Economics (Barron's Business Review Series)

Rating:
Summary: Great book as a supplement or a refresher!
Review: Having already obtained a B.S. in Economics, I was looking for a book to have a refresher before I start my masters degree. Boy did I ever pick the right book! This book is fantastic. It is easy to read, is very insightful, and has great question and answer sessions as you go through the chapters. It even has an entire chapter (ch. 2) on what most people find to be the most difficult part of economics, the graphs. It covers Macro, Micro, and even stems out into taxes and government, spilling over a bit into finance even. This is a great book and I would reccomend it for anyone who needs a good refresher or just some additional help.

Rating:
Summary: Great book as a supplement or a refresher!
Review: Having already obtained a B.S. in Economics, I was looking for a book to have a refresher before I start my masters degree. Boy did I ever pick the right book! This book is fantastic. It is easy to read, is very insightful, and has great question and answer sessions as you go through the chapters. It even has an entire chapter (ch. 2) on what most people find to be the most difficult part of economics, the graphs. It covers Macro, Micro, and even stems out into taxes and government, spilling over a bit into finance even. This is a great book and I would reccomend it for anyone who needs a good refresher or just some additional help.

Rating:
Summary: Good resource
Review: This book has come in handy with some of my business courses. When a text book is "foggy" on something this littly book has come through to clear up the subject in question. The only down side to this is that most classes are taught with a separation between micro and macro. This book is separated also, but I think it would be best to have to books instead of one, that way the authors could cover each area in more detail.

Rating:
Summary: Good resource
Review: This book, like the others I have read from the Business Review Series is top notch. It covers the topics presented in college level economics courses. It covers macroeconomics and microeconomics theories. Easily, this is one of the more readable texts on an otherwise dry subject.

The book targets both students and professionals who want to get a deeper understanding of economics. Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Well I read this book and the author is really great.The book tells one about the finer points about economics, Another book that i reccomend by this author is Micro Economics the easy way

