Human Capital
Human Capital is Becker's classic study of how investment in an individual's education and training is similar to business investments in equipment. Recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, Gary S. Becker is a pioneer of applying economic analysis to human behavior in such areas as discrimination, marriage, family relations, and education. Becker's research on human capital was considered by the Nobel committee to be his most noteworthy contribution to economics. This expanded edition includes four new chapters, covering recent ideas about human capital, fertility and economic growth, the division of labor, economic considerations within the family, and inequality in earnings. "Critics have charged that Mr. Becker's style of thinking reduces humans to economic entities. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mr. Becker gives people credit for having the power to reason and seek out their own best destiny."-Wall Street Journal
The Robber Barons
Prize-winning historian and biographer Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons is the story of the Gilded Age's giant American capitalists who seized economic power after the Civil War and altered the shape of American life forever.The definitive book on the rise and power of early American capitalists, The Robber Barons examines the careers of such masters of finance and industry as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, E. H. Harriman, and Henry Clay Frick. In a fascinating narrative, mixing social, economic, and political history, Josephson shows that under the command of these industry titans, the country progressed from a mainly agrarian-mercantile society to an economy propelled predominantly by mass production. "With great verve and a fine sense of its dramatic values, what [Josephson] has written is not a mere series of biographies but a genuine history, with the stories of the great American capitalists skillfully interwoven, and with an eye always on the broader social background."--New York Times Book Review
