PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

'Really made me think about how I think' - Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West 
 
Tough times don't last. Tough people do. 
 
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncer&shy;tainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resil&shy;ient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. 
 
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. 
 
Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: the antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. 
 
'The hottest thinker in the world' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

Antifragile

Things that Gain from Disorder

Michael Lewis

'It's a foreboding,' she said. 'A knowing that something is looming around the corner. Like how when the seasons change you can smell Fall in the air right before the leaves change and the wind turns cold.' 
 
 In January 2020, as people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan, China, few really understood the magnitude of what was happening. Except, that is, a small group of scientific misfits who in their different ways had been obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated - and with why the governments and the institutions that were supposed to look after us, kept making the same mistakes time and again. 
 
 This group saw what nobody else did. A pandemic was coming. We weren't prepared. 
 
 The Premonition is the extraordinary story of a group who anticipated, traced and hunted the coronavirus; who understood the need to think differently, to learn from history, to question everything; and to do all of this fast, in order to act, to save lives, communities, society itself. It's a story about the workings of the human mind; about the failures and triumphs of human judgement and imagination. It's the story of how we got to now.

The Premonition

A Pandemic Story

Jenny Odell

We're living on the wrong clock - one that tells us time is money - and it's destroying us. 
 
Here is a radical argument for other ways of experiencing time that offer hopeful possibilities for ourselves and the planet. 
 
Our daily experience is dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside. It wasn't devised for people, but for profit. Saving Time rearranges how we experience time, and imagines a world not centred around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by - inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time. 
 
In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful journey, Jenny Odell takes us through other temporal habitats: as planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal. 
 
She urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms, to imagine a source of meaning outside the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives - or the life of the planet - is not a foregone conclusion. 
 
Now is our moment to rethink. And if we do, time might just save us.

Saving Time

Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

Gene Kerrigan

Ireland’s economic collapse hit with bewildering speed and cut deep into many lives. At a time when we most needed leadership, our politicians let us down, telling us we were all to blame for the recession and that we just needed to suffer a little pain to make everything right again. It was a Big Lie. 
This book offers an alternative view to the official cover story of austerity. It’s about the great majority of us who weren’t gambling with our future. It’s about what’s being done to us, who is doing it and why. It’s also about who benefits from this and who gets it in the neck. And what we might do about that. 
Gene Kerrigan delves deep into the muddy waters of the boom and crash, the chaos in the banks, the intervention by the troika and the erosion of democracy. He looks at how the Dáil and the media became full of mindless free market cheerleaders, how the country became laden down with unregulated bankers, and how the government acquiesced in imposing a destructive programme of austerity on the Irish people. 
Meanwhile, the elites in our society wrap the green flag around themselves, calling for sacrifice and patriotism, while they hold on fiercely to every perk and privilege. 
It’s time to tell the truth.

The Big Lie - Who Profits From Ireland’s Austerity?

Niall Ferguson

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot. Call it what you like, it matters now more than ever. In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is the foundation of all human progress and the lifeblood of history. From the cash injection that funded the Italian Renaissance to the stock market bubble that sparked the French Revolution, from the bonds that fuelled Britain's war effort to the Wall Street Crash and today's meltdown, this is the story of boom and bust as it's never been told before. Whether you're scraping by or rolling in it, there's no better time to understand the ascent of money.

The Ascent of Money

A Financial History of the World

Hsiao-Hung Pai

You know the people in this book. 
 
You&rsquo;ll remember the harassed waitress from your local Chinese restaurant. You&rsquo;ve noticed those builders across the street working funny hours and without helmets. You&rsquo;ve eaten the lettuce they picked, or bought the microwave they assembled. The words &lsquo;cockle-pickers&rsquo;, &lsquo;Morecambe Bay&rsquo;, &lsquo;Chinese illegals found dead in lorry&rsquo; will ring a bell. 
 
But did you know that there are hundreds of thousands of undocumented Chinese immigrants in Britain? They&rsquo;ve travelled here because of desperate poverty, and must keep their heads down and work themselves to the bone. 
 
Hsiao-Hung Pai, the only journalist who knows this community, went undercover to hear the stories of this hidden work force. She reveals a scary, shadowy world where human beings are exploited in ways unimaginable in our civilized twenty-first century. 
 
CHINESE WHISPERS exposes the truth behind the lives of a hidden work force here in Britain. You owe it to yourself, and them, to read it.

Chinese Whispers

The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour

Emma Holten

'Brilliantly rewrites the history of economic thought to place 'her story' at its heart - while combining sharp analysis with piercing wit and deep care. A must-read' - Kate Raworth, author of DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS 
 
'One of the most important feminist voices of the 21st century . . . The book about capitalism we didn't know we needed' - Sofie Hagen 
 
In 2020, the prominent Danish feminist Emma Holten read an article stating that women were a net ‘deficit’ to society. Women took more than they gave, ‘draining’ the public purse by giving birth and taking parental leave. They contributed less than their fair share in taxes, because they often worked part-time to look after other people at home, or held low-paid 
jobs in the public sector. Denmark would be richer if women’s lives looked more like men’s, the economic experts concluded. A similar story is told around the globe. 
 
How did we get here? In Deficit, Emma Holten traces how economic thinkers – from the Enlightenment onwards – created a value framework that overlooked and neglected ‘women’s work’ and acts of care. She reveals how the economic models that drive political decisions today are just as flawed, giving us unparalleled monetary wealth, but causing deep social harms that are hurting us all. 
 
If we cannot properly value the things that matter, how can we build a better future?

Deficit

How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World

Anne Boyer

''Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange: 
 
Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it. 
 
Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects? 
 
I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt. 
 
What do you think would happen? 
 
People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt.' 
 
When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through dreams - in all the forms and categories that shape, contain and constrain - that we keep ourselves alive. Yet, in a society in which some are rich and some are poor, who gets to dream, and who invents our forms? This is a book made of money and the lack of money; of writing and of not-writing; of illness and of care; of low-rent apartments, cake-baking mothers, Socratic daughters and bodies that refuse to become information.

Garments Against Women

Scott Galloway

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
In Adrift, Scott Galloway looks from the past to the present - from 1945 to the 2020s - to reveal how America has reached its current state of political, social and economic crisis. It is on the brink of massive change, change that will disrupt the working of its economy and drastically impact its financial backbone, the middle class. 
 
Telling America's story through 100 charts, Galloway demonstrates how crises such as Jim Crow, World War II, and the Stock Market Crash of 2008, as well as the escalating power of technology, an entrenched white patriarchy, and the socio-economic effects of the pandemic, created today's perfect storm. 
 
Adrift seeks to make sense of it all, and offers Galloway's unique take on where America is headed and what it will become. It's a vital guide for anyone who wants to understand the state the country is in and how and why its influence on the world has changed.

Adrift

100 Charts that Reveal Why America is on the Brink of Change

Marc Coleman

We're in the midst of a global economic crisis and a domestic economic disaster. 
 
But enough of the hand-wringing. Where did this all come from, where are we now and, most importantly, what's going to happen next? 
 
In a compelling and jargon-free argument, economist Marc Coleman makes sense of this mess we're in with clear, accessible analysis of Ireland's economic situation and where it might be heading. 
 
Addressing first the global dimension - how early warnings were ignored, why American monetary policy failed the world and why an unfinished revolution in globalisation left us defenceless - Coleman makes a case for a new kind of capitalism. 
 
The unravelling threads that created the Irish financial crisis are also untangled. The death of competitiveness, the mismanagement of tax revenues, issues of demographics, bad urban planning, stupid banks and an unsuccessful regulator are all examined and, combined with dysfunctional politics, are shown to be the root causes of the predicament we now find ourselves in. 
 
But all is not lost. 
 
With a positive, can-do approach to the economic crisis, Coleman creates a fix-it manual for the future, explaining how Ireland can prosper again by adopting a smart economy, reforming social partnership and curing a warped fiscal cycle with budgetary and electoral reform. 
 
Ireland's economic nightmare will end. It is a dream not destroyed, merely delayed.

Back From The Brink

Ireland's Road to Recovery

Angela Y. Davis

An icon of revolutionary politics, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for prison abolition for over fifty years. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, the first of two important new volumes, brings together an essential collection of Davis&rsquo;s essays, conversations, and interviews over the years, showing how her thinking has sharpened and evolved even as she has remained uncompromising in her commitment to collective liberation. 
 
Davis traces a genealogy of the penal system, from slavery to the prison industrial complex, offering a trenchant analysis of the relationship between the prison system and capitalism, both in the US and on a global scale. Combining decades of analytical brilliance and lessons from organising both inside and beyond prison walls, Davis addresses the history of abolitionist practice, details the unique contributions of women to abolitionist struggles, and offers the radical tools we need for revolutionary change. 
 
