What Price Liberty? PDF Download

Author: Ben Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Takes us through four centuries of British, American and European history, elaborating not just how civil liberties were constructed in the past, but how they were continually rethought - and re-fought - in response to modernity and puts into context the controversies of the past decade or so.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309074428
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
How well does the consumer price index (CPI) reflect the changes that people actually face in living costsâ€"from apples to computers to health care? Given how it is used, is it desirable to construct the CPI as a cost-of-living index (COLI)? With what level of accuracy is it possible to construct a single index that represents changes in the living costs of the nation's diverse population? At What Price? examines the foundations for consumer price indexes, comparing the conceptual and practical strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of traditional "fixed basket" and COLI approaches. The book delves into a range of complex issues, from how to deal with the changing quality of goods and services, including difficult-to-define medical services, to how to weight the expenditure patterns of different consumers. It sorts through the key attributes and underlying assumptions that define each index type in order to answer the question: Should a COLI framework be used in constructing the U.S. CPI? In answering this question, the book makes recommendations as to how the Bureau of Labor Statistics can continue to improve the accuracy and relevance of the CPI. With conclusions that could affect the amount of your next pay raise, At What Price? is important to everyone, and a must-read for policy makers, researchers, and employers.

Author: Sarah E. Croco
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107081491
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Peace at What Price? explains why some leaders voluntarily stay in wartime quagmires by introducing the theoretical concept of leader culpability. Sarah E. Croco includes analyses on wars from 1816 to 2007, several case illustrations, and a discussion of the American experience in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Author: Tyler Cowen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674001558
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In a world where more people know who Princess Di was than who their own senators are, where Graceland draws more visitors per year than the White House, and where Michael Jordan is an industry unto himself, fame and celebrity are central currencies. In this intriguing book, Tyler Cowen explores and elucidates the economics of fame. Fame motivates the talented and draws like-minded fans together. But it also may put profitability ahead of quality, visibility above subtlety, and privacy out of reach. The separation of fame and merit is one of the central dilemmas Cowen considers in his account of the modern market economy. He shows how fame is produced, outlines the principles that govern who becomes famous and why, and discusses whether fame-seeking behavior harmonizes individual and social interests or corrupts social discourse and degrades culture. Most pertinently, Cowen considers the implications of modern fame for creativity, privacy, and morality. Where critics from Plato to Allan Bloom have decried the quest for fame, Cowen takes a more pragmatic, optimistic view. He identifies the benefits of a fame-intensive society and makes a persuasive case that however bad fame may turn out to be for the famous, it is generally good for society and culture.

Author: Daniel Callahan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520246640
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Medical research, with its power to attract money and political support, and its promise of cures for a wide range of medical burdens, has good and bad sides--which are often indistinguishable. In this book, the author teases out the distinctions and differences, revealing the difficulties that result when the research imperative is suffused with excessive zeal, adulterated by the profit motive, or used to justify cutting moral corners. Exploring the National Institutes of Health's annual budget, the inflated estimates of health care cost savings that result from research, the high prices charged by drug companies, the use and misuse of human subjects for medical testing, and the controversies surrounding human cloning and stem cell research, he clarifies the fine line between doing good and doing harm in the name of medical progress. His work shows that medical research must be understood in light of other social and economic needs and how even the research imperative, dedic.

Author: Dave Stern
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471107396
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The Starship Enterprise NX-01 is Earth's flagship - the first vessel to embark on a sytematic exploration of what lies beyond the fringes of known space. Led by Captain Jonathan Archer, eighty of Starfleet's best and brightest set forth to pave humanity's way to the stars. Tempered by a year of interstellar exploration, the crew has become a disciplined, cohesive, unit. And now, for the first time, they have lost one of their number. Bad enough that Ensign Alana Hart is dead. Worse, she died while attempting to sabotage the ship, killed by her nominal superior, armory officer Lieutenant Malcolm Reed. Even as they deal with the circumstances of her death, Archer, Reed and the rest of the crew find themselves caught squarely in the middle of another tense situation - a brutal war between two alien civilizations. But in the Alpha System nothing is what it seems. And before he can discover the secret behind what happened to Ensign Hart, Reed is forced once more to confront the reality of death.

