Economic history

Ugo Bardi delivers a sweeping history of the mining industry, starting with its humble beginning when our early ancestors started digging underground to find the stones they needed for their tools. He traces the links between mineral riches and empires, wars, and civilizations, and shows how mining in its various forms came to be one of the largest global industries. He also illustrates how the gigantic mining machine is now starting to show signs of difficulties.

This book tracks the rise of a powerful idea in global biodiversity conservation. Many scientists, bureacrats, and environmentalists now believe that the only way  to slow the decimation of nonhuman life on earth is to translate conservation into an economically rational -- even profitable -- set of policies and practices.

This book shows how revolutionary ideas from economics and science are providing answers to these age-old questions. Around the world, researchers are upending a hundred years of economic theory and recasting the economy as a teeming evolutionary stew, a ' complex adaptive system' more akin to the brain, the Internet, or an ecosystem than to the static picture presented by traditional theory.

When it was first published, this national bestseller quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank.