Modern Monopolies

Modern Monopolies

Author: Alex Moazed

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1250091896

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town, creating vast fortunes for its founders while dominating everyone's daily life. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather that making things, they simply connect people. The Internet today is awash in platforms - Facebook is responsible for nearly 25 percent of total Web visits, and the Google platform crash in 2013 took about 40 percent of Internet traffic with it. Representing the ten most trafficked sites in the U.S., platforms are also prominent over the globe; in China, they hold the top eight spots in web traffic rankings. The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other, melding the digital and physical worlds and blurring distinctions between "offline" and "online." These platform giants are expanding their influence from the digital world to the whole economy. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last ten years. In Modern Monopolies, Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson tell the definitive story of what has changed, what it means for businesses today, and how managers, entrepreneurs, and business owners can adapt and thrive in this new era.


Goliath

Goliath

Author: Matt Stoller

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 1501182897

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“Every thinking American must read” (The Washington Book Review) this startling and “insightful” (The New York Times) look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism has transformed American politics, and business. Going back to our country’s founding, Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny, one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis. A concentration of power—whether by government or banks—was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse. They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal. In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today’s bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment. The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller’s study will only grow more relevant as time passes. “An engaging call to arms,” (Kirkus Reviews) Stoller illustrates here in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy.


It's All a Game

It's All a Game

Author: Tristan Donovan

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2017-05-30

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1250082730

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“[A] timely book . . . a wonderfully entertaining trip around the board, through 4,000 years of game history.” —The Wall Street Journal Board games have been with us even longer than the written word. But what is it about this pastime that continues to captivate us well into the age of smartphones and instant gratification? In It’s All a Game, Tristan Donovan, British journalist and author of Replay: The History of Video Games, opens the box on the incredible and often surprising history and psychology of board games. He traces the evolution of the game across cultures, time periods, and continents, from the paranoid Chicago toy genius behind classics like Operation and Mouse Trap, to the role of Monopoly in helping prisoners of war escape the Nazis, and even the scientific use of board games today to teach artificial intelligence how to reason and how to win. With these compelling stories and characters, Donovan ultimately reveals why board games—from chess to Monopoly to Risk and more—have captured hearts and minds all over the world for generations. “Splendid . . . A quick and breezy read, it doesn’t just tell the fascinating stories of the (often struggling) individuals who created our favorite games. It also manages to convey the entire sweep of board game history, from the earliest forms of checkers to modern-day surprise hits like Settlers of Catan.” —Mashable “Artfully weaves together culture, business, and ways games impact society.” —Booklist “A fascinating and insightful discussion not only of games past, but the socioeconomic and historical factors that contributed to their popularity.” —Chicago Review of Books


The Monopolists

The Monopolists

Author: Mary Pilon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1620405717

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Monopolists reveals the unknown story of how Monopoly came into existence, the reinvention of its history by Parker Brothers and multiple media outlets, the lost female originator of the game, and one man's lifelong obsession to tell the true story about the game's questionable origins. Most think it was invented by an unemployed Pennsylvanian who sold his game to Parker Brothers during the Great Depression in 1935 and lived happily--and richly--ever after. That story, however, is not exactly true. Ralph Anspach, a professor fighting to sell his Anti-Monopoly board game decades later, unearthed the real story, which traces back to Abraham Lincoln, the Quakers, and a forgotten feminist named Lizzie Magie who invented her nearly identical Landlord's Game more than thirty years before Parker Brothers sold their version of Monopoly. Her game--underpinned by morals that were the exact opposite of what Monopoly represents today--was embraced by a constellation of left-wingers from the Progressive Era through the Great Depression, including members of Franklin Roosevelt's famed Brain Trust. A gripping social history of corporate greed that illuminates the cutthroat nature of American business over the last century, The Monopolists reads like the best detective fiction, told through Monopoly's real-life winners and losers.


