Showing results by author "Robert H. Frank" in All Categories

Step beyond the stars and into the boundless imagination of the genre’s greatest visionaries with The Masters of Science Fiction Short Stories—a powerful collection of timeless tales from the pioneers who shaped modern science fiction.

How important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine.

Who was the greater economist--Adam Smith or Charles Darwin? The question seems absurd. Darwin, after all, was a naturalist, not an economist. But Robert Frank, New York Times economics columnist and best-selling author of The Economic Naturalist, predicts that within the next century Darwin will unseat Smith as the intellectual founder of economics.

This carefully compiled collection for young readers includes: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Lyman Frank Baum, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.

The Modern Age is one of information overload. Bombarded, surrounded, and battered by facts, figures, opinions and seemingly whatever else comes out of anyone’s head from all directions at all hours of the day and night. It’s exhausting. In the pens of such luminaries as Henry James, E M Delafield, C E Montague, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and many others we connect with old fashioned media from publishing and advertising to telegrams and radio and everything in between in ways that are surprising, enlightening but always entertaining.

Although middle-income families don't earn much more than they did several decades ago, they are buying bigger cars, houses, and appliances. To pay for them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. In a book that explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today, Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off "expenditure cascades" that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class.

Society embraces regulations that limit physical harm to others, as when smoking restrictions are defended as protecting bystanders from secondhand smoke. But we have been slower to endorse parallel steps that discourage harmful social environments, as when regulators fail to note that the far greater harm caused when someone becomes a smoker is to make others more likely to smoke. In Under the Influence, Robert Frank attributes this regulatory asymmetry to the laudable belief that individuals should accept responsibility for their own behavior.