For years, North Carolina has been one of the nation's fastest-growing states, bringing tremendous change to the state's people, industries, jobs, places, environment, and government. Much of this change resulted from the information and technology revolution, which connected the state more fully to the country and the world. But we are now moving beyond the connected age, argues Michael L. Walden, to a new era of living, production, and work, and North Carolina faces not only unanswered questions about the past but also new challenges and opportunities visible on the horizon. What will these new transformations mean for the state's people, places, and prosperity? In this book, Walden lays out these looming economic issues and offers predictions of future trends as well as multiple policy options for taxation, infrastructure, and environmental issues. While the future cannot be perfectly predicted, Walden's expert analysis is mandatory reading for policy makers, business leaders, and everyday people seeking to prepare for upcoming changes in North Carolina's economy.

Wouldn't it be nice to end our dependence on foreign oil, and fuel automobiles with a cheap and abundant energy source? Corith College scientist George Hollaway thinks he's found the answer to this dilemma when he finally succeeds in squeezing fuel from the tenacious kudzu plant.

But when George seeks financial advice for his discovery from newly hired economics professor Dia Fenner, he receives some bad news. He's overlooked some key costs in producing kudzu fuel that make the alternative unprofitable in today's marketplace. Yet powerful forces see kudzu fuel as the ticket to their dreams, including the interim college president and two influential businessmen.

When Dia persists in presenting her economic arguments questioning the fuel, she first finds her job-then her life-in jeopardy. Her house is vandalized, she's attacked, and shadowy figures stalk her. Someone is trying to silence Dia. Will they succeed?

Dr. Lydia "Dia" Fenner is a newly minted PhD in economics who takes her first job with the U.S. Treasury Department. Her assignment is to design policies to get the economy out of its slump before the next election. But when the policies Dia recommends are implemented, they don't work. Something underhanded is going on that wasn't covered in her Ivy League education.

Dia enters a race against time as she tries to determine who, or what, is trying to sabotage the economy. Along the way she must contend with a vengeful ex-boyfriend, an arrogant boss, an ambitious senator, and a mysterious, yet attractive, colleague. The action spans the halls of power in Washington, D.C., to the rolling hills of rural Virginia as Dia attempts to unravel the plot against the troubled economy.

Will she succeed, or will she too become a target-and a victim?

"Macro Mayhem" supplies the double punch of an entertaining story with insight into how the macroeconomy works. Economics, also known as the "dismal science," has never been as much fun-or as dangerous-as in this fast-paced thriller of financial intrigue.

For years, North Carolina has been one of the nation's fastest-growing states, bringing tremendous change to the state's people, industries, jobs, places, environment, and government. Much of this change resulted from the information and technology revolution, which connected the state more fully to the country and the world. But we are now moving beyond the connected age, argues Michael L. Walden, to a new era of living, production, and work, and North Carolina faces not only unanswered questions about the past but also new challenges and opportunities visible on the horizon. What will these new transformations mean for the state's people, places, and prosperity? In this book, Walden lays out these looming economic issues and offers predictions of future trends as well as multiple policy options for taxation, infrastructure, and environmental issues. While the future cannot be perfectly predicted, Walden's expert analysis is mandatory reading for policy makers, business leaders, and everyday people seeking to prepare for upcoming changes in North Carolina's economy.

At a time when North Carolina's population is exploding and its economy is shifting profoundly, one of the state's leading economists applies the tools of his trade to chronicle these changes and to inform North Carolinians in easy-to-understand terms what to expect in the future. Today we are living in a technologically connected age that has completely transformed the North Carolina economy, Walden explains. Once driven by tobacco, textiles, and furniture, the North Carolina economy now thrives on technology, pharmaceuticals, finance, food processing, and the manufacture of vehicle parts. While the state as a whole has benefited from these dramatic transformations, some population groups and regions have not experienced consistent economic growth. Walden identifies education as the key factor; a skilled, college-educated work force, he argues, is now a region's most prized commodity. Walden traces how the forces of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have remade the North Carolina economy, impacted people and regions, and led to the most substantive public policy debates in decades. Written in a lively style and including original research and insights, North Carolina in the Connected Age is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how the state arrived where it is today and what its future might hold.