|
Book 1: Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It
Faculty leader:
Meeting dates: 10/7, 10/14, 10/21
Meeting time: 12:30pm-1:45pm
Meeting location: Kennesaw Campus
Book description: Why is dental insurance so crummy? Why is pet insurance so expensive? Why does your auto insurer ask for your credit score? The answer to these questions lies in understanding how insurance works. Unlike the market for other goods and services—for instance, a grocer who doesn’t care who buys the store’s broccoli or carrots—insurance providers are more careful in choosing their customers, because some are more expensive than others.
Unraveling the mysteries of insurance markets, Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Ray Fisman explore such issues as why insurers want to know so much about us and whether we should let them obtain this information; why insurance entrepreneurs often fail (and some tricks that may help them succeed); and whether we’d be better off with government-mandated health insurance instead of letting businesses, customers, and markets decide who gets coverage and at what price. With insurance at the center of divisive debates about privacy, equity, and the appropriate role of government, this book offers clear explanations for some of the critical business and policy issues you’ve often wondered about, as well as for others you haven’t yet considered.
Book 2: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Faculty leader:
Meeting dates: 2/18, 2/25, 3/4
Meeting time: 12:30pm-1:45pm
Meeting location: Kennesaw Campus
Book description: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering
the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other
continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new
chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series. Until
around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point,
a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts
of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when
indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders.
As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing
food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest,
displacement, and genocide. The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to
broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how
did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or
Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories
tracing societal differences to biological differences. He assembles convincing evidence
linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic
proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses
the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing
a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and
glaciers.
Book 3: The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World
Faculty leader:
Meeting dates: 11/6, 11/13, 11/20
Meeting time: 12:30pm-1:45pm
Location meeting: Kennesaw Campus
Book description: One of America’s greatest success stories is its economy. For over a century, it has been the envy of the world. The opportunity it generates has inspired millions of people to want to become American.
Today, however, America’s economy is at a crossroads. Many have lost confidence in the country’s commitment to economic liberty. Across the political spectrum, many want the government to play an even greater role in the economy via protectionism, industrial policy, stakeholder capitalism, or even quasi-socialist policies. Numerous American political and business leaders are embracing these ideas, and traditional defenders of markets have struggled to respond to these challenges in fresh ways. Then there is a resurgent China bent on eclipsing the United States’s place in the world. At stake is not only the future of the world’s biggest economy, but the economic liberty that remains central to America’s identity as a nation.
But managed decline and creeping statism do not have to be America’s only choices, let alone its destiny. For this book insists that there is an alternative. And that is a vibrant market economy grounded on entrepreneurship, competition, and trade openness, but embedded in what America’s founding generation envisaged as the United States’s future: a dynamic Commercial Republic that takes freedom, commerce, and the common good of all Americans seriously, and allows America as a sovereign-nation to pursue and defend its interests in a dangerous world without compromising its belief in the power of economic freedom.
|
