{"product_id":"crunch-isbn-9781576754771","title":"Crunch","description":"Is Social Security really going bust, and what does that mean to me? If I hire an immigrant, am I hurting a native-born worker? Why does the stock market go up when employment declines? Should I give that homeless guy a buck? What’s a “living wage”?  How much can presidents really affect economic outcomes? What does the Federal Reserve Bank really do?  And when the pundits say the economy’s doing so well, why do \u003ci\u003eI\u003c\/i\u003e still feel so squeezed?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e If you’d like some straight answers, premier economist Jared Bernstein is here to help. In \u003ci\u003eCrunch\u003c\/i\u003e he responds to dozens of questions he has fielded from working Americans, questions that directly relate to the bottom-line, dollars-and-cents concerns of real people.  Chances are if there’s a stumper you’ve always wanted to ask an economist, it’s solved in this book. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Bernstein is fed up with “Darth Vaders with PhDs” who use their supposed expertise to intimidate average citizens and turn economics into a tool for the rich and powerful. In the pages of \u003ci\u003eCrunch\u003c\/i\u003e, Bernstein lays bare the dark secret of economics: it’s not an objective scientific discipline. It’s a set of decisions about the best way to organize our society to produce and distribute resources and opportunities. And we all can, and must, participate in these decisions. “America is a democracy,” he writes. “And in a democracy all of us, not just the elites and their scholarly shock troops, get to weigh in on biggies like this.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Our economy will be only as fair as we can make it. In this lively and irreverent tour through everyday economic mysteries, Bernstein helps us decode economic ”analysis,” navigate through murky ethical quandaries, and make sound economic decisions that reflect our deepest aspirations for ourselves, our families, and our country.Preface\u003cbr\u003e Introduction: So What Is Economics, Anyway?\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 1--The Big Squeeze\u003cbr\u003e If the Economy’s Doing So Well, Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?\u003cbr\u003e Econ-Noir\u003cbr\u003e All Is Not As It Appears: Measuring Economic Outcomes\u003cbr\u003e Whatever Happened to the Cleavers?\u003cbr\u003e The Health Care Squeeze\u003cbr\u003e The Medical Industrial Complex \u003cbr\u003e Health Care Reform\u003cbr\u003e Poverty Amid Plenty: The Whats\u003cbr\u003e Poverty Amid Plenty: The Whys\u003cbr\u003e Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? \u003cbr\u003e The ABCs of Worker Pay\u003cbr\u003e What’s So Bad About Inequality?\u003cbr\u003e All Education, All the Time \u003cbr\u003e Chapter 2--Don’t Know Much About GDP\u003cbr\u003e Gross Domestic Product\u003cbr\u003e Unemployment: Wall Street vs. Main Street\u003cbr\u003e Underemployment\u003cbr\u003e Making Better Doughnuts\u003cbr\u003e Inflation\u003cbr\u003e What’s a Recession?\u003cbr\u003e Blowing Bubbles\u003cbr\u003e The Night of the Living Wage (and Other Scary Stories)\u003cbr\u003e Your Textbook Got It Wrong\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 3--Political Economy 202 \u003cbr\u003e Social Insecurity\u003cbr\u003e Economists in Chief\u003cbr\u003e The Fed\u003cbr\u003e The Budget Deficit (Part 1)\u003cbr\u003e The Budget Deficit (Part 2, in Which a Nobelist Agrees with Me) \u003cbr\u003e The Economy and the Military\u003cbr\u003e Guns or Butter\u003cbr\u003e A New WPA?\u003cbr\u003e “Please Remain on the Line”\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 4--The World Ain’t Flat As All That\u003cbr\u003e What’s Right and Wrong About Globalization?\u003cbr\u003e Outsourcing\u003cbr\u003e The Conscience of a Shopper\u003cbr\u003e World Trade\u003cbr\u003e Globalization and Greed\u003cbr\u003e How the Capitalists Killed Capitalism\u003cbr\u003e Undocumented Workers\u003cbr\u003e The Not-So-Great Immigration Debate\u003cbr\u003e What’s So Bad About a Labor Shortage?\u003cbr\u003e The Mighty Dollar\u003cbr\u003e Can Economists Save the Planet?\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 5--The Reconnection Agenda\u003cbr\u003e Easing the Squeeze\u003cbr\u003e Health Care\u003cbr\u003e Immigration\u003cbr\u003e Education\u003cbr\u003e Globalization\u003cbr\u003e What’s Left?\u003cbr\u003e Conclusion: The Lesson of the Rink\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003cbr\u003e About the Author“Jared Bernstein—the rare economist who writes lucid English—has a gift for making difficult topics easy to grasp without dumbing them down. Bernstein’s latest superbly timed book, \u003ci\u003eCrunch\u003c\/i\u003e, is a must-read guide to the economy's current slide and its effect on us all.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eRobert Kuttner, Founding Co-Editor\u003ci\u003e, The American Prospect\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Jared Bernstein’s new book is a must-read for everyone who cares about restoring economic fairness in an America with the greatest income inequality since the Great Depression.  Drawing on everyday examples, \u003ci\u003eCrunch\u003c\/i\u003e is an accessible explanation of economic principles presented with equal parts of insight, humor, and stimulation.  In the process, Bernstein explains how we got to where we are, what to do to fix it, and why fighting for a fair society is so important”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Senator John Edwards\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The sprightliest writer working in the dismal science since the heyday of John Kenneth Galbraith.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Harold Meyerson, \u003ci\u003eWashington Post \u003c\/i\u003ecolumnist\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Jared Bernstein has written a fun, user-friendly primer that tells you everything you need to know about the economy. I liked it, you’ll like it, and if you read it you can stop feeling guilty that you forgot everything you learned in that freshman econ course.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Jonathan Chait, Senior Editor, \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic, \u003c\/i\u003eand author of\u003ci\u003e The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“\u003ci\u003eCrunch\u003c\/i\u003e is a dangerous book.  Anyone who reads it will be armed with new ideas to start kicking back at the false economic theories that have ensnared this country.  The book is witty, irreverent, and easy to read, but don’t let that fool you.  It’s powerful.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Elizabeth Warren, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard Law School and coauthor of\u003ci\u003e All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan   \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eJared Bernstein is a senior economist and director of the Living Standards Program at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC. He is the coauthor of the last seven editions of The State of Working America as well as The Benefits of Full Employment: When Markets Work for People. He writes a regular column for the American Prospect online, and his op-eds have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post.Introduction: So What Is Economics, Anyway?