Author: Pamela Brubaker
Publisher: Tpp
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
The author explains the dynamics of globalization and the ways this issue affects the daily lives of ordinary people. Drawing from Scripture as well as her many experiences with people around the globe, and exploring successful economic justice efforts, she provides options for addressing this critical topic. This revised and expanded edition includes: a revised preface; updated statistics and the state of the debate on globalization; more recent reports; campaigns; and new stories from recent experiences in Guatemala, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Brazil.

Author: Gerald Smith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549075
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
Winner, 2022 Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award, American Marketing Association How do leaders, managers, and proprietors go about the essential task of setting prices? What biases enter into this process, and why? How can a business debias its price setting to become more productive, strategic, and profitable? Combining perceptive insights from behavioral economics with leading-edge ideas on price management, this book offers a new approach to pricing. Gerald Smith demonstrates why understanding, reframing, and refining everyday pricing processes—a firm’s or manager’s pricing orientation—results in a better long-term pricing strategy. He explores how pricing actually happens in practice and shows how to identify and remove the psychological blinders that cause suboptimal decisions and policies. Smith details how to improve pricing orientation by combining the soft behavioral skills that intuitively shape and refine pricing practice with the hard analytic skills that guide and structure pricing strategy. The result is more rational and more profitable pricing—with respect to not only revenue and profitability but also employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Offering an accessible and actionable model, Getting Price Right is the first book to apply behavioral economics to managerial price setting. It is a must-read for corporate business leaders, thought leaders, and professionals interested in advances in pricing and for managers, entrepreneurs, proprietors, and small and midsize business owners whose everyday work involves pricing.

Author: Edward Chancellor
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802160077
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
A comprehensive and profoundly relevant history of interest from one of the world’s leading financial writers, The Price of Time explains our current global financial position and how we got here In the beginning was the loan, and the loan carried interest. For at least five millennia people have been borrowing and lending at interest. The practice wasn’t always popular—in the ancient world, usury was generally viewed as exploitative, a potential path to debt bondage and slavery. Yet as capitalism became established from the late Middle Ages onwards, denunciations of interest were tempered because interest was a necessary reward for lenders to part with their capital. And interest performs many other vital functions: it encourages people to save; enables them to place a value on precious assets, such as houses and all manner of financial securities; and allows us to price risk. All economic and financial activities take place across time. Interest is often described as the “price of money,” but it is better called the “price of time:” time is scarce, time has value, interest is the time value of money. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, interest rates have sunk lower than ever before. Easy money after the global financial crisis in 2007/2008 has produced several ill effects, including the appearance of multiple asset price bubbles, a reduction in productivity growth, discouraging savings and exacerbating inequality, and forcing yield starved investors to take on excessive risk. The financial world now finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place, and Edward Chancellor is here to tell us why. In this enriching volume, Chancellor explores the history of interest and its essential function in determining how capital is allocated and priced.

Author: Howard Steven Friedman
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520383125
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
How much is a human life worth? Individuals, families, companies, and governments routinely place a price on human life. The calculations that underlie these price tags are often buried in technical language, yet they influence our economy, laws, behaviors, policies, health, and safety. These price tags are often unfair, infused as they are with gender, racial, national, and cultural biases that often result in valuing the lives of the young more than the old, the rich more than the poor, whites more than blacks, Americans more than foreigners, and relatives more than strangers. This is critical since undervalued lives are left less-protected and more exposed to risk. Howard Steven Friedman explains in simple terms how economists and data scientists at corporations, regulatory agencies, and insurance companies develop and use these price tags and points a spotlight at their logical flaws and limitations. He then forcefully argues against the rampant unfairness in the system. Readers will be enlightened, shocked, and, ultimately, empowered to confront the price tags we assign to human lives and understand why such calculations matter.