The Week’s Best Business and Finance Longreads: Business Beast’s Picks for the Week of Nov. 30, 2012

Taxes are lower than you thought, and a 101-year-old Nobel Prize winner thinks economists have gotten it all wrong. The Daily Beast picks the best business and finance journalism from around the Web this week.

Tax Burden Is Lower For Most Americans Than in the 1980s
Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff, The New York Times

The real story of wealth and taxation: from the 1980s to today.

Last Call
Tim Heffernan, Washington Monthly

How America’s liquor industry is becoming British.

Mr. China Comes to America
James Fallows, The Atlantic

Why American might be the next manufacturing giant ... again.

Bond Investor Gundlach Buys Stocks, Sees ‘Kaboom’ Ahead
Seth Lubove and Alexis Leondis, Bloomberg Markets

America’s best bond investor quotes T.S. Eliot and makes his own Mondrians. The FBI also thinks he’s “brilliant.”

Walmart's Evolution From Big Box Giant To E-Commerce Innovator
Farhad Manjoo, Fast Company

Bentonville takes on Seattle: Walmart’s Internet battle plan.

Urging Economists to Step Away From the Blackboard
Brendan Greeley, Bloomberg Businessweek

Ronald Coase is 101 years old. He won the Nobel Prize 21 years ago for a paper he wrote in 1960. And now he’s trying to save economics from itself.