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e So a doctor tells this unfortunate woman that she has but six months to live. “Isn’t there anything I can do?” she pleads. “Marry an economist,” the doctor replies. “It won’t cure the illness, but it will make the six months seem like five years.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e We might as well start with the basics, and I promise this won’t take anywhere near six months.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I recently completed my toughest speaking gig of the year: I taught an economics lesson to my first-grader’s class. The goal was to teach them the fundamental concepts of needs versus wants, goods versus services, and scarcity. These distinctions are critical, because a good working definition of economics is the following:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The economy is the way we organize our society to best provide the goods and services that we need and want. Economics studies the best ways to do this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e They quickly got the needs\/wants distinction, but they raised some fascinating questions. They got that housing is a need. But someone then asked, “What about a mansion?” (Just to be sure, I asked them if they knew what a mansion was. “A big house with lots of cobwebs,” they said.) They discussed that and determined that a mansion is a “want,” not a need. Smart kids, I thought.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Anyway, all I’m saying is that anybody of any age can get this stuff. In fact, to not get it, to give up because it’s too obscure, is, as I will show, a profoundly important political act, one with damaging consequences. The stakes are high, for ourselves and for those who come after us—too high to entrust to those whose agenda is to redistribute power and resources to themselves and their friends.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Am I really suggesting that evil people disguised as social scientists are out to rob us blind while we willingly sign on the dotted line because we don’t get the math?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e No, not at all, though many powerful political and corporate actors use economists and economic (il)logic to do just that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It’s just that there are countless ways to organize our society to “best provide the goods and services that we need and want.” In other advanced economies—in those of Europe, Canada, Scandinavia—they answer this question quite differently from the way we do. For example, they take access to health care services “out of the market,” based on the beliefs (a) that health care is a basic right in an advanced society, and (b) as discussed in some detail later, that there are special attributes of health care that make unregulated markets a particularly inefficient (read: wasteful) way to deliver and provide it. And you don’t have to get on a plane to learn the lesson that there are different ways to organize the economy. In other periods within our own history, we organized things differently, too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This question of how we organize the economy matters a lot. It determines how the benefits of growth are distributed. Even more important, it determines who gets the opportunity to realize their potential. If the best educational opportunities go to the haves, their position relative to the have-nots will become etched in stone, as economic mobility atrophies. If those in political power believe—and act on the belief—that labor standards, like minimum wages, overtime, or the right to collectively bargain, are harmful to economic growth, then the ability of some workers to bargain for their fair share of the growing economy will evaporate while that of others grows stronger. How we organize our economy determines how we structure our response to the challenges from environmental degradation, globalization, the lack of health coverage, and staggering wealth inequalities.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When answering the questions that follow, three unifying principles kept coming up. I’ll come back to these often, as I found them to be useful navigational tools, providing the intellectual and moral guideposts needed to keep us moving in the right direction—toward an economy that works best for all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CRUNCH-STYLE ECONOMICS\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 1. Economic outcomes are generally thought to be fair, in the sense that market forces dole out rewards to those who merit them. But that’s not always the case. Power, whether it’s based on political clout, wealth, class, race, or gender, is also a key determinant of who gets what.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 2. Economic relationships often play out in surprising ways, contradicting both basic logic and textbook theory. The path to economic truth is paved with evidence, not assumptions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 3. Since economics is concerned with finite resources, economic decisions often invoke trade-offs: choosing one outcome over another. Though these trade-offs are usually thought of as the benign outcomes of rational discourse, it’s not so: See #1.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As I hope these principles suggest to you, the goal of this book is not simply to help readers become better versed in economic discourse, though that’s part of my goal. It’s also to offer a new way to answer the question, how can we best organize our society to provide the things we want and need? America is a democracy, and in a democracy we all get to weigh in on biggies like this, not just the elites and their scholarly shock troops.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e With that in mind, let’s get to work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Crunchpoint :* Economics is not an objective, scientific discipline. It is a set of decisions about how to produce and distribute resources and opportunities. Understanding and evaluating the logic and rationales for those decisions, while recognizing whom those decisions favor or exclude, is a big part of what this book is about. To proceed with these insights foremost in our minds is the only way I know to rechannel the power of economic analysis back to the service of those who need it most: the ones in the vise grip of the crunch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e * Each question and chapter in the book ends with a “crunchpoint,” an allegedly snappy summary of the discussion.","brand":"Berrett-Koehler Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233057714405,"sku":"NP9781576754771","price":26.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/crunch-isbn-9781576754771","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}