Rating:
Summary: What is, not what ought to be
Review: Wessels doesn't mention that indignity, disempowerment, and hunger accompany capitalism worldwide. No one sensibly denies this, yet even among those who despise capitalism, most fear that suffering would increase without it. While some certainly find capitalism odious, few celebrate an alternative and those who do generally favor "market socialism," But there's a great alternative. To transcend capitalism, we can advocate equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, and ecological balance. What institutions can propel these values in domestic economics, as well as get economic functions done well?
To start, we should advocate public/social property relations in place of privatized capitalist property relations. In the new system, each workplace is owned in equal part by all citizens. This ownership conveys no special right or income. Bill Gates doesn't own a massive proportion of the means by which software is produced. Instead, we all do--or symmetrically, if you prefer, no one does. At any rate, ownership of productive property becomes moot regarding distribution of income, wealth, or power. In this way the ills of private ownership such as personal accrual of profits yielding huge wealth, disappear. But that's it. We haven't accomplished anything more than that, only a removal. We must go much further.
Next, workers and consumers are organized into democratic councils with the norm for decisions being that methods of dispersing information to decision-makers and at arriving at preferences and tallying them into decisions should be such as to convey to each actor about each decision, to the extent possible, influence over the decision in proportion to the degree they will be affected by it. Councils exist at many levels, and have subunits such as work groups and teams and individuals, as well as supra units such as workplaces and whole industries. Councils are the seat of decision making power. Actors in councils are the decision-makers. Votes could be majority rule, three quarters, two-thirds, consensus, etc., and would be taken at different levels, with fewer or more participants, all as appropriate depending on the particular implications of the decisions in question. Sometimes a team or individual would make a decision pretty much on its own, though within a rubric of other encompassing decisions that were made more broadly. Sometimes a whole workplace or even industry would be the decision body. Different voting and tallying methods would be employed, as needed for different decisions. There is no a priori single correct choice. There is, however, a right norm to try to efficiently and sensibly implement: decision-making input should be in proportion as one is affected by decisions.
Next, what about the organization of work? Who does what tasks in what combinations? Each actor does a job, of course, and each job is composed of a variety of tasks, of course. What changes from current corporate divisions of labor to a preferred future division of labor is that the variety of tasks each actor does is balanced for its empowerment and quality of life implications. Every person participating in creating new products is a worker. Each and every worker has a balanced job complex. The combination of tasks and responsibilities you have accords you the same empowerment and quality of life as the combination I have accords me, and likewise for each other worker and their balanced job complex. We do not have some people overwhelmingly monopolizing empowering, fulfilling, and engaging tasks and circumstances. We do not have other people overwhelmingly saddled with only rote, obedient, and dangerous things to do. For reasons of equity and especially to create the conditions of democratic participation and self-management, we establish that when we each participate in our workplace and industry (and consumer) decision-making, we each have been comparably prepared by our work with confidence, skills, and knowledge to do so. The typical situation now is that some people who produce have great confidence, social skills, decision-making skills, and relevant knowledge imbued by their daily work, and other people are only tired, de-skilled, and lacking relevant knowledge due to their daily work. Balanced job complexes do away with this division of circumstances. They complete the task of removing the root basis for class divisions that is begun by eliminating private ownership of capital. They eliminate not only the role of owner/capitalist and its disproportionate power and wealth, but also the role of intellectual/decision making producer who exists over and above all others,. They retain the needed tasks, but they apportion them and also rote and unempowering responsibilities more equitably and in tune with true democracy and classlessness.
But how much are people paid? We work. This entitles us to a share of the product of work. But how much? This new vision says that we ought to receive for our labors an amount in tune with how hard we have worked, how long we have worked, and with what sacrifices we have worked. We shouldn't get more by virtue of being more productive due to having better tools, more skills, or greater inborn talent, much less by virtue of having more power or owning more property. We should be entitled to more consumption from society's product only by virtue of expending more of our effort or otherwise enduring more sacrifice in its creation. This is morally appropriate and also provides proper incentives due to rewarding only what we can affect, not what we can't. With balanced job complexes, for eight hours of normally paced work Sally and Sam will receive the same income,. This is so if they have the same job, or any job at all. That is, no matter what their particular job may be, no matter what workplaces they are in and how different their mix of tasks is, and no matter how talented they are, if they at a balanced job complex, their total work load will be similar in its quality of life implications and empowerment effects, so the only difference specifically relevant to reward for their labors is going to be length and intensity of work done, and with these equal as well, the share of output earned will be equal. If length of time working or intensity of working differ somewhat, so will share of output earned. And who mediates decisions about the definition of job complexes and about what rates and intensities people are working? Workers do, of course, in their councils and with appropriate decision-making say using information culled by methods consistent with employing balanced job complexes and just remuneration.
There is one very large step left to proposing an alternative to capitalism, even in broad outline. How are the actions of workers and consumers connected? How do decisions made in one workplace and all others, and by collective consumer councils, as well as by individual consumers, all come into accord? What causes the total that is produced by workplaces to match the total consumed collectively by neighborhoods and other groups and privately by individuals? For that matter, what determines the relative social valuation of different products and choices? What decides how many workers will be in which industry producing how much? What determines whether some product should be made or not, and how much? What determines what investments in new productive means and methods should be undertaken and which others delayed or rejected? These are all matters of allocation, among others that are too numerous to list in their entirety here. Existing options for dealing with allocation are central planning (as was used in the old Soviet Union) and markets (as is used in all capitalist economies with minor or greater variations). In central planning a bureaucracy culls information, formulates instructions, sends these instructions to workers and consumers, gets some feedback, refines the instructions a bit, sends them again, and gets back obedience. In a market each actor in isolation from concern for other actors well being competitively pursues its own agenda by buying and selling labor (or the ability to do it) and buying and selling products and resources at prices determined by competitive bidding. Each actor seeks to gain more than other parties in their exchanges. The problem is, each of these two modes of connecting actors and units imposes on the rest of the economy pressures that subvert the values and structures we favor. Markets, for example, even without private capitalization of property, distort valuations to favor private over public benefits and to channel personalities in anti-social directions diminishing and even destroying solidarity. They reward primarily output and power and not only effort and sacrifice. They divide economic actors into a class that is saddled with rote and obedient labor and another that enjoys empowering circumstances and determines economic outcomes, also accruing most income. They isolate buyers and sellers as decision-makers who have no choice but to competitively ignore the wider implications of their choices, including effects on the ecology. Central planning, in contrast, is authoritarian. It denies self management and produces the same class division and hierarchy as markets built first around the distinction between planners and those who implement their plans, and extending outward to incorporate empowered and disempowered workers more generally. Both these allocation systems subvert the values we hold dear, rather than propelling them. What is the alternative to markets and central planning.
In place of top-down imposition of centrally planned choices and in place of competitive market exchange by atomized buyers and sellers, we opt for cooperative, informed choosing by organizationally and socially entwined actors each having a say in proportion as choices impact them and each able to access needed accurate information and valuations and having appropriate training and confidence to develop and communicate their preferences. This choice is consistent with council centered participatory self-management, with remuneration for effort and sacrifice, with balanced job complexes, with proper valuations of collective and ecological impacts, and with classlessness. To these ends, activists favor participatory planning, a system in which worker and consumer councils propose their work activities and consumer preferences in light of accurate knowledge of local and global implications and true valuations of the full social benefits and costs their choices will impose and garner. The system utilizes a back and forth cooperative communication of mutually informed preferences via a variety of simple communicative and organizing principles and vehicles including indicative prices, facilitation boards, rounds of accommodation to new information, and so on - all permitting actors to express their desires and to mediate and refine them in light of feedback about other's desires, arriving at compatible choices consistent with remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory self managing influence.




Rating:
Summary: Wonderful prep for an MBA program, and study guide for CLEPs
Review: Your Business Review series is excellent. While this series was not designed for CLEPs or any of the other standardized examinations universities use to test accomplished areas of knowledge, I have found the entire series crucial for just that. Particularly as I am entering an MBA program. These volumes were precisely what I needed, and I have been telling everyone with even slight interest in these topics about them. Specifically, I am referring to the following books of the series (by title): Accounting, Economics, Finance, (Business) Statistics, Management, and Marketing.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful prep for an MBA program, and study guide for CLEPs
Review: Your Business Review series is excellent. While this series was not designed for CLEPs or any of the other standardized examinations universities use to test accomplished areas of knowledge, I have found the entire series crucial for just that. Particularly as I am entering an MBA program. These volumes were precisely what I needed, and I have been telling everyone with even slight interest in these topics about them. Specifically, I am referring to the following books of the series (by title): Accounting, Economics, Finance, (Business) Statistics, Management, and Marketing.