Too Greedy for Adam Smith

Too Greedy for Adam Smith PDF Author: Steven Bavaria
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781518861512
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
(LIBRARY EDITION) "Too Greedy for Adam Smith" is about how out-of-control CEO pay is destroying free enterprise in America. If a corporate purchasing manager rented office space from a cousin or crony at twice the market rate he would be fired in a heartbeat. But "sweetheart deals" that would be unethical elsewhere in the business world are the norm in the world of CEO pay, where highly conflicted boards of directors award pay packages many times the size normal free market economics would require. "Too Greedy for Adam Smith" explains in plain English how this is more than just flawed economics. It also gives capitalism a "bad name" as voters see our corporate elite living by a different set of rules than everyone else. Beyond paying CEOs more than they deserve, this encourages corporate behavior that has little economic purpose besides enriching management and its Wall Street enablers. Excessive one-time payoffs encourage CEOs to "swing-for-the-fences," so that doing mega-deals where they can "take the money and run" trumps doing what's best for the company in the long run. We need to reject the idea that excessive pay for CEOs is just a "normal" part of capitalism in the same way we refuse to accept price fixing, embezzlement and other corrupt activity. Boards of directors should be put on notice that approving such deals is a breach of their fiduciary duty, and they should be held to account through shareholder suits, SEC actions and by the press. This issue concerns everyone - Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative - who values free enterprise and wants to see it maintained and strengthened.

Too Greedy for Adam Smith

Too Greedy for Adam Smith PDF Author: Steven Bavaria
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781518861512
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
(LIBRARY EDITION) "Too Greedy for Adam Smith" is about how out-of-control CEO pay is destroying free enterprise in America. If a corporate purchasing manager rented office space from a cousin or crony at twice the market rate he would be fired in a heartbeat. But "sweetheart deals" that would be unethical elsewhere in the business world are the norm in the world of CEO pay, where highly conflicted boards of directors award pay packages many times the size normal free market economics would require. "Too Greedy for Adam Smith" explains in plain English how this is more than just flawed economics. It also gives capitalism a "bad name" as voters see our corporate elite living by a different set of rules than everyone else. Beyond paying CEOs more than they deserve, this encourages corporate behavior that has little economic purpose besides enriching management and its Wall Street enablers. Excessive one-time payoffs encourage CEOs to "swing-for-the-fences," so that doing mega-deals where they can "take the money and run" trumps doing what's best for the company in the long run. We need to reject the idea that excessive pay for CEOs is just a "normal" part of capitalism in the same way we refuse to accept price fixing, embezzlement and other corrupt activity. Boards of directors should be put on notice that approving such deals is a breach of their fiduciary duty, and they should be held to account through shareholder suits, SEC actions and by the press. This issue concerns everyone - Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative - who values free enterprise and wants to see it maintained and strengthened.

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life PDF Author: Russ Roberts
Publisher: Portfolio
ISBN: 1591847958
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
"How the insights of an 18th century economist can help us live better in the 21st century. Adam Smith became famous for The Wealth of Nations, but the Scottish economist also cared deeply about our moral choices and behavior--the subjects of his other brilliant book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Now, economist Russ Roberts shows why Smith's neglected work might be the greatest self-help book you've never read. Roberts explores Smith's unique and fascinating approach to fundamental questions such as: - What is the deepest source of human satisfaction? - Why do we sometimes swing between selfishness and altruism? - What's the connection between morality and happiness? Drawing on current events, literature, history, and pop culture, Roberts offers an accessible and thought-provoking view of human behavior through the lenses of behavioral economics and philosophy"--

Economics of Good and Evil

Economics of Good and Evil PDF Author: Tomas Sedlacek
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199831904
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tomas Sedlacek has shaken the study of economics as few ever have. Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about good and evil. In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a product of our civilization. It began within philosophy--Adam Smith himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking, broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity, from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club. Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we can do technically? Does it pay to be good? Placing the wisdom of philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way we calculate economic value.

The Greedy Hand

The Greedy Hand PDF Author: Amity Shlaes
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307819337
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Greedy Hand is an illuminating examination of the culture of tax and a persuasive call for reform, written by one of the nation's leading policy makers, Amity Shlaes of The Wall Street Journal. The father of the modern American state was an obscure Macy's department store executive named Beardsley Ruml. During World War II, he devised the plan for withholding taxes from your paycheck, thereby laying in place a system that allows the hand of government to reach into your wallet and take what it wants. Today, taxes make up more than a third of our economy, the highest level in history outside war. We live in the nation revolutionary father Thomas Paine foresaw when he wrote of "the Greedy Hand of government thrusting itself into every corner of industry." This book is a cultural examination of the way taxes influence our behavior, how they force us into an arbitrary system that punishes families and individual enterprise. Amity Shlaes unveils the hidden perversities of our lifelong tax experience: how family tax breaks do little to help the family, and can even hurt it. She demonstrates how married women pay a special women's tax rate, higher than anybody else's. She shows how problems that engage and enrage us--Social Security problems, or the things we don't like about schools--are, at heart, tax problems. And she explains why the solutions Washington offers merely accelerate a vicious cycle. Finally, Amity Shlaes shows us a way out of this madness, endorsing a number of common-sense reforms that will give all Americans a fairer and simpler tax system. Written with eloquent compassion for working Americans and their families, The Greedy Hand makes the best case yet for rethinking our tax code. It is a book no tax-paying citizen can afford to ignore.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

The Theory of Moral Sentiments PDF Author: Adam Smith (économiste)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 636

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Income Factory: An Investor’s Guide to Consistent Lifetime Returns

The Income Factory: An Investor’s Guide to Consistent Lifetime Returns PDF Author: Steven Bavaria
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
ISBN: 1260458547
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
The proven, all-weather investing strategy that delivers long-term, consistent returns The most common investing approach today—one that values “growth” over all else—can be ineffective and counterproductive for many investors, not to mention needlessly stressful. Now, one of Seeking Alpha’s most popular writers, Steven Bavaria, provides a groundbreaking alternative that will see you through all markets—up, down, and sideways. The Income Factory shows how to build an income stream that increases solidly and consistently—a result of re-investing and compounding the dividends. And the best part? This income stream actually grows faster during market downturns than during flat or rising market periods. The Income Factory sheds light on: • Why “high-yield” doesn’t have to mean “high-risk” • How credit investments perform more predictably than equity investments • Why “junk” is a misnomer—and why high-yield debt is safer than most of the stocks investors own • How to grow your wealth steadily without following the markets obsessively Through Bavaria’s strategy, cash income increases year after year at a predictable rate. For example, a 9% yielding portfolio doubles and re-doubles every 8 years. If you’re in for the long haul, an Income Factory lets you achieve your goals and still sleep well at night. Investing does not have to be about picking specific horses and hoping they win the race. An Income Factory achieves its goals by essentially betting on horses to make it around the track and finish the race. Those are easier bets to win, and they don’t require us to be glued to the financial news 24/7.

Adam's Fallacy

Adam's Fallacy PDF Author: Duncan K. Foley
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674027078
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book could be called "The Intelligent Person's Guide to Economics." The title expresses Duncan Foley's belief that economics at its most abstract and interesting level is a speculative philosophical discourse, not a deductive or inductive science. Adam's fallacy is the attempt to separate the economic sphere of life, in which the pursuit of self-interest is led by the invisible hand of the market to a socially beneficial outcome, from the rest of social life, in which the pursuit of self-interest is morally problematic and has to be weighed against other ends.

How Much is Enough?

How Much is Enough? PDF Author: Robert Skidelsky
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590515080
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
A provocative and timely call for a moral approach to economics, drawing on philosophers, political theorists, writers, and economists from Aristotle to Marx to Keynes. What constitutes the good life? What is the true value of money? Why do we work such long hours merely to acquire greater wealth? These are some of the questions that many asked themselves when the financial system crashed in 2008. This book tackles such questions head-on. The authors begin with the great economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1930 Keynes predicted that, within a century, per capita income would steadily rise, people’s basic needs would be met, and no one would have to work more than fifteen hours a week. Clearly, he was wrong: though income has increased as he envisioned, our wants have seemingly gone unsatisfied, and we continue to work long hours. The Skidelskys explain why Keynes was mistaken. Then, arguing from the premise that economics is a moral science, they trace the concept of the good life from Aristotle to the present and show how our lives over the last half century have strayed from that ideal. Finally, they issue a call to think anew about what really matters in our lives and how to attain it. How Much Is Enough? is that rarity, a work of deep intelligence and ethical commitment accessible to all readers. It will be lauded, debated, cited, and criticized. It will not be ignored.

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich PDF Author: Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673983X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
A “thought-provoking” one-volume distillation of the author’s powerful trilogy in praise of the middle class’s role in creating a better, and richer, world (Library Journal). The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment. Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith’s puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity. The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism. For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey’s magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is what you’ve been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Art Carden bring together the trilogy’s key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent. The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle. It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth. The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies. McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones. Not matter but ideas. Not corruption but improvement. Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey’s influential explanation of how we got rich. At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, this book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought. Praise for the Bourgeois Era Trilogy “A contender for the great book of our age.” —The Times, Book of the Week “Persuasive . . . richly detailed and erudite.” —Financial Times

Our Great Purpose

Our Great Purpose PDF Author: Ryan Hanley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216703
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
Invaluable wisdom on living a good life from the founder of modern economics.