From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, a captivating novel of money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it.Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a fiv...

Generation Priced Out is a call to action on one of the most talked-about issues of our time: how skyrocketing rents and home values are pricing the working and middle classes out of urban America. Randy Shaw tells the powerful stories of tenants, politicians, homeowner groups, developers, and activists in over a dozen cities impacted by the nation...

The public intellectual, as a person and ideal, has a long and storied history. Writing in venues like the New Republic and Commentary, such intellectuals were always expected to opine on a broad array of topics, from foreign policy to literature to economics. Yet in recent years a new kind of thinker has supplanted that archetype: the thought lead...

"Perfectly placed to tell us what's really new about [the] second-generation Web."--Los Angeles TimesBusiness visionary and bestselling author David Weinberger charts how as business, politics, science, and media move online, the rules of the physical world--in which everything has a place--are upended. In the digital world, everything has its plac...

Katie Roiphe, culture writer and author of The Morning After, shares a timely blend of memoir, feminist investigation, and exploration of famous female writers lives, in a bold, essential discussion of how strong women experience their power. Told in a series of notebook entries, Roiphe weaves her often fraught personal experiences with divorce, si...

Winner (third place), 2014 BC Historical Federation Lieutenant-Governor's Medal for Historical WritingVancouver Island in the late nineteenth century was a major port of entry for people from all walks of life. But for many, the sense of hope that had sustained them through rough sea voyages came to an abrupt halt as soon as they reached land. Quar...

America needs better options for resolving potential crisesIn recent years, the Pentagon has elevated its concerns about Russia and China as potential military threats to the United States and its allies. But what issues could provoke actual conflict between the United States and either country? And how could such a conflict be contained before it ...

As M.E. Thomas says of her fellow sociopaths, We are your neighbors, your coworkers, and quite possibly the people closest to you: lovers, family, friends. Our risk-seeking behavior and general fearlessness are thrilling, our glibness and charm alluring. Our often quick wit and outside-the-box thinking make us appear intelligent even brilliant. We ...

In 1958 construction began on Akademgorodok, a scientific utopian community modeled after Francis Bacon's vision of a "New Atlantis." The city, carved out of a Siberian forest, 2,500 miles east of Moscow, was formed by Soviet scientists with the full support of Nikita Khrushchev. They believed that their rational science, liberated from ideological...

An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the author of the Divine ComedyFor all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work. Dante's writings are therefore never far away in this authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography, wh...

The Good Friday Agreement deserved the attention the world gave it, even if it was not always accurately understood. After its ratification in two referendums, for the first time in history political institutions throughout the island of Ireland rested upon the freely given assent of majorities of all the peoples on the island.It marked, it was hop...