For over forty years in more than sixty countries, Raymond Baker has witnessed the free-market system operating illicitly and corruptly, with devastating consequences. In Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, Baker takes readers on a fascinating journey through the global free-market system and reveals how dirty money, poverty, and inequality are inextricably intertwined. Readers will discover how small illicit transactions lead to massive illegalities and how staggering global income disparities are worsened by the illegalities that permeate international capitalism. Drawing on his experiences, Baker shows how Western banks and businesses use secret transactions and ignore laws while handling some $1 trillion in illicit proceeds each year. He also illustrates how businesspeople, criminals, and kleptocrats perfect the same techniques to shift funds and how these tactics negatively affect individuals, institutions, and countries.

In this important book, William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm contend that the answers to these questions lie within capitalist economies, though many observers make the mistake of believing that "capitalism" is of a single kind. Writing in an accessible style, the authors dispel that myth, documenting four different varieties of capitalism, some "Good" and some "Bad" for growth. The authors identify the conditions that characterize Good Capitalism--the right blend of entrepreneurial and established firms, which can vary among countries--as well as the features of Bad Capitalism. They examine how countries catching up to the United States can move faster toward the economic frontier, while laying out the need for the United States itself to stick to and reinforce the recipe for growth that has enabled it to be the leading economic force in the world. This pathbreaking book is a must read for anyone who cares about global growth and how to ensure America's economic future.

This short book makes a connection between recent ‘tectonic shifts’ in the world economy and the political problems currently confronted by western democracies. The shift of manufacturing away from the West, allied to the pressure to keep costs down in an increasingly competitive global economy, has led to economic inequality, reliance on service industry employment and public sector austerity. All this has in turn produced large numbers of desperate citizens attracted to a populist economic nationalism accompanied by xenophobia. However, the originality of this text lies not in the above argument, but in the philosophical reflections which drive and derive from it. These include reflections on history as a supposed causal process; on the need to make ethical judgements of economic activities and the difficulties of doing so; and on the problems confronting modern citizens in understanding complex economic processes and their political implications. Capitalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century endorses Wittgenstein’s ‘praxis’ approach to human social life and its study. Accordingly, it not only analyses economic and political problems but suggests ways of solving or mitigating them. In doing so it relies on Marx’s conviction that our capacity to see certain phenomena as problems is at least a priori evidence that they can be solved. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students of politics, comparative politics, political economy and international relations.

The Rules of the Game brings together essays written over the course of thirty years by a major figure in the field. McKinnon analyzes and compares a wide variety of important international monetary regimes: the establishment of the gold standard in the nineteenth century, Bretton Woods, the dollar standard, floating exchange rates, the European Monetary System, and current proposals for reforming world monetary arrangements. The essays are unique in that they specify precisely the rules of the game for each international monetary regime - past, present, and future. For ease of reference, the book offers boxed summaries of each set of rules and then discusses their advantages and disadvantages, from the gold standard down to the author's proposal for a common monetary standard for the twenty-first century.

Few discussions in modern social science have occupied as much attention as the changing nature of welfare states in western societies. Gosta Esping-Andersen, one of the most distinguished contributors to current debates on this issue, here provides a new analysis of the character and role of welfare states in the functioning of contemporary advanced western societies. Esping-Andersen distinguishes several major types of welfare state, connecting these with variations in the historical development of different western countries. Current economic processes, the author argues, such as those moving towards a post-industrial order, are not shaped by autonomous market forces but by the nature of states and state differences. Fully informed by comparative materials, this book will have great appeal to everyone working on issues of economic development and post-industrialism. Its audience will include students and academics in sociology, economics and politics.

Until the early nineteenth century, "risk" was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future. Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutions-insurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities markets-while posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk's rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one's own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name "financial services industry." Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system. Amid the nineteenth-century's waning faith in God's providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. Freaks of Fortuneis one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.

The historical relationship between capital and labor has evolved in the past few decades. One particularly noteworthy development is the rise of shared capitalism, a system in which workers have become partial owners of their firms and thus, in effect, both employees and stockholders. Profit sharing arrangements and gain-sharing bonuses, which tie compensation directly to a firm’s performance, also reflect this new attitude toward labor. Shared Capitalism at Work analyzes the effects of this trend on workers and firms. The contributors focus on four main areas: the fraction of firms that participate in shared capitalism programs in the United States and abroad, the factors that enable these firms to overcome classic free rider and risk problems, the effect of shared capitalism on firm performance, and the impact of shared capitalism on worker well-being. This volume provides essential studies for understanding the increasingly important role of shared capitalism in the modern workplace.