Robert Frank

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER RICH-I-STAN n. 1. a new country located in the heart of America, populated entirely by millionaires, most of whom acquired their wealth during the new Gilded Age of the past twenty years. 2. a country with a population larger than Belgium and Denmark; typical citizens include "spud king" J. R. Simplot; hair stylist Sydell Miller, the new star of Palm Beach; and assorted oddball entrepreneurs. 3. A country that with a little luck and pluck, you, too, could be a citizen of. The rich have always been different from you and me, but Robert Frank's revealing and funny journey through "Richistan" entertainingly shows that they are truly another breed.

In this riveting book, Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank explores the lives and lifestyles of a new breed of millionaires and billionaires - many of them self-made and from blue-collar backgrounds - and how this new gilded age is affecting wider society. Profiles of 'instapreneurs', dot-com billionaires, and eccentrics from the lower and upper reaches of Richistan take us into the rarified world of people like Ed Bazinet, who became a multi-millionaire by selling miniature ceramic villages, and Tim Blixseth, who earned billions by trading remote stretches of timberland. The influence wielded by the newly wealthy goes far beyond their earning power, and Frank also explores the lifestyles developing around them (butler schools and a new type of service employee, self-help groups for people worth $10 million or more) as well as where their money is going (the commodification of the art world, the rise of 'market-driven' philanthropy). As wealth creation becomes more and more globalised, Richistan looks behind the glitz to find the real story of new money and its impact on the world.

Why do the keypads on drive-up cash machines have Braille dots? Why are round-trip fares from Orlando to Kansas City higher than those from Kansas City to Orlando? For decades, Robert Frank has been asking his economics students to pose and answer questions like these as a way of learning how economic principles operate in the real world-which they do everywhere, all the time. Once you learn to think like an economist, all kinds of puzzling observations start to make sense. Drive-up ATM keypads have Braille dots because it's cheaper to make the same machine for both drive-up and walk-up locations. travellers from Kansas City to Orlando pay less because they are usually price-sensitive tourists with many choices of destination, whereas travellers originating from Orlando typically choose Kansas City for specific family or business reasons. The Economic Naturalist employs basic economic principles to answer scores of intriguing questions from everyday life, and, along the way, introduces key ideas such as the cost-benefit principle, the no cash on the table" principle, and the law of one price. This is as delightful and painless a way to learn fundamental economics as there is.

Gegenstand der Arbeit ist die Bekampfung der Geldwasche in den USA. Die Geldwasche ist kein neues kriminologisches Phanomen, als Annex der Organisierten Kriminalitat und des globalen Terrorismus wird die durch sie ausgehende Bedrohung fur jeden Einzelnen, fur Gesellschaft und Staat immer groesser. Der Autor beschrankt sich nicht auf die Darlegung der Erscheinungsformen der Geldwasche oder der geltenden Rechtslage. Im Kern der nachstehenden Arbeit stehen die unterschiedlichen Methoden zur Bekampfung der Geldwasche, bei der die USA uber die mit Abstand langste und umfassendste Erfahrung verfugen. Wahrend z. B. das deutsche Geldwaschegesetz (GwG) erst seit 1993 existiert, ist das amerikanische Pendant, der Bank Secrecy Act, seit 1970 geltendes Recht. Vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen deutschen Reformbestrebungen zur Geldwasche aus Anlass der Terrorangriffe des 11. September 2001 gewinnen die amerikanischen Erfahrungen noch mehr an Brisanz: Schon seit 1990 bundelt die zentrale nationale Behoerde FinCEN die gesammelten Daten und wertet sie aus.

Disney chairman Michael Eisner topped the 1993 Business Week chart of America's highest-paid executives, his $203 million in earnings roughly 10,000 times that of the lowest paid Disney employee. During the last two decades, the top one percent of U. S. earners captured more than 40 percent of the country's total earnings growth, one of the largest shifts any society has endured without a revolution or military defeat. Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook argue that behind this shift lies the spread of "winner-take-all markets"--markets in which small differences in performance give rise to enormous differences in reward. Long familiar in sports and entertainment, this payoff pattern has increasingly permeated law, finance, fashion, publishing, and other fields. The result: in addition to the growing gap between rich and poor, we see important professions like teaching and engineering in aching need of more talent. This relentless emphasis on coming out on top--the best-selling book, the blockbuster film, the Super Bowl winner--has molded our discourse in ways that many find deeply troubling.