When Teresa Ghilarducci penned an op-ed for the New York Times back in September, she didn’t think what she was saying was too controversial. After all, she’d already made the case for Guaranteed Retirement Accounts in her recently published book When I’m Sixty-Four and her idea to allow people to move the funds from the 401Ks at the much higher August levels to the GRA plan would help many recent or soon-to-be retirees.

However, as you can read in this insightful op-ed at Inside Higher Ed–things didn’t go quite as planned.

With the American daily news having transformed itself into an incessant trumpeting of economic Armageddon, it might seem the height of escapism, not to mention irrelevance, to contemplate a vanished Japanese mathematical tradition known as temple geometry.  Escapism it surely is; irrelevant, maybe.

Princeton University Press is proud to partner with our colleagues in the Association of American University Presses and the Association of American Publishers to promote books as gifts this holiday season. Here is a selection of recently published books that would make lovely gifts for anyone on your list.

Columbia professor Amar Bhide spoke with Reuters to talk about President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to invest in new technological innovation. His counter intuitive argument, further developed in his book The Venturesome Economy, is that technology is relatively portable so it does not matter where it is developed–what is truly important is the ability to package new technologies from diverse sources into products that America’s “venturesome consumers” will buy.

The Venturesome Economy also achieved a trifecta of sorts–included in the books of the year round up for The Economist, a review in The Financial Times, and, of course, that fantastic article in the New York Times.

Bee Wilson, author of Swindled, spoke with Minnesota Public Radio last week about the melamine scandal in China and the long historical roots of food fraud in Britain and America.

Professor Archibugi discusses his reasons for writing The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy and his hopes for a future of change in the international climate. He spoke with Professor Rob Briner at Birkbeck University of London’s School of Management and Organizational Psychology.

Daniel A. Bell discussed China’s changing political landscape this past October at the United Nations University.   Communism has lost its capacity to inspire the Chinese. But what is replacing it? And what should replace it? Clearly, there is a need for a new moral foundation for political rule in China, as well as a new philosophy that can provide moral guidance in everyday life.  You can watch the interview here.

Daniel’s excellent position as one of the few Western professors at a major Chinese university (Tsinghua University in Beijing) gives us a unique, unbiased look at Chinese society.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Bee Wilson, food columnist and author of Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee, debunked myths about the quality of food in contemporary America for the Washington Post’s Outlook section. Thankfully, we’re reading this after indulging in all sorts of goodies at Thanksgiving dinner!

New York Times columnist Steve Lohr spoke with author Amar Bhidé about innovation, research, technology, and their impact on the U.S. economy.

The resulting article is available here at the New York Times Web site, but here is a quick excerpt:

In a new book, “The Venturesome Economy” (Princeton University Press), Mr. Bhidé makes a detailed argument that contradicts the prevailing view of expert panels and authors who contend that the nation’s prosperity is threatened by the technological rise of China and India, and that America’s capacity for innovation is eroding. To arrest the decline, they insist that more scientists and engineers, and more government spending on research, are sorely needed.

Mr. Bhidé derides the conventional view in science and technology circles as “techno-nationalism,” needlessly alarmist and based on a widely held misunderstanding of how technological innovation yields economic growth. In his view, many analysts put too much emphasis on the production of new technological ideas. Instead, he observes, the real economic payoff lies in innovations in how technologies are used.