The Punishment Monopoly

The Punishment Monopoly

Author: Pem Davidson Buck

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Published: 2019-11-22

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1583678328

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examines the roots of white supremacy and mass incarceration from the vantage point of history Why, asks Pem Davidson Buck, is punishment so central to the functioning of the United States, a country proclaiming “liberty and justice for all”? The Punishment Monopoly challenges our everyday understanding of American history, focusing on the constructions of race, class, and gender upon which the United States was built, and which still support racial capitalism and the carceral state. After all, Buck writes, “a state, to be a state, has to punish ... bottom line, that is what a state and the force it controls is for.” Using stories of her European ancestors, who arrived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and following their descendants into the early nineteenth century, Buck shows how struggles over the right to punish, backed by the growing power of the state governed by a white elite, made possible the dispossession of Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites. Those struggles led to the creation of the low-wage working classes that capitalism requires, locked in by a metastasizing white supremacy that Buck’s ancestors, with many others, defined as white, helped establish and manipulate. Examining those foundational struggles illuminates some of the most contentious issues of the twenty-first century: the exploitation and detention of immigrants; mass incarceration as a central institution; Islamophobia; white privilege; judicial and extra-judicial killings of people of color and some poor whites. The Punishment Monopoly makes it clear that none of these injustices was accidental or inevitable; that shifting our state-sanctioned understandings of history is a step toward liberating us from its control of the present.


Salt and the Colombian State

Salt and the Colombian State

Author: Joshua M. Rosenthal

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2014-08-23

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0822977982

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In republican Colombia, salt became an important source of revenue not just to individuals, but to the state, which levied taxes on it and in some cases controlled and profited from its production. The salt trade consistently accounted for roughly 10 percent of government income. In the town of La Salina de Chita, in Boyaca province, thermal springs offered vast amounts of salt, and its procurement and distribution was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance. Focusing his study on La Salina, Joshua M. Rosenthal presents a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the early Colombian state, its institutions, and their interactions with local citizens during this formative period. Although historians have cited the state's weakness and, in many cases, its absence in local affairs, Rosenthal counters these assumptions by documenting the primary role the state held in administering contracts, inspections, land rights, labor, and trade in La Salina, contending that this was not an isolated incident. He also uncovers the frequent interaction between the state and local residents, who used the state's liberal rhetoric to gain personal economic advantage. Seen through the lens of the administration of La Salina's saltworks, Rosenthal provides a firsthand account of the role of local institutions and fiscal management in the larger process of state building. His study offers new perspectives on the complex network of republican Colombia's political culture and its involvement in provincial life across the nation.


Smashing the DC Monopoly

Smashing the DC Monopoly

Author: Tom Coburn

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781944229757

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Pork-barrel projects like the $452 million "bridge to nowhere" and Keynesian economic debacles like the $840 billion stimulus package that saved as few as 600,000 jobs ($1.4 million per job) have led to a staggering $20 trillion in national debt--about $150,000 per citizen. With most members of Congress focusing only on their own interests, it's time to smash the DC elitists' monopoly and rein in spending and extraconstitutional overreach. Although the Constitution established a framework for limited federal power and expansive personal freedoms, self-interested politicians and activist court rulings have seriously imbalanced the system. Smashing the DC Monopoly provides the solution to how we the people can finally wrest control away from Washington insiders and back to our local and state representatives. Having spent more than fifteen years fighting government fraud and irresponsibility, Sen. Tom Coburn reveals that at least $150 billion could be saved annually by eliminating waste and duplication in the federal government. Indeed, while serving on the Simpson-Bowles Commission Senator Coburn worked on a proposal to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over ten years (which, although a good first step, is but still a drop in the bucket compared to the federal government's $143 trillion in unfunded liabilities). Yet the profligate spending and mismanagement continue unabated. In fact, the growth of government has led to a divided, debt-ridden nation of dependent citizens with decreasing personal freedoms. It's time for the people to take charge. The Constitution's Framers anticipated a time when self-interested officials would be unwilling or unable to act in the people's long-term interest. Thus they included the safety feature of Article V that allows the people to propose amendments to the Constitution through the actions of their state legislatures. Already a growing number of grassroots organizations are actively promoting a convention of the states to address issues such as mandatory balancing of the federal budget, term limits on congressional members, and limits on the federal judiciary. Giving up on the political class, Smashing the DC Monopoly argues for an Article V amendments convention as the best solution to limit the power and scope of the federal government. The book provides the historical background for Article V, reveals past attempts to hold an amendments convention, explains the inherent safety of this process, and examines the current efforts since 2010. Senator Tom Coburn explains how we the people can at last rebalance our governmental system and counter the dysfunction in Washington. Complete with a list of resources and organization fighting for the people, Smashing the DC Monopoly is your guide to standing up for the next generation and defeating the "me-first" Washington elite who are mortgaging our country's future.


Monopolies in America

Monopolies in America

Author: Charles R. Geisst

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9780195123012

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A historian and professor of finance traces the struggle between the federal government and expanding big business, showing that mega-mergers are a natural progression of capitalism. 35 illustrations.