2008 film by Ron Howard

The newly appointed Minister for Administrative Affairs, the Rt Hon. Jim Hacker MP, finds even the corridors of power congested by the machinations of his Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey and his Civil Service cohorts.

Dark America is experiencing an age of profound economic inequality. Employee protections have been decimated, and state welfare is virtually non-existent, while hedge fund billionaires are grossly under-taxed and big businesses make astounding profits at the expense of the environment and of their workers. How did this come about, and who were the driving forces behind it? In this powerful and meticulously researched work of investigative journalism, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker , exposes the network of billionaires trying to buy the U.S. electoral system―and succeeding.

Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.

本书从宏观经济政策解读入手，先后分析了GDP保8背后的就业压力，国进民退的结构性原因，产业空心化的形成是关键要素的非市场化等众多经济社会问题。力图为读者展现一幅中国经济的宏观画卷，希望大家能够把握时代的脉搏，找到自己的位置。