New Books: Business & Fashion Merchandising

From investors and monetary authorities to governments and policy makers, almost everyone had assumed inflation was dead and buried. But now people the world over are confronting a poisonous new economic reality and, with it, the prospect of vast and increasing wealth inequality. How have we arrived in this situation? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Stephen D. King identifies key lessons from the history of inflation that policy makers chose not to heed. From ancient Rome through the American Civil War and up to the asset bubbles of today, inflation stems from policy error, sovereign greed, and a loss of faith in currencies.

A cinematic narrative of glamour, grit, luxury, and luck, Fashion Killa draws on exclusive interviews with the leaders of the fashion world to tell the story of the hip-hop artists, designers, stylists, and unsung heroes who fought the power and reinvented style around the world over the last fifty years. Set in the sartorial scenes of New York, Paris, and Milan, Krishnamurthy's reporting on the intersecting histories of hip-hop and contemporary fashion focuses on the risk takers and rebels--the artists, designers, stylists, models, and tastemakers--who challenged a systemic power structure and historically reinvented the world of haute couture.

Everyone knows YouTube. Across the world, people watch over a billion hours of video on the website every day. And yet virtually no one knows how YouTube works. This book explains how YouTube's technology and business evolved, how it works, and how it helped Google grow to unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who created YouTube and the Google engineers and chiefs who took it over. It's the story of an industry run amok, and of how corporate greed resulted in the unraveling of truth, the spread of violence, and the corruption of the Internet, all for the sake of profit.

For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity--cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits--as a means to regain solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they've had devastating effects on social and economic welfare. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: what if solvency was never really the goal? The Capital Order traces the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital--and indeed capitalism--in times of social upheaval from below.

Americans have long been skeptical of corporations, and that skepticism has only grown more intense in recent years. Meanwhile, corporations continue to amass wealth and power at a dizzying rate, recklessly pursuing profit while leaving society to sort out the costs. For Profit argues that the story of the corporation didn't have to come to this. Throughout history, corporations have been purpose-built to benefit the societies that surrounded them. Corporations enabled everything from the construction of ancient Rome's roads and aqueducts to the artistic flourishing of the Renaissance to the rise of the middle class in the twentieth century.

From our earliest ancestors to babies born today, fabric is a necessary part of our everyday lives, but it's also an opportunity for creativity, symbolism, culture and connection. A century ago in Wales, women would sew their own funeral clothes over tea with friends. In Papua New Guinea, bark is stripped from trees and beaten into cloth. Harris Tweed has a particular smell, while Guatemalan weavers use dazzling colors. Uncovering the stories of the fabrics people wear and use from sacking to silk, Fabric combines science, history, tradition and art in a captivating exploration of how we live, work, craft and care.

We are all taught to think like an economist, with total faith in the power of the individual, the purity of the free market, and our boundless future. The problem is that economics is a fairy tale--one that perpetuates vast inequality and environmental devastation. The Progress Illusion charts the rise of the economic worldview and its infiltration into our daily lives as a theory of everything--I over us, private over public, consumption over community. Ecological economist Jon Erickson calls for a challenge to this destructive philosophy, both within academia and in 'the real world,' through educational reform and grassroots social movements.

A sweeping, lively, and highly approachable history of American business from the nation's founding to the 21st century. Major themes include the nation's business beginnings in land and real estate, the pivotal place of financial institutions from the nation's earliest days, America's emergence as an industrial powerhouse, the dominance of its railways, automobiles, and other transportation companies, and the role of government.

This concise volume evaluates the cause and significance of recent corporate failures and financial scandals, and how they reflect on the fitness for purpose of the external auditors, financial reports, financial watchdogs, boards, directors and senior management. Revealing the shortcomings in audit quality, independence, choice and the growing expectation gap, Financial Failures and Scandals questions if the profession, its regulators or government watchdogs, are adequately prepared for the challenges of inevitable future financial failures.

Economists are the guardians of the world's economies and financial systems. The applications of economic theory can alleviate poverty, reduce disease, and promote sustainability. However, economic interventions, including those that are deemed successful, also cause harm. The Tragic Science says what economists have too long ignored: that economists do great harm even as they aspire to do good. DeMartino's argument is that economic harm is complicated, and economists aren't equipped by their professional training to understand the causes and implications of the harm its practice induces.