Browse

To most Americans, the United States tax code has become a vast and confounding puzzle. In 1940, the instructions to the form 1040 were about four pages long. Today, they have ballooned to more than a hundred pages, and the form itself contains more than ten schedules and twenty worksheets. The complete tax code totals about 2.8 million words—about four times the length of War and Peace. The author of this book maintains that America's tax code has become a tangle of loopholes, paperwork, and inconsistencies—a massive social program which fails tests of simplicity and fairness. More important, our tax system has failed to keep pace with the changing economy, creating burdens and wastes of resources that weigh our nation down. The author offers a solution in which most Americans pay no income tax at all, and those who do pay tax enjoy a far simpler tax process, arguing that this is possible without decreasing government revenues or removing key incentives for employer-sponsored health care plans and pensions.

Predicting the future is serious business for virtually all public and private institutions because they must often make important decisions based on such predictions. This book explores how institutions from legislatures to corporations might improve their predictions and arrive at better decisions by means of prediction markets, a promising new tool with virtually unlimited potential applications. The book explains how prediction markets work; why they accurately forecast elections, sports contests, and other events; and how they may even advance the ideals of our system of republican government. It also explores the ways in which prediction markets address common problems related to institutional decision-making. Throughout, the book extends current thinking about prediction markets and offers imaginative proposals for their use in an array of settings and situations.

This book provides a legal blueprint for creating alternate corporate business models that mitigate climate change, pay living wages, and act as responsible community members, including Certified B Corps and benefit corporations. With an emphasis on cooperatives, the book reveals the power and potential of cooperating as a unifying concept around which to design social enterprise achieving triple bottom-line results: for society, the environment, and finance. The book begins with the year 2020, considering it an inflection point when the world changed due to the spread of the novel coronavirus and sent people into isolation. It talks about the cooperation learned during the pandemic, which is essential in the transition off fossil fuels. It also mentions path-breaking cooperatives that sparked ideas for how to structure social enterprises. Another world was shown to be possible, wherein fossil fuels are left behind and a better life in the new democratic economy is defined by shared prosperity. We have reached a critical juncture in global development that calls for a fresh approach to cooperating for a livable planet. There is a growing awareness around the world to move the global economy off fossil fuels and rethink and redesign man's relationship with natural resources.

This book argues that, although little noticed, the face of central banking has changed significantly over the past ten to fifteen years. The author, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve System and member of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, shows that the changes, although quiet, have been sufficiently profound to constitute a revolution in central banking, and considers three of the most significant aspects of the revolution. The first is the shift toward transparency: whereas central bankers once believed in secrecy and even mystery, greater openness is now considered a virtue. The second is the transition from monetary policy decisions made by single individuals to decisions made by committees. The third change is a profoundly different attitude toward the markets, from that of stern schoolmarm to one of listener. The author examines the origins of these changes, and their pros and cons.

This book grapples with a core modern reality—that the value and meaning of a home extends beyond its property lines to schools, shops, parks, services, neighbors, neighborhood aesthetics, and market conditions. The resulting tension between the homeowner's desire for personal autonomy at home and the impulse to control everything that could affect the home's value fuels continual conflict among neighbors and communities. The home's unbounded nature implicates nearly every facet of residential life, from the financial vulnerability of homeowners to the persistence of segregation by race and class. The book shows how innovations that increase the flexibility of property law can address critical issues of neighborhood control and community composition that have been simmering unresolved for decades—and how homeownership itself can be reinvented to better deliver on its promises.

Three decades ago, federal policymakers—Republicans and Democrats—embarked on a general strategy of deregulation. In the electricity, gas delivery, and telecommunications industries, the strategy called for restructuring to separate production from transmission and distribution, followed by elimination of price controls. The expected results were lower prices and increased quality, reliability, and scope of services. The author of this book, an economist with 40 years of experience in the regulatory field, assesses the results and concludes that deregulation has failed to achieve any of these goals in any of these industries. The book shows that we now have only partial deregulation, a mixture of oligopoly structure with direct price control. The book explores why this system leads to volatile and high prices, reduced investment, and low profitability, and deciding which policy actions can be implemented to address these problems.