Powerful and rewarding, filled with insight and provocation, Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, is essential reading for anyone seeking to imagine a world without prisons.

Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Vol. 1

Norman Longmate

Everyone has heard of the workhouse. But what exactly was it? Who went there? And how did an institution so universally hated come to be set up? Surprisingly, no full-scale history of the workhouse has ever been written. A year after the re-opening of the workhouse at Southwell by the National Trust, this book fills the gap and tells the full story from its first beginnings in Elizabethan times until the final reluctant demise of 'the union' in the 1940s. 
 
The book concentrates, however, on the Victorian workhouse in the years of its tarnished glory. It describes the combination of circumstances which in the 1830s led to the opening of 600 new workhouses, against astonishingly little effective opposition, and it explains why radicals like Francis Place and humane reformers like Lord Brougham supported the New Poor Law, while a handful of Tories like Disraeli and arch-reactionaries like Colonel Sibthorpe fought against it. It records the riots, the protests, the pleadings, with which the poor challenged their virtual enslavement, and the misery of their daily life when they were finally incarcerated within the workhouse walls. 
 
What did gruel taste like? Why was workhouse uniform so uncomfortable to wear? How did it feel to pound bones all day, or grind corn, or scrub floors? How was Christmas Day in the workhouse celebrated in reality? Norman Longmate has, by exhaustive research into long-neglected sources, managed to answer all these and many more questions, in the words of those who experienced the workhouse regime. All the essential facts - of legislation passed and numbers admitted - are here, presented in a concise and lucid form which will make this book valuable to the serious student, but they are illustrated throughout by a wealth of anecdote, which reveals in human terms the meaning of the laws and regulations which previous historians of the Poor Law have so often merely catalogued.

The Workhouse

John Kenneth Galbraith

&quot;A compelling challenge to conventional thought&quot; New York Times In this newly updated edition of his classic text on the &quot;economics of abundance&quot;, Galbraith lays bare the hazards of individual and social complacency about economic inequality. It is as relevant now, with the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, as when it was first published 40 years ago. Galbraith challenges why we worship work and productivity when so many of the goods we produce are superfluous, and why we grudge spending on public works while ignoring extravagance in the private sector. THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY exemplifies Galbraith's wit, clarity and eloquence of prose.

The Affluent Society

Updated with a New Introduction by the Author

Silvia Federici

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.

Caliban and the Witch

Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Piers Brendon

Piers Brendon's magisterial overview of the 1930s is the story of the dark, dishonest decade - child of one world war and parent of the next - that determined the course of the twentieth century. 
 
Dealing individually with each of the period's great powers - the USA, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, Spain and Russia - Brendon takes us through the ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil. When Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfurstendamm and the Ginza - neon metaphors of hope after four years of carnage - grew dim as the giants of unemployment, hardship, strife and fear took their hold. From the concentration camps of Dachau and Kolyma, the Ukraine famine and the American Dust Bowl, to the Moscow metro, the Empire State Building and the Paris Exposition, The Dark Valley brings the 1930's back to life through meticulous scholarship. 
 
Brendon examines the great leaders - Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Tse-Tung, Haile Selassie and countless others - not with hindsight but in the context of their age; but also, through a vivid chronicling of contemporary experience, he gives us a sense of what it was to be living then.

The Dark Valley

Richard McGregor

For more than half a century, American power in the Pacific has successfully kept the peace. But it has also cemented the tensions in the toxic rivalry between China and Japan, consumed with endless history wars and entrenched political dynasties. Now, the combination of these forces with Donald Trump's unpredictable impulses and disdain for America's old alliances threatens to upend the region. If the United States helped lay the postwar foundations for modern Asia, Asia's Reckoning will reveal how that structure is now crumbling. With unrivalled access to archives in the US and Asia, as well as many of the major players in all three countries, Richard McGregor has written a tale which blends the tectonic shifts in diplomacy with the domestic political trends and personalities driving them. It is a story not only of an overstretched America, but also of the rise and fall and rise of the great powers of Asia. The confrontational course on which China and Japan have increasingly set themselves is no simple spat between neighbours. And the fallout would be a political and economic tsunami.

Asia's Reckoning

The Struggle for Global Dominance

Maya Shankar

An unexpected diagnosis. 
A breakup. 
A redundancy. 
 
When life throws a curveball, this book helps you overcome. 
 
After an incident in her own life left her reeling, pioneering cognitive scientist Maya Shankar spent decades researching the mind. Her powerful book now invites us to rethink our relationship with change altogether. 
 
Sharing the riveting stories of others who have also gone through remarkable disruption, Maya unpicks scientific insights to illuminate the universal lessons hidden within them. Exploring our complex reactions to all kinds of change, from denial and guilt to rumination and stagnation, we’re offered tools and strategies to unlock our full potential in the face of upheaval. 
 
We see how change isn’t something to just endure. It doesn't have to leave us feeling stuck, hopeless or broken. Approached in the right way, it can lead us to uncover new abilities, perspectives and values, transforming us in extraordinary ways. 
 
Whether you're processing a past change, grappling with a present one, or bracing for a future one, discover who you can become on the other side of change.

The Other Side of Change

Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans

Emily Callaci

'The women of the world are serving notice. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don’t get what we want, we will simply refuse to work any longer!' 
 
Across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework! Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise. 
 
Here historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators, tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades: from the early 1970s, when Selma James, a working-class political organizer, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a scholar-activist, started laying the foundations of Wages for Housework in London and Italy; through philosopher Silvia Federici reframing the campaign in the context of New York City’s fiscal crisis; to Wilmette Brown, lesbian poet and anti-war activist, and Margaret Prescod, community organizer, who brought the insights of Black feminism to the movement. 
 
Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism – and beyond. Then as now, Wages for Housework poses profound questions. What would it be like to live in a society that prioritizes care rather than production? How would this change our relationship with the natural world? And what would women do with their lives if they had more time?

Wages for Housework

The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise

Ingrid Robeyns

We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately. 
 
In this game-changing intervention, leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control. In moral, political, economic, social, environmental and psychological terms, she shows, extreme wealth is not only unjustifiable but harmful to us all - the rich included. 
 
In place of our current system, Robeyns offers a breathtakingly clear alternative: limitarianism. The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism - and the opportunity for a vastly better world - lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. Because nobody deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you.

Limitarianism

The Case Against Extreme Wealth

Frank McDonald

Kathy Sheridan

In the past fifteen years, Ireland has gone from being one of the poorest countries in the EU to one of the richest in the world. Of all the factors in this extraordinary transformation, none has been more prominent than the astonishing boom in construction. In The Builders, Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan tell the stories of these men and of the changes - physical and psychological - they have brought about. The story of Ireland's property developers has been the great untold story of the boom - until now.

The Builders

How a Small Group of Property Developers Fuelled the Building Boom and Transformed Ireland

Walt Bogdanich

Michael Forsythe

**A TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022** 
 
An explosive exposé of a firm whose work has made your world more unequal, more corrupt and more dangerous. 
 
McKinsey & Company have earned billions consulting almost every major corporation in the world - and countless governments, including our own. Shielded by NDAs, their practices have remained vague - until now. 
 
In this propulsive investigation, prize-winning journalists Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe reveal the jaw-dropping reality. McKinsey's work includes ruthless cost-cutting in the NHS, troubleshooting for Big Oil, executing Trump's immigration policies (the ones that put children in cages) as well as advising some of the world's most unsavoury despots. 
 
'A story of secrecy, delusion and untold harm' OBSERVER 
 
'Makes you so angry...the evidence the authors winkle out is astonishing' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'Panoramic, meticulously reported and ultimately devastating' PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE 
 
'A harrowing account of decades of dishonourable exploits' ECONOMIST

When McKinsey Comes to Town

The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm

Joya Chatterji

This book tells the story of South's Asia's twentieth century in eight chapters. Unlike standard narrative histories of the subcontinent that concentrate exclusively on politics, here nature, objects, technologies, cultures, and people's changing relationships to them and to each other, are central preoccupations. 
 
The structure of the book is unorthodox. Unusually for a work of this kind, it is thematic rather than chronological. Chapters address specific questions that might arise in the minds of a 'lay', but thoughtful, reader; but each chapter is chronological within itself, analysing change over a century in one particular sphere. This format allows the reader to explore particular issues - say, the changing character of nationalism, migration or consumption - over time and in depth. 
 
Shadows at Noon is a bold and innovative work that pushes back against standard narratives of 'inherent' differences between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The purpose of the book is to make contemporary South Asia intelligible, while sharing with the reader its infinite colour and excitement. The book does not 'talk down' to the reader or attempt, in facile ways, to simplify the history of a vast, and almost mythically intricate, society.

Shadows At Noon

The South Asian Twentieth Century

John Lanchester

John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay is the unbelievable true story of the economic crisis. 
 
 We are, to use a technical economic term, screwed. The cowboy capitalists had a party with everyone's money and now we're all paying for it. What went wrong? And will we learn our lesson - or just carry on as before, like celebrating surviving a heart attack with a packet of Rothmans? 
 
 John Lanchester travels with a cast of characters - including reckless banksters, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts, and innocent bystanders to understand deeply and genuinely what is happening and why we feel the way we do. 
 
 'Devastatingly funny ... the route map to the crazed world of contemporary finance we have all been waiting for' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Will Self 
 
 'Bang on the money' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Independent 
 
 'Explains the crisis in a way that actually sticks ... to my amazement, I finally grasp it' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Janice Turner, The Times 
 
 'Endlessly witty ... will turn any reader into an expert within the space of 200 pages' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Jonathan Coe 
 
 'Terrific ... there is no better guide to the crazy world of high finance' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;GQ 
 
 John Lanchester is a journalist, novelist and winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award. His fiction includes Mr Philips, The Debt to Pleasure and Capital. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, with a monthly column in Esquire.

Whoops!

Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

Daniel Chandler

Despite the enormous problems we face and widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, it's surprisingly hard to find a coherent vision of what a better, fairer society would look like. 
 
Free and Equal provides that vision. In this hugely ambitious and exhilarating debut, philosopher and economist Daniel Chandler argues that the ideas we need are hiding in plain sight, in the work of the twentieth century's greatest political philosopher, John Rawls. Although they have revolutionised philosophy, his ideas have had little impact on politics - until now. Taking Rawls's humane and egalitarian liberalism as his starting point, Chandler builds a careful and ultimately irresistible case for a progressive agenda that would fundamentally reshape our political and economic institutions. 
 
This is a book brimming with hope and possibility - a much-needed alternative to the cynicism that pervades our politics, setting out a 'realistic utopia' that can galvanise people from all walks of life. Free and Equal has the potential not only to transform contemporary debate, but to offer a touchstone for a modern, egalitarian liberalism for many years to come, cementing Rawls's place in political discourse, and firmly establishing Chandler as a vital new voice for our time.

Free and Equal

What Would a Fair Society Look Like?

John Cassidy

At a time when we are faced with fundamental questions about the sustainability and morality of the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from colonialism and the Industrial Revolution to the ecological crisis and artificial intelligence. 
 
John Cassidy adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics. From eighteenth-century weavers who rebelled against early factory automation to Eric Williams's paradigm-changing work on slavery and capitalism, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, this absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It looks at familiar figures – Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi – from a fresh perspective, but also focuses on many less familiar, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labour union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; and J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Gandhian economics. 
 
Blending biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time.

Capitalism and Its Critics

A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World

Eliza Filby

The Sunday Times Bestseller! 
 
Many of us grew up believing in a meritocracy, where hard work and a good education brings rewards. Go to university, get a job, put in the hours and things will be OK. That’s what we were told – but the reality is that life chances and opportunities are no longer shaped by what we learn or earn but by whether we have access to the Bank of Mum and Dad. We’re living in an inheritocracy, where parental support is what matters most – whether that’s covering the cost of university, stumping up for a house deposit or helping with childcare. And let’s be honest, this isn’t something we like to talk about with our friends, families or as a society. It’s a modern taboo. 
 
In this timely and revealing book, generational expert Eliza Filby explores the emergence of this inheritocracy through her own life story, revealing how her family’s financial circumstances shaped everything from her education to her dating life, from her career to her class identity. Inheritocracy is a thought-provoking and candid blend of memoir and cultural commentary, told through Eliza’s humorous and insightful voice. 
 
With trillions of pounds set to be passed down the generations over the next two decades, a significant divide is emerging between those who can rely on family wealth and those who can’t. Inheritocracy offers a fresh, captivating and honest look at our recent past and a future that will be shaped – for better or worse – by family fortunes.

Inheritocracy

It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad

‘A fantastic, provocative book about where we are now and where we are going’ Phil Simon Huffington Post 
 
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are the four most influential companies on the planet. Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. Just about everyone is wrong. 
 
For all that’s been written about the Four over the last two decades, no one has captured their power and staggering success as insightfully as Scott Galloway. 
 
Instead of buying the myths these companies broadcast, Galloway asks fundamental questions: 
- How did the Four infiltrate our lives so completely that they’re almost impossible to avoid (or boycott)? 
- Why does the stock market forgive them for sins that would destroy other firms? 
- And as they race to become the world’s first trillion-dollar company, can anyone challenge them? 
 
In the same irreverent style that has made him one of the world’s most celebrated business professors, Galloway deconstructs the strategies of the Four that lurk beneath their shiny veneers. He shows how they manipulate the fundamental emotional needs that have driven us since our ancestors lived in caves, at a speed and scope others can’t match. And he reveals how you can apply the lessons of their ascent to your own business or career. 
 
Whether you want to compete with them, do business with them, or simply live in the world they dominate, you need to understand the Four.

The Four

The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google

Slavoj Žižek

In Trouble in Paradise, Slavoj Žižek, one of our most famous, most combative philosophers, explains how by drawing on the ideas of communism, we can find a way out of the crisis of capitalism. 
 
There is obviously trouble in the global capitalist paradise. But why do we find it so difficult to imagine a way out of the crisis we're in? It is as if the trouble feeds on itself: the march of capitalism has become inexorable, the only game in town. 
 
Setting out to diagnose the condition of global capitalism, the ideological constraints we are faced with in our daily lives, and the bleak future promised by this system, Slavoj Žižek explores the possibilities - and the traps - of new emancipatory struggles. 
 
Drawing insights from phenomena as diverse as Gangnam Style to Marx, The Dark Knight to Thatcher, Trouble in Paradise is an incisive dissection of the world we inhabit, and the new order to come. 
 
'The most dangerous philosopher in the West' - Adam Kirsch, New Republic 
 
'The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in many decades' - Terry Eagleton 
 
'Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation' - New Yorker

Trouble in Paradise

From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

Alan Greenspan

Adrian Wooldridge

Shortlisted for the FT &amp; McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2018 
 
'An inspiring, rip-roaring read - like the astonishing story it describes' Liam Halligan, Daily Telegraph 
 
Where does prosperity come from, and how does it spread through a society? What role does innovation play in creating prosperity and why do some eras see the fruits of innovation spread more democratically, and others, including our own, find the opposite? 
 
In Capitalism in America, Alan Greenspan, legendary Chair of the Federal Reserve, distils a lifetime of grappling with these questions into a profound assessment of the decisive drivers of the US economy over the course of its history. In partnership with Economist journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge, he unfolds a tale of vast landscapes, titanic figures and triumphant breakthroughs as well as terrible moral failings. Every crucial American economic debate is here - from the role of slavery in the antebellum Southern economy to America's violent swings in its openness to global trade. 
 
At heart, the authors argue, America's genius has been its enthusiasm for the effects of creative destruction, the ceaseless churn of the old giving way to the new. Although messy and painful, it has lifted the overwhelming majority of Americans to standards of living unimaginable even a few generations past. At a time when productivity has again stalled, stirring populist furies, and the continuing of American pre-eminence seems uncertain, Capitalism in America explains why America has worked so successfully in the past and been such a gigantic engine of economic growth.

Capitalism in America

A History

Richard Layard

In this new edition of his landmark book, Richard Layard shows that there is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. This is not just anecdotally true, it is the story told by countless pieces of scientific research. We now have sophisticated ways of measuring how happy people are, and all the evidence shows that on average people have grown no happier in the last fifty years, even as average incomes have more than doubled. In fact, the First World has more depression, more alcoholism and more crime than fifty years ago. This paradox is true of Britain, the United States, continental Europe, and Japan. What is going on? Now fully revised and updated to include developments since first publication, Layard answers his critics in what is still the key book in 'happiness studies'.

Happiness

Lessons from a New Science (Second Edition)

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Kate-Atkinson

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

Discover the Penguin books that shaped us

Extracts

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

8 spirited heroes that will inspire you to be brave 

Features

8 spirited heroes that will inspire you to be brave

6 lessons your child will learn from Terry Pratchett books

6 lessons your child will learn from Terry Pratchett's books

An image showing a selection of adventure stories for 9-12 year olds on a bright yellow background with orange doodles that include a hashtag, flag, danger sign and speech bubble

Children's reading lists

16 books for 9 to 12-year-olds that love adventures

An image of a selection of spooky children's books on a dark purple background with an orange shape which features a zig-zag pattern

32 spooky books to read this Halloween

An image of the author Terry Pratchett, on a red and purple background, holding out his hand as though he is casting a spell and there are a couple of illustrations from his books riding the wave

'At his best, Terry was a teacher': Why we love Terry Pratchett

A picture of several different children's books on a pink to blue ombre background; each book has a bright yellow shadow

Showing results for: ‘tiffany aching’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter