Economist Rob Larson combines wit, righteous anger, and clear-eyed analysis as he dissects the lifestyle, moral bankruptcy, and stupidly large sums of money hoarded by the disgustingly wealthy.The fact that we live in one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world is becoming common knowledge. And while lists of “richest people in x country” may be easy to come by, how much do we really know about the billionaires who sit atop our global economic sys...

This is a darkly humorous guide to the three great crises plaguing today's world: environmental degradation, social conflict in the age of austerity and financial instability.Rob Larson holds mainstream economic theory up against the grim reality of a planet in meltdown. He looks at scientists’ conclusions about climate change, the business world’s opinions about its own power, and reveals the fingerprints of finance on American elections.Through ascerbic analysis, Bleakono...

Ramona Blu and Adam White are ordinary teenagers falling in love, until one day they realize they are living in a fake trailer park atop a huge underground magnet train tunnel. Until one day they realize they are cyborgs, created by DARPA, for use in a secret world war. Until one day they realize they are the most powerful creatures to walk the earth, and will fatefully bring about The Singularity. This is a tribute to the remaining ordinary teenagers, the ones who do not yet know what the...

If the stories they tell about themselves are to be believed, all of the tech giants—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon—were built from the ground up through hard work, a few good ideas, and the entrepreneurial daring to seize an opportunity when it presented itself.With searing wit and blistering commentary Bit Tyrants provides an urgent corrective to this froth of board room marketing copy that is so often passed off as analysis. For fans of corporate fairy-tales ther...

For years, we’ve been taught that capitalism is good for freedom. Dominant right-wing talk radio hosts to this day recommend “libertarian” classics like Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom that claim markets free us, and this picture still dominates the schools and the political spectrum. Well get bent, one percent, because Rob Larson’s Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom puts big business under a microscope. This book debunks the conservative classic...

**A New Yorker Best Book of 2024A History Today Book of the Year"A powerful case for limitarianism—the idea that we should set a maximum on how much resources one individual can appropriate. A must-read!"—Thomas Piketty, bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First CenturyAn original and galvanizing indictment of the world’s uber-rich that boldly argues for a cap on wealth from the philosopher who coined the term "limitarianism.”**How muc...

Over the last decade, author and activist Astra Taylor has helped shift the national conversation on topics including technology, inequality, indebtedness, and democracy. The essays collected here reveal the range and depth of her thinking, with Taylor tackling the rising popularity of socialism, the problem of automation, the politics of listening, the possibility of rights for the natural and non-human world, the future of the university, the temporal challenge of climate catastrophe, an...

A Future Perfect is the first comprehensive examination of the most important revolution of our time—globalization—and how it will continue to change our lives. Do businesses benefit from going global? Are we creating winner-take-all societies? Will globalization seal the triumph of junk culture? What will happen to individual careers? Gathering evidence worldwide, from the shantytowns of São Paolo to the boardrooms of General Electric, from the troubled Russia-Estonia border to t...

A potent glimpse into the behind-the-scenes workplace control mechanisms which prevent workers from defending themselves from exploitationFor most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply opera...

They Rule reflects on key political questions raised by the Occupy movement, showing how similar questions have been raised by previous generations of radical activists: who really owns and rules the US? Does it matter that the nation is divided by stark class disparities and a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few? Along the way, this book sharpens readers' sense of who the US oligarchy are, including how their fortunes have changed over the course of US history, how they live and...

A lively, accessible, and timely guide to Marxist economics for those who want to understand and dismantle the world of the 1%.Economists regularly promote Capitalism as the greatest system ever to grace the planet. With the same breath, they implore us to leave the job of understanding the magical powers of the market to the "experts."Despite the efforts of these mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many of us have begun to question why this sys...

***A NEW YORKER, ESQUIRE, HISTORY TODAY AND THE CONVERSATION BOOK OF THE YEAR*‘The best case I've read for putting an upper limit on the accumulation of wealth’** Richard Wilkinson'One of the most talked-about books to the moment … Limitarianism floats the heretical idea that fixing society isn’t just about saving the poorest from destitution, but about putting a cap on how much the richest are able to own' Sp...