Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.
Hailed a “significant contribution” by The New York Times, David Noble’s book America by Design describes the factors that have shaped the history of scientific technology in the United States. Since the beginning, technology and industry have been undeniably intertwined, and Noble demonstrates how corporate capitalism has not only become the driving force behind the development of technology in this country but also how scientific research—particularly within universities—has been dominated by the corporations who fund it, who go so far as to influence the education of the engineers that will one day create the technology to be used for capitalist gain. Noble reveals that technology, often thought to be an independent science, has always been a means to an end for the men pulling the strings of Corporate America—and it was these men that laid down the plans for the design of the modern nation today.
This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.
In this age of genetic engineering and global warming, it is more important than ever to understand the history and current trends of science and technology. With so much information out there, though, it's hard to know where to start. That's where The History of Science and Technology -- the most comprehensive and up-to-date chronology of its kind -- comes in. From the first stone tools to the first robot surgery, this easy-to-read, handy reference book offers more than seven thousand concise entries organized within ten major historical periods and categorized by subject, such as archaeology, biology, computers, food and agriculture, medicine and health, materials, and transportation. You can follow the world's scientific and technological feats forward or backward, year by year, and subject by subject. Under 8400 BCE Construction, you will discover that the oldest known wall was built in Jericho. Jump to 1454 Communication and you will learn about Johann Gutenberg's invention of movable type. Take an even larger leap to 2002 Computers and find out about the invention of the Earth Simulator, a Japanese supercomputer. The History of Science and Technology answers all the what, when, why, and how questions about our world's greatest discoveries and inventions: How are bridges built? When were bifocal eyeglasses invented and by whom? What medical discovery led to the introduction of sterilization, vaccines, and antibiotics? What is the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) process, and why is it one of the pillars of the biotechnology revolution? Not only can you discover how our world came to be and how it works, but with cross-referenced entries you can also trace many intricate and exciting connections across time. Highly browsable yet richly detailed, expertly researched and indexed, The History of Science and Technology is the perfect desktop reference for both the science novice and the technologically advanced reader alike.
The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction is a new look at an ancient subject: the silk road that linked China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean across the expanses of Central Asia. James A. Millward highlights unusual but important biological, technological and cultural exchanges over the silk roads that stimulated development across Eurasia and underpin civilization in our modern, globalized world.
In the nineteenth century, science and technology developed a close and continuing relationship. The important advancements in physics were deeply rooted in the new technologies of the steam engine, the telegraph, and electric power and light. The author explores how the leading technologies of the industrial age helped reshape